Nobody asked for this. Not the concrete, not the museum guard eyeing these bodies like they're about to vandalize a Rothko, not the pigeons scattered when limbs started carving geometry into stale civic air. That's precisely the point.
Site specific dance is the bastard offspring of too much training meeting not enough money meeting fuck your proscenium arch. anyway. It's dancers saying: this Brutalist fountain, this abandoned warehouse, this gallery where tourists shuffle past installations they pretend to understand, this is where we detonate. This is where form meets friction meets "what the hell is happening right now?"
Because here's the thing: trained bodies in untrained spaces create voltage. A grand jeté in Golden Gate Park isn't the same animal as a grand jeté on a sprung floor under stage lights. The ground doesn't forgive. The wind isn't programmed. That tourist wandering into frame with his fanny pack of confusion? He's now part of my composition, whether I like it or not. Site specific work strips away the safety net of convention and says: dance or die, and probably both.
It's dance as invasion. Dance as disruption. These aren't performances in spaces, they're arguments with spaces. Watch bodies move through Chinatown's narrow corridors and I'm seeing a negotiation, sometimes hostile, between choreography and chaos, between what the artist intended and what the architecture insists upon. The space doesn't adapt to the dance. The dance mutates, compromises, screams, survives.
And you? The audience? You're not sitting in velvet seats with your playbill. You're standing on wet grass or cold marble, shifting your weight, free to fart without detection while blocking someone else's view, part of the thing whether you bought a ticket or just stumbled into it. No fourth wall, there's barely a first wall. Just bodies and space and this live wire moment of now or never that could collapse into embarrassment or transcendence and frequently does both.
The best site specific work understands this: the site isn't a backdrop, it's a collaborator with its own vocabulary. Volcanoes, museums, waterfalls, ruins, each location argues back, changes the grammar of movement, forces adaptation or obliteration. The dancers aren't conquering these spaces. They're translating them, interrogating them, making temporary peace with stone and water and wind and history.
This is dance stripped of comfort, prestige, predictability. Dance that has to mean something here, in this exact configuration of light and matter and witnesses, or it means nothing at all. And that's the terrifying, exhilarating part: it usually means both.
Don’t go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines. Jerry Saltz The Cantor sits there on Stanford’s campus like every other institutional temple to dead things under glass, all that marble and hush and carefully calibrated light designed to make you whisper and feel appropriately small. […]
How funny things are! You go to those museums and galleries and think what a damned bore they are and then, when you least expect it, you find that something you’ve seen comes in useful. It shows art and all that isn’t really waste of time. W. Somerset Maugham, Theatre Adji Cissoko, moving through a […]
On the evening of March 9th, 2020, right before the world went to absolute shit, we’re doing something that has no business being as cool as it was. We staged a fragment of Sophocles‘ Laocoön at the Berkeley Art Museum. Berkeley. My first memories are from these streets, this place. Coming back here to do […]
Bodies defying the institutional geometry, movement carving rebellion into all that brutalist concrete and those sterile fluorescent slashes. This is what I’m talking about. This is the escape velocity made flesh. I’m talking about that electric moment when you’re three drinks deep into a conversation that matters, when the music’s so loud it rewires your […]
Chocolate Heads: The Chocolate Ball for Polymaths in Green Library, Stanford University. He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast. Leonardo da Vinci Chocolate Heads: The Chocolate Ball for Polymaths Green Library, Stanford University. A performance as part […]
The Planetary Dance by Anna Halprin in 1980 was created as a call to enact a positive myth in dance. “The Planetary Dance is a dance that transcends cultural and temporal barriers, a dance that speaks to the community that makes it, and a dance that addresses contemporary issues as they are experienced by all […]
Our culture is in the throes of crisis: I have a vision of dance working in the service of healing. I invite you to join me in this quest. Anna Halprin I caught something most people can’t see even when they’re staring right at it. Not the performance, fuck the performance, anyone with a decent […]
Anna Halprin Blank Placard Dance: at the invitation of the De Young Museum, A piece originally performed in 1967 with members of the San Francisco Dancers Workshop in San Francisco as a reaction to the Vietnam War and the growing social unrest of the time. The dance is a walk by some forty dancers who carry […]
Cunamacué rehearsing their “Son De Los Diablos.” A performance inspired by the Afro-Peruvian dance Son de los Diablos to activate public spaces and reclaim ancestral practices of ceremony and ritual. Created by Carmen Roman and Pierr Padilla Vasquez The performance traveled to various sites in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood with the route beginning at 35th Ave […]
