Keith Hennessy: performing resistance, embodying reconstruction

Keith Hennessy: performing resistance, embodying reconstruction

by M. Soledad Sklate

Keith Hennessy

Keith Hennessy, the Canadian-born, San Francisco-based performance artist, dancer, choreographer, singer, juggler, teacher, queer dance pioneer, sex healer, ritual conductor, anarchist and activist knows what he performs for: to denounce “shit that seems wrong, fucked-up, oppressive, unjust, unnecessary, cruel, stupid, and expensive.” He also knows what stimulates his creative process. "Power, especially the asymmetrical power with its embedded violent hierarchies, is a kind of muse for me,” Hennessy says.

His activist performance style has resulted in praise for “breaking boundaries considerably more restraining than handcuffs, straightjackets or coffins,” (Movement Research Performance Journal #35, 2009) but also in multiple arrests. He estimates nine.

In spite of the distance that a virtual conversation imposes between us, Hennessy’s enthusiasm when talking about these experiences reveals that he takes pride in having been behind bars a few times. He considers them, in fact, important educational incursions into “the ugliness of power.”

Keith Hennessy
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Hennessy strongly rejects my attempts to dig for psychological explanations for his activism in his childhood or upbringing. This does not stop him, however, from extensively talking about his family background and how life was in the Canadian mining town of Sudbury (Ontario), where he was raised as one of five siblings of an Irish Catholic family.

His parents certainly did not encourage him to defy the forces of law and order. But he admits that “there was a really strong sense of justice that was handed to us by our family and some of that is connected to a kind of Catholic or Jesuit social justice. Be good to others. Don’t speak badly about others. Help others in the time of need.” While he was the only sibling who became an activist, he points out that one of his sisters embraced activist causes such as the feminist struggles of the 1970s and Quebec’s nationalist movement.

McGill University (Montreal), where he enrolled as a business student was, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, an ebullient place where ideas of social justice and activism were not only talked about but acted upon. Tuition increases, nationalist and labor politics, anti-apartheid initiatives and anti-nuclear movements mobilized the student body to protest, organize non-violent actions and political meetings, and to even shut down the school and the city center once.

Hennessy has an explanation for his unexpected choice of a traditional career. “Where I come from, there was no real imagination of what university was for, except to go to university in order to get a job. I didn’t have any other thoughts besides, ‘Am I doing pre-law?’ ‘Am I doing pre-med?’ or ‘Am I going into engineering?’ I thought I would be a lawyer and I would go to business school before that, so that was the trajectory.”

In spite of having an uncle who was an artist (but had a "real" job as well) and a mother who painted and collected art as a hobby, being an artist “was not an imagination that I could have,” Hennessy says. As for becoming a dancer or performer, “I didn’t even know that existed,” he adds.

At McGill, however, he complemented his business courses with dance classes and street performing. The jugglers, acrobats, and vaudevillian comedians he became involved with were at the center of politicized student and anarchist movements. Something quickly became apparent to him: “Clearly, I wasn’t going to follow through with business school,” Hennessy says.

While becoming a lawyer might have been more of a logical career choice to advance his activism, Hennessy did not stick to that plan either. He jokes about his potential in that profession. “I could have been a lawyer in a lot of ways, because I’m a talker,” he says and ironically adds, “I’m also a performer and I think I could have done well as a trial lawyer… you know, another form of performance.”

Then, I asked, why did he choose dance and performance?

“I didn't choose dance and performance until I was already dancing and performing. We can all work for justice or goodness where ever we are. So the ‘fate’ answer is that I work in dance because I am a dancer, and I work on social justice issues because I care,” he replies, his tone showing some annoyance about my question.

In 1982, on his last year of business school, Hennessy dropped out to join his friend on a hitchhiking trip from Montreal to San Francisco to attend a juggling convention there.

“We didn’t know where it was taking us, and where we set out is not where we ended up.” While his friend followed their original plan--go to Italy to study commedia dell'arte--Hennessy remained in San Francisco. “It just never made sense to go anywhere else or do anything else,” he says, noting that he considers this city “one of the really great leftist places to live.”

“When I moved to the Bay Area, there was a very strong anarchist network of households, of activities, of civil disobedience groups, of political engagement in a variety of issues, and I walked right into that sort of environment.” He found artists, performers and dancers intrinsically involved in these progressive movements, actively and openly engaged in shaping life and public discourse through their art and performance. He immediately joined those artists with a deep sense of social and political responsibility, and those are the values that permeate through his work since then.

An odd attitude that combines aloofness and keenness manifests in his recounting of his life. However, talking about his dance and performance work provokes a change in attitude by igniting his passion. A few questions I sent him over email in preparation for our virtual interview elicited something like a ‘manifesto for activist performance.’

“Much of my work, especially the group work, is motivated by political crises and movements,” he explains. For instance, Turbulence (a dance about the economy) (2012), one of his latest “collaborative failures” with Circo Zero, a performance action group he created in 2001, deals with questions of debt, value, exchange, union busting, precarity, financialization, war, torture--all issues connected to the economic collapse and political crisis of the last few years.

