© 2024 KALW 91.7 FM Bay Area
KALW Public Media / 91.7 FM Bay Area
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Choreographer Keith Hennessy: Sights & Sounds

Michael Rauner
Choreographer Keith Hennessy will be opening Sink on 12/1

Sights & Sounds is your weekly guide to the Bay Area arts scene. Choreographer Keith Hennessy will be opening his new solo show Sink at the Joe Goode Annex. He told KALW’s Jen Chien about three fantastic arts events happening around the Bay this week.

Credit David Papas
Kathleen Hermesdorf and Scott Wells in "On the Occasion of our 25th Anniversary (and eviction) Kathleen Hermesdorf and Scott Wells ask: Was that good for you?"

Scott Wells & Dancers present "On the Occasion of our 25th Anniversary (and eviction) Kathleen Hermesdorf and Scott Wells ask: Was that good for you?" Wells and Hermesdorf first moved to San Francisco together 25 years ago as two young artists, engaged to be married and ambitious to start their dance careers. The new piece revisits their last collaboration 20 years ago when they danced with tape measures. They've reworked this piece in the context of eviction and the struggle to make a career out of dance; the tape measure evokes metaphors for measuring time passed, the high commodity of physical space, and what has been lost and gained through the years. Looking back on our careers, we ask each other, "Was that good for you?" The show runs 12/1-12/2 and 12/7-12/10 at Dance Mission.

HENNESSY: "I'm looking forward to the work, and I think that the piece is also a way for thinking through how cities change, how personal relationships change, how gentrification works, and what's the personal role of that?"

Hackedepicciotto is a project of Alexander Hacke — a founding member and bass player of Einstürzende Neubauten — and Danielle de Picciotto— the lead singer of the band Space Cowboys and the co-initiator of the Love Parade. The couple married in 2006, and they've worked together creatively for almost two decades. Danielle specializes in unusual instruments such as the hurdy-gurdy, the autoharp, and the kemence besides playing the violin and piano while Alexander is master of the bass, guitar, and drums. Their live shows known to be intense: together they create beautiful, existentialistic, acoustic soundscapes, which roar and vibrate simultaneously. They'll be playing from their new album Menetekel on 12/2 at 8:30 at The Lab. Menetekel is another word for “the writing on the wall” and through the album Hackedepicciotto projects their despair of what is happening worldwide into a monumental symphony of sound, twirling and twisting it into a biblical frenzy. The symbolic and spiritual questions asked add unusual depth to the album, giving it a universal and very poignant touch of the current human quest.

HENNESSY: "It's probably going to be very loud, very whole-body consuming sense around. yeah, exciting experiments in sound and political processing."

Credit Tim Fabian Bartel
Jorge de Hoyos in Rite of Spring: Conduit

Formerly based in San Francisco for five years, Berlin-based artist Jorge De Hoyos presents Rite of Spring: Conduit at SAFEhouse Arts' 1 Grove Street location on 12/3 at 7 p.m. His solo choreography to Igor Stravinsky’s archetypal music score is a maelstrom of physical acts of resistance and attempts at survival. De Hoyos asks, "What artistic strategies can a solo body employ to confront a history of violence? What forms are appropriate to address the act of killing?"

HENNESSY: "I'm just super curious. I think we'll see the body pushed to certain kinds of emotional or physical exhaustion at times."