Interview with Krissy Keefer

Keefer, Krissy ; McKiernan, Stephen

Krissy Keefer is a dancer, choreographer, and artist-activist. In 1975, Keefer co-founded the feminist dance company, Wallflower Order. Later, in 1984, she co-founded another dance company, Dance Brigade, with Nina Fichter. She developed her own kind of dance theater which combined martial arts, female athleticism, and social justice issues.

2001-12-16

In copyright

2017-03-14

McKiernan Interviews

82:04

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Krissy Keefer
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 16 December 2001
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:02):
Testing one, two, testing. Again, thank you very much.

KK (00:00:08):
Oh, sure.

SM (00:00:09):
And, hopefully, I will be able to meet you because, actually, I interviewed a couple other people like David [inaudible], who lives in Berkeley. And I know David said, "When you come out, I want you to take my picture," even though I have interviewed him already. Okay, when you think of the (19)60s and the early (19)70s, what is the first thing you think about?

KK (00:00:30):
When I think about the (19)60s and the early (19)70s? Well, I was actually still in high school.

SM (00:00:35):
Also, speak up, because this phone of mine is not that loud.

KK (00:00:38):
Yeah. Well, I was in high school during the (19)60s and early (19)70s, so I graduated from high school in (19)71. So, mostly, I think about the cultural conflict, I do not know, kind of turmoil. It was turmoil, I think, because we were kind of trapped between two value systems that were colliding. The one value system was, get good grades, go to a school, and be a cheerleader. And the other was, give up all worldly possessions, get stoned, and hate the establishment. It was that explosion that was happening, and I felt like I was caught in all of that in high school.

SM (00:01:25):
When you were in high school, were you already interested in dance?

KK (00:01:29):
I had been a dancer since I was a kid. I started studying ballet when I was six. My mother was a dancer, so dance is part of our [inaudible].

SM (00:01:39):
So you knew, when you left high school, you were going to stay in that as a profession?

KK (00:01:45):
I did not know how it was going to take form, but it was definitely my aspiration, my [inaudible]. But I had not built self-confidence around it or anything like that, but it was what I loved to do and what definitely unfolded for me, because I actually was able to get involved with a group of people in Oregon when I was probably 19, so really young, and started Wallflower Order with four other women when I was 22, and doing the same thing since then.

SM (00:02:22):
Before we start to talk about Wallflower Order, what was it in high school? Was it your peers? Was it teachers? Was it things you were seeing on the news?

KK (00:02:34):
All of that? I was in Cincinnati, Ohio, so I was really drawn to, and was one of the personalities in my high school that very much identified with, being a hippie. But I was in the suburbs in a rather affluent neighborhood, trying to be a hippie in that situation where suburb culture, everybody was smoking pot, listening to music, and becoming a hippie through looking at Life Magazine and listening to the news and sort of watching the anti-war movement, but not really necessarily being a real part of it. So it felt rather peripheral, but important. I was a peripheral player, but it was important for me. And when I talk to people my age, we all say we would rather have lived through the (19)60s than be young now. I actually feel sorry for people who had their maturation process take place during the Reagan era and later.

SM (00:03:47):
Yeah, describe that, because certainly growing up being young under Reagan, or even Bush?

KK (00:03:54):
Well, I think, actually, in a way, Reagan's era was more destructive because I feel like the ideological goal of Reagan's reign was to destroy the value system that we created in the (19)60s, which was less is more, and drop out from the rat race, and try to find a sense of peace and brotherly love, and try to get some kind of social justice for the black community and women and poor people. That became the dominant culture. We had a culture. We had a dual power culture operating in the United States that everybody was tied into so that my mother could sing along to Jefferson Airplane songs because our music and our culture is very tightly woven, and it kind of dominated the era. And I think what Reagan did, the goal of that was to undermine that and put [inaudible] personality back at the center, definitely destroy the black liberation movement, and start pumping drugs into the black community, and making social contributions seem more about how much money someone had rather than what they had for contribution. For example, someone like Jackson Brown or Bonnie Raitt who were not... Jackson got more political, but Bonnie Raitt, for example, or somebody like that who was not necessarily political could generate hundreds of thousands of dollars for a benefit for somebody who was working on more a grass roots level like myself for Holly Near that is not generating anywhere the same amount of money, you started to feel maybe your contribution was less significant or less [inaudible] able to participate in that kind of way. And so I felt like all of our contributions, our kind of collective conscious and sharing of resources, all of that, that is what they undermined. And everyone started buying into borrowing money and liquidating their own kind of more political, deep social justice aspirations.

SM (00:06:24):
Kris, could you speak up just a little bit, too?

KK (00:06:26):
Yeah-yeah-yeah.

SM (00:06:27):
Okay. Thank you. When you hear, and I know you have heard it, but I have for many years, these commentators, many of them conservatives, I am not being biased here, but many conservatives who will say that all the problems in the American society today can be placed blame on that period when Boomers were young in the (19)60s and (19)70s. Basically, I know they are making reference to the sexual revolution, the breakup of the American family, the drug culture, the divisions between black and white, the lack of respect for authority, the victim mentality that many people see in our society. And I remember there has even been books written about the Democratic Party was destroyed after McGovern lost in (19)72, and they had to go a different direction because they were identified too much with the anti-war movement. So your thoughts on those critics who blame the problems we have today on what happened when Boomers were young?

KK (00:07:31):
Well, I think that is their point of view, and that is actually a total distortion of what actually happened. The thing is that this country was founded on the genocide of Native American people and the enslavement of African people. That is the foundation of it, and there was never any self-criticism or rectification for either of those social monstrosities. So if you never looked deeply into how we got this land base and got this, quote, great country going, then you do not have any sense of what is really happening. And what the hippies and the (19)60s did is the truth finally started to emerge about what created the wealth of this country and what created our place in the world, so to speak. And I think all of those people... I am never one of the people that say, "Oh, the good old days." The good old days of what? What era are you talking about? So because the African-American population has never been given any economic [inaudible] this country. And that is what the (19)60s revealed is the inequities, not the division started. It was when the inequities were finally pointed out. And then that is what Reagan did. Reagan put a damper, a big clamp down on the black community and destroyed its economic base. So I think those are the apologists for imperialism. That is the white fundamentalist, Christian-based, church conservative movement of which I have family in Cincinnati. Those are my people, too. That is what I am saying, when you get caught kind of in the cross-hairs, the crossfire of two different world views. But that worldview is deeply unfair and inaccurate.

SM (00:09:36):
Let me try to turn my volume up. Hold on one second. Yeah, I am just going to have some beeps here. There?

KK (00:09:43):
Yes.

SM (00:09:43):
Okay, very good. If you look at the Boomer generation, it is hard to state that everybody falls into this category, but when you look at the generation as a whole, what are its strengths, in your view? And what are its weaknesses? And that is looking at all Boomers, male, female, black, white? What do you think were some of the strengths within the generation?

KK (00:10:14):
I am from San Francisco, right? So I [inaudible] KPFA events. Do you know what KPFA is?

SM (00:10:16):
No.

KK (00:10:24):
Okay, KPFA is the public radio, Pacifica. Do you know what Pacifica is?

SM (00:10:29):
Yes, I do.

KK (00:10:30):
WPAI? KPFA? Anyway, for most people in their (19)60s, the most radical radio stations on in the Bay Area, mostly Boomer. It is the older side of the Boomers. And then there is all the Boomers that bought into the Reagan era, and drive SUVs, and spend their time skiing, and shopping at very fancy stores, and travel all the time. You cannot really characterize what the Boomers are now, or what they became. They are just a big group of people. I