Turbulence (a dance about the economy)

In the director’s notes for Turbulence, Hennessy says that with this collaborative experimental creation (that incorporates contemporary dance, improvised happening, and political theater), the goal is “to inspire broader public engagement, discussion and action with regards to the economy, particularly its violence, corruption, and injustice.”

Turbulence is perfect example of Hennessy’s articulation of how dance and performance can participate in criticizing and challenging oppressive, exploitative and unjust systems and interest networks. Dance critic Cassie Peterson encapsulates this aspect of the piece in her Context Notes for its presentation at New York Arts Live in 2012 where she writes that “Turbulence is an exercise in brute force, coercion, and inexcusable excess. It is a picture of poverty and depletion. It is class warfare.”

As the performers vehemently confront the violence inherent to these corrupt power structures and lasting economic inequities, the audience also does. Through Turbulence, Hennessy provokes strong reactions from the public; he successfully stirs up anger and resentment against social, economic and political abuses and injustices. He pushes the spectator to the limit. “Hennessy is calling us to the crumble,” Peterson says.

“Resistance”, Hennessy explains, “suggests anti as in anti-capitalism, anti-precarity, anti-racist, anti-war, anti-systemic, anti-coercive, anti-sexist/homophobic, anti-normative, anti-hegemonic, anti-oppression, anti-colonialism/imperialism, anti-gentrification...” Hennessy’s call to resistance is certainly anti. But it does not stop at the opposition and annihilation of old structures.

For him, resistance is likewise pro, referring to “an aspect of service also alive in the practice.” Resistance is also about reconstruction and “creating alternatives, serving victims and survivors,” he clarifies.

That is why, after the urgent call to destruction in Turbulence, “We are also asked to find love inside of our anger and resistance,” Peterson adds.

BIO

Keith Hennessy works in and around dance and performance. Born in northern Ontario, he lives in San Francisco and tours internationally. His interdisciplinary research engages improvisation, ritual and social movement as tools for investigating political realities. Hennessy directs Circo Zero in queer and collaborative anti/spectacles. Recent projects include Turbulence (a dance about the economy) with major funding from the National Dance Project; the artist laboratory Performing Queer (Failure) presented in France, Vienna/Impulstanz and Helsinki/Side Step Festival; and Negotiate, a collaboration with dancers from Togo, DRCongo, and Senegal, presented at L'Institute Français, Dakar. Keith was a member of the collaborative performance companies Contraband, CORE, and Cahin-caha, and he co-founded the culture spaces 848 and CounterPULSE in San Francisco. Recent awards include the United States Artist (Kjenner) Fellow, a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie), a Bilinski Fellowship, and two Isadora Duncan Awards. Hennessy is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at UC Davis.

Joe Bowie, Jr.: The Stuff of Life

Joe Bowie, Jr.: The Stuff of Life

interviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Joe Bowie, Jr.
(photo by Amber Star Merkens)

You can tell people, over and over, how much you love something, but when they see you doing it, they see the love. 

Bread is life, and it's living.

I'm a real bread nerd.

SUBURBAN DAYS

My mother ran one of the cafeterias at Michigan State University, and my father worked for General Motors. He started on the line and worked his way up to white collar, middle management--both very hard workers. I have one sister who is a year older, and we are thick as thieves and always have been.

I was a little bit of a strange and nerdy kid, loved school, loved learning. My parents taught us how to read at a really young age and how to write. I remember it very fondly. Basically having a good time and making good friends, though my sister was probably more social and socially at ease than I was.

I liked things on tv like The Brady Bunch. I liked anything with magic: Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie and My Favorite Martian. I'd play with my friends, and I'd be, like, "You can be Captain America, and I'm going to be a warlock!" I just wanted to be a big ol' witch!

I played tennis a little, but my sister was really athletic--better at baseball and things than I was. I wasn't bad, but they put me on the team because she wouldn't play unless I played.  So I was always like stuck out in right field where no one hit the ball. She was the best first baseman in our city at ten, eleven years old.

Tennis, though, was one of the things that felt natural to me. I liked all the things that felt graceful--ice skating, rollerskating. I watched all the conventionally clichéd gay male sports like ice skating and gymnastics.

In junior high, I was the “Smart Black Kid.” I liked coaching and teaching anyone who needed tutoring. I played volleyball and tennis. I played in our school symphony and our city’s junior symphony, playing the double bass. I was the smallest kid and played the largest instrument.

DOCTOR BOWIE?

When I was a kid, I had all the doctor toys, the doctor kits and a [Milton Bradley] game called Operation. My great grandmother used to call me "Doc," and my family would let me prescribe candy pills for them.

I was always going to be a doctor and loved science. And so it was really strange for me to love to do other things like art. I drew really well and wrote a story that won a citywide award when I was ten. But you kind of put those things away, and my parents were very practical.

For college, I settled on Brown University's pre-med program for African-American students. All summer, studying science--really, really fun.

It was strange to be away from home. You could make all your own decisions as far as what courses to take and whatever. I had always done what was expected. I'd never done anything that would cause anyone pause.  You'd never look at me and say, "He's going to rebel," because I never did.

THEN CAME DANCE

But, in freshman year, I had a friend who dared me to go to a dance class. So, I went. I took the dance class. And boy! It really threw me for a loop because I kind of liked it a lot.

