American Realness matters

My American Realness

by Keith Hennessy, americanrealness.com, January 19, 2014

MELT...with you

A sampler of the many imaginative workshops

from Movement Research's MELT Winter 2012 

(January 2-20)

Chris Aiken
An Eco-poetic Approach to Dance Improvisation and Performance

In this movement workshop we will explore awareness and intention through the development of perceptual acuity in relationship to our inner and outer landscapes. We will examine the delicate relationships between our poetic imagination and our sensory systems. The basis of my approach is that composition and performance are ecologically rooted acts. Our imagination grows from where and how we exist. Movement, story, image and gesture are imbedded in the relationships that are evolving all around us.  Come ready to dance, perceive, perform and imagine.

Keith Hennessy
Improvisation as Potential Shamanism     SOLD OUT/WAIT LIST OPEN

Five days of contemplative embodiment, intensive breathwork, fake healing, endurance shaking, post-contact, disco and séance, all in the attempt to invigorate improvisation practice for dancers, choreographers, and performance makers. Shamanism, in a general usage, refers to the ritual/spiritual practices of working with forces and energies, unseen and poetic, of transforming space and time to shift meaning and perspective, of communicating with the dead or not-human. Contemporary improvisation and performance practices often engages the same intentions. Let's dance in the borderlands of anti-systemic knowledge, magic, real and fiction, contagion and exchange, and various states of presence. Dance class is a ritual, potentially.

DD Dorvillier
Touch Move Talk Write: open studio practices

This workshop focuses on generating new practices through touching, moving, talking, and writing. We will shape each practice with simple rules and apply different sequences and durations, giving equal time to all four aspects. By pushing the notion of practice to extremes, one begins to understand assumptions about style, body, self, technique, unspoken rules, expertise, etc. etc... The aim is to proliferate unexpected results, to try many things quickly, and to foment revolution. Please don't come without a notebook and a pen.

Miguel Gutierrez
INEFFABLE INTANGIBLE SENSATIONAL

This workshop looks at some of the ways in which Miguel Gutierrez approaches a practice of movement and improvisation in his work. Working from the proposition that dance is a mode of perceptual inquiry, and working against the idea of dance as a non-verbal "language," students will be led through a series of movement explorations that prioritize sensation, non-rational action, and that trigger automatic, unprepared physical response. Some of the questions that guide this workshop are: What does movement "do" and how does it operate as a framework for complicated, nuanced, embodied meaning?

For full program, schedule and registration details about these and other MELT Winter workshops, click here.

Meg Stuart lays it out on the table

I hope Meg Stuart and Performa 09 will not mind my quoting a bit of the promotion for Auf den Tisch! (At the Table!) which I attended, last night, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. It's really the best way to get the concept right:

Picture this: you enter a room and can take a seat at an enormous table, with four microphones at the ready, as if in a conference situation. From your chair you can see how the table becomes a platform for action and reflection. Or something of the kind. You see performers sing, play, dance, and talk about performance issues, fragility, and territories. Or not. Meeting and improvising at an oversized table such as this one, it is no wonder that things get out of proportion. “Auf den Tisch!” (At the Table!) is a curatorial improvisation-project by Meg Stuart. Upon her invitation and initiation, a changing cast of performers, thinkers, writers, musicians, actors, and dancers confer about their pressing issues while presenting a performance of negotiations.

If you manage to get a reservation for tonight's final performance (7:30pm), you too can witness--or, as you wish, more directly participate in--this conference of sorts.

The table--a huge, blond wood beauty with a couple of unimaginatively used trap doors--is a total performer magnet. Who wouldn't look at this spacious, brightly lit thing and want to clamber on and act out?  Combining the likes of Stuart, David Thomson, Yvonne Meier, George Emilio Sanchez, Trajal Harrell, Keith Hennessy and others, you certainly have the makings of a major act of acting out. Audience folk sit to table with the performers or occupy a few rows of chairs that ring it. As Stuart settles down in front of her microphone and gazes around the room, there's a sense of something momentous about to happen.

She starts by reading text. It sounds sensitive, fragile and quiet, a kind of table-like base for what will follow, and might represent Stuart's essential nature as the dreamer and generator of the entire project. The performance I saw contained a repeating motif of a heavy body or bodies piling on top of or rolling over a body underneath. Stuart's opening words are followed by other voices around the table that accumulate and spill over one another, swelling, eventually subsiding.

Stuff happens. Lots of it. Anything can happen, since improvisation is in the room. Thomson, dressed in a comic-strip hoodie and jeans, prowled the

space between table and outer chairs. Later, he was the first to bust out dancing, top and center, in loose-limbed, splayed-out movements.

