Rants, dance, and chants by Keith Hennessy

Sink’s approach to current politics waivers between punk and contemplative, transformative and fucked. Loneliness, a lifejacket, a white man, a shadow dance, a sad angry song, and love, suspended.

“Sink is a clarion call for justice, the miracle of surviving, and an amazing journey that embraces a volcano of everyday emotions… with wild bursts of sentimentality and moments of savage beauty and grace.” John Wilkens, KQED

The performance is an embodied response to the current political, economic, and social shifts that have produced not only Trump and Brexit, Erdogan and Duterte, but also the massive refugee crises all over the world, the mass shootings in Christchurch, Charleston, and Gilroy, and normalization of precarity in all sectors (financial instability, impossible debt, depression, anxiety, poverty, incarceration, species extinction, climate chaos and existential fears…).

An intimate and confrontational portrait of the current era, Sink features poetic texts, contemplative dances, dark satire, plaintive chanting, re-processed nazi music, and an aerial dance.

Hennessy says, “Sink is a personal experiment... I'm feeling fragile and distracted and that's partly structural. I'm responding to hate and terror, shame and paralysis, the will to survive competing against the urge to implode/explode. I'm reaching in new and old directions, dancing contemplatively, climbing dangerously, singing my guts out, asking too many questions at once: Is freedom a useful concept to motivate dancing? Can a performance be a spell of support for Syrian and Sudanese refugees or victims of fire, hurricane and government betrayal? Is there a non harmful role for the white and male artist? In our need to create contexts for healing, care, and trauma relief, how can I defend artistic provocation or abstract formalism?”

Sink, verb: going under, to fall or drop gradually, to displace the volume by descending
Sink, idiom: everything but the kitchen sink

Press

“Sink is a summons to pay passionate attention to the enormous violence of this place and time… a profound welcome to our place in the circle of mourning for a world both drowning and on fire. [Sink] casts a spell for all our kin harmed, betrayed, abandoned, left to die.” - Julian Carter, Dance Matters
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"[Sink} confronts injustice with wild bursts of sentimentality and moments of savage beauty and grace...It is a clarion call for justice, the miracle of surviving, and an amazing journey that embraces a volcano of everyday emotions..." - John Wilkins, KQED
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"There is something queer about Sink, a political purge in heels, a ritualized communal healing, a street-smart shamanic journey... Sink is unsinkable, heavy in content and reality, buoyantly hopeful in its alchemy." - David Moreno, Culture Vulture
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"Hennessy is as much a dramatic poet as a movement-artist; he knows how to mix the media... He keeps us precarious, and that's the point." - Paul Parrish, Bay Area Reporter
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Jennifer Chien and Keith Hennessy radio feature on KALW
Click here to listen

Credits

• Choreography, performance, text, visuals: Keith Hennessy
• Music: new and old compositions by Marc Kate, with additional songs by Sylvester and Terry Callier
• Costumes: Jack Davis, Nadine Jessen, Keith Hennessy
• Guest dancer June 2018 and November 2019: Nathaniel Moore
• Guest dancer December 2017 premiere: Aaron Perlstein
• Light design: Beth Hersh in collaboration with Grisel Torres and Keith Hennessy
• Photography: Robbie Sweeny
• Production Manager: Alley Wilde

Performance History

January 2017 :: Sink work-in-progress showing at FRESH Festival in San Francisco
October 2017 :: Sink work-in-progress showing at Lion's Jaw in Boston
December 1-9, 2017 :: Sink premiered at The Joe Goode Annex in San Francisco
June 1-2, 2018 :: Sink at The Joe Goode Annex in San Francisco
November 1-2, 2019 :: Sink at the Joe Goode Annex in San Francisco
Novermber 8-9, 2019 :: Sink at Velocity Dance Center in Seattle

Funding

Sink is made possible with funding by The San Francisco Arts Commission OPG Grant, California Arts Council Local Impact Grant, and The Kenneth Rainin Foundation.