I had danced around a lot when I was a kid, and I watched it on television and loved it. My mother used to take me to shows– Eubie! and Your Arms Too Short to Box with God, Ain't Misbehavin' and The Wiz. But my parents really weren't into the dance thing. There were all those stigmas attached to it.

I never enrolled in a dance class, but the head of the department--wonderful woman, Julie Strandberg, Carolyn Adams's sister--was the teacher, and she would just let me come in and take class. There weren't very many men dancing, and there were a couple of student companies.

I would just go to the studio and dance. My world was turning around. I had gone in with a plan, and now the plan was changing because I was changing, and I didn't know how to express that, how to articulate it to my parents.

My grades dropped for a moment, and I had always done well. It was partially rebelling. I didn't go to class as much as I should have. I had a physics class that I barely went to. (I never liked physics.) I was trying to be me for the first time, and it wasn't easy.

GETTING TO GOOD

Fortunately, Brown was, for an Ivy League school, very liberal and open. They told us early on, in the pre-med program, that you can major or concentrate in something else. You don't have to be a Bio major or Chem major. I could take advantage of a curriculum that allowed me to explore other things I liked.

I started taking literature classes--in particular, poetry. And still did the science thing, sort of on the side, and started dancing more and going to dance class more. I was in both student companies. I spent any time I could in the dance studio. I would even write my papers in the studio. I don't know who I thought I was or what I thought I was, but I was really kind of happy with myself for the first time. It wasn't about an achievement or an award. I really felt good in my skin.

At that time, my parents didn't know people who were actors and dancers in our city. People sang in church, had great voices, but we didn't know of anyone who was in a show. It was really frightening for my parents to spend all this money for me to go to college and then not come out on the other side with a degree and accolades and a profession that everyone expected.

After college, I spent the summer at Jacob's Pillow with The Jazz Project. I worked with Milton Myers and Otis Sallid and Lynn Simonson--all these great people--and then I went to New York and said, "I'm going to see what happens."

So, when I got into Paul's company, I remember my father asking me, "Well, do you have a salary?" And I said, "Yes."

"Do you have health insurance?"

"Yes."

And that's all they needed to know, even thought they didn't know who Paul Taylor was.

My first year with the company, we performed at the University of Michigan, an hour and a half away from my parents' home. So, my parents came. Paul was really great about making sure that, if you were in your home state or your home city, you were in everything. They were going to get to see you. I'm pretty sure I was in every piece in the program. I was, like, 23. Everyone wanted to meet my parents afterwards since they hadn't come to the shows in New York.

My mother, my great aunt and my dad came, and I walked out of the dressing room, and my mother looked at me, and she was crying, and she was shaking me, and she was saying, "You are really, really good. You are really, really good." And my dad was standing there as a proud papa. He wasn't the most emotional... And he was, like "You know, it was great to see you up there. That was really beautiful."  That was the first time they really got it.

You can tell people, over and over, how much you love something, but when they see you do it, they see the love.

And so my mother, she knew I loved school because of my grades. Saying I love dancing was like saying I love the clouds, to my mother. It didn't resonate at all, and then when she saw me up there with full joy in this company. I was the only Black face up on the stage in that company, and they were exceptionally proud. That's where it sort of turned, and they started to understand it.

I left Paul's company to join Mark's company. Whenever Mark saw my parents, he was so sweet to them, and our executive director Nancy Umanoff would always make sure that they had great seats at shows.

WHAT COMES NEXT?

They started to understand a little bit more about what I was doing, and I think that the only worry was, “How much longer can he do it?” With other professions, if you do something for twenty years or whatever, you've got a pension, retirement. For dancers, what comes after is not so evident.

There was a part of me that could have continued to teach for Mark and set pieces for Mark, be assistant director for operas and things--which is really fun for me--but I always loved to bake. It's stereotypical, but I won a Home Economics award when I was 14!

I once baked cupcakes for one of my colleagues in Mark's company because I didn't have time to buy him a gift. I had the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook and made cupcakes. They fought over them like five-year-olds at a birthday party!

I was, like, "Here, John. These are for you. You can do whatever you want with them." He said, "Thank you," and they were gone!

I was, like, Oh!

So, I started baking for people’s birthdays. I would try to figure out what they wanted or their personality. Or I would say, "Give me an ingredient, and I'll make something for you." I'd bring in pecan pies, something like that. Towards the latter part of my dance career, baking was always around.

I went on a tour of the French Culinary Institute for their pastry department. I even sat in on a couple of classes. But I said, "This isn't for now."

It was also $45,000 for six months, and I was, like, "Wooooo! Did anyone tell you what I've been doing for the past twenty years?"

I'd ask some people "What did you do before this?" And they’d say, "I managed a hedge fund, and I decided to bake." And I was, like, "I chose the lucrative career of being a dancer, and now I'm choosing the also-lucrative career of being a baker!" They’d say, "I work for JPMorgan during the day, and I come and take these classes at night." And I was, like, "I don't do that! I work for a dance company!"

In the company, all of my friends were gone or going. I still had a few close people. The toll on your body....  I'd danced for quite a few years, and it's not that they weren't beautiful. But you start to look at it and say, “What can I bring to this? I think you should take me out of this. Choose him. He's dying to do this, and I've done it for so long.”