Meier--challenged by Stuart at one point-- retorted, "I'm sorry. I'm not sitting on my mouth." Someone, to clunky effect, alluded to the Fort Hood shooting: "I'm still stuck on the psychiatrist with a machine gun. Was he improvising?"

A parlor game broke out, and the possible fucking of pineapples and righteous politics of pineapples were contemplated. Thomson and Harrell engaged in a cross-table Q&A about forgiveness. A belligerent Janez Jansa somewhat reluctantly performed the history of Richard Schechner's "putting off of clothes." This "getting close to history" made Meier at last "sit on her mouth."

The spectacular "Floral Cat"--the spectacular Hennessy in costume--touched off a segment of leftover Halloween shenanigans. Sanchez--in a kind of Soupy Sales act flipped upside down and turned psychological--encouraged all of us to take a piece of paper money from our own wallets and simply rip it up. Amid more scampering, a few words were carefully added to a flipchart and just left there, meaninglessly, until someone gave the equally meaningless order for the flipchart to be flattened to the floor.

There were dashes of chemistry, untethered patches of the jazz of delicious movement (Thomson, Harrell) and wide-awake humor (Sanchez), and not a little mystification and diminishing returns. The performers seemed unwilling to acknowledge signs that energy and interest had dropped. What I had been told would last "maybe a little over an hour," stretched towards two hours before, having had more than enough, I rose to leave.

You have to know when to push back from the table.

At that point, Stuart, having just asked the audience if it had any questions, was answered by a heavy silence. For an interesting moment, we were left with her standing rather defenselessly before us in all her original sensitivity, fragility and quiet. Okay. Matters could have ended there, and quite reasonably.

But then, Performa founder and director RoseLee Goldberg took the mic and asked something on the order of "Do you think improvisation is still alive?"

I'm not really sure what she was going for with that question but, in light of the overall lack of surprise, challenge or revelation in the performance, I'd rephrase the question, maybe split it into two parts:

"Do you think there's still life in your improvisation?" and "Can improvisation still matter?"

Performa 09 information and resources

Baryshnikov Art Center

450 West 37th Street, Manhattan

Late-night Hennessy: special DTW deal

Keith Hennessy/Zero Performance is working a late-night gig--featuring Hennessy's solo, Antibody--at Dance Theater Workshop on Friday, April 3 at 10:30pm. What's more, if you already have a ticket for DTW's Hennessy/Melanie Maar shared program earlier that evening, you can see Hennessy in Antibody at the recession-friendly price of $5. All others pay $10.

Information and ticketing, or call 212-505-0426.

Antibody is live performance research, testing the potential of art as a liberating force, as transformative ritual, as rhetorical pedagogy, and as pleasurable entertainment.By calling the performance-action Antibody, Hennessy links the one-time-only event to a personal lineage of improvised performances, spontaneous choreographies, and real-time dancing. Costumes might change. Objects might appear. There will be talking, maybe singing, and lots of movement, dance, and physical action. Antibody has been performed in variations of 15 to 75 minutes in theaters and studios since 2000, most recently at The Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater in Chicago, October 2008.

By calling the performance-action Antibody, Hennessy links the one-time-only event to a personal lineage of improvised performances, spontaneous choreographies, and real-time dancing. Costumes might change. Objects might appear. There will be talking, maybe singing, and lots of movement, dance, and physical action. Antibody has been performed in variations of 15 to 75 minutes in theaters and studios since 2000, most recently at The Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater in Chicago, October 2008.

Nothing is scripted or choreographed in advance, but Hennessy will have access to 30 years of performance habits, training, making, and watching. It is likely that the economic disaster will be addressed. It is unlikely that Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin will be mentioned or even referred to. Formal considerations will focus on the ritual bending of time and space, the potential for embodied intelligence to be revealed through improvised performance, and the role of the artist-audience relationship in a country at permanent war. Antibody is a performance ritual in which symbolic action in one world is intended to affect another. The goal is a lucid dream in which the body and the theatrical context become metaphors for re-visioning our personal and social fears, doubts, desires and ambitions.

Keith Hennessy is an award-winning performer, choreographer, teacher and organizer. He dances. Hennessy was born in Canada, lives in San Francisco and works often in Europe. His interdisciplinary research engages improvisation, spectacle, ritual, and public action as tools for investigating and re-visioning political realities. Alone and with others, Hennessy makes politically engaged, soul-touching performance. Hennessy directs Circo Zero Performance, a performance-making company that sometimes includes circus arts in a cross-disciplinary and body-based approach to performance art. Click here for more information.