Kolaborativna koreografija neuspjeha.
Objašnjenje ekonomske krize plesom (uračunato zanemarivanje općeprihvaćenih pravila djelovanja).
Istovremeno suvremeni ples, improvizirani hepening i političko kazalište. I, naravno, uračunati neuspjeh. Nije bitno promijeniti svijet, nego napraviti plesnu predstavu o nemogućnosti te promjene.
Turbulence
(a dance about the economy)
A collaborative failure choreographed by Keith Hennessy
and produced by Circo Zero.
Turbulence World premier - US Tour - Fall 2012
Performer/collaborators: Julie
Phelps, Emily Leap, Laura Arrington, Jesse Hewit, Jorge Rodolfo De
Hoyos, Hana Erdman, Gabriel Todd, Ruairí O'Donovan, Empress Jupiter,
Jassem Hindi, Keith Hennessy.Unstable structures supported by unsustainable systems, this dance cannot stand up on its own.
Turbulence (a dance about the economy) plays with normative disruptions and calculated disregard for generally accepted rules of engagement. A collaborative creation, the work is an experimental hybrid of contemporary dance, improvised happening, and political theater; it is a bodily response to economic crisis. Instigated before Occupy and engaging questions of debt, value, and exchange, Turbulence is intended as both provocation and affirmation of global movement for economic justice.
More frictions that drive the work: economic crisis, disaster capitalism, debt, precarity, propaganda, torture, union busting, magic, collaboration, war, and physical performance.
Responding both to economic and ecological crises, Turbulence is an experiment not only in performance, but also in developing alternative modes of producing performance. Integrating new cast members as generative collaborators for each performance, the work resists fixed or predetermined outcomes. Improvisation is both survival strategy and political tactic. The economies of making dances and being an artist also impacts our research.
Accumulating dances, images, texts, songs and tactics with each cast, the process was tested at venues in San Francisco, Stolzenhagen/Germany, Vienna, Portland, and Pontempeyrat/France from 2010-12.
Click here for our Process Blog - notes to guest artists, excerpts from interviews, responses to audience inquiry...
Director’s Notes
Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine revealed how many of us have prioritized human rights issues (and identity politics) at the expense of economic injustice and more lasting structural change. I set out, over two years ago, to challenge my own ignorance about financialization, about the roots of economic turbulence, and to sharpen my understanding of extreme wealth disparity. The mythological association of capitalism to democracy to freedom must be troubled, contested, and ultimately destroyed. Ok that’s a manifesto. How can a manifesto inspire a dance?
Foolishly, I decided to make a BIG BIG project during a time of economic contraction and precarity for most artists. Of course precarity and violence for the vast majority is directly linked to an overwhelming concentration in the offshore tax free accounts of the very few. My rage is always close to the surface but the bank bailouts really pissed me off. And somehow I’ve received much more money to make this work than I’ve ever received before. So I’m paying as many artists as I can to play with me, to ask questions and share their bodies, and to collaborate in making a poetic response to the economy. In the studio and on stage, Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure dialogues with academic texts on neoliberal financialization and activist tracts from Occupy blogs. I propose movement scores about unsustainable structures and others respond with personal stories that reveal gender and racial class hierarchies. We work on everything at once, producing almost nothing coherent or clear…
We joke that Turbulence is a failed political theater collective. We recognize the critique that contemporary dancers embody the ultimate neoliberal subject: dedicated to individual freedoms we are always working and rarely payed, prioritizing career over community we are internationally mobile, serving corporations who acknowledge us only as free content providers on facebook and youtube… And still we play, theorize, dream and struggle in a queer utopia of our own collective imagining and embodiment.
Without delivering a coherent critique nor a totalizing vision of resistance and reconstruction, we hope to inspire broader public engagement, discussion and action with regards to the economy, particularly its violence, corruption, and injustice.