So we started figuring out, how much I wanted to dance or go on tour. Sometimes, you won't go on tour; you'll stay and do this or go to such-and-such university and do this for the company. That’s what I do. I never had any designs to choreograph, but I am a very good rehearsal director. That's something I love and do well, and I like to coach people and nurture them.

THE MAGIC STAFF OF LIFE

Career Transitions for Dancers held a day at our center, the Mark Morris Dance Center, and showed us that we could apply for $2,000 grants. Knowing how little we make in our careers, they wanted to see if we could try something that we really were interested in without spending our own money and then deciding that it wasn't for us.

I'd found an interesting artisan bread baking class for five days at the French Culinary Institute, but I didn't have $1,500 to spend on it.  So I wrote my essay, sort of connecting baking to dance. I wish I had a copy of it! I was very happy that I had spent a lot of time with words up to that point in my life, because you can make connections--and, in the arts, you are more likely to make connections between things. I remember something about "a safe haven of baking and dance" or something! I don't know. But I submitted it, and that was that.

And then I got a call from Career Transitions: I was one of the finalists and had to interview. I wasn't in New York at the time, but they had just opened up an office in Chicago, and I was setting one of Mark's pieces in Milwaukee. So, they had someone call me and interview me there. Then I got a letter of congratulations. They gave me a check for 1,500 bucks! I think in my account I still have $500 left. You're given the full $2,000, and the rest remains available to be used.

Bread is the staff of life. Almost every culture has bread. It's not like having a cookie, which is a treat. Bread is life, and it's living, and it's different all the time.

I can let red velvet cupcake batter sit there. It will still make a cupcake, but it will ferment and won't be delicious. It won't be beautiful. [Bread making] had an aesthetic point of view, because you would score it and shape it and bake it and it would come out as this beautiful thing with varying colors and textures because they were naturally blooming out of the flour and yeast and the salt and water. The four ingredients were like magic. I'd always wanted magic.

When I put these things together, nothing that comes out of this oven looks like what I put in, and that's why I like baking more than cooking. If you put a chicken in the over, it's going to come out still a chicken. But baking was like alchemy, so fabulous.

That it's a living thing can also be frustrating. You can't control it, and that’s also exciting. In my career, I've worked in situations where it's really stressful, like when you work for Chef Daniel Boulud, and you have bread to get out, and it has to be perfect, because every French chef has an idea of what a baguette looks like–the one from his region or the one from his favorite bakery. And you have to appease all of these people. And if it doesn't come out perfectly, we put it on the family table, or we throw it away, and then there are people who would be dying for this piece of bread that I'm making. There are things like that that are hard for me at times.

It's arduous. You're on your feet. People are, like, "Oh, you've been on your feet all day as a dancer." But I was moving around. When you're in a bakery, you're standing there for nine, sometimes ten hours. It's tiring but not in the same way as moving or jumping around in dance. It's hard on your body. I'm not 22 lifting these things; I'm 49.

The actual bread making itself is pretty much always a joy, even though there's a routine to it. I like that routine. It's like taking class. You might not want to, but you need to go to class to do what you love.

I need to scale out and mix these ingredients to create what I love--a decent bread. That's part of it, not separate from it. People say, "Oh, I don't go to class." Different things work for different people but, for me, it was always that I liked the idea of maintaining so that, when I got on stage, I could worry about other things besides where my body was. The thing about taking a class was, "Let me feel where everything is."

When you get to take a loaf of bread from start to finish, you get to know where everything is moving. You get to check in all the time. I like that aspect of it.

It's endlessly interesting to me that I'm a nerd. I'm a real bread nerd. I watch videos on shaping things. I read about the proteins that make the gluten structure. I can't stop it!

My first job out of school, I was in a research and development kitchen in a little bakery run by Le Pain Quotidien. I always loved to teach; it was a natural fit for me. I got to do production and learn more about bread baking. The woman who ran it, an instructor at French Culinary, we hit it off. I knew how the bakery worked. We were a small team. I worked there for a year, then left because I thought I should go experience other things. And now I'm going back to help develop classes there.

It's a wonderful ride. I learned so much about myself. I learned a lot about patience. I can't control the bread. I can know all the variables around it that will help me have an idea. Dancing was a wonderful thing, but the idea of putting my hands in dough is gorgeous.

You know how it feels when it's not going right--also,when it's not doing what you want it to do. The same thing with your body: "Oh, I used to rebound more quickly after these shows. This didn't hurt as much."

In this profession of baking, you realize the process is so important. It echoes, many times, how you're doing personally--not that I bring my personal life into work, but some days I feel impatient, work is particularly arduous, or days when it feels like I'm as light and airy as the baguette I just baked. What a beautiful crumb!

Although a baguette is not my favorite bread! My favorite bread is called a miche–an old country French bread. Not everyone has an oven. So, you'd bring your bread to a communal oven, and you'd cut it or score it in a way that would mark if for your family. That scoring also helps the bread rise. They would bake them all together, and later you would come and get them.

