wcciJAM

Morning Intensive: Testing Ground

Can we be real with each other, right now, following points of contact and attention, yielding to and resisting each other, not knowing but trusting the future, together?

This class offers experimental approaches to dancing, improvisation, and collaboration. Our intergenerational, cross-racial, and queer partnership points to the very tangible differences between any two bodies, with all their histories and desires. Can we practice improvisation to liberate our imaginations and bodies, to expand what’s possible? What if the C in CI refers to collaboration? Can we dance in contact without touching each other? What happens when touching and physical intimacy are not assumed but negotiated? How do our politics impact our aesthetics impact our dancing? How are care and repair integrated into improvisational dancing? How do traditional, folk, and diasporic cultures flow with “somatic” and “experimental” practices, that is, can we question and subvert how whiteness and colonial practices are embodied in CI practices by allowing other embodiments, styles, sounds, cultures to infiltrate our dancing? What happens if CI looks more like Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland’s Oo-Ga-La (1983) rather than Nancy Stark Smith and Steve Paxton in Fall After Newton (1972-1983)? We don’t know what will happen in this dance lab but these are some questions that will guide our playful experiments in improvised dancing together. 

Keith and jose started working and friending together in 2016 and have collaborated on several performance, curatorial, and community schemes including Touchy Subjects (with Scott Wells, 2016), Circle X (with Snowflake Calvert, 2018-19), Scheme (2019), TRY (with Ishmael Houston-Jones, 2021-2024), and coteaching the experimental choreography series Testing Ground at The Lab (2024.) jose and Keith have never taught CI together. 

Keith Hennessy MFA, PhD, is a frolicker, imperfectionist, and witch working in dance, performance, arts production, writing, teaching, affordable housing, sexual and political healing. Keith started dancing CI in Montréal in 1979. He's still at it, critically, playfully. Raised in Canada, living in Ramaytush Ohlone territory (San Francisco) since 1982, his ancestry is Irish and French. Prioritizing improvisation, ritual, and collaboration, Keith and friends instigate queer embodied experiences that respond to political crises. Hennessy directs Circo Zero, co-founded the culture spaces 848 and CounterPulse, and was a member of Sara Mann’s Contraband. Keith’s work is widely published and presented. Recent appearances include a mini book within the new series Dance History/s (Wesleyan Press, 2024), touring TRY to ImPulsTanz in Vienna, teaching CI in Ukraine as dancer solidarity, and waterdancing in Bacalar, Mexico and Oakland. Awards include Guggenheim and USArtist Fellowships, NY Bessie, and Bay Area Izzy. www.circozero.org

jose esteban abad (they/them) is an Afro-Carribean Filipinx multidisciplinary choreographer, Vertical Dancer, DJ, and curator based in unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Territory (San Francisco). Their work explores the complexities of identity at the intersection of gender, sexuality, class, race, and geography. Rooted in collaboration and improvisation as tools of resistance and liberation, abad’s work centers QTBIPOC experimental collective process-based practices of becoming and re-membering to highlight the most intelligent technologies that exist in this world—our bodies, ancestral wisdom, and nature. 

They have performed and taught nationally and internationally in the Philippines, Palestine, Mexico, and Europe, individually, and in collaboration with Ishmael Houston Jones, Alleluia Panis, Joanna Haigood, Anne Bluethenthal, Keith Hennessy, Sara Shelton Mann, Skywatchers, Jess Curtis/Gravity, RUPTURE, Bandaloop, TRY, KulArts, and others.