Archive — Jamie Lyons
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography Sharpness is a bourgeois concept Henri Cartier-Bresson
2021 Industries
So I’m screwing around on Google Scholar, because that’s what you do when you’re procrastinating on real work, and there it is. My photograph. We Players’ Macbeth at Fort Point, 2014. On the cover of Theatre History Studies. Published by the University of Alabama Press. An actual academic journal with peer review and footnotes and […]
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2020 Engineering
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 […]
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2020 Speculation
What we’ve got here is me hauling a fragment of a lost Sophocles tragedy into BAMPFA like I’m smuggling contraband across time itself, rehearsing in the actual space where this thing’s going to live or die. Babatunji’s wrestling with Laocoon, not the marble version sitting in the Ufizzi, the breathing, screaming one, while Aleta’s working […]
View2019 Industries
Children of the future Age Reading this indignant page, Know that in a former time Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime. William Blake This is the sickness, right here. The moment we decided that ecstasy needs credentials. That you can’t just be happy, you have to justify being happy, prove you’ve earned it, demonstrate […]
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2019 Industries
Shooting this production felt like documenting a beautiful corpse. And I mean that with all the love and heartbreak that implies. The students were great, of course they were great. They always are. Committed, sweating under those lights, believing in every goddamn note. That’s not the problem. The problem is watching a department that once […]
View2018 Engineering
At 4:45pm on November 16th, 2018, a cold, gray, 54 degree afternoon, we staged the two remaining fragments of Aeschylus‘ Danaids at the Pulgas Water Temple in San Mateo County. Let me be clear about what we’re dealing with here: Aeschylus’s Danaids trilogy is mostly gone. Lost to time, fire, neglect, pick your poison. What […]
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2018 Industries
That is what the title of artist means: one who perceives more than his fellows, and who records more than he has seen. Edward Gordon Craig What the hell are we supposed to do with theater documentation anyway? It’s the corpse of the thing, the empty bottle, the setlist scrawled on a napkin after the […]
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2018 Industries
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 […]
View2018 Engineering
May 9th, 2018. High noon. East Palo Alto shoreline. Sixty-four degrees and sunny, the kind of day that makes you forget, for a moment, that everything ends badly. Especially here, where the ground itself is a monument to bad decisions. We’re standing on a Superfund site. Toxic landscape. The kind of place where American ambition […]
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2018 Industries
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 […]
View2017 Engineering
John Warren Travis’ Design for Oedipus Rag There’s something absolutely primal, something that cuts through all the academic horseshit, about staging Sophocles in a chapel at Fort Mason. I’ve seen Greek tragedy done in every godforsaken venue from The Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus to prosceniums that smell like 1950s cigarettes to black box theaters where […]
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2017 Industries
David Greig took the 2011 Norway massacre, where some kid walked into a summer camp and shattered everything, and decided to make a play that doesn’t give you easy answers or comfortable catharsis. Because there aren’t any. And Shotgun Players at Berkeley’s Ashby Stage produced it. I photographed this thing for set designer Angrette McCloskey. […]
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2016 Industries
Performers Under Stress presents the West Coast Premiere of BLACK RIVER FALLS by Bryn Magnus.
View2016 Engineering
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 […]
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2016 Industries
A zookeeper, a docent, an animal behaviorist, and a mental health professional arguing over the proper protocol for a conflicted anteater. That’s not theater, that’s a fever dream someone had after reading too much Ionesco while working at a municipal zoo. It’s beautiful. It’s completely deranged. It’s exactly the kind of thing that makes you […]
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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 […]
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2015 Industries
‘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 […]
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2015 Engineering
I’m going to tell you about something that happened on a Saturday afternoon in October, and you’re going to think it’s either the most pretentious thing you’ve ever heard or you’re going to get it immediately. There’s no middle ground here. That’s just how it is. 2:45 p.m., October 3rd, 2015. The hold of the […]
View2015 Engineering
There’s something deeply, irrationally beautiful about staging dead Greek shit at a racetrack. I mean, here we are: 1:15 in the afternoon, June 6th, 2015, Golden Gate Fields, where the smell of horse piss and broken dreams hangs in the air like a question nobody wants to answer. It’s 71 degrees, sunny, perfect California weather […]
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2015 Engineering
Here’s the thing about standing in the Pacific at dawn, reciting words that haven’t been heard in their original context for two-and-a-half goddamn millennia: you’re probably insane. Or maybe that’s the only sane response to a world that’s forgotten how to have actual experiences that aren’t mediated through a screen or commodified into bite-sized chunks […]
View2014 Industries
Victoria Theater, San Francisco: Yeast Nation (the triumph of life) presented by Ray of Light Theatre
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2014 Speculation
I know this thing is doomed. Katie knows it too, though we don’t say it out loud during our afternoon rehearsals in that sweatbox of a studio space in Los Feliz. Michael doesn’t know, which is somehow worse. Or maybe he does. The heat in LA is biblical, relentless. Beckett. Happy Days. A woman buried […]
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2014 Industries
Looking at the Fool in Lear is like staring into a cracked mirror at 1:34 AM with bourbon on your breath and truth seeping through the fissures. This isn’t some jingling court jester doing pratfalls for the Renaissance crowd, this is the guy who sees the wreckage before the crash, who speaks in riddles because […]
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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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2014 Industries
That title. Mud. One syllable that lands like a boot heel in primordial ooze. It’s the sound of being stuck, of drowning slowly in the ordinary. Because Mud doesn’t traffic in the redemption industrial complex. Mae, Lloyd, Henry: they’re not climbing out of anything. They’re sinking, and Fornes just watches with the cold, clear eye […]
View2013 Industries
I stand there in the damp brick corridors of Fort Point with a camera and Shakespeare’s murder ballad echoing off Civil War-era walls, and I start to understand something about why I do this stupid, beautiful thing called documentation. Not because theater needs more goddamn photos. But because Ava and her company decided to stage […]
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2013 Speculation
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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2012 Industries
What gets me is how performance becomes the only honest medium for dealing with governmental dishonesty. You’re creating something live, ephemeral, something that by its very nature can’t be perfectly preserved or controlled, the exact opposite of Nixon’s paranoid recording compulsion. There’s something genuinely radical about taking the most documented presidency in history up to […]
View2010 Collusion
Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions. Alexander Calder So here I am, belly-down on the floor of a Dogpatch studio, camera in hand, staring into the wooden faces of two dead-eyed puppet boys who’ve seen things… Hansel and Hansel. Niki Ulehla makes marionettes. Not the kind you remember […]
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