You can get a lot of volume with miche bread, and they're full of flavor. They're all naturally fermented. I used to make this one with starter wheat and rye, cooked and fermented for a long time, and there are these coffee and caramelly kind of flavors in it. And it's just bread. The crust is dark, and once you let it cool, you taste so many different things. That is my favorite bread to eat and to make.

BAKING OFF-DUTY?

Do I bake off-duty? I do! I'm that crazy guy! My boyfriend always says, “I can't believe that, on your days off, you're baking!”

In the past maybe three and a half months, I've been making more sweets, but when I was baking more bread, I would bake sweets at home--and sometimes bread, but mostly cookies and cakes and stuff like that.

I have beer and cheese bread that people tend to like, and also I would make challah for Fridays, things like that. I love to bake at home.

I can usually tell when it's a job that I'm not loving, I don't bake at home. It's funny, when I'm happy at work and feel great about what I'm doing there. I tend to bake all the time. When I feel blocked in some way, I don't bake as much at home, and it feels like a chore. But when everything is sort of aligning, I'll bake all the time. I'll bake until the ingredients go away. No more eggs. No more chocolate. No more flour. I will.

OKAY, BUT THE PARENTS: WHAT DO THEY SAY?

I think they're okay with it. With this, at least. My mother bakes. My grandmother, great grandmother--incredible cooks! My mom is from South Carolina; my dad is from Mississippi. In South Carolina, where we would spend our summers, I mean, they would throw down! And they didn't have a lot of money. But the food...!

Baking, my mother kind of gets it. "Hey, you said you were going to send me that recipe." Or, I'd go home, and I'd get a list of things I'm supposed to make: "I want a red velvet cake, and your aunt wants one."

I remember when I was dancing and, at one point, my mother was, like, "Show me what you do." And so I taught her a little ballet barre. She was so sweet about it.

She really doesn't bake bread, but she knows that I also bake other things. So we have more to talk about in that way. And if I'm ever feeling down and blue--and I'm not necessarily a blue person--but if I get a bit worked up, she'll say, "Why don't you go bake something?"

They wouldn't have been happy if I had gone to culinary school out of high school: College was where I was going. But now they like it because they get to eat it in the same way that they had the joy of watching their son up on stage and being proud of him, which is beautiful. My dad loves to be the center of attention. I remember walking into a restaurant after a performance in Ann Arbor, and they applauded me, and my dad started bowing like it was for him. He takes pride in his kids.

I don't get to see them as often as I would like. It's more difficult with a baking career. When you're dancing, you have layoffs. With baking, it's pretty much all the time. You may have some vacation. My parents, though, have been great supporters. My sister is my biggest support in everything I do. She is my biggest fan in everything, and I am hers as well. We adore each other.

BONUS!

Here's my chocolate-chip cookie recipe. My friends and family love them. You'll need a small scale to make them; we rarely use volumetric measurements in the bakery.

Flour  639g
Baking soda  5g
Salt  7g
Butter (room temp)  340g
Brown sugar  569g
Eggs 125g
Vanilla extract  18g
Chocolate (semi-sweet or bittersweet)  551g, chopped

Whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt in a medium-sized bowl.

Cream the butter and sugar together in the bowl of your stand mixer, using the paddle attachment or in a large bowl using the regular beaters of your handheld mixer, until light and fluffy.

Add the eggs and vanilla extract, and mix until just combined.

Add the flour, baking soda, and salt mixture in two additions, mixing until just combined each time.

Mix or fold in the chopped chocolate.

Refrigerate the dough for at least an hour to allow the gluten to relax.

Preheat your oven to 350-375 degrees, and line your cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Portion out the cookie dough into 75g balls (make the balls by rolling the dough between your palms).

Bake at 350-375 degrees for 12 to 14 minutes, rotating the cookie sheets halfway thru the baking time.

Let the cookies cool on the cookie sheets for ten minutes and then de-pan onto a rack to allow them to cool completely.

Store in an airtight container for 3 or 4 days. If you feel as though they're getting stale, warm them slightly in a toaster oven or at about 250 degrees in your conventional oven.

BIO

Joe Bowie was born and raised in Lansing, Michigan. He started dancing when he was a sophomore at Brown University, and graduated with honors in English and American Literature. Joe moved to NYC in 1986, and danced in the works of Robert Wilson, Ulysses Dove, and for two years with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, before he moved to Belgium in 1989 to join the Mark Morris Dance Group. He danced with the Mark Morris Dance Group for twenty-one years. In 2010, Joe received a grant from Career Transitions For Dancers to pursue his second passion: baking. With the grant, he took a five-day artisan bread baking class at the French Culinary Institute (now the International Culinary Center), and fell in love with it. Using this momentum and newly-found love, he enrolled in The Art of International Bread Baking, the French Culinary Institute's professional artisan bread baking course in 2011. Since graduation, he has worked as both a baker and instructor for Le Pain Quotidien, in its research and development bread bakery; for world-renowned chef, Daniel Boulud, in his Prep Kitchen's bread bakery; for Dean & Deluca, in both its bread a pastry kitchens: and as a baker for a small, but growing, Brooklyn-based bakery called Ovenly. He will soon return to Le Pain Quotidien to develop bread baking classes for their Bleecker Street Bakery.

