Keith Hennessy

Dance Theater Workshop
presents
Keith Hennessy / Zero Performance
in
Antibody
APRIL 3, 2009 at 10:30pm

Special Ticket Price: $5 for Hennessy/Maar ticket holders
Regular Ticket Price: $10

New York, NY, March 27, 2009 – Dance Theater Workshop announces an additional performance by Keith Hennessy on Friday, April 3 at 10:30pm. Hennessy’s solo, Antibody, is a separate project from the performance presented during the double bill with Melanie Maar. The work is live performance research, testing the potential of art as a liberating force, as transformative ritual, as rhetorical pedagogy, and as pleasurable entertainment.

By calling the performance-action Antibody, Hennessy links the one-time-only event to a personal lineage of improvised performances, spontaneous choreographies, and real-time dancing. Costumes might change. Objects might appear. There will be talking, maybe singing, and lots of movement, dance, and physical action. Antibody has been performed in variations of 15 to 75 minutes in theaters and studios since 2000, most recently at The Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater in Chicago, Oct 2008.

Nothing is scripted or choreographed in advance, but Hennessy will have access to 30 years of performance habits, training, making and watching. It is likely that the economic disaster will be addressed. It is unlikely that Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin will be mentioned or even referred to. Formal considerations will focus on the ritual bending of time and space, the potential for embodied intelligence to be revealed through improvised performance, and the role of the artist-audience relationship in a country at permanent war. Antibody is a performance ritual in which symbolic action in one world is intended to affect another. The goal is a lucid dream in which the body and the theatrical context become metaphors for re-visioning our personal and social fears, doubts, desires, and ambitions.

“Hennessy is that rare artist who succeeds in translating fierce social concerns into artistically satisfying creations that enlighten and entertain. Against all odds he believes in art’s power to reassume its ritualistic and healing function.” – San Francisco Bay Guardian

This added performance of Antibody will take place at Dance Theater Workshop in the Bessie Schönberg Theater, April 3 (Friday at 10:30pm). For ticket holders to the Hennessy/Maar performance, tickets are $5. All other tickets are $10 online and $15 through the box office and are available online at dancetheaterworkshop.org, over the phone at 212.924.0077, and in person at the box office. Box Office hours are Monday – Friday from 5pm-9pm and Saturday – Sunday from 12pm – 8pm. Dance Theater Workshop is located at 219 West 19th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues.

About the Artists

Keith Hennessy is an award-winning performer, choreographer, teacher and organizer. He dances. Hennessy was born in Canada, lives in San Francisco and works often in Europe. His interdisciplinary research engages improvisation, spectacle, ritual, and public action as tools for investigating and re-visioning political realities. Alone and with others, Hennessy makes politically engaged, soul-touching performance.

Hennessy directs Circo Zero Performance, a performance-making company that sometimes includes circus arts in a cross-disciplinary and body-based approach to performance art. He was a member of the collaborative performance companies: Contraband (85-94), CORE (95-98), and Cahin-caha, cirque bâtard (98-02). His work is featured in several books and documentaries, including How To Make Dances in an Epidemic (David Gere, University of Wisconsin: 2004), Gay Ideas (Richard Mohr, Beacon: 1992), and Dancers in Exile (RAPT Productions, 2000). Hennessy is a co-founder of 848 Community Space/CounterPULSE, a thriving performance and culture space in San Francisco. Hennessy has an MFA in Choreography and is a PhD student in Performance Studies at University of California - Davis. His research is mostly focused on Bay Area performance in life and art during the 1970s.

Recent awards include a Goldie (2007) and the Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship in Dance (2005). Recent commissions include Arsenic, Lausanne (Crotch, 2008), Centre Chorégraphique National, Belfort (Sol niger, 2007), Les Subsistances, Lyon (Sol niger 2007, Homeless USA, 2005), Les Laboratoires, Paris (American Tweaker, 2006), FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance), and Lower Left Performance Co, San Diego (Gather, 2005). Keith’s 2008 teaching includes UC Davis, Orvieto (Italy)/ Zipfest, Vienna/imPulsTanz, Moscow/TSEH, Montreal/Circuit Est, Toronto/IDA, Chicago/NPN-Columbia College, and talks at CI36 events in Berlin and Juniata College PA. In 2009 Crotch will tour to Dance Theater Workshop (New York) and TNT (Bordeaux). For more information, visit circozero.org.

Press kits and digital images available on request.

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