Keith Hennessy
Dance, Play, Political Healing

This is a dance class for all bodies that prioritizes creative bodily play and explores the (political) healing potential of dancing together. This workshop questions how the current wars and political crises impact our bodies, imaginations, and dancing. Supported by ideas from anarchism, Black- and speculative feminisms, Zapatismo, anti-capitalism, and our own embodied experiences participants will explore the potentials of the dance studio to re-negotiate and develop new practices of social relations.

How do the current wars and political crises impact our bodies, imaginations, dancing? Can we decommodify dancing, healing, and critique? Can we play with everything? How can dancing alchemize the political harms that we bring into the studio?

Participants will use Contact Improvisation (CI) as one of their resources, not to replicate CI techniques, style or sociality but to prioritize the work and play of improvised dancing in contact – physical and energetic – with all their relations, including other dancers, the place, ancestors, futures and the non-human. They will dance with objects, fake healing, not knowing and the unseen.