Anti-modernism. Fake healing. Real dancing, singing & magik.
The almost legendary Keith Hennessy presents Bear/Skin, his first new solo performance since the Bessie-award winning Crotch. Bear/Skin uses dancing, singing, story telling, and magik to gather people for a ritualistic moment outside of daily life. The intimate and low-tech performance pretends to be informal and yet is motivated by grand spectacle and ambitious prayer. Bear/Skin is politically incited by the tension between cop killing and killing cops, the racist failures of modernism, and mental health (specifically anxiety and depression) as a socio-political situation. And yes, Bear/Skin is a dance.
The work circulates around a set of questions about healing, community, and change that have motivated Keith Hennessy’s work since 1986 while making Religare with Contraband in the violent ruins of the Gartland Pit (Valencia and 16th Street), the site of a landlord arson that resulted in the deaths of several elderly and disabled tenants. Keith is building on questions formed during Religare to consider: What social, material, and spiritual conditions enhance the potential for healing, for mutual recognition, for lasting social change?
Bear/Skin appropriates Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) to consider Modernism's dependence on appropriations of the indigenous, folk, exotic, and oriental – the cultures crushed by the industrial revolution, European colonialism, and the slave trade – to ask questions about how post-industrial peoples might approach ritual and art today.
Keith Hennessy says, “Bear/Skin is a live performance about history, mine and ours, and by ours I am referring to makers of live performance and US Americans and maybe even humans. I am working with some of the basic tools of gathering, the technologies of bringing people together: story telling, vocal music, and body movement.”
Hennessy’s current work explores the breakdowns of idea and narrative, of form and identity. Bear/Skin approaches storytelling through the influence of both ADHD (speed, distraction, lack of focus) and dementia (scrambled meaning, memory loss, drifting). Under these influences he weaves an incomplete tale with too many disparate threads including: Modernism's complicated relationship to racism and orientalism, AND the altered mental states of ADHD and dementia, AND the personal and political economies of both suicide and torture, AND the practice of ritual and the danced projections of primitive and animal, AND the skin, especially the skin of the other. Bear/Skin is an autobiography and it is dance history. It is kid's play, therapy, ritual, trickery, and it is a dance unto death.
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The almost legendary Keith Hennessy presents Bear/Skin, his first new solo performance since the Bessie-award winning Crotch. Bear/Skin uses dancing, singing, story telling, and magik to gather people for a ritualistic moment outside of daily life. The intimate and low-tech performance pretends to be informal and yet is motivated by grand spectacle and ambitious prayer. Bear/Skin is politically incited by the tension between cop killing and killing cops, the racist failures of modernism, and mental health (specifically anxiety and depression) as a socio-political situation. And yes, Bear/Skin is a dance.
The work circulates around a set of questions about healing, community, and change that have motivated Keith Hennessy’s work since 1986 while making Religare with Contraband in the violent ruins of the Gartland Pit (Valencia and 16th Street), the site of a landlord arson that resulted in the deaths of several elderly and disabled tenants. Keith is building on questions formed during Religare to consider: What social, material, and spiritual conditions enhance the potential for healing, for mutual recognition, for lasting social change?
Bear/Skin appropriates Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) to consider Modernism's dependence on appropriations of the indigenous, folk, exotic, and oriental – the cultures crushed by the industrial revolution, European colonialism, and the slave trade – to ask questions about how post-industrial peoples might approach ritual and art today.
Keith Hennessy says, “Bear/Skin is a live performance about history, mine and ours, and by ours I am referring to makers of live performance and US Americans and maybe even humans. I am working with some of the basic tools of gathering, the technologies of bringing people together: story telling, vocal music, and body movement.”
Hennessy’s current work explores the breakdowns of idea and narrative, of form and identity. Bear/Skin approaches storytelling through the influence of both ADHD (speed, distraction, lack of focus) and dementia (scrambled meaning, memory loss, drifting). Under these influences he weaves an incomplete tale with too many disparate threads including: Modernism's complicated relationship to racism and orientalism, AND the altered mental states of ADHD and dementia, AND the personal and political economies of both suicide and torture, AND the practice of ritual and the danced projections of primitive and animal, AND the skin, especially the skin of the other. Bear/Skin is an autobiography and it is dance history. It is kid's play, therapy, ritual, trickery, and it is a dance unto death.
