Note: The ordering of these descriptions is applicable to the printed strip of photos; they don't follow the sequence of the photos in the online gallery/slideshow.

Center strip

1. Roble Gym, Saturday, late afternoon, overcast. “Architecture is as much about the events that take place in spaces as about the spaces themselves.” —Bernard Tschumi. The lettering on the facade shows the founding date: established 1932. Elegant, with scalloped windows: a Stanford gym. The lines of oak branches are reflected in sharp silhouette on the windows. In front, there is huge red banner announcing “Stanford Dance Marathon” and a bright arch of red and white balloons. Dance Marathon is not the intended purpose of the gym, its end goal, but the look of the gym contributes a kind of understanding to what is happening. Dance Marathon is at one level profoundly physical, intense dancing and increasing physical exhaustion, never sitting down, sweat rolling down the necks of the dancers, trash cans overflowing with empty Gatorade bottles. The located space—a gym—reflects that. But it is also a Stanford gym, built for female undergrads in 1932 under pressure from the Women's Athletic Association, and it is Stanford students who are dancing here. The fight against AIDS is being fought here by people passionate about changing the world. It is also being fought with bright-colored T-shirts for the dancers and red lanyards made to order for the event, imported last minute from China, with free DVDs given out by sponsors and iPods given away in drawings. The dance floor in the gym (actually the Roble Dance Studio—intended more often for ballet and social dance than marathons) is expensive and well-polished—No Shoes Allowed—and so during Dance Marathon it is covered with massive sheets of plastic-y material, taped at the edges, to protect the surface. “Site specific performances are conceived for, and conditioned by, the particulars of found spaces [...] They are inseparable from their sites, the only context within which they are readable.” (Pearson in Kaye, 1996: 21) —Mike Pearson, the Presence Project.

2. 11:13 a.m., Saturday. Caileen Cooke, one of the Dance Marathon co-chairs, consulting with Nicole Wires, head of the Dancer Relations committee, in front of Roble Gym about an hour before the event begins. There is an air of frenzy on the part of the planners in the hours before it begins; a last desperate attempt to get everything in order. The planners and execs had been at Roble preparing the site for hours the previous day, staying until late at night, then returning early Saturday morning to set up before staying awake for twenty-four hours with the dancers. The team of execs and committee members have been working on event planning for five months; the co-chairs have been planning it since last year. Event expense is estimated at about $20,000, covered by special fees.

3. 11:16 a.m., Saturday. A dancer stretching about an hour before the event, waiting in the courtyard outside the gym to be admitted. People have been checking in since 10:00, but no one can enter until noon. At exactly 12:00, they rush through the doors to a burst of music and start dancing.

4. 11:33 a.m., Saturday. Two dancers, sporting the blue “One Party, One Day, One Cause” official dancer t-shirts and red lanyards with name tags are preparing for the event, braiding their hair to keep it off their neck and out of their face during the twenty-four hours of dancing. This is also one of the last, not-yet-thoroughly-appreciated, soon-to-be-remembered-nostalgically chances to sit down.

5. 12:39 p.m., Saturday. Two committee members re-hydrating in the refreshment room. The first hour or two of the event is characterized by extremely high energy—everyone is rested, excited (after months of planning and fundraising), and dancing like mad to the blasting music. Sweat rolls down their necks and cheeks, and the cold water bottles pulled out of buckets of ice (all food donated by Stanford Dining) are refreshing.