A couple of quotes that I carry into the studio with me:
1. All clarity is ideological (Trinh T. Minh-ha)
2. Love, despite its toxicity and violence, can bring us closer to the possibility of expressing human tenderness. If one is ambitious enough to want to create a shared history, then one must be willing to risk an impossible dance, one that pivots on a desire to outmuscle exhaustion, a desire alive to our wavering capacities to bestow and receive responses, and an apparently insatiable desire to question these capacities and what motivates and blocks them, repeatedly.
(Peggy Phelan)
Keith Hennessy/Circo Zero review: zero
Allan Ulrich
Veteran performance artist Keith Hennessy calls his full-evening piece "Turbulence" a dance, but that may only be to distinguish the work from a herring or a mackerel.
True, there is considerable movement in the work, unveiled locally Thursday evening at the Yerba Buena for the Arts Forum before a capacity audience, but this absurdist vaudeville targeting our soul-draining economy takes flight only sporadically. Hennessy, once a member of the noted Contraband company, and his Circo Zero troupe boast a considerable following in this community and brief, passing moments in "Turbulence" (or in the 70 minutes I sat through) hit home.
But, for a work that tackles a subject as fecund as the plight of the have-nots in a post-Occupy world, this opus elevates incomprehensibility to a new high. Most of the work is improvised, and it's likely that it will look and sound considerably different on Saturday evening. However, the improvisatory skills of the 14 performer-collaborators and the three guests vary widely, and many of their contributions are cringe inducing.
Still, certain details indicate what might have been. Hennessy's most tantalizing prop is a bolt of gold-sequined fabric, divided this way and that. When worn as a head covering (as do seven performers posed in pyramid formation singing in sweet harmony), the cloth suggests nothing less than Wagner's Tarnhelm, that object that, in the "Ring," symbolizes rampant power and wealth.
The headgear later grows and transmutes into capes, sarongs, carpets and even projectiles (one landed in this observer's lap). Also impressive was the naked couple huddled motionless in the ceiling grid, like an 18th century painting come to life.
But what are we to make of the fellow who obsessively disrobes throughout the performance and even poses naked upside down at the window, to the delectation and clicking phones of passers-by? Why does the same man urinate into a bottle? How do we interpret Hennessy's declaiming a manifesto from a trapeze bar while another man depants him? Why do some performers run incessantly back and forth through the space? Do those episodes of contact improvisation and all that wriggling on the floor mean anything other than marking time till someone thinks of another stunt?
The performance space abounds in wires, cartons pasted on the walls and other indications of urban detritus. Audience participation is solicited. Recited text is muddied with grinding noise (earplugs are available on request).
Political theater has its place in our culture, but the best of it should amount to more than a rant, a louche clown act or a series of impenetrable symbols. Without rigor or coherence, we're left dancing on the edge of the precipice. "Turbulence" makes it all too easy to step back from the abyss.
On Failure and Fake Healing: An Interview With Keith Hennessy
by Julie Potter
Some of your students have mentioned that your way of pushing is to destabilize yourself and the performance container. Can you talk about this way of working?
Two big cliches are to work from failure or to work in relation to failure or unstable structures or destabilization. If people are slightly snobbier they’ll use Deleuze’s term deterritorialization. I think that these theories are ways of trying to look at oppressive structures or closed loop power dynamics. For people to have any sense of personal or communal power we then need to disturb or destabilize structures in order to have any free space. The ideas of failure out there are super trendy.
In the business management world, there are books like Fail Better. Then in the academic world two texts came out recently. One looks at experimental theater and performance and the idea of staging failure, with narratives that fail or characters who are failures rather than heroes, called Performance Theater and the Poetics of Failure by Sara Jean Bailes. It looks at Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service. Then Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure came out.
The first book was an affirmation of a certain kind of working and way of looking at experimental theater since Brecht and what kinds of ideas peeps are pushing…even this genre of film called mumblecore, where nothing really happens is an example. It’s young people and their lives aren’t shown as being meaningful. These are failures in a way because these people are not becoming something.
How does failure function in relation to the work Turbulence?
With Turbulence the event itself is a failure and fails to meet the expectation of the audience about what the show should be…I have been trying to think really in terms of political structures and hegemony in a both psychological and institutional weave of structure that is fragile, always changing, and takes a lot to maintain. Every time it needs something to maintain the structure, those are weak points that could be exploited.
