American Realness

Keith Hennessy & Jassem Hindi

future friend/ships

U.S. Premiere

Saturday, January 9, 7:00pm
Sunday, January 10, 10:00pm
Tuesday, January 12, 10:00pm

Run Time: 60 minutes

Abrons Arts Center, Playhouse
466 Grand Street / tickets $20

Single Tickets Festival Pass

future friend/ships is made out of oracles, science fiction and childish drone dances.

Projecting oneself into the future is more often than not a privilege reserved to a happy few, and a way to reproduce sameness. future friend/ships casts a different kind of physical fiction: we host the uninvited to conjure the curse. We are amateur oracles and oracle-making machines. We call upon fragments of raging poetry, broken machines, dying animals, and plastic flowers. We use arab future fiction and punk anxiety as excuses and models. We celebrate, among others, the poems of Nazik al Malaika and Donna Haraway. The more we generate potential for transformation, the more we will be surprised by the future. Otherness hosts otherness.

Keith Hennessy and Jassem Hindi describe their work as 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 as much a magnificent declaration of love to a world as it could be.

future friend/ships was created with support of Caroline Spellenberg, Nadine Jessen, Kampnagel, Circo Zero, and __hindiana_.

Photo by Anja Beutler


Created and Performed by Keith Hennessy and Jassem Hindi
Lighting Design by Dennis Doescher


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). In 2009-10, Keith was awarded residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Djerassi. Commissions include National Dance Project (Turbulence 2012), Arsenic, Lausanne (Crotch, 2008), Centre ChorÈgraphique National, Belfort (Sol niger, 2007), Les Subsistances, Lyon (Sol niger 2007, Homeless USA, 2005), Les Laboratoires, Paris (American Tweaker, 2006), FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance), and Lower Left Performance Co, San Diego (Gather, 2005). Hennessy teaches internationally at festivals, universities and independent studios. Teaching since 2009 includes UC Davis, imPulsTanz/Vienna, TSEH/Moscow, Circuit Est/Montreal, Hub 14/Toronto, AEx-Corps/Dakar, Stary Bowar/Poland, Movement Research/NY, Tanzfabrik/Berlin, University of Dance & Circus/Stockholm.

Jassem Hindi (Palestine/France) was born in Saudi Arabia and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris. He works in the fields of sound, performance and temporary objects / installations. As a musician, he uses mainly broken objects, diverted machines, lo-fi field recordings, feedbacks, in the spirit of experimental music influenced by noise, hardcore, image editing techniques, and older masters including Alvin Lucier and Bellini.

Jassem’s working method extends to the fields of visual and performative arts. He regularly collaborates with choreographers and performers, as a musician, an advisor or as a performer. He has flirted with research around the themes of public displays of violence, intimacy and differentiation, political ritual, and the art of hospitality.

In 2014-15, among others, he collaborated with Keith Hennessy, Ida Larsen, Marie-Louise Stentebjerg, Ruairi Donovan, Hana Erdman, Rani Nair, Jeremy Wade and Mia Habib. He is the recipient of several grants and residency programs in Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, and USA. Additionally, Jassem collaborates with Sweet and Tender , an experimental dance-performance collaborative experimenting with alternative economies and modes of production.

Jassem teaches philosophy and sound improvisation for dance artists, as guest faculty at HZT in Berlin and annually at Impulstanz in Vienna.