QUEER!
(Un)Dancing representations of gender and sexuality

Queer means odd or strange. Queer is a term of political solidarity for all who are not heterosexual, monogamous, and obedient. Queer is a political and aesthetic strategy of disruption and disobedience. Queer is an attitude towards the body, especially its sex and gender, and how that body is or is not compliant with social norms and rules. Queer is shameless emobodiment of abject, animal, monster, cyborg, feminist, or homosexual. Queer is an alchemical detournement of insult and slander, of violence and rejection. Queer embraces social disruption in favour of sexual liberation, and that includes in the theatre, as well as in the streets, the family, the school and beyond. When queer is dangerous it also transgresses ethnic, racial, and national borders. Queer performance is a utopian fantasia. It fails, but it fails fabulously.

How can we dance queer? How is dance already queer? How does our dancing body and choreographic mind reproduce the simplest of binary roles for man and woman? How can we fuck with that? We will dance and play, improvise and compose. Sometimes we will work directly with gesture, action, movement vocabulary, physical attitude. Other times we will work with dialogue, discourse, image, and intervention. Each class will include brief critiques of ImPulsTanz performances from a queer-feminist-postfeminist perspective.




Keith Hennessy
Keith Hennessy is an award-winning performer, choreographer, teacher and organiser. He 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 revisioning political realities. He is the director of ZERO PERFORMANCE and CIRCO ZERO, temporal collaborations with artists working in diverse genres and styles of dance, circus, performance, music, visual and conceptual art.
Hennessy was a co-founder of 848 Community Space and CounterPULSE, thriving culture spaces in San Francisco. Hennessy was a member of Sara Shelton Mann's legendary CONTRABAND, is deeply curious about improvisation, and has been queering bodies and stages for over 25 years.

Recent awards include two Isadora Duncan Awards (2009) for "Sol niger", 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 DTW/New York and TNT/Bordeaux and hopefully San Francisco.
www.circozero.org