So it’s called Turbulence: A Dance About the Economy. How do you address economy?
The piece started as a dance about the economy so I’m coming back to economic structures: how they’re set up, how economically unsustainable they are, how they morph and enjoy crisis. We used to think crisis was really bad. Now we have Naomi Klein who has actually gone through the last fifty years and has shown how so much has been either a fake crisis started by the financial system or a crisis that was not predictable like a tsunami or an earthquake, or war in a small place that the larger places could not have predicted, and those crises are then exploited by the financial structures… so all of these things I think about in terms of what it means to work in instability and exploit failure…
Another strategy thats very active for me is this idea of queer. To look at what new trends are happening and to imagine they won’t fulfill your dreams. To be queering them or working outside of them. I think with Turbulence I recognize the mainstream nature in contemporary art of proposing an unstable project that exploits failure. Then I ask “what does it mean to queer that?” Do you deliver part of the spectacle or not? I sometimes just think about being nice to audiences, giving them what they want.
I think what works for me in art is somewhere between classical, modern and postmodern approaches. Somewhere in that mashup and not necessarily any one of them. If it’s just a classical or modernist work, it’s really easy to critique. The kinds of theater I like, which is what I want to make, is one where there’s a lot of inquiry, a lot of self reflection and exposing the process. It’s post-Brechtian, its postmodern, unstable in terms of what we expect from theater and also somehow has a sense of magic and ritual that you couldn’t have anticipated.
So what is the unstable structure for Turbulence?
There’s no score. I have a list I share with the dancers including things like fake healing when people come in, creating the pyramid… I decide how many things I insist on that have to happen in each show. At a certain time I might stop and say “Hey audience, I was hoping that by this time the pyramid would have happened, but it didn’t.” If I just talk about it and ruin the flow it’s a kind of failure and improv strategy…
With the Turbulence process, some of us now have been working on the piece for two years. I’m getting to know people better but I’m not making any material for people or creating situations where they’re making material. I’m really trying to create context in which to improvise and see what happens.
Every now and then I ask to try and keep something like what was created in rehearsal. Gabriel Todd wrote a song and I think he didn’t even share it with the group for like six months because he was like “Oh you’re going to insult it.” and then we did insult it. We’ve sung it in every performance since.
How did you select the artists you’re working with for this project?
I invited people who I thought were makers, even if they didn’t have a long history of being a maker. I invited people who make their own work and then I brought them into an unstable situation where the group is always changing …we’re in this weird laboratory together that’s heavily reliant on people feeling confident enough to just make images spontaneously or take action.
I’m sure in my psychic process what I’m doing is something related to the most far reaching research aspects of Sara Shelton Mann’s work. There are many moments when I think about Contraband with this group, especially now that we’ve toured a few times together…theres something really different being with each other 24 hours, seven days a week, or traveling to a foreign country together, or flying in airports together and sharing hotel rooms. Now we’re building on that set of experiences and also looking at those as economic relationships that influence the work.
How do you hope people interface with the work?
Every piece of theater speaks to the last piece of theater people saw, but it also speaks to the life they led before they walked into the theater. That’s one version. With the current piece, Turbulence, we’re working with this idea of soft boundaries. It’s not clear when it starts and when it ends, so I tell the audience that the piece is over when a certain amount of time has gone by, but we don’t leave the stage. It’s clear that so many things are broken down by then that you could just leave, or come onstage and start talking to artists that you know, or you could go over and look at the trapeze, things just keep going.
I’m hoping to bring a different perspective and a different urgency for people to look at how the economy shapes their everyday life. So the follow up to me is quite personal. I don’t think that’s about everyone deciding to participate in Occupy, but it is about considering how deeply embedded the economy is in their life or that economic relations impact their social relations, which impact the way they imagine their potential in the world, and the ways they give and receive, and how they shop and how they pay rent or mortgages. In some ways that’s just already going to fail since the piece is not a lecture. People have to enter it poetically or that won’t happen. If they’re just waiting for the content to arrive it won’t happen.
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