Fen Kennedy + Colin Kemper
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Just Breathe For A Minute
Performance: Fen Kennedy (they/them)
Music: Colin Kempner (he/him)
Materials: Mask-making fabric, green cotton yarn, nickel pins, and home.
The themes that resonated from the SHAPE residency were trauma, vulnerability, care, and how to grapple with these things in our art making. In one conversation we debated about the need to “rip off the band aid” and leave people in confrontation with the traumas of structural racism and other forms of hate, vs the pressures placed on marginalized peoples to resolve their art towards a hopeful or at least cathartic finish. As a transgender, immigrant, teaching artist, I usually bow to the pressure to resolve my work upwards, and have struggled during quarantine to make work that tells the truth of my experiences without softening the blow for those who might penalize me for their discomfort.
Just Breathe For A Minute is an exercise for myself, and for others, to sit in discomfort without resolution, but also an exercise in finding peace. I was inspired by Colin Kemper’s work Quarantine, which he wrote “at the onset of the pandemic in order to capture a snapshot of my feelings.” The work’s title – Just Breathe For A Minute – is a self-care practice that we could all do well to remember, it is a reassurance to my frenetic and over-productive self, and it is an invitation to you to breathe with me, to let yourself pause in stillness, and observe the subtler undercurrents of the world that might have passed you by. I have tried to be honest – neither quelling my fidgets nor tidying my spaces – and to hold to the task of simply being and breathing, no matter what was going on at the time. In this way a body (a person) that is marginalized, and that is intimately familiar with the sculptings and flow of trauma can take a minute, just a minute, to be vulnerable. I hope you can too.
Dr. Fen Kennedy is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Alabama. Their research - practical and theoretical - investigates the articulation of social and cultural norms, and how dance has the power to change and challenge our values. Their work has been published in Dance Chronicle, The Journal of Dance Education, The Activist History Review, and is forthcoming in Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Organizing and Social Movements. Their choreography has most recently been seen on Alabama Repertory Dance Theatre, at C for Courtside Gallery, and in SHAPE Residency's Virtual Exhibit. In pandemic-free times Kennedy also travels and teaches social partner dancing across the United States.
You can find more of their writing and dancing at: https://headtailconnection.wordpress.com/
You can also support the University of Alabama by donating at: https://bamablitz.ua.edu/giving-day/21246/department/24898
Colin Kemper is a Composition Graduate Student at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, where he has studied with Drs. Amir Zaheri and Craig First. Prior to his entering the program, Kemper earned a Master of Arts in Composition at Tulane University, where he studied with Drs. Maxwell Dulaney, Richard Snow, and Barbara Jazwinski. Colin has written for stage, theater, ensembles, orchestra, soloists, games, and dance film. His music has been performed by members of the Dal Niente Ensemble, the Lunar Ensemble, the Meridian Percussion Trio, Houston’s Foundation for Modern Music, the University of Alabama Contemporary Ensemble, the University of Alabama Theatre and Dance Department, and soloist Orlando Cela. Recently he completed the full soundtrack to Earthborn Interactive's "Flutterbombs". It was released on Xbox360 and PS4 American and European marketplaces.
You can explore more of Colin’s work at: https://www.colinkemper.com/