Queer Symposium

(Click image for large version. Please note this event includes adult content.)

Curators

Keith Hennessy is an award-winning performer, choreographer, teacher and organizer. He lives in San Francisco and tours internationally. His interdisciplinary research engages improvisation, public actions and alchemy/shamanism as tools for investigating political realities.

Hennessy directs CIRCO ZERO, a contemporary circus, in intimate spectacles for stage and street. He was a member of the collaborative performance companies: Contraband (85-94), CORE (95-98), and Cahin-caha, cirque bâtard (98-02). His work is featured in several books and documentaries, including 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.

Recent awards include Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship in Dance (2005) and SF Bay Guardian’s Best of the Bay for Circo Zero. Recent commissions include Les Subsistances, Lyon (Homeless USA, 2005), Les Laboratoires, Paris (American Tweaker, 2006), FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance), Centre Chorégraphique National, Belfort (Sol niger, 2007), and Lower Left Performance Co, San Diego (Gather, 2005). Keith’s 2005-07 teaching includes JFK University, UC Davis, University of San Francisco, improvisation festivals in Budapest, Seattle, Stolzenhagen (Germany), Moab, the Aerial Dance Festival (Boulder), plus grass-roots workshops in Arcata, Chicago, Toronto, Victoria BC, Madison, and Earthdance (Northampton MA).

Chris McCoy is a director, choreographer, producer, and teacher who has worked with numerous theatre and opera companies around the country including Seattle Children’s Theatre, Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, Denver Center Theatre Company, St. Louis Opera Theatre, San Diego Opera, and Austin Lyric Opera. For four years, Chris worked with Theater League, Inc. a promoter of national Broadway tours in ten cities across the country. He was the first Education and Community Programs coordinator for Theater League whose educational initiatives reached underserved communities and received many regional and national grants. Chris was also the artistic director of the Kansas City Musical Theater Festival for two years. Chris has directed and choreographed dozens of shows most recently the world premiere production of Sangre de Un Angel in Boston, MA; Nicky Silver’s Pterodactyls for Emerson College; and Paula Vogel’s Long Christmas Ride Home.

Performing Artists

Amy Louise Cole has been acting, directing, producing and teaching professionally in the Bay Area for over a decade. Amy co-founded El Gato Theatre in San Francisco and has worked with TheatreWorks, San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, and 42nd Street Moon among other companies. Amy is a 2010 MFA in Acting candidate at UC Davis. Performance highlights at UC Davis include Goram in #5 Angry Red Drum, written and directed by Philip Kan Gotanda, and Polina in The Seagulldirected by Katya Kamotskaia. Upon graduation this June, Amy will spend a month in New York training with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company before moving to Berlin, Germany where she will continue her investigation of German theatre and devised performance. Amy is a member of Actor’s Equity Association, Screen Actors Guild, and Theatre Bay Area.

Claire Maria Chambers holds an MA in Transforming Spirituality from Seattle University, and is currently completing her dissertation in Performance Studies at UC Davis. Her project, titled “Impossible Acts and Unsayable Speech: Apophasis in Contemporary Performance,” theorizes the ethical necessity of nothingness, the void, and the “via negative” in the relationship between performer and audience. A writer, performer, and director, Claire has acted, improvised, and directed on various stages in and around Seattle, and at UC Davis. www.clairemariachambers.com

Jess Curtis has created a body of work ranging from the underground extremes of Mission District Warehouses with Contraband (1985-1994) to the formal refinement of European State Theaters with Jess Curtis/Gravity (2000-present). Along the way Curtis has co-created groundbreaking circus works with the Franco-American Circus project Cie Cahin Caha, Cirque Batard; collaborated with the renowned FabrikCompanie in Potsdam, Germany on the award-winning fallen; and been commissioned to create works for companies such as Artblau (Germany), ContactArt (Italy), and Blue Eyed Soul Dance Company (England.) He founded Jess Curtis/Gravity in 2000 as a research and development vehicle for very live performance, With Gravity he has created three full-evening performance works, No Place Like Home (2000), fallen (2001), and Touched: Symptoms of Being Human (2005).

Karl Frost has been practicing and performing contact improvisation and interdisciplinary, dance-based performance since the mid 80′s. In the last years, his work has been gravitating more and more towards directing experimental body-based theater. His physical work is influenced by release technique, his study of martial arts, and an intimate knowledge of physics (physics degree from UC Berkeley, 1992). Known internationally for his dynamic movement style and for the edge-pushing nature of his work, physically and psychologically, both in process and performance, his performances take the body and emotionally and physically felt experience as their reference points. His work has been showcased over the last 2 decades across 5 continents, both in established institutions/universities and in independent studios and theaters.

Nina Galin is a dance-theater artist, singer, somatic educator and bodymind philosopher. She is interested in the notion of “categories”, perhaps because she can’t seem to fit into one. She generates and disseminates her interdisciplinary work using movement, talking, singing, touch, writing, breathing and listening. From 1991-2002 she was based in San Francisco, directing her company Nina Galin Music & Dance, and maintaining a private bodywork practice based in Alexander Technique, Pilates, connective tissue massage and shiatsu. She still does all those things but lives in Sebastopol.

Installation Artists

Xela 8 has been a working 2D and 3D artist since 1999. She works in a variety of media including: acrylic, ink, pastel, pencil, collage and assemblage/mixed media. Her work has been shown in many juried art exhibitions throughout Northern California. She is past President of Northern California Arts, one of California’s oldest art clubs.

Elizabeth M. Stephens is interdisciplinary artist, activist and educator who has explored themes of sexuality, gender, queerness, and feminism through art for over 20 years. Her current passion is SexEcology: the art of exploring the Earth as a lover. This work is designed to create the desire in others to love, cherish and honor the earth as they would their own lover, instead of expecting the earth to take care of them as one might expect from one’s mother. SexEcology combines Stephens’ interest in sexuality and ecology in order to help stop environmental degradation and bring about environmental healing and pleasure. Some of her other works include the bronze sculptural installation, The Academic/Porn Star Panty Collection; the road trip performance piece Wish You Were Here; the video installation, Kiss, as well as her ongoing collaboration with Annie Sprinkle in the Love Art Laboratory. She has exhibited and performed in museums, galleries and festivals around the world. For more information about Elizabeth’s other work see www.elizabethstephens.org

Annie M. Sprinkle is an internationally known multi-media artist whose work is often studied in History of Performance Art classes, gender studies and film studies at major Universities/Colleges. Sprinkle has continuously toured one-woman theater performances about her life since 1989, such as Post Porn Modernist and Hestory of Porn. One of the pivotal players in the 80’s “sex positive feminist movement,” Ms. Sprinkle’s art work has long championed sex education and equal rights. The film she produced and directed, The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop has played in well over 100 film festivals, at museums and galleries, including at the Guggenheim in NYC. She became the first sex film star to successfully bridge into the world of art, and to earn a Ph.D., which she was awarded from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, in 2002. She is a popular visiting artist at many Universities. Annie Sprinkle’s autobiographical book, Post Porn Modernist broke new ground in art books that include sexually oriented imagery. Her book, Hard Core From the Heart; The Pleasures, Profits and Politics of Sex in Performance was published by Continuum Press for the academic market and won the Firecracker Alternative Book Award (2002). For more information about Annie Sprinkle, go to her other web site, www.anniesprinkle.org