6. 12:45 p.m. The energy is still high. The blue shirts are registered dancers, pledged to stay the full 24 hours; the yellow shirts are committee members who contributed to the planning; the scattered dancers in white with red sleeves are executives. The dance floor is covered, albeit not thickly (the turnout for Dance Marathon does not begin to approach the turnout for the average Jammix or row party, of course)—the drop-off rate peaks around 4:00 a.m., although retention is better than last year. The entertainment helps: throughout the event there are performances by Stanford dance groups, a capella, the SIMPs, speakers, etc. The element of presence is interesting because in a traditional performance there is a clear divide between the audience and the performer. In Dance Marathon, this line is a lot less clear. The dancers themselves are staging an event, in which multiple groups, speakers, etc. perform. Yet these groups do not in themselves “perform” Dance Marathon: if anything, they are guests of the dancers, who are both the performers and audience. In addition, there is a small number of reporters, members of the community, and other Stanford students (not registered dancers) who trickle through to watch. “Notions of presence hinge on the relationship between the live and mediated, on notions of immediacy, authenticity and originality. Presence prompts questions of the character of self-awareness, of the presentation of self. Interaction is implicated — presence often implies being in someone's presence.” —The Presence Project.

7. 2:26 p.m., Saturday. What also manages to inspire dancers throughout the event is the reminder of what they are getting so exhausted for in the first place: reminders of the reality of pediatric AIDS. There are speakers periodically: Jake Glaser, AIDS patient and son of the Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation founder; a doctor from the Stanford medical school; etc. Students wander through periodically to look at presentation boards covered with photographs, mostly of children in Africa. Small captions underneath explain their circumstances. This area is stiller, with soft lighting, the stories are tragic. But whereas last year this area was in a separate room, this year it is located along one edge of the gym, separated by tables. The upbeat music blasts through here as loudly as on the dance floor; the atmosphere is incongruous.

8. 12:53 p.m., Saturday. Water bottles clutched in hand, the dancers are still going strong. It’s only a little into the event, and the tiredness is only at a surface level—moments of breathlessness.

9. 4:25 p.m., Saturday. The front door of Roble gym. The countdown toward the end is posted every hour on this door—more for the sake of passers-by than for the dancers themselves, who are inside. Event publicity and promotion has been a big deal for the last few months in an attempt to recruit dancers and donors—so much so that there are more than a few angry emails to dorm chatlists complaining about the spam. On the door you can see the reflection of the trees, the intermittently sunny sky outside, the cars along Santa Teresa. They overlay other faint images of the scene within: the registration table with name tags, lanyards, programs, and T-shirts. A few committee members hopefully man the check-in table on the chance of late arrivals—or maybe just to have a valid excuse to sit down

10. 3:31 p.m., Saturday. A man and his daughter who dropped by for a few hours. Students aren’t the only ones at Dance Marathon. A number of members of the community, including a handful of children, stop in for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to see how it’s going. Their numbers drop off drastically as it gets later.

11. 3:10 p.m., Saturday. A dancer and a moraler, and a surge of energy. At three hour intervals throughout Dance Marathon, groups of “moralers,” in red shirts or in costumes, rush in and attempt to raise the energy and morale in the gym. Being rested, hydrated, and a lot less sore, they are able to inject a high dose of enthusiasm.

12. 2:54 p.m., Saturday. The participants are, of course, still Stanford students, and Dance Marathon was ill-planned to coincide with a particularly heavy bout of midterms. A full twenty-four hours, plus recovery time, is a lot to sacrifice during midterms. Some people fail to show because they are busy or tired; others just multi-task. Copies of The Brothers Karamazov and spiral-bound notebooks lay on the locker-room benches. This dancer is reading a copy of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy.

13. 5:30 p.m., Saturday. By 5:30 it’s getting darker in the gym, and people are hungry (dinner hasn’t quite been served yet). Energy is starting to sink a little more—not too much—but this dancer is still going.

14. 5:31 p.m., Saturday. Enough said.

15. 12:41 a.m., Sunday. After midnight. The event is half over, which only slightly eases the subjective sense of exhaustion. Half over is a lot, but by this time dancers have a good idea of what twelve hours of dancing feels like—and there are still twelve to go. It’s very dark in the gym, and dancers are starting to droop. Glowsticks are brought out and handed out free to everyone. The faint lights still on are colored; the shadows are pink. Some dancers twist their glowsticks into the shape of an AIDS ribbon. Lime and pink and glowing indigo AIDS ribbons wave in the air or are taped to people’s shirts. All the dancers are glowing and arcs of light follow their movements.

