Affordable Housing, Gay Sexuality, and Political Healing and Ritual
Keith Hennessy, MFA, PhD, is a frolicker, imperfectionist, and witch working in the fields of contemporary dance, queer performance, affordable housing, gay sexuality, and political healing and ritual. Raised in Canada, he has lived in Yelamu/San Francisco since 1982, and tours internationally. Keith started dancing CI in Montreal in 1979. Hennessy’s work is interdisciplinary and experimental, motivated by anti-racist, queer-feminist, and anarchist movements. With a focus on the poetics and politics of relationship, Keith’s work prioritizes collaboration, improvisation, and community process. Collaborators include Ishmael Houston-Jones, Annie Danger, Sarah Crowell, Snowflake Calvert, Meg Stuart, Peaches, Nathaniel Moore, Jassem Hindi, jose abad, Peiling Kao, and Gerald Casel. Hennessy directs Circo Zero and was a member of Contraband with Sara Shelton Mann. Hennessy is a co-founder of CounterPULSE (formerly 848 Community Space) a thriving performance space in San Francisco. Awards include Guggenheim, USArtist, NY Bessie, and SF Izzies. Venues include Impulstanz/Vienna, Kampnagel/Hamburg, SF MOMA, The New Museum/NY, TBA Festival/Portland, Velocity/Seattle, Ponderosa/Germany, YBCA, CounterPulse, CORE/Atlanta. Keith teaches widely at universities, festivals, and independent studios, most recently at La Manzana de Paxton in Oaxaca and Cornell University.
Classes in Spiral & Root / 5 days – third week.
CI AS POLITICAL HEALING
Prioritizing improvisation and collaboration we will play with the possibilities of healing, politics, and dancing together. This laboratory will welcome your curiosity and concerns. What’s up? What inspires you or prevents you from dancing more freely, especially with others? What activates or impedes your healing potential? How is your body responding to new wars and embodied traumas? How can CI dancing and care be activated as anti-capitalism, as a new ethics of relationship, pleasure, and shared power? We will invite the prophetic ancestors Gustav Landauer and Octavia Butler into the studio to renew our dancing. Depending on interest we will integrate performance practices throughout the week.
