TRY Talk

Featuring: Ishmael Houston-Jones, jose e. abad, Keith Hennessy, Kevin O’Connor, Snowflake Calvert, and collaborators of the TRY team LONG STORY TRY began with a simple premise: bring together an intergenerational racial diverse queer group of improvisation-based artists, spend deep relational time, and then see what emerges from there. TRY was a collaborative performance project developed during pandemic by Ishmael Houston-Jones, Kevin O’Connor, jose e. abad, Snowflake Calvert, & Keith Hennessy, produced by Alley Wilde and Hennessy for Circo Zero. We danced about pandemics and contagion, dancing and land, racial colonialism and queer futurism. The project came to life with visual designs by Monica Canilao and Azul, lights by GG Torres, and live electronic music by jose e. abad, Inéz Nuñez de Arco, and Madre Guia/Stephanie Hewett. Haunted by colonial histories, TRY explored what Sadiya Hartman calls, “Acts of collaboration and improvisation that unfold within the space of enclosure.” The TRY team’s collaborative work circled around the crises and potentials of land, healing, movement, consent, ownership and solidarity. We sought a soft experience where land acknowledgement and fascia can be woven into a single conversation. Where bodies are energies and powers at the same time, always entangled within the ecologies from which they emerge. The work toured in various iterations to the beach on Fire Island (BOFFO), the rocky Bernal Hill (SF), The Lab (SF), B-Complex (Atlanta), ImpulsTanz (Vienna), Saratoga Springs (Lake County), and on the internet (Danspace and Movement Research, NYC). Photo of Ishmael Houston-Jones and Snowflake Calvert from a performance of TRY in Atlanta at B Space, photo by Feliple Barral