Dancing Magic Together avec Keith Hennessy

A five-class series exploring the poetics, politics, and potentials of creating a shared world by dancing together. Working mostly in duets but also solo, trio, group, we enter a laboratory of making and unmaking. We will dance more than talk supported by ritual technologies of divination, ancestors, elements, care, and prayer. We’ll consider the symbolic and metaphoric aspects of dancing together as well as the real intimacy of what is happening right here and now. Engaging decolonial and queer-feminist practices of consent and collaboration this will be a futurist laboratory that knows that another world is possible and it will be improvised.

Magic involves poetic and embodied action in a ritualized context to influence both consciousness and material realities. The pretend influences the real. Working with dancing, somatics, tarot, and spell crafting we will create a laboratory of activist magic. We’ll include indigenous land acknowledgement as a necessary act of healing, education, and respect. How can bodies and imaginations be decolonized and healed? How can dancing respond to anxiety and trauma? What are the potentials and pitfalls of wicca on colonized land? How do we develop tools for non verbal and improvised negotiations of consent and collaboration? All this while deepening the desire to move; to feel and learn and express through dancing.

The class will draw on Keith’s ongoing work including dancing objects, fake healing, negotiating power, while prioritizing intuitive and embodied responses to political crises.