Keith Hennessy Informal Showing

Photo by by Michael Rauner.

On Thursday, April 21, 2016 at 5:30 p.m., MANCC welcomes visiting artist Keith Hennessey in presenting an informal showing of his latest work-in-progress, Blank Map.

Featuring an all Black cast, Blank Map is a performance experiment. The dance-with-live-music-and-art is inspired by anti-assimilationist tendencies in African diasporic culture: punk, futurism, feminism, queer, pessimism, and improvisation. The work prioritizes an expansive space where both individual and shared narratives can emerge.

Blank Map is a temporary collective of artist-performer-musicians Adee Roberson, Brontez Purnell, keyon gaskin, Tasha Ceyan, Wizard Apprentice, with Stephanie Anne Johnson (lighting), Sampada Aranke (dramaturg), and Keith Hennessy (instigator/producer).

At MANCC the creative team, a collective of artist-performer-musicians, lighting designer, dramaturg and Hennessy as instigator/producer, will engage in hard core sound-movement-image-action collage, making choreographies from the material generated from a February/March solo and a collective research period. Working from both political rhetoric and intuitive impulses the group will share practices of making and editing, scratching and breaking, flowing and speaking. The process will be shared with the community through discussion and this informal work-in-progress showing. Collaborator sin residence include performers,  Adee Roberson, Brontez Purnell, keyon gaskin, Tasha Ceyan, Wizard Apprentice, and dramaturg, Sampada Aranke.

The work premiers in San Francisco June 3-12, 2016, at Dance Mission, a co-production of Circo Zero and the National Queer Arts Festival.