16. 1:47 a.m., Sunday. Roble gym looks almost eerie at night. It’s only faintly illuminated by the yellow glow from its lamps. There’s just enough night light for the tree branches to make silhouettes. Two policemen stand outside of Dance Marathon. Some effort (largely, though not entirely, successful) is being made to keep drunken partiers from crashing. Is that why the policemen are outside?

17. 8:32 a.m., Sunday. Although technically dancers are not allowed to sleep or even sit, there is not any enforcement, per se, except for social pressure. Some proportion of the dancers raise their money and don’t even show up. Others drop in for a few hours; more come for most of the day but leave early Sunday morning to sleep a bit. A few dancers, especially those who are already sleep-deprived or sick or simply worn out but unwilling to leave, slip off to the locker room to nap or just get off their feet. This dancer has fallen asleep sitting up.

18. 7:10 a.m., Sunday. More than one of the benches in the locker room are serving as hard, makeshift beds.

19. 6:44 a.m., Sunday. Jessie Liu, committee member, asleep under the condom table. The white cloth falling around her is the floor-length tablecloth that hides her from view. Jessie has a special excuse to be off her feet: two weeks before she sprained her ankle badly while snowboarding; she’s only recently off of crutches. She dances hard until her ankle is in too much pain to manage, then slips off to recover. Right now she is taking a thirty minute nap. As soon as the pain in her ankle is manageable, she’s back on her feet dancing.

20. 7:43 a.m., Sunday. Twenty-four hours is a long time to do any one thing; many people break up the time with activities besides dancing. These two dancers are also quite good jugglers. Elsewhere in the room, people are studying, talking, and playing cards.

21. 8:28 a.m., Sunday. Palpable exhaustion. Those who are dancing (instead of standing in small, hunched clumps) are often doing so rather half-heartedly. Three and a half hours to go.

22. 8:39 a.m., Sunday. Light is starting to spill in through the high windows. With these clear signs of morning, there is kind of second wind. Most are still dancing; a few are watching from the side.

23. 11:59 a.m., Sunday. For the last half hour, the energy level has peaked. It is at least as high—maybe higher—as the first half hour of the event. One minute before noon, everyone starts to jump in the air, arms waving. The music seems more upbeat. The air is one of expectancy, and excitement, and relief.

24. 12:02 p.m., Sunday. Dance Marathon is over. At noon, a large percentage of the dancers collapse onto the ground, enjoying the first moment of their feet. Not everyone even bothers to sit down, though, and for those who do the victory is in some sense only symbolic—they still have to make it back to their dorms before they can really rest.

Detail photos, top strip

1. Dancer roster, lanyards and name tags, programs, and promotional stickers for “oodle” (corporate sponsors) for dancers to pick-up upon check-in.

2. Elizabeth Glaser brochures and flyers and a pile of hundreds of red AIDS ribbons for dancers to pin on.

3. Handprint detail from the “I PLEDGE TO BE AWARE” banner. At Dance Marathon 2005, all dancers dipped their hands in paint and left their handprint and name on a giant banner, which was hung in the gym this year.

4. One of the display boards of photographs in the education section.

5. A bowl of condoms. For some time during Dance Marathon a Vaden representative mans a small table with information on STDs, sexual health, a display vibrator, and free condoms and lube. Safe sex is important to prevent the spread of HIV. A few students dropped many; many seem awkward.

6. The Dancer Relations committee wrote the name of every dancer on a CD and strung them on fishing line, then hung them outside as decoration. Light flashed off them in the sunlight. By the end of the night, a few are shattered on the ground.

7. Balloons in the courtyard, 4:12 a.m. At noon on Saturday, the balloons were bobbing festively. By 4:12 a.m., they were sagging and barely afloat, covered with dripping dew, colors muted in the dark. They looked like I felt.

