Keith Hennessy comes to the New Museum to improvise. To invent a performance from almost nothing, accessing almost everything. Curious about histories of moving bodies and bodily movement, Hennessy’s improvisations are a dynamic mash-up of Judson, body art, stand up, ridiculous, modern, lecture, and ritual (where ridiculous means, among other things, subversive camp, and ritual is about how a group of people experience magic and/or death together). He might go off on a political rant, he might take questions from the audience; he’ll probably change costumes and be naked.

Keith Hennessy is an award-winning performer, choreographer, teacher and organizer. He lives in San Francisco and tours internationally. His interdisciplinary research engages improvisation, ritual and public action as tools for investigating political realities. Hennessy directs CIRCO ZERO PERFORMANCE, and was a member of the collaborative performance companies: Contraband (1985-94), CORE (1995-98), and Cahin-caha, cirque bâtard (1998-2002). Recent awards include two Isadora Duncan Awards (2009), the SF Bay Guardian’s Goldie (2007) and the Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship in Dance (2005). Recent works include Delinquent, commissioned by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Crotch, a solo performance developed at L’Arsenic in Lausanne, and presented in NY at DTW. He has an MFA in Choreography and is currently writing a dissertation on 1970s performance collectives to complete a PhD in Performance Studies at UC Davis.