Abstract
This chapter focuses on the rhetorical term ‘(rest’ and the figure of hendiadys that brings together apparently unrelated materials or processes. Keith Hennessy is a Canadian performer, now living in San Francisco, who builds performances from dance, movement, light, sound, words, song, bodies and flesh. A close study of two of his pieces, Sol Niger and Turbulence, explores the strategies for collaboration he generates for bringing moments of (rest from rehearsal into performance. A performer as used to international venues as local, Hennessy works resolutely in the alongside, exploring queer as an alterior way of working. Making performance in the alongside implies working on what is not-known to discursively cultural understandings of performance, which is especially difficult on the festival circuit. The study explores the generating of sociosituated performativity with highly diverse and disunified audiences.
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Notes
- 1.
Hendiadys n. OED etymology.
- 2.
Form n. OED etymology: Sanskrit dharman, neuter, holding, position, order; dhar to hold.
- 3.
This is a ‘performativity’ that does something different to Judith Butler’s notion of performativity as identities constructed iteratively through complex citational practices in (Butler 1993). It is closer to, but still different from, Diana Taylor’s sense of the ‘performatic’ that mediates between hegemonic discourse and hegemonic agency (Taylor 2003). For a short critique of the latter, see Hunter (2008, 7).
- 4.
- 5.
Sol niger is a production of Circo Zero, a contemporary performance company directed by Keith Hennessy. The work was commissioned by the University of California, Davis, Department of Theatre and Dance, Les Subsistances (Lyon), and the Centre Chorégraphique National de Franche-Comté (Belfort). Additional support came from FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance), the Zellerbach Family Fund and private donations. Circo Zero is a fiscal project of CounterPULSE.
- 6.
Polyptoton is a figure that repeats words derived from the same root.
- 7.
Ploce refers to the repeated occurrence of the same word or element, usually separated by other words.
- 8.
The figure of antimetabole balances words in the second half of an expression in reverse order to those in the first half.
- 9.
Gayatri Spivak defines catachresis as, ‘A concept-metaphor without an adequate referent is a catachresis’ (Spivak 1993, 281).
- 10.
Tani Barlow re-works Henri Lefebvre to underpin the use of ‘historical catachresis’ in this way (2006, 29 n. 14).
- 11.
See Chap. 7.
- 12.
To be hooded is to assume a social role. For example, after women were married in the renaissance period and earlier, they would wear a hood. The suffix ‘–hood’ relates to ‘condition, quality, rank’ (OED) and is cognate with ‘head’ as in ‘maidenhead’/’maidenhood’.
- 13.
Turbulence toured 2010–14 to Portland Oregon, Seattle Washington, San Francisco, New York (twice), Hamburg, Krems, and Mannheim.
- 14.
Consulting Hennessy later, he says, ‘I have used lists before but they have not been improvised or non mandatory lists. For example with Action (Syria) last year in Vienna, I posted a list of actions on the wall and then I moved through them in order. I think there are photos on my site that show the list behind me. In Turbulence there is a list but it is neither chronological nor 100% mandatory. Also over time we created a kind of secondary list, the optional list of actions/scores/events that we had done more than once and to which we felt some attachment and even commitment but knew that the Turbulence ethics/scores of soft borders, non mandatory action, improvisation and spontaneous composition ruled out any scenario that demanded certain actions or scores to happen’. 22 June 2016, email correspondence with L. Hunter.
- 15.
The Turbulence trapeze is designed by Hennessy and trapeze artist Emily Leap, and constructed by Sean Riley.
- 16.
The spanset is a re-enforced fabric loop that is used in construction and heavy rigging, as well as in circus. Inspired by a deconstructive approach to circus in France in the 1990s, Hennessy adapted the spanset as a primary circus apparatus. Many artists have either been inspired this example or found their own way to using spansets in circus and aerial performance.
- 17.
Crotch (all the Joseph Beuys references in the world cannot…) is a complex, one-person rant about art-making for which he received a Bessie Award in 2011; so also is the 2018 zine Questioning Contact Improvisation.
- 18.
I find out later that this audience member is a well-known dancer, keen to be involved, surprised at the risks he took.
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Hunter, L. (2019). Keith Hennessy’s Sol Niger and Turbulence. In: Politics of Practice. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14019-9_6
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