8. A motivational display made by the Morale committee.

9. The coffee station at 3:10 a.m. The gym got steadily dirtier throughout the night, especially in the drink department. Piles of water bottles collected in every corner and the recycling bins were overflowing with empty Gatorade bottles. The coffee station also suffered a hit. Empty tea bags and creamer containers piled on the table. At one point, around 4:00 in the morning, I found myself exhausted, sore, dehydrated, and cold, too miserable even too eat and not allowed to sit down. Instead, I crouched in the corner drinking hot sugar water through a stirring straw until I had recovered enough to dance again.

10. The CD decorations in the sunlight. An entirely different ambiance than the night before.

11. A table outside the gym, Sunday morning. The collection of items is a cross-section of Dance Marathon: a beach ball (from the Beach Ball Party during the night), water, and homework.

12. Starbucks Frappuccinos, Dance Marathon programs, and iPod pictures. The event was technically caffeine-free (the concern was that students would drink caffeine to stay awake and then hurt worse when they ‘crashed’), but some dancers smuggled it in. Apple, a Dance Marathon sponsor, had a booth at the event, demo-ing Apple computers, iPods, and computer-cameras.

Detail photos, bottom strip

1. The coffee station at the beginning of the event, still neat and organized. Tea and coffee was in high demand—no caffeine, but it kept you warm, and it was a cold night. It also provided a change from the monotony of water when you had to drink so much (you need a lot to stay hydrated while dancing for twenty-four hours).

2. One of many encouraging posters created by the Morale Committee and scattered throughout the gym. It’s still early, and the light is shining through it. 3. Signs from the education area. They give sobering statistics and facts about pediatric AIDS—a reminder of why the dancers are here.

4. A giant red ribbon constructed from PVC pipe and red fabric and mounted in the corner of the gym. Another reminder of the cause.

5. A picture from the edges of the room, where ‘stuff’ began to accumulate steadily throughout the event—mounds of sweatshirts, spare T-shirts, water bottles, watches, and cameras—anything people didn’t want to hold while dancing.

6. The door to Roble Dance Studio, in which the event was held. The entire floor was covered so that dancers could wear their shoes after all—there was no way to dance twenty-four hours without arch support. You can see reflected in it the courtyard, fountain, and balloons.

7. “At the scene of the crime, anything may be important.” A corner of the stage holding another collection of items that speaks eloquently about Dance Marathon: a bowl of trail mix, paper cups of tea, plastic cups of water, bottles of water and Gatorade, gloves, an I.D. card, an electrical outlet for the microphone onstage, cell phones, a crumpled event program, and the plastic beads that the Soul Linedancers handed out after their performance.

8. The sky outside the gym as it gets dark, balloons still bright. Saturday evening.

9. Another corner of the room: the best depiction of the amount of hydrating going on. In an event as physical, and as physically draining, as Dance Marathon, beverages were omnipresent, as inescapable a part of the event as the music.

10. No sitting allowed. The benches have signs to remind you, in case you are tempted: “Don’t even think about it,” “For loading and unloading only,” “I bite.” They are empty, except for the occasional person who keeps to the letter of the law, body bent double so they can rest their head and torso on the bench without their feet leaving the ground. But soon the blood rushes to their head, and it doesn’t really help the soreness of the feet.

11. Two dancers taking a break to have their photos taken for the iPod ad contest. Apple, a Dance Marathon sponsor, promised to take pictures of any dancers who wanted to participate with an iPod, then select one to use for their regional iPod poster. The response was overwhelming. Before the end of Dance Marathon, everyone received a printout of their picture, doctored to look like an iPod ad.

12. A long, long row of signs encouraging dancers. The Morale Committee and the various moralers who came in shift were busily at work in the Roble dorm lounge creating signs for every dancer, usually made by one of their friends, to keep them going.