An Approximation of resilience (2024)

New FOUNDRY Project

A long trip to this point.

When Alex lived in New York City in the early 1990s, during the height of the AIDS epidemic he felt he needed to get involved somehow. He volunteered at Friends in Deed, an organization whose goal was to provide emotional and spiritual guidance to those infected with the disease and those caring for the sick. It was a formative experience regarding how to be of service to a community on the precipice of mortality.

Alex took care of his ailing father for the last ten years of his life when his Dad’s body was in a critical state of failure. It gave him an intimate window into how callous our medical system can be towards those who are infirm and don’t have infinite resources. It was also interesting to reflect as an artist on what the United States is culturally in terms of its rituals around death.

Always wanting to put his body in direct proximity with the things he is curious about he was trained and became a hospice volunteer. The Foundry was about to embark on a project called Still Witness using this experience as the foundation for research and a new work when the Covid19 pandemic occurred shutting down all of their opportunities instantly.

While in lock-down, Alex began to think of other communities that suffered from loneliness and likely drastically affected by the shutdowns. He thought of our incarcerated population and went on a website called Write A Prisoner.

By accident or divine fate he wrote a single page letter to Death Row inmate and artist Bill Clark. Two weeks later he got a seven page letter back.

Those exchanges have led to a deep friendship that has now spanned the past five years, with Alex visiting Bill weekly and the two of them engaging in a number of different art projects collaboratively.

They initially made the film Distal Imprint. They then taught together at Stanford a class called DanceAcution which uses Bill’s experience as the platform for the students to develop performance projects. The class is ongoing.

And they are now creating An Approximation of Resilience, an evening length work stemming in part from this friendship, but more significantly an intimate portrait of Bill’s transcendence of the abhorrently violent nature of our prison system. A system that somehow thinks confining individuals to 5x8 foot cells continuously (except for 12 hours a week) is morally justified. Bill has been in this state of isolation for the past 32 years.

Even with being incarcerated, Bill has created a life that has vastly outshone his circumstance. He lives with an unfailing optimism, hope, and generosity which is magnificent to experience.

From his indomitable light and friendship, The Foundry is excited to bring this work to stages in the fall of 2024.

For more details please contact alexketley@gmail.com

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