In future friend/ships, performance artist Keith Hennessy and sound designer Jassem Hindi endeavor to make sense of the many tragedies of our current political climate through movement and sound. They offer “an idiot’s perspective on violence and despair,” exploring what happens in a world where everything worth defending is being destroyed and desecrated.
How can we explore the future when everything in the present is a dystopian horror story?
future friend/ships is incited by drone wars, futurism, works of art from Arab feminists and astronomers, and the science fiction of utopia and dystopia. Central to the performance is the tension and question, how can we explore the future when everything in the present is a dystopian horror story? Hennessy and Hindi address this tension by following an afro-futurist precept: when the “real future” is being robbed, the only thing left is to create speculative fiction.
In practice, Hennessy and Hindi peer into the future with a layered tryptic of experimental sound, post-disciplinary dance, and a rich visual field overflowing with flowers. future friend/ships features costumes like rubber butcher’s aprons and animal masks that are blinding. Sounds are produced from broken machines and excesses of cassette tape. Its performance of simultaneous acts — flying drones while dancing, reading poetry while reading futurist tarot — aim to find a (post) utopian space onstage without pretending to know anything.
Despite these disparate influences, future friend/ships is undeniably focused on the devastation of the Middle East. Hennessy and Hindi studied the poetry of Etel Adnan, Nazik al Malaika, and Donna Haraway, and created a tarot deck of Arab futurism including Sun Ra and Palestinian/American professor Edward Said. All of this culminates in a performance that aims to “craft a poem of Arab Futurism.” This is their speculative fiction.
Despite “feeling powerless to save what is already lost,” Hennessy and Hindi consider it their role to imagine this “impossible future.” Join them, and watch what the New York Times describes as a “poetic/political work that gradually transforms chaos into hope.”
future friend/ships will show Thursday–Sunday, December 15–17, at 8:00 p.m. at CounterPulse (80 Turk Street) in San Francisco.
Tickets start at $15 and can be purchased at www.counterpulse.org.
