Keith Hennessy

Keith Hennessy
Nationality	American and Canadian
Known for	Dance and choreography
Movement	Modern dance and Performance art

Keith Hennessy (born 1959 in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada) is aSan Francisco-based dancer, choreographer, and performance artist regarded as a pioneer of queer and AIDS-themed performance. He is known for non-linear performance collages that combine dance, speaking, singing, and physical and visual imagery, and for improvised performances that often undermine the performer-observer barrier. Hennessy directs ZERO PERFORMANCE / CIRCO ZERO, which has received commissions from Les Subsistances (Lyon) & Les Laboratoires (Paris), FUSED (France-US Exchange), as well as funds from the Zellerbach Family Fund, San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council, Grants for the Arts, and The San Francisco Foundation. Hennessy's performances are embedded in leftist and anarchist social movements; his career began in anti-nuclear juggling, acrobatics, and vaudevillian comedy. In 1982, he hitchhiked to the San Francisco Bay Area for a juggling convention, and stayed. In his San Francisco living room he co-founded the grassroots performance art coalition "848 Community Space," which later became CounterPULSE. He was influenced by and has worked with Lucas Hoving, Gulko, Ishmael Houston-Jones and Patrick Scully, Terry Sendgraff, Karen Finley, Joseph Kramer, the collective CORE (Jess Curtis, Stanya Kahn, Jules Beckman, Stephanie Maher, Hennessy), and Contraband, a company directed by Sara Shelton Mann. His work also developed from his participation in social and political activism inspired by Direct Action to Stop the War, Critical Resistance, ACT UP and Queer Nation. In San Francisco Hennessy's work has been presented at numerous venues including Dance Mission, Theater Artaud, Mama Calizo's Voice Factory and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Hennessy is also known for his ability to fuse performance art with community organizing and activism. In one early San Francisco work, Religare, by Contraband, he danced in the dirt in the ruins of a Mission district single-room-occupancy building that was burned down by the owner/landlord. As critic Paul Parish explained, "[I]t was an exorcism and a funeral for the winos who died there, and a healing for the neighborhood, and is perhaps the single greatest dance experience I've ever had."

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