A collaborative creation, Turbulence (a dance about the economy) is an experimental hybrid of contemporary dance, improvised happening, and political theatre; it is a bodily response to economic crisis. Initiated before Occupy and engaging with questions of debt, value, and exchange, Turbulence is intended as both a provocation and an affirmation of global movements for economic justice. The work is instigated by San Francisco-based artist Keith Hennessy and produced by Circo Zero, an international performance company that Hennessy directs. Since its inception in 2010, Turbulence has received wide acclaim in the United States and Europe, and this is its premiere presentationin Canada, building upon Hennessy’s performance-lecture as part of the Blackwood Gallery’s 2016 exhibition, I stood before the source.

Turbulence plays with normative disruptions and calculated disregard for generally accepted rules of engagement. Itis a fractured and embodied narrative of economic unrest. Reflecting on disaster capitalism, debt, precarity, propaganda, torture, union busting, magic, collaboration, and war, Turbulence works across a range of performance modes that contemplate economic crises, contradictions, and frustrations. Turbulence engages the performers’ experiences and struggles by enacting varied responses to economic crises along race, gender, ability, and class lines. Throughout the performance, a sense of chaos, abjection, and failure is punctuated by moments of re-thinking, collaborative action, and resistance to power.

Turbulence is not only an experiment in performance but also in alternative modes of producing performance, positioning improvisation as both a survival strategy and a political tactic. Integrating new cast members as generative collaborators for local iterations, the work resists predetermined outcomes. This process of involving local performers supplements Turbulence’s conceptual underpinning: it provides the opportunity to build an international queer community in the face of precarity. For the Canadian presentation, performers have been selected with an eye to the diversity of lived experiences they bring to issues of immigration, settler colonialism, and accumulation by dispossession.

For Hennessy, Turbulence recognizes “the critique that contemporary dancers embody a neoliberal subject: dedicated to individual freedoms, we are always working and rarely paid; prioritizing career over community, we are internationally mobile, serving corporations that acknowledge us only as free content-providers… And still, we play, theorize, dream, and struggle in a queer utopia of our own collective imagining and embodiment. Without delivering a coherent critique or a totalizing vision of resistance and reconstruction, wehope to inspire public engagement, discussion, and action with regards to the economy, particularly its violence, corruption, and injustice.” Keith Hennessy, “Director’s Notes,” Turbulence: circozero.org/turbulence/">http://circozero.org/turbulence

Performers: Laura Larry Arrington, Ruairí Donovan, Empress Jupiter, keyon gaskin, Keith Hennessy, Jesse Hewit, Jassem Hindi, Jorge de Hoyos, Shaista Latif, Emily Leap, Allyson Mitchell, Julie Phelps, Brian Solomon, Gabriel Todd, Ravyn Wngz.

Production Manager: Alley Wilde