Alberto Denis: On becoming GoGo Gadget

Alberto Denis...or should we say GoGo Gadget?
(photo by Mike Dennis)

Alberto Denis: On becoming GoGo Gadget

interviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

About two or more years ago, I thought I was all but done dancing for anyone but myself...I'd considered that perhaps the dance world, for the most part, was done with me. – Alberto Denis

Ah, but all that was before GoGo Gadget!

On the second annniversary of GoGo Gadget’s boylesk debut, dancer Alberto Denis–now starring in Third Rail Projects’ acclaimed Then She Fell--recalls his liberating transformation into this sexy-nerdy character.

Alberto Denis
(photo by Gustavo Monroy)

Yaa Asantewaa: When you arrived at the idea that you were done with dance--or, perhaps, it was done with you--you eventually turned to burlesque.  What drew you to the burlesque movement?

Denis: Over the years, I rarely engaged in solo choreography and was pleased to learn that I might in fact have something to say. That my work was well received enough to warrant frequent remounting of the work was a surprise to me. XXXV spoke to my experience of time and moments in my life, my journey from infancy to the age I was then--35. While it was fleetingly rewarding to create work on my own, it wasn't what I'd envisioned for my dance career. I was left questioning what, if anything, lay ahead of me.

My struggles with body image are, somewhat unfortunately, inexorably linked to a very natural desire to build a loving, passionate relationship. I'd spent the past several years as a bachelor and continued to find that, in searching for a partner, I focused more and more on my body image. I believe this to be primarily driven by societal norms as well as behaviors within the various communities to which I belong--my identity as a gay male and as a self-proclaimed geek.

I wanted to make a new work, which I'm finally embarking upon now. I wanted to explore my struggle with body image and the concept of attraction. At the time, doing research on bulimia and anorexia, while valuable, was a bit too depressing. I decided to take a look at the resurgent burlesque community and do positive research on a field that celebrates the female form regardless of societal norms.

I went to a performance called Meaner, Harder, Leather which introduced me to the concept that men also participate in burlesque, in what is casually called boylesk. Over several months, I continued to attend performances and befriended a very prominent performer--Chris "Go-Go" Harder–and attended his five-weekend burlesque course.

In that setting, I fully let down my guard, embarking on the long journey of accepting and occasionally celebrating my sexually attractive body. Even thinking those words is still difficult; I'd like to believe that I'm attractive to at least a few. But GoGo Gadget, unlike Alberto, is overly confident, assured, sexual and provocative. I'm so grateful for him, as I truly believe he's directly responsible for my personal growth as a dancer/actor, and he contributes to my process with Third Rail Projects.

GoGo Gadget in action
(photo by Gustavo Monroy)

Yaa Asantewaa: Where did you see Meaner, Harder, Leather? How extensive is the male participation in the contemporary burlesque movement relative to female dancers?

Denis: Meaner, Harder, Leather ran for what I believe to be a little over a year at what was then the Vig 27 Lounge on 27th Street between Park and Lexington. In the few years I've been exposed to the burlesque community, I've seen the ratio of male-to-female participants spike significantly, in no short part due to Chris’s workshops. When I began there were perhaps half a dozen or so regularly performing men, whereas now--just from the performances I've been able to see--I've seen closer to twenty-five to thirty male performers engaging in boylesk on a regular basis.

Yaa Asantewaa: What helped you to let down your guard?  Let us in, a little, on the process of how you grew in self-acceptance.

Denis: I felt comfortable participating with a group as opposed to working as an individual, and also with Chris' very enthusiastic and well thought out process for leading the workshop. I'm still growing toward acceptance of what is physically attractive about me. It has been rewarding to rediscover my dancing ability within the context of a different community. To see it rewarded and celebrated has sparked a sense of "attractiveness" that I don't necessarily experience within the context of my dance community.

I believe that courage is also attractive, and I've had to learn to build my courage each time I build a new boylesk act and try it out, both to see if it works and the more basic fact that, by its conclusion, I become fully, physically exposed.

Also, for two years running, I've had an incredible collaborator in my gym trainer, Ray La Roca Grijalvo of SEEK FITNESS, who is genuinely invested in my success and achieving my physical goals. He and his wife have attended several of Gadget's performances. He's also developing relationships with many of my neighbors who also struggle with body image challenges.

Yaa Asantewaa: What’s behind the name GoGo Gadget?  How did this character develop?

Denis: GoGo Gadget references my own Peter Pan complex, directly linking the name to a cartoon from my childhood. Inspector Gadget, a cartoon character of the 1980s-90s, was very popular in my youth. He was often put in situations where he was ill-prepared to succeed, and yet he always prevailed. Gadget also references my love of all sorts of tech gadgetry. (I’ve been employed by a major technology company for the past several years.) Gadget's development is still very much in progress and grows with each performance and each new work.

Yaa Asantewaa: How do you go about bringing him out when it’s time for him to perform?

Denis: The best way to bring him out is through masks, makeup, costumes, music and glitter.  Lots and lots of glitter!  Oh and bubbles too!  Gadget loves candy, fun, sweating, dancing, cartoons, comic books, adventure heroes, men, and a few women too.  And most importantly, he absolutely loves getting naked and feels beautiful about his appearance.