Anti-modernism. Fake healing. Real dancing, singing & magik.
The almost legendary Keith Hennessy presents Bear/Skin, his first new solo performance since the Bessie-award winning Crotch. Bear/Skin uses dancing, singing, story telling, and magik to gather people for a ritualistic moment outside of daily life. The intimate and low-tech performance pretends to be informal and yet is motivated by grand spectacle and ambitious prayer. Bear/Skin is politically incited by the tension between cop killing and killing cops, the racist failures of modernism, and mental health (specifically anxiety and depression) as a socio-political situation. And yes, Bear/Skin is a dance.
The work circulates around a set of questions about healing, community, and change that have motivated Keith Hennessy’s work since 1986 while making Religare with Contraband in the violent ruins of the Gartland Pit (Valencia and 16th Street), the site of a landlord arson that resulted in the deaths of several elderly and disabled tenants. Keith is building on questions formed during Religare to consider: What social, material, and spiritual conditions enhance the potential for healing, for mutual recognition, for lasting social change?
Bear/Skin appropriates Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) to consider Modernism's dependence on appropriations of the indigenous, folk, exotic, and oriental – the cultures crushed by the industrial revolution, European colonialism, and the slave trade – to ask questions about how post-industrial peoples might approach ritual and art today.
Keith Hennessy says, “Bear/Skin is a live performance about history, mine and ours, and by ours I am referring to makers of live performance and US Americans and maybe even humans. I am working with some of the basic tools of gathering, the technologies of bringing people together: story telling, vocal music, and body movement.”
Hennessy’s current work explores the breakdowns of idea and narrative, of form and identity. Bear/Skin approaches storytelling through the influence of both ADHD (speed, distraction, lack of focus) and dementia (scrambled meaning, memory loss, drifting). Under these influences he weaves an incomplete tale with too many disparate threads including: Modernism's complicated relationship to racism and orientalism, AND the altered mental states of ADHD and dementia, AND the personal and political economies of both suicide and torture, AND the practice of ritual and the danced projections of primitive and animal, AND the skin, especially the skin of the other. Bear/Skin is an autobiography and it is dance history. It is kid's play, therapy, ritual, trickery, and it is a dance unto death.
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The almost legendary Keith Hennessy presents Bear/Skin, his first new solo performance since the Bessie-award winning Crotch. Bear/Skin uses dancing, singing, story telling, and magik to gather people for a ritualistic moment outside of daily life. The intimate and low-tech performance pretends to be informal and yet is motivated by grand spectacle and ambitious prayer. Bear/Skin is politically incited by the tension between cop killing and killing cops, the racist failures of modernism, and mental health (specifically anxiety and depression) as a socio-political situation. And yes, Bear/Skin is a dance.
The work circulates around a set of questions about healing, community, and change that have motivated Keith Hennessy’s work since 1986 while making Religare with Contraband in the violent ruins of the Gartland Pit (Valencia and 16th Street), the site of a landlord arson that resulted in the deaths of several elderly and disabled tenants. Keith is building on questions formed during Religare to consider: What social, material, and spiritual conditions enhance the potential for healing, for mutual recognition, for lasting social change?
Bear/Skin appropriates Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) to consider Modernism's dependence on appropriations of the indigenous, folk, exotic, and oriental – the cultures crushed by the industrial revolution, European colonialism, and the slave trade – to ask questions about how post-industrial peoples might approach ritual and art today.
Keith Hennessy says, “Bear/Skin is a live performance about history, mine and ours, and by ours I am referring to makers of live performance and US Americans and maybe even humans. I am working with some of the basic tools of gathering, the technologies of bringing people together: story telling, vocal music, and body movement.”
Hennessy’s current work explores the breakdowns of idea and narrative, of form and identity. Bear/Skin approaches storytelling through the influence of both ADHD (speed, distraction, lack of focus) and dementia (scrambled meaning, memory loss, drifting). Under these influences he weaves an incomplete tale with too many disparate threads including: Modernism's complicated relationship to racism and orientalism, AND the altered mental states of ADHD and dementia, AND the personal and political economies of both suicide and torture, AND the practice of ritual and the danced projections of primitive and animal, AND the skin, especially the skin of the other. Bear/Skin is an autobiography and it is dance history. It is kid's play, therapy, ritual, trickery, and it is a dance unto death.
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