Keith Hennessy in collaboration...
or perhaps,
I wanna die saving a (sexy) woman
Since Fall 2012 I have watched a lot of action films. I would type searches like: best political action films, best action films of all time, best political thrillers, best action films with a female lead, then make lists and start streaming. I was annoyed by tired tropes of cold war fantasies and racially or ethnically defined “bad guys” but I kept watching...
Read moreA performance poem based on a protest chant spontaneously created by 30 or 40 mostly anarchists and witches during a protest against the first Gulf war, in February 1991. When AWOL (Artists and Writers Out Loud) asked me to perform at a rally "after the war", I scribbled it down and yelled it from a megaphone in front of SF City Hall. Then it was integrated into my solo performance, The King Is Dead (Long Live The King) which was presented in San Francisco and Auckland. In collaboration with Essex Hemphill (RIP), the text was edited slightly and then performed as a duet to benefit The Bastard Review at New College of California, later in 1991.
Dedicated to the 200,000 Bay Areans who publicly protested the oil war.
Read morefrom the solo performance Chosen (2005).
(Performed in a re-purposed, long, white wedding gown with fetish details by Jack Davis, periodically drinking apple cider vinegar with a straw, gagging and drooling excessively, while standing on the fire escape of Dance Mission Theater in a piss and junk alley off 24th St. in San Francisco.)
A piss and vinegar letter in honor of the dead world citizens
since September 11, 2001...
Read moreKeith Score
A solo performance by Keith Hennessy developed unintentionally while improvising.
Written documentation, July 20, 2009, Berlin
I have been performing solo improvisations since the early 80s. I think my first spontaneous choreographies for an audience were in 1982 or 83 at The Alchemy Lab, a weekly improv ‘club’ held in a side room of the Fillmore West in San Francisco. Since these earliest experiments I have merged talking and dancing to extend postmodern dance into mongrel post-genre performance...
Read more(Performed in recycled wedding gown with fetish details by Jack Davis, periodically drinking apple cider vinegar with a straw, gagging and drooling excessively, while standing on the fire escape of Dance Mission is a piss and junk alley off 24th St. in San Francisco.)
A piss and vinegar letter in honor of the dead world citizens
since September 11, 2001.
Dear George W Bush
Dear Mr Cheney, Mr Rumsfield, Dr Rice, Mr Wolfowitz, Mr Gonzalez,
Dear Mr. Bechtel, Mr. Chevron, Mr Lockhead Martin Mr Monsanto Mr Smart Bomb Mr & Ms New American Century...
The next piece is by Mark Twain, and is called The War Prayer. In it, Twain suggests that every prayer has an unspoken twin, a shadow prayer that completes the first, warning us, to be careful what we pray for.
He wrote it a century ago in response to the invasion and occupation of the Philippines. In two short years, between 1899 and 1901, the US military, without airplanes, killed over 500,000 Philipinos in a program called Benevolent Assimilation, ushering in an era of political instability and subservience to US economic interests that has continued to this day, and been replicated in various countries around the world...
Read more