Keith Hennessy + Jassem Hindi Present The World Premiere Of future friend/ships

Motivated by the ambivalent outcomes of the Arab Spring and a failed effort to understand the war in Syria, future friend/ships plays in the imaginary realms of future fiction, December 15-17, 2016 at CounterPulse in San Francisco. Tickets $20-$30 (no one turned away for a lack of funds)

After the June premiere of Blank Map in San Francisco and a summer performance with electroclash superstar Peaches at Impulstanz in Vienna, Keith Hennessy returns with Palestinian/French sound artist Jassem Hindi to present the world premiere of future friend/ships.

future friend/ships experiments with dance, live music, poetry, and visual art - mobilizing both virtuosity and amateur play. The performance is motivated by ambivalent outcomes of the Arab Spring and a failed effort to understand the wars in Syria. Re-imagining friendship and re-claiming the importance of hospitality, Hennessy + Hindi develop a world where astronauts, inventors, and fighters meet poets, mythical animals, and transdisciplinary scholars.

Hennessy + Hindi describe future friend/ships as "a poetic reaction to all the madness in the world and in themselves, as an anarchic-queer alternative discourse, which despite all of the fierce attacks it displays, is a magnificent declaration of love."

Keith Hennessy and Jassem Hindi have a five-year practice of friendship, art, and political engagement; an ongoing collaboration that has produced two internationally-touring performance works: Almost and Turbulence. With future friend/ships they are, for the first time, politicizing the racial/ethnic/regional differences between themselves. Insurmountable differences feel intensely personal, and easily become metaphors of political struggles, violence, and resistance. future friend/ships engages with the politics of friendship to find points of departure for a hospitable future.

Hennessy + Hindi conceived of future friend/ships through a commission from Kampnagel Theater in Hamburg, Germany, which culminated in a work-in-progress performance July 2015. Following the German presentation, future friend/ships was presented in 2016 as a work-in-progress at New York's premiere experimental performance festival American Realness.

Despite feeling powerless to save what is already lost, Hennessy and Hindi engage the possibility of imagining an impossible future, embodying this post-utopian place, and presenting this reality on stage with a deep desire to invite the audience into this fictional worlD. Hennessy + Hindi center this work of Arab Futurism around one simple ideal: if it is impossible to project ourselves in a near immediate future because of war and misery, we can always imagine a fictional future.

future friend/ships considers these questions: What if there is no imaginable future? What if we are amateur oracles? What if we could build oracle-making machines? How can we call upon raging poetry and broken drones to project a future that this soon-to-be-past would never afford? Hindi and Hennessy use Arab future fiction and punk anxiety as excuses and models.

Researching (and inventing) the ancestors of Arab Futurism, this work hosts the uninvited to conjure a curse. Hennessy + Hindi map a genealogy of Arab Futurism that is: 1) a fiction, a child's game, a mystical process and 2) an effort to present the enduring genius - especially in terms of imagination and creativity - of the people from Arab, Persian, and Levant regions (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi, Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, Gulf...) who are being ______________ by the US and everyone.

Hindi, who was born in Saudi Arabia to a Palestinian father and a French mother, has lived also in Lebanon and Syria. A major part of Hennessy + Hindi's creative process includes telling each other stories of where they come from, where they've been, and what motivates their artistic and political tactics. Marked by diaspora and displacement, Hennessy + Hindi are (contemporary, neoliberal) artists with complicated relationships to Homeland and Mother tongue.

Tickets are available at- www.counterpulse.org

About Circo Zero

Circo Zero, instigated by Keith Hennessy in 2001, is one of the most prolific and widely touring of West Coast dance-performance companies. The company engages a diverse team of artists who create hybrid spectacles for a wide range of venues. The work is interdisciplinary and experimental, operating within the tensions between intimacy and spectacle, rhetoric and ritual, personal and social. Circo Zero evolves performance language and builds community through collaboration, while crossing lines of artistic discipline, personal and cultural identity, and social expectations. We participate in local and global struggles for justice; functioning as a public laboratory for investigations of spiritual, artistic, sexual, and political concerns.

About The Artists

Keith Hennessy was born in a mining town in Northern Ontario, Canada, lives in San Francisco, and works regularly in Europe. He is an award-winning performer, choreographer, teacher and organizer. Hennessy directs Circo Zero, a laboratory for live performance that plays with genre and expectation. Rooted in dance, Hennessy's work embodies a unique hybrid of performance art, music, visual and conceptual art, circus, and ritual.

Hennessy was a member of Sara Shelton Mann's legendary Contraband (85-94), as well as the collaborative performance companies CORE (95-98) and the France-based Cahin-caha, cirque bâtard (98-02). His work is featured in several books and documentaries, including Composing While Dancing (Melinda Buckwalter, U of Wisconsin: 2010), How To Make Dances in an Epidemic (David Gere, Univ of Wisconsin: 2004), Gay Ideas (Richard Mohr, Beacon: 1992), and Dancers in Exile (RAPT Productions, 2000). Hennessy is a co-founder of 848 Community Space/CounterPULSE a thriving performance and culture space in San Francisco. Awards include the United States Artist Kjenner Fellowship (2012), a Bilinski Fellowship (2011), a NY Bessie (2009) for Crotch, two Isadora Duncan Awards (2009) for Sol niger, a Goldie (2007) and the Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship in Dance (2005).

Jassem Hindi (French/Palestinian, Born in Saudi Arabia) is an artist based in Berlin playing with strange objects, future fiction and politics of hospitality. His usual materials are broken sounds, broken bodies and broken texts. In the recent past years he has been involved in a series of collectives and collective performances focusing on political strategies and weird objects in performance, using tools coming from real time composition, concrete music, future making poetry and politics of friendship. Jassem also gives workshops, both in philosophy and about sound in performance. This past recent period he has collaborated, among others, with Keith Hennessy, Ida Larsen, Marie-Louise Stentebjerg, Ruairi Donovan, Hana Erdman, Rani Nair, Jeremy Wade, Valentina Desideri and Mia Habib. He is the recipient of several grants and residency programs, and has been / is supported by Norway, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, France, and the U.S.A. (CCN Belfort, Norwegian Arts Council, Nordic Culture Fund, Kampnagel Hamburg, EMS Stockholm, Ystad Arts Museum...)

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