Keith Hennessy
Provocation x Care

Dancing and creating performance raise many questions in times of precarity, anxiety, and trauma: When to provoke? When to heal? When is healing provocative? When is provocation healing?

This binary will be rejected, complicated, multiplied, dissolved. When is provocation inappropriate to the intended audience or community? What is the difference between healing as radical care (Lourde) and healing as privileged escape (neoliberal new age whiteness)? Many of us – anarchists, queers, feminists, punks, activists, contemporary artists – were taught to prioritise disruption and critique. What happens when we shift our practice to respond to anxiety, attention disorders, and multi-generational trauma? Decolonizing art practices demands multiple and hybrid perspectives. Let‘s get complicated together.

In this workshop, participants not only re-consider performance tactics but also embrace complexity together: dance, heal, play, engage in conversation, create performances, read tarot, and explore We are all Anxious by The Institute for Precarious Consciousness in conversation with indigenous and lesbian feminisms, Marx, Landauer, and all the medicinal and activist practices that this group brings into the studio.