Cunamacué rehearsing their “Son De Los Diablos.” A performance inspired by the Afro-Peruvian dance Son de los Diablos to activate public spaces and reclaim ancestral practices of ceremony and ritual. Created by Carmen Roman and Pierr Padilla Vasquez Saturday, September 8th, at 2pm The performance travels to different sites in the Fruitvale neighborhood with the […]
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. William Blake, Letters I […]
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 […]
Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while Marx, (Groucho) The whole fucking premise is so simple it hurts: you take artists, real ones, not the kind pumping out content for the algorithm gods, and you put them somewhere beautiful and remote and you say, “Here. No deadlines. No […]
I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in sacred spaces, but Aleta Hayes’ Chocolate Heads turning Stanford’s Memorial Church into some kind of Byzantine hallucination hits different when that same building held my father’s memorial service. When my brother, who hated Stanford with a kind of pure contempt that honestly scared me, inexplicably chose to […]
You walk into the Stanford d.school, this temple of design thinking, this cathedral of sticky notes and whiteboards where tomorrow’s disruptors learn to disrupt, and you’re expecting the usual performance art nonsense. The kind where someone’s going to stand in a corner for three hours or wrap themselves in cellophane while reading Foucault through a […]
The lobby at Bing Concert Hall is all soaring glass and clean California geometry, the kind of space that makes you wonder if anyone’s actually allowed to breathe wrong in here. I’m here to photograph which means I’m basically a voyeur, trying to freeze what shouldn’t be frozen: movement, breath, sculpture, sound, the precise moment […]
The thing about Ghost Architecture: A Palimpsest is that it understood what most commemorative performances miss entirely, that a building isn’t just bricks and sweat stains, it’s every body that ever moved through it, every kid who learned to fail there before learning to fly. Aleta Hayes’ Chocolate Heads took that renovated gym, all shiny […]
Aleta Hayes and The Chocolate Heads are building Ghost Architecture, and I’m here trying to capture what happens when sculptural performance becomes something between séance and construction site. It’s ephemeral by design, chocolate edifices that exist in that sweet between solid and melting, between here and gone, like memory made tactile. This is the kind […]
July 10th, 2016. 1:08 in the afternoon. Pillar Point. Seventy two degrees, California sun beating down, the beach looking out at Mavericks, that legendary, bone crushing surf break where waves rise up like mountains and gods go to die, and we’re about to do something beautifully, almost stupidly ambitious: perform what’s left of a play […]
At 6:57 a.m. on April 7th, 2016 (this specificity matters, that exact fucking minute matters) Muriel Maffre, Ryan Tacata and myself dragged our asses up Slacker Hill in the Marin Headlands to do something either profoundly necessary or completely insane. We performed fragments of a lost Euripides tragedy, one of those plays that got shredded […]
The body is living art. Your movement through time and space is art. A painter has brushes. You have your body. Anna Halprin The city that gave us the Beats and the Summer of Love is turning into an open-air dormitory for software engineers who make more in a year than most families see in […]
I documented Aleta Hayes and The Chocolate Heads‘ Space Launch thing at McMurtry, and it’s exactly the kind of beautiful, ridiculous, necessary chaos that makes you remember why live art matters. They’re building these chocolate head sculptures like some kind of collective ritual… tactile, ephemeral, with that Warhol meets launch pad energy where high concept […]
Speculation: Site Specific Dance Rehearsal as the Chocolate Heads‘ rehearse at McMurty Art Building, Stanford. It’s about trying to frame something. And draw attention to it and say, “Here’s the beauty in this. I’m going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful.” That’s what artists do. It’s really a pointing […]
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 […]
inkBoat 95 Rituals for Anna Halprin a Site Specific Dance performance at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature, we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves that have been long buried and forgotten. Anna Halprin
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. […]
So here we are in the Cantor, Stanford’s marble temple to the idea that culture can be contained, catalogued, made safe for the children of tech money and inherited privilege. And into this pristine space comes Aleta Hayes with her Chocolate Heads, turning off the goddamn lights and switching on the black lights like some […]
I’m full of shit, we’re all full of shit, every last one of us. And that’s not cynicism, that’s the most liberating truth you’ll ever swallow. We perform every goddamn day. For our lovers, our bosses, ourselves in the mirror at 3 AM when the pills have worn off and we’re wondering who the hell […]
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