An Approximation of resilience (2025)

Winner of a National Dance Project Award, An Approximation of Resilience is a portrait of Bill Clark, a 71 year old artist and writer who has spent the past 33 years confined to a 4ft by 10ft cell on California’s Death Row. Despite this, he has become an inspirational figure through his artwork and his educational outreach. He is relentlessly optimistic, and The Foundry has worked intimately with him across the past two years to bring this new work to life.

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, choreographer and Guggenheim Fellow Alex Ketley became increasingly worried about how the pandemic was affecting our incarcerated population. He went on a website called Write-A-Prisoner, and was struck by Bill’s profile, primarily that he said he experienced a crushing loneliness being nearly perpetually confined to his cell. Ketley wrote a one page letter saying hello, and two weeks later received a beautiful seven page handwritten letter back from Clark. This began one of the most impacting friendships of Ketley’s life. After the quarantine lifted Ketley has visited Clark almost every week during these past five years.

In addition to becoming friends, they bonded deeply over their shared love of art. Slowly they both realized how synergistic their interests were and began working on projects together. The first was the film Distal Imprint, and later Ketley invited Bill to be a recurring guest in his Stanford class called Dance(A)cution. Clark called into the class each week from his cell and talked with the students from his vantage point as an incarcerated artist, and the students used these conversations as the foundation for making their own artwork.

An Approximation of Resilience is Ketley and Clark’s latest endeavor. An hour long dance-theater installation, created with a stellar group of performers and artists, it takes the premise that beauty exists anywhere if it is given the opportunity to be seen and celebrated. Even in the horrid confines of Death Row.

“Tenderness is the word that keeps coming to mind while watching Alex Ketley’s An Approximation of Resilience. The dance is unfailingly, unflaggingly, extraordinarily tender.” - San Francisco Chronicle

Exclusive Tour Representation:

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Excerpt of the new work here

Spring San FRANCISCO PERFORMANCES

TWO SHOWS PER NIGHT

Saturday March 22nd 7pm & 9pm

Saturday March 29nd 7pm (9pm Invite Only)

Saturday April 5th 7pm & 9pm

Saturday April 12th 7pm & 9pm

City Dance Studios

60 Brady Street

San Francisco, CA 94103

For Tickets visit:

https://www.citydancesf.com/alex-ketleys-an-approximation-of-resilience

Quotes Inspiring resilience

“Not-knowing is always more thrilling than knowing. Not-knowing is where hope and art and possibility and invention come from. It is not-knowing, that old, old thing, that allows everything to be renewed.”

- Anthony Doerr, Writer

"There is no joy in leading people to a place where they already are."

- Matthew Goulish, Theater Director

“More than putting another man on the moon…we need the opportunity to dance with really exquisite strangers.”

- Matthew Dickman, Poet

“The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.”

- Kehinde Wiley, Artist

“Performance is a way of going to another world and coming back with gifts.”

- Tim Etchels, Theater Director

“Joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity.”

- Ross Gay, Author

“The work of an intellectual is, through analyzing one's own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, and to re-evaluate rules and institutions.”

Foucalt, Philosopher

“What I was interested in was conveying an emotional message, which means using everything you’ve got inside you sometimes to barely make a note, or if you have to strain to sing, you sing.”

Nina Simone, Singer and Activist

“Rules are merely tendencies, not truths, and genre borders only as real as our imaginations are small.”

Ocean Vuong, Poet and Writer

“I want to have a sharp pen, thin skin, and an open heart.”

Taylor Swift, Singer

“What’s it’s of is always more remarkable than what it is.”

Diane Arbus, Photographer

“People are creative, godlike beings. I don’t feel like we carry ourselves like that or know how miraculous we are.”

Deana Lawson,  Photographer

“There is nothing avant-garde, subversive or experimental about artwork that excludes poor people.”

Unknown

“A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”

Leonard Bernstein

“We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.”

Walter Brueggemann, Theologian

“I have come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned. We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated.”

Bryan Stevenson, Civil Right Lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative

"But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment – mere loss of liberty – has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, and solitary confinement. There remains, therefore, a trace of ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice."

Michel Foucault, Philosopher, from his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“Transform your trembling into action. Move closer towards those whom you have averted your eyes. Gift your eyes, your voice, and your freedom of movement to those who need them most.”

Jackie Sumell, Artist and Activist

“As an artist you have a responsibility to seduce and destroy.”

Jackie Sumell, Artist and Activist

“Performance is not about presenting something. It is a way to unveil the truth.”

Anonymous

“The most powerful way to challenge the ethos of disposability underlying mass incarceration is to make the full humanity of incarcerated people more visible to the public.”

Jesse Krimes, Artist and Formally Incarcerated Individual