Tagged — Jamie Lyons
dancer (n.)
c. 1300, from Old French dancier (12c., Modern French danser), which is of unknown origin, perhaps from Low Frankish dintjan and akin to Old Frisian dintje "tremble, quiver." A word of uncertain origin but which, through French influence in arts and society, has become the primary word for those who participate in this activity from Spain to Russia (Italian danzare, Spanish danzar, Rumanian dansa, Swedish dansa, German tanzen).
Cinematics 2024
Shooting dance rehearsal is like trying to bottle lightning while someone keeps striking the match over and over again. Répétition. The French got it right. Repetition, yes, but also something more… a ritual of refinement, of searching. Watch these LINES dancers move through Alonzo King‘s choreography and you’re watching the same phrase fifty times, but […]
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Collusion 2023
Here’s the thing about Aleta Hayes and those Stanford Facilities Operations workers that nobody wants to say out loud because it makes the PhD crowd uncomfortable as hell: these guys with their hands in the dirt, their backs bent over root systems and drainage patterns, thirty to fifty feet up in the goddamn canopy where […]
ReadIndividualism 2023
You walk into Roble Gym expecting, I don’t know, something mystical maybe. Incense. Robes. The kind of earnest California spirituality that makes you want to jump off a bridge. What you get instead is bodies. Real bodies, doing impossible things with physics. These dancers move like they’re negotiating a peace treaty with the floor, every […]
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Collusion 2018
The thing about catching bodies in motion against those gritty San Francisco Chinatown backdrops, I’m threading this beautiful needle between the pristine and the profane, right? The classical line meeting the cracked sidewalk. It’s not some precious art school contradiction; it’s the only honest collision that matters. And we’re doing this from on top of […]
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Speculation 2018
Two hands rise, separating into yīn and yáng Left and right like a yīn and yáng fish Movement springs from extreme stillness, opening then closing Relax the shoulders and sit on the leg as if embracing the moon Two hands form into yīn and yáng palms Two palms crossed over for locking joints Wait for […]
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Collusion 2018
Figures in a California Landscape: a dance performance by movement troupe Chocolate Heads inspired by Manuel Neri’s sculptures in The Anderson Collection at Stanford University. This piece is part of a year long Aleta Hayes/Chocolate Heads project exploring the idea of California. Native Californian, Manuel Neri with his interest in the human figure, provoked this deepened […]
ReadCollusion 2016
The fight is won or lostfar away from witnesses –behind the lines,in the gym,and out there on the road,long before I dance under those lights.Muhammad Ali Inga Weiss was the real deal in a world drowning in polite academic horseshit. This woman looked at post-war Germany, her good parents in Ansbach, the comfortable life, all […]
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Industries 2015
This isn’t some gauzy statement about the fragility of memory. It’s literal: the Tinikling, that Filipino folk dance where you hop between bamboo poles that snap together like jaws, came out of Spanish colonial rice field punishments. People got their ankles crushed. And here’s Gerald Casel, generations later, making something beautiful out of inherited trauma […]
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Industries 2015
I’m trying to make art about art, standing outside the spectacle while photographing bodies suspended in mid blur, freezing dancers who’ve already evaporated into the afternoon fog. But here’s the thing: it’s essentially one decent frame I caught of dancers locked into YBCA’s courtyard geometry and a goddamn bird that decided to photobomb the whole […]
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Collusion 2014
Frank Smigiel, from SFMOMA, calls me up and asks if I want to play the Mayor of San Francisco. Not the actual mayor, but some conceptual version of a mayor in a performance piece by these South African artists in the Mission District. I’m thinking: Why me? I’m not an actor. I’m not a politician. […]
ReadFalseArt 2013
The Thing About Knives and Beauty So here’s Amélie Ségarra, a French ballerina, standing on top of a grand piano in some gorgeous, empty Baroque theater in Girona that’s seen better centuries. But she’s not wearing regular pointe shoes, those pretty pink torture devices that already mangle feet into gnarled question marks by age twenty-five. […]
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Industries 2013
Ann Carlson The Symphonic Body in Bing Concert Hall The Symphonic Body is a performance made entirely from gestures. It is a movement based orchestral work performed by people from across the Stanford University campus. Instead of instruments, individuals in this orchestra perform gestural portraits based on the motions of their workday. These portraits are […]
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Industries 2012
Let My People Go isn’t some polite meditation on mortality. This is Astrid Bas standing in a room and saying: here are two women who made extraordinary things and then they were gone. One chose to go. One had that choice ripped away from her in the most obscene way human beings have ever devised. Sarah […]
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