Saliva (1988-89)

Re-staged at the original site in Dec 2009 as part of A Queer 20th Anniversary, with a history talk about the work co-presented by Shaping SF at CounterPULSE.

Performance by Keith Hennessy

Additional music by Jeffrey Alphonsus Mooney (1989/2009) and Jules Beckman (1989-90).

20 years ago Keith Hennessy created SALIVA, an interdisciplinary dance-performance-ritual under a freeway South of Market near downtown San Francisco. Deep within the rage and grief of the AIDS crisis, Hennessy performed a ritualistic reclamation of the body, the queer male body, as holy.

SALIVA was also presented at Highways in LA, was featured in the national gay magazine The Advocate (1990), and has since inspired chapters in two academic books: Gay Ideas by Richard Mohr (1992) and How To Make Dances in an Epidemic, the landmark study of AIDS and dance by David Gere (2004).