Yaa Asantewaa: Does his personality influence you and help you in everyday life? Or is this something segregated to dance or, specifically, boylesk?

Denis: What a fantastic question! I continue to struggle to introduce his ever-forming personality within my everyday life. I can say that he continues to grow in boylesk, and now recently is certainly making his presence known within my dance identity.

Yaa Asantewaa: How does GoGo Gadget influence you as you prepare to perform in other dance work, including your work with the celebrated immersive theater troupe, Third Rail Projects?

Denis: I can say that Gadget has directly influenced my ability to take greater risks when developing another role. That courage I spoke of earlier is accessible to me outside of burlesque. My latest role creation draws a great deal from my nightlife experiences as Gadget, asking me to be sexually enticing to both men and women, an outrageous attention whore, physically provocative, as well as physically innovative. Gadget's regular activities on stage often explore these kinds of themes, and I'm drawing heavily on my experiences to create dance scores for my new role based on this kind of material.

Yaa Asantewaa: Would you recommend some training in boylesk to other male dancers? If so, why? What could they take away from it?

Denis: I believe if a male dancer wants to challenge both his perceptions of self- identity on stage as well as develop his choreographic skills, boylesk is an absolute must. It's a brilliant combination of dance and theater structured in a way that requires taking emotional as well as physical risks.

If you happen to be in Paris on October 5, you can see GoGo Gadget in action at The Lettingo Cabaret. New Yorkers, keep watch for news on the GoGo Gadget front for late fall.

Alberto Denis
(photo by Gustavo Monroy)

BIO

Currently a member of Third Rail Projects and featured in their production of Then She Fell, in 2008 Alberto Denis created [QuA²D] = The Queens Academy of Arts & Dance after leaving his position as Production Director/Producer for Dance New Amsterdam where he created the first ever staff infrastructure for their inaugural theater on Chambers Street in lower Manhattan, while co-curating their first three seasons of programming. Previously he created the Wight Room Dance Series presented at The Movement Salon near Union Square. Alberto Denis has toured the world (Dubai, Dublin, Barcelona, Bangkok, Taipei, Mexico City, Oslo and Prague and more) as a stage manager, audio engineer, assistant technical director and production electrician as well as a performer for many choreographers. He has performed for Arthur Aviles' Typical Theater for five years and in projects for Doug Elkins, Risa Jaroslow, Palissimo Dance Theater, Dixie Fun Dance Theater, ann and alexx make dances, Marta Renzi, Alexandra Beller, Michael Leleux, Heidi Latsky Dance, Lawrence Goldhuber, Luis Lara Malvacias, JoAnna Mendl Shaw’s Equus Projects and Mei Yin Ng’s Mei-Be Whatever. He was also a featured performer in the Whitney Museum's Christian Marclay: Festival performance of Prêt-a'-Porter. His choreography has been produced at Dance Theater Workshop's Family Matters, Danspace Project’s Food For Thought, Dixon Place’s Body Blend and Moving Men, BAAD!’s Boogie Down Dance Series and Out Like That Festival and Kinetics Dance Theater, Baltimore MD. He has also served on the Dance Theater Workshop Curatorial Advisory Committee.

Ben Asriel: A Shift at the Right Time

Ben Asriel
(photo courtesy of Kevin Kwan)

A Shift at the Right Time

by Evan Teitelbaum

      “I like playing second fiddle. But I still like having a fiddle.” Ben Asriel laughs playfully, but he’s pointing out a critical aspect of his work as a dancer. He dances for choreographers who use their dancers’ individual qualities and choices to shape the work, giving Ben a sense of ownership over his art even when he is not the sole creator of the piece.

      He expresses gratitude for those creative relationships, for having had the opportunity to make his mark with choreographers such as John Jasperse, Juliana May and Walter Dundervill, as he shifts his focus to a radically different endeavor. This coming semester, Ben will leave his life as a full-time performer behind him, becoming a full-time student at Columbia with his sights set on medical school. He feels ready. In his own words, his “‘Benness’ has been used and expressed in a full way” through dance.

      We are squeezed onto a loveseat in the studio apartment he shares with his boyfriend Brian on a tree-lined street in the West Village. I prod him to take a stab at defining this “Benness.” Foregoing a surface description of style, he distills what about dancing has fascinated him the most: the object-subject split. A central paradox of being a dancer, as I see it, is that the dancer is simultaneously a body-object being observed, and a subjectivity communicating his experience. By way of illustration, Ben takes me into his process with Dundervill: “We’ve done a lot of work on being an object and being a shape and being aesthetically beautiful and very kind of Apollonian, but at the same time existing within the piece as yourself and noting your experience and also projecting that subjective experience of what it is to objectify. And that, I really love that.”

      It’s a dizzying explanation, but fortunately I understand exactly what he means because I’ve witnessed it in real time. In a performance of Dundervill’s Aesthetic Destiny 1: Candy Mountain that I saw at what was then Dance Theater Workshop (now New York Live Arts), Ben and Burr Johnson performed a duet of shared shape-shifting. Maintaining contact on the surface of their bodies, they created symmetrical forms of sloping curves and defined angles. This meticulous shape-making objectified the body to an extreme, forcing it to conform to geometry over anatomy. The atmosphere, however, was thick with the awareness it took to move so precisely. The sensitivity to the other that was required to maintain connection textured the undertaking with a palpable vulnerability.

