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Heterogenous Spectacles

West Coast March for Gaza

San Francisco City Hall, Gaza Protest, West Coast March for Gaza

West Coast March for Gaza

It is true that the sky was always beautiful but I don’t remember marvelling at sunset or gazing at the dawn of a new day. Survival does not allow time for poetic reflection.
 Izzeldin Abuelaish, I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity

West Coast March for Gaza
Sunday, January 14
San Francisco Civic Center Plaza

Chocolate Heads: Gardening after Dark

Stanford Dance in Roble Gym for Stanford TAPS

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Chocolate Heads part of Stanford Dance in Roble Gym for Stanford TAPS

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Chocolate Heads part of Stanford Dance in Roble Gym for Stanford TAPS

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Chocolate Heads part of Stanford Dance in Roble Gym for Stanford TAPS

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As an intermedia, prototypical dance and performance troupe, The Chocolate Heads (founded by Aleta Hayes in 2009) cultivates student artists and interdisciplinary thinkers from across the Stanford campus. Garedning After Dark brings contemporary dance, live music, fashion presentation, and visual installation together in celebration of beauty in all of its forms; metamorphosis in all of the ways one can imagine; and a rich collaboration to awaken the muses.

Gardening After Dark in Roble Gym for Stanford TAPS,  December 7, 2023

Sankai Juku Master Class

Sankai Juku , Roble Gym, Stanford Arts

Butoh belongs both to life and death. It is a realization of the distance between a human being and the unknown. It also represents man’s struggle to overcome the distance between himself and the material world. Butoh dancers bodies are like a cup filled to overflowing, one which cannot take one more drop of liquid- the body enters into a perfect state of balance.
Ushio Amagatsu

Sankai Juku Master Class at Stanford University
presented by Aleta Hayes and Stanford Arts.

Beach Signs

Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.
Haruki MurakamiKafka on the Shore

Point Lobos

Anything that excites me, for any reason, I will photograph: not searching for unusual subject matter but making the commonplace unusual, nor indulging in extraordinary technique to attract attention. Work only when desire to the point of necessity impels – then do it honestly. Then so called “composition” becomes a personal thing, to be developed along with technique, as a personal way of seeing.
Edward Weston
April 26, 1930, Point Lobos.

Grotowski Workcenter at Franconia

 

Why do we sacrifice so much energy to our art?

 

Not in order to teach others but to learn with them what our existence, our organism, our personal and repeatable experience have to give us; to learn to break down the barriers which surround us and to free ourselves from the breaks which hold us back, from the lies about ourselves which we manufacture daily for ourselves and for others; to destroy the limitations caused by our ignorance or lack of courage; in short, to fill the emptiness in us: to fulfill ourselves…art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.
Jerzy Grotowski 

 

LINES Ballet’s “Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled”

LINES Ballet, Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled, YBCA, Ballet Photography

LINES Ballet, Lisa Fischer

LINES Ballet, Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled, YBCA, Ballet Photography

LINES Ballet, Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled, YBCA, Ballet Photography

LINES Ballet, Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled, YBCA, Ballet Photography

LINES Ballet, Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled, YBCA, Ballet Photography

As artists, which we all are, our obsession is to crumble the veils of delusion, to make the invisible apparent, and to see behind all appearance. If I’ve come to a realization where I’ve left the sense of ‘me‘, and expanded to the sense of ‘we’, finally stepping into the idea of ‘oneness’, how can I exploit a mountain? How can I exploit a people? Because I realize that people and that mountain, is me. That ocean that is being polluted is me.
Alonzo King

CELEBRATION OF ALONZO KING & ZAKIR HUSSAIN

Adji Cissoko, LINES Ballet, Alonzo King and Zakir Hussain collaboration

Alonzo King LINES Ballet

Celebration of Alonzo King & Zakir Hussain.  Hussain’s mastery of classical Indian percussion brought him a Grammy award and worldwide renown. His collaborations with Alonzo King renew classical forms, holding respect for the old and ushering in the new with a keen eye for innovation.

