Hot Mess with Alex Ketley

My day started with Alex Ketley’s Hot Mess. Today was a unique class as we started reworking tasks from the previous week, for the festival showing on Friday. One of the elements of the class is an exercise that calls for the participants to string about 8 different emotive states together. These states are a combination characters, voices, obscure and expansive physical bursts, all of which Ketley creates on the spot based on the information one of us is giving him in that moment. The task is to learn them and be able to go through all eight in eight counts. We reworked four of the versions we have made in class. Alex was excited because he has not worked in a process where he has made a piece strictly from these exercises. And we were all excited to be given the space to just “go there." We all started the class imagining what we would be like if we did hot mess for a year. We concluded we would most likely feel comfortable screaming up close at people on the street. Alex brought this up during the artist panel discussion tonight, and it was fulfilling to hear him reflect on our first conversation of the day at the close of the day. The work we have been doing is building something inside of all eight of us in class, and I’m happy to report Alex Ketley will head back to San Francisco afresh with new and exciting steps he will to take in his process!

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