      Ben’s approach to performance stems equally from his childhood in Glasgow, Kentucky and his graduate study at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (which turns out to be much less of a culture clash than you might think). Ben’s mother (“brilliant,” “cultured,” and “bad-ass”) taught dance at a local studio and did nothing to discourage Ben’s interest in his body. Her creative movement classes for kids involved “lying on the floor imagining things,” which Ben notes prepared him well for the type of class work you might find at a Movement Research offering. Ben keeps a video of himself dancing in his grandparents’ backyard as a child and says,“what I was doing there was very me. It was something I could do now.”

      I try to picture this childhood improvisation, this early uncovering of “Benness,” and wonder what it was like for a quirky, artistic boy to grow up in a small Kentucky town. For Ben, the smallness of the community actually provided plenty of space. In small towns, he explains, “there’s a lot that happens outside of the norm but, because everyone knows each other, it’s almost unnoticed in a way.” Familiarity rendered potential bullies unintimidating. They’d all grown up together.

      Arriving in New York at 22, Ben sought to recreate the comfort of knowing everyone. Faced with a tight community that he didn’t have automatic entrée to and initially frustrated that he didn’t have a seat at “the cool kids’ lunch table”, he used his post at the Dance Theater Workshop box office to scope the scene. Now, asked how he has gotten work with some of the more visible scene-shapers of downtown dance, Ben shrugs, “I just have friends who make work, and I dance for them.”

      But something is shifting for him now. Curiosity fueled his exploration, and he’s not interested in performing with a quality that has become “known.” His essential “Benness” needs to maintain its vitality. “I don’t want it to ossify within me, “ he says. “ I don’t want it to become a thing inside me that’s stale. That people can hire…I feel like performing it feels like controlling it where it used to feel like releasing it.”

      Ben’s readiness to leave dance is also a comment on the lack of support for the arts. Ben admits: “I always felt selfish dancing. Or not always. That was something I fought and I think a lot of people fight. The idea that the culture gives us that making art is somehow selfish. Which it isn’t. It’s essential. And it’s generous and it is definitely a sacrifice to live an artist’s life more than it is to do lots of other things.” Despite Ben’s conviction, fighting this cultural disregard takes a toll.

      By choosing medicine as his next venture, Ben is not abandoning the fight. He will take his experience as an artist into his approach towards medicine. “I felt really disenfranchised by the medical community as a dancer, not having health insurance. And so I guess I want to change it from the inside.” His transition back to school also speaks to the seriousness of his relationship of two years. He and Brian flirt with ideas of how to create a more stable future together without, of course, ruling out the possibility of “just staying crazy.”

      Ben is excited to talk about Brian, his eyes brightening as he tells me about Brian’s culinary gifts. I brace myself for envy as I await a mouth-watering anecdote about an unforgettable meal this culinary school graduate prepared in some early stage of their courtship. Instead, Ben talks about how Brian watched food being cooked as a child and would “not just see it browning, but like he understood what it meant to be like a molecule of the food as it was cooking.” As Ben is speaking, I again find myself picturing little Ben dancing in his grandparents’ yard. I am struck by the sense that Ben and Brian’s younger selves shared this nonverbal curiosity –an intuitive, embodied way of tapping into things.

      The small but airy apartment they now share feels just right for two creative entities contemplating how they might fit themselves more neatly into a less precarious lifestyle, but without being in any big hurry to do so. Although Ben apologizes for the gentle cascade of worn socks, books left out of place, and crumbs on counters, I am warmed by the lived-in state of things.

      I ask Ben if he’s been seeing a lot of art lately, and he says no.

      “I feel a little out of touch with what’s happening and that feels okay. I don’t feel the need to, like, get in touch.” At 32, he’s expressing a very different attitude than the 22-year old angling for a spot at the downtown dance table.

      “I’m kind of looking forward to being a spectator or maybe a funder, or having some other role in dance—”

      “Or health care provider,” I suggest.

BIO:

Ben Asriel grew up in Glasgow, Kentucky where he cultivated his love of art in his mother’s dance classes, on the soccer field, and playing trumpet in the GHS band. He studied music theory at Brown University (AB Music ’03) and dance at NYU Tisch (MFA ’06). In addition to MAYDANCE, Ben dances with Walter Dundervill, and Liz Gerring Dance Company. Ben has also performed with Gerald Casel, Daria Faïn, Jack Ferver, Gabriel Forestieri, John Jasperse, Antonio Ramos, Edisa Weeks, and Pavel Zustiak, among others. In 2010/2011 Ben was a Choreographic Fellow of NYCB’s New York Choreographic Institute, supported by Oregon Ballet Theater. His dances have been presented by CPR - Center for Performance Research, the Chocolate Factory Theater, Dance New Amsterdam, Movement Research at the Judson Church, The Tank, and Danspace Project. He is currently enrolled in Columbia University’s postbac premed program. Tell him what you think: basriel@gmail.com