Tagged — Jamie Lyons
The Wave Organ in San Francisco sits at the end of a jetty like some kind of acoustic accident, a sculptural listening post where the bay does all the talking. It's made from salvaged headstones and PVC pipes, which sounds insane until you're standing there, and then it makes perfect sense. The dead singing to the living through the tides.
There's something about this place that gets under your skin. The fog rolls in. The water slaps against stone. And these pipes, these ridiculous pipes jutting out at odd angles, they capture it all. They amplify the bay's breathing. Some days it's a whisper. Some days it's a roar. You don't control it. You just show up and listen.
That's what drew me there with "Savage Blasts," my site-specific piece working with a fragment from Sophocles. You want to stage ancient tragedy? Do it where the gods might actually be paying attention. Where the environment itself is unpredictable, uncontrollable, indifferent to your artistic intentions. The Wave Organ doesn't care about your blocking or your dramatic timing. The tide comes in when it comes in. The wind hits when it hits. You adapt or you drown—metaphorically speaking.
Sophocles understood the savage indifference of fate. The Wave Organ embodies it. Standing there with Lauren and Derek, we're not just creating theater, we're negotiating with elemental forces. The bay either collaborates or it doesn't. Usually both.
Later, working with LINES Ballet there for a photo shoot, same thing. Dancers who spend their lives mastering control, precision, technique, suddenly they're on uneven stone, dealing with spray, timing their movements to avoid getting soaked. The location demands honesty. It strips away pretense. You can't fake anything when you're that exposed, that vulnerable to the elements.
The Wave Organ is a monument to impermanence, built from monuments to permanence. Every performance there is temporary. Every moment is unrepeatable. That's not a bug. That's the whole point. You do the work, the tide erases it, and something about that feels right. Honest. True.
Collusion 2018
The thing about photographing dance is that I’m not actually photographing the dance at all. I’m photographing the spaces between moments, the electrical current that runs from one impossible position to the next, the split-second where a human body tells me something about physics and grace and mortality that I can’t articulate any other way. […]
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Speculation 2018
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth. William Saroyan The Wave Organ’s this crumbling concrete jetty that some madman stuck pipes into so the bay could gargle its own tidal […]
ReadEngineering 2017
The Fragment he blows no longer on small pipes, but with savage blasts, without a mouthpiece. Three lines of Sophocles, three lousy lines that survived when 96 percent of his work got swallowed by time. This fragment doesn’t want to be understood. It wants to be encountered. So I picked the Wave Organ, this broken-ass […]
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Speculation 2016
There’s something nobody tells you about being a kid at rehearsal. How the adults stop being adults for a minute. How they shed all that bullshit, the mortgage anxiety, the careful professional face, the parental authority, and become something else entirely. Something rawer. Something that plays. I grew up in rehearsal spaces. Theaters that smelled […]
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Speculation 2016
Speculation: Rehearsing Sophocles #116. Fantastic rehearsal/experimentation/playing/imagining with amazing people at sunrise under a full moon… for Sophocles Savage Blasts. Here’s what the photographs don’t tell you: it’s cold as hell out there at the Wave Organ at dawn. The bay doesn’t care about your artistic intentions. The concrete under your feet is unforgiving, and the […]
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Speculation 2016
Derek isn’t here to make pretty ambience; he is hunting for the frequency where ancient violence meets the Pacific’s indifference, and somehow in this process the conceptual exercise transforms into something I can actually feel in my chest, the kind of site responsive work that doesn’t explain itself or apologize, that just exists in a […]
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