William Saroyan

William Saroyan, Grave, Fresno

Everything is changed for you. But it is still the same, too. The loneliness you feel has come to you because you are no longer a child. But the world has always been full of that loneliness.
William Saroyan, The Human Comedy

Charlie at the Gates of Hell

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The main thing is to be moved,
to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.
Be a man before being an artist!
Auguste Rodin

Rodin’s Gates of Hell
Stanford University

Alonzo King LINES Ballet “Deep River”

Deep River, a collaboration with composer Jason Moran and vocalist Lisa Fischer. Bending the lines between classical and contemporary ballet, Alonzo King draws on the strengths of his extraordinary dancers, altering the way we look at ballet today.

Bolinas Morning

Bolinas Morning

I did not consider, even passingly, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it would.
William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

Chocolate Heads at Stanford’s Cantor Museum

Cantor Art Center, Stanford Museum, Stanford Arts, Stanford Dance, Stanford TAPS, Cantor Museum

Cantor Art Center, Stanford Museum, Stanford Arts, Stanford Dance, Stanford TAPS, Cantor Museum

Cantor Art Center, Stanford Museum, Stanford Arts, Stanford Dance, Stanford TAPS, Cantor Museum

Cantor Art Center, Stanford Museum, Stanford Arts, Stanford Dance, Stanford TAPS, Cantor Museum

Stanford Museum

   

Don’t go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines.
Jerry Saltz

Aleta Hayes’ Chocolate Heads performing a site specific dance, Fashion Fable, at the Cantor Museum, Stanford University.

Fashion Fable at Cantor Arts Center

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Fashion Fable ~ A Dance and Runway Event, marks the long-anticipated return of the Chocolate Heads to the Cantor Arts Center with live performance. The Chocolate Heads Movement Band (founded in 2009 by TAPS lecturer and Artistic Director, Aleta Hayes), is an intermedia, prototypical dance and performance troupe that cultivates student artists and interdisciplinary thinkers from across the Stanford campus. This performance brings together contemporary dance, live music, fashion presentation and visual installation in celebration of beauty in all of its forms and metamorphosis in all of the ways one can imagine.

Collaborating artists include: Jamie Lyons, Connie Strayer, Angrette McClosky and Patrick Lotilla.

February 25th at The Cantor Arts Center

Register Here

La Réunion (again) with LINES Ballet

Babatunji Johnson, LINES Ballet, Reunion Island

Adji Cissoko, Shuaib Elhassan, LINES Ballet, Reunion Island, ballet photography

Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the hypnotic landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically. Time had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched only the flowering waves of faery and the recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries—the hoary groves, the untainted pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass. Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades. We were now burrowing bodily through the midst of the picture, and I seemed to find in its necromancy a thing I had innately known or inherited, and for which I had always been vainly searching.
H. P. Lovecraft

Gallery Exhibit Dance

Adji Cissoko dancing beautifully among a gallery exhibit of my photographs for Alonzo King LINES Ballet.

Jamie Lyons, Gallery Exhibit Dance, Exhibition sign

Translation: Photographer and videographer (but also director, teacher and researcher), Jamie Lyons has been pursuing fraternal companionship for several years with choreographer Alonzo King.

During his first visit to Reunion, he followed the company in its explorations of the wild and basaltic landscapes of our island which inspired the sublime  Pole Star . Armed with his camera and a camera, he captured and staged his dancers in the natural settings of the Niagara waterfall, Mafate or Piton de la Fournaise to draw a series of snapshots and sketches where the rock, mist and emerald of great dreams frame the grace and energy of bodies.

A magnificent dance walk in these natural monuments that we rediscover here, more beautiful than ever, through an inspired and unique American perspective.

Gallery Exhibit Dance

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

Roble Dance Rehearsal

Chocolate Heads, Aleta Hayes, Stanford Arts, Stanford TAPS

Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford Theater Program, Roble Gym, Stanford Dance

Chocolate Heads, Aleta Hayes, Stanford Arts, Stanford TAPS

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…

Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park

Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, Lindsey Dillon, Charlie Lyons

When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?
Seneca the Elder

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