Some days the life of an improviser is doubly charmed. Watch this video by Yva Jung who I happened to meet in 2008 in New York's Union Square where she was selling the breath of artists. Prices ranged from 22 cents to $121, with several 'breath samples' offered for barter (a good natured hug, a song, 32 oz Ketchup). I bartered for a 'really good dance.' Later that night I told the story while performing at a raw space in the Ambush festival (in the Brooklyn neighborhood, Bushwick) and tried to recreate the dance I had improvised in Union Square. By fluke, Yva heard about the performance, got a copy of the video from Treva Wurmfeld and created this work comparing the two events. In the audience that night were Yvonne Meier, Ishmael Houston-Jones (you can hear him laughing), Carla Peterson, a few ex-pats from San Francisco, and a bunch of artists/people from the neighborhood...
Passing Strange (The Musical / Film)
Passing Strange
A movie by Spike Lee documenting Passing Strange, a Broadway musical with lyrics and book by Stew and music and orchestrations by Stew and Heidi Rodewald.
Before my brief comments on this concert/play/movie, here’s the synopsis from wiki:
“A young black musician travels on a picaresque journey to rebel against his mother and his upbringing in a church-going, middle-class, late 1970s South Central Los Angeles neighborhood in order to find "the real". He finds new experiences in promiscuous Amsterdam, with its easy access to drugs and sex, and in artistic, chaotic, political Berlin, where he struggles with ethics and integrity when he misrepresents his background as (ghetto) poor to get ahead...
WHY I READ MY TEXTS IN PERFORMANCE
THE ROLE, MEANINGS, AND PRESENCE OF THE TEXT
1. Because they’re fresh, reworked until the last minute, just written and I don’t have time to memorize while dealing with production, promotion, choreography, costumes, lights, volunteers, ticket sales, press, documentation, props and rigging, shopping for necessary stuff, and practicing the action, the dancing, and/or some crazy stunt...
Read morePhotos from The Keith Score
Here's a photo (taken by the audience) of me improvising The Keith Score at the PRISMA gathering in Mexico in early July.
Read morePERFORM THE KEITH SCORE
Keith 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 moreQUEER! a workshop
In late July I taught a five-day class called Queer! at Impulstanz, a big contemporary dance fest in Vienna.
Satu Herrala, one of the participants wrote about the class for Corpus a cool site that you can check out here.
http://www.corpusweb.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1263&Itemid=35
I didn't have a particular pedagogy for the class but each day I worked with an idea or a particular theorist and tried to come up with improvisation and composition exercise to explore that idea, e.g., Gloria Anzaldúa on borderlands, Trinh, T. Minh-ha on movement between margins and centers, Kate Bornstein's work on analyzing one's personal gender(s)...