Interview with Keith / Cuz’n by robin hood
robin hood: In this interview I’m excited to explore your formative experiences of ritual leading up to how you presently incorporate it into your life and artistic work. What is your story of ritual? How has your relationship to ritual evolved from the first time and place it entered your life? How has it informed your life as a queer person? How do you use ritual to counteract supremacist conditioning? Cuz’n: I am responding to these questions in bed. It’s 11pm. A quiet Saturday night after a long bath soaking in warm water with Epsom salts and aromatherapy. For some people this might have been a ritual. What were the ritualistic elements of this bath? I did it with the intention of shifting my mood, my body, my state of consciousness. I wanted to spend some time outside of time, in a place outside of my habitual places. I mixed earth (salt) and water, supported by plant medicine. Warm water is a meeting of fire and water. I lit a candle and turned off the light. One expression I learned early in my witch trainings was, magic happens at the place where the elements meet. I have no idea how long I was soaking. I’m different now than I was before the bath. For some of the time I was reading Adrienne Marie Brown’s Pleasure Activism. These days, with the supremacy of my phone and screen based reading, anytime I read an actual book (even on my kindle) feels like a ritual. Reading about sex and pleasure and healing from political harm shifts my breath, drops me into my body, and moves me out of the habitual or quotidian world. I am not interested in most psychological or family narratives. I forget most myths I’ve ever read or worked magically at Reclaiming’s Witch Camps. I’m not a story person. Which is ironic because I’m a storyteller. I can talk all night. I can describe most performances I see in rich detail. All this to say that nothing much or too much comes to mind when I think about my story of
ritual. I’ve always been drawn to ritual and I haven’t unpacked why. I was raised Catholic, like a lot of queer ritualists. My godparents were eccentric artists/seekers who only once gave me a gift, at the age of fifteen, a course in Transcendental Meditation. This was very unusual in our family context. The only time I went to a summer camp was as a junior counselor on a small island on the Canadian side of Lake Huron, in Georgian Bay. The camp was run by an American psychologist who had an idea to start the summer with an encounter group featuring the entirely white and teenage camp counselors with a group of Anishnaabe (Ojibwe) teens from Manitoulin Island. This was very unusual in our summer camp context. I moved to San Francisco in 1982 and by 1984 I was involved in a ragtag community of anarchist artists; hippy punks who went from protest to late night
Hex City Hall by Annie Danger + Keith Hennessy, 2017, photograph by Madrone Jack.
RFD 180 Winter 2019 43
