Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Industries 2024
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is spitting poetry, and Wendy Whelan is doing things with her body that make you question every lazy decision you’ve ever made. Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. Because when everything’s burning down, when the whole damn country is doom-scrolling itself into oblivion, when families aren’t talking and everyone’s pre-unfriending half their social […]
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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 2022
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. […]
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Speculation 2021
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.Friedrich Nietzsche Chocolate Heads’ rehearsal in Roble dance studio…
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Collusion 2021
The pandemic turned everyone into bargain basement Beckett characters, didn’t it? Waiting for something that wasn’t coming, performing rituals in squares on screens, and here’s Aleta Hayes doing the honest work: admitting that rites of spring might just be imagined anyway, might always have been a kind of mass hallucination we agreed to because the […]
ReadAbsolute Solipsism 2021
“In the world of Peloton, exercise-at-home apps, and dance classes on Zoom, is physical co-location necessary? Join us for a discussion about the ethics of using digital ecosystems for training performance artists.” Ethics Society and Technology Unconference, Stanford University, May 13th-14th Presenting Liveness in the Tech Space with Aleta Hayes, Samer Al-Saber, Jamie Lyons, and […]
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Speculation 2021
Look at this video. Vince Evan Pane dancing with a busted street lamp globe like it means something. And here’s the thing that’ll piss you off: it did mean something. In his hands, anyway. We shot this at three in the morning in the Stanford Quad. Three AM. Empty campus. Just us and the […]
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Engineering 2019
As bohemias go, Perry Lane was Arcadia, Arcadia just off the Stanford golf course. It was a cluster of two room cottages with weathery wood shingles in an oak forest, only not just amid trees and greenery, but amid vines, honeysuckle tendrils, all buds and shoots and swooping tendrils and twitterings like the best of […]
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Collusion 2019
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 […]
ReadIndividualism 2019
The man built a wall that refuses to be a wall. It doesn’t keep anything in or out. It just exists, this undulating spine of sandstone crawling through grass and under trees, going nowhere in particular, and that’s exactly the fucking point. It’s not trying to be profound. It’s not begging for your approval. It […]
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Collusion 2019
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 […]
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FalseArt 2018
The great ones don’t teach you a damn thing. Not directly. They just sit there in the tenth row and call out the truth until you stop flinching. Carl Weber sat in that tenth row for Brecht. He sat in it for Kushner. He sat in it for me. The man watched the most radical […]
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Industries 2018
So here’s the thing about these images: they’re documentation masquerading as art, or maybe art pretending to be documentation, that beautiful, fucked-up place where nobody’s quite sure what they’re looking at anymore. Rush Rehm’s doing Euripides like it still matters, like these 2,400-year-old words about women destroyed by war and men destroyed by their own […]
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The phone rings. Can’t tell you who. I’m sworn. But trust me, Google images knows things. ¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión, una sombra, una ficción, y el mayor bien es pequeño; que toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son. What is life? A madness. What […]
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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 […]
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Engineering 2018
When the sun shouts and people abound One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze And the iron age; iron the unstable metal; Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster. Roots will not pierce the heaps for […]
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Individualism 2017
Auguste Rodin Gates of Hell at Sunset (Stanford University)… To-day, artists and those who love artists seem like fossils. Imagine a megatherium or a diplodocus stalking the streets of Paris! There you have the impression that we must make upon our contemporaries. Ours is an epoch of engineers and of manufacturers, not one of artists.Auguste Rodin and Paul […]
ReadCollusion 2017
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 […]
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Industries 2017
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 […]
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Collusion 2017
It’s Inauguration Day, right? Day one of the Trump Era… So naturally everyone’s freaking out, reciting founding values like scripture, as if Thomas Jefferson’s ghost gives two shits about your a cappella group. But that’s not what’s happening in these frames. What’s happening is bodies moving through sacred architecture like they’re trying to shake loose […]
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Individualism 2016
The first time doesn’t exist in my head, it’s just gone, one of those origin stories you lose in the noise. But there’s your laugh, like gravel and light, cutting through those parties at my parents’ place. There’s me, just a kid, watching some play you’d put together, and you, you, asking what I thought. […]
ReadIndustries 2016
The universe is real but you can’t see it. You have to imagine it. Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about reproducing it. Alexander Calder Look at this thing. Sitting there outside the law school like some kind of predatory bird that decided mid-flight to just fucking freeze, arrested in steel, suspended in […]
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Speculation 2016
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 […]
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Speculation 2016
Aleta Hayes rehearsal of the Chocolate Heads Class in Roble Studio. The natural order will emerge only if we let go of the fear of the disorder, we trust each other. Judith Malina Stanford Theater and Performance Studies‘ lecturer Aleta Hayes leads The Chocolate Heads Class in Roble Gym
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Collusion 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 […]
ReadCollusion 2016
Look at them. Amber and Judy. First ones on the Roble Theater stage (now the Harry J. Elam Jr. Theater) in this space that still smells like fresh paint and possibility. You know what that means? That means there’s no roadmap. No one’s fucked it up here yet. No one’s nailed it yet either. Just […]
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Collusion 2016
I get it. They did what they always do, what they’ve been doing to everything worth a damn since some MBA sociopath figured out you could monetize nostalgia and sell it back as “progress.” They took something old, something with actual soul (remember soul?), something that had earned every water stain, every crack in its […]
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FalseArt 2016
“Notes to myself on beginning a painting” by Richard Diebenkorn 1. Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion. 2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued – except as a stimulus for further moves. 3. DO […]
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Speculation 2016
Roble Gym Rehearsal, Stanford University with Judy Syrkin-Nikolau The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. Émile Zola
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rehearsing Sophocles Nausicäa in Stanford TAPS Prosser Studio Poseidon god of the earthquake launched a colossal wave, terrible, murderous, arching over him, pounding down on him, hard as a windstorm blasting piles of dry parched chaff, scattering flying husks… The Odyssey, Robert Fagles trans.
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Speculation 2016
You’re sitting there with your muse and your muse is telling you something and you’re following it, and you end up the next day looking at it and thinking “what the hell was the muse saying to me?” Nathan Oliveira I rehearse in a room built for someone else’s kestrels, someone else’s vision of transcendence, […]
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Speculation 2016
Speculation in The Windhover, Stanford University I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a […]
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Industries 2015
‘Change life! ‘Change society!’ These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space. Henri Lefebvre So here’s the thing about fairy tales performed at dusk in an amphitheater: someone decided that the only way to properly fuck with Grimm and Perrault was to drag their corpses outside, shake the dust off those cautionary […]
ReadSpeculation 2015
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 […]
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Industries 2014
Durational performance art is the kind of thing that makes most people want to check their phones after ninety seconds, and that’s precisely the fucking point. We live in a world built on the three-minute song, the fifteen-second clip, the swipe-left mentality. Everything’s pre-chewed, pre-digested, designed to go down easy. But then some lunatic decides […]
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Industries 2014
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 […]
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Industries 2014
I know what it looks like already. The body suspended mid leap or run, caught in that freeze frame mythology we’ve all agreed means “transcendence” or “freedom” or whatever bullshit someone is packaging this week. The lighting just so. The composition that genuflects about “liminal space” ever thumbtacked to a corkboard. It’s pornography, really, image […]
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Rebecca gets it. She understands that friendship is the most important thing there is because it requires you to show up without armor, without an agenda, without any guarantee that the other person won’t just look at you like you’re speaking Martian. It’s vulnerable and stupid and necessary, and most of us are too chickenshit […]
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Individualism 2013
Gsell: What astonishes me, is that your way is so different from that of other sculptors. They prose the model. Instead of that, you wait till a model has instinctively or accidentally taken an Interesting pose, and thon you reproduce It. Instead of your giving orders to the model, the model gives orders to you. […]
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Industries 2013
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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Industries 2013
Margaret Tedesco Cameo. Nights, and Night Margaret Tedesco sits in a semi-dark room and watches entire feature-length films with the sound off and the projection blocked by her own body, then just tells you what she’s seeing, not the plot, not the names, just “she walks across the room, he touches the wall, they stand in blue light, […]
ReadIndustries 2013
Aleta Hayes, Signing in The Room Performance Studies international conference Stanford University Aleta Hayes took the Goldilocks story, you know, breaking and entering, eating someone’s porridge, napping in their bed, and turned it into a solo dance-song cycle about trespassing as sacred practice. She’s got koken with her, those “invisible” stagehands from Japanese theater who […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2013
Solipsism at Performance Studies international, Stanford University It is wrong to oppose to objects an isolated ego-subject, without seeing in the Dasein the basic constitution of being-in-the-world; but it is equally wrong to suppose that the problem is seen in principle and progress made toward answering it if the solipsism of the isolated ego is […]
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Collusion 2013
I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it. John Cage Collected Works John Cage Lecture on Nothing. PSi, Stanford Michael Hunter and Derek Phillips did John Cage‘s Lecture on Nothing at the Performance Studies International conference. Stanford’s Roble Gym. The old fencing studio, before they […]
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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 […]
ReadSpeculation 2013
Look, I have nothing against scholars. Hell, I am one, PhD and all, even if that fact makes me want to punch myself in the face sometimes. But there’s a particular kind of fuckery that happens when really smart people theorize about performance in ways that completely erase how it’s actually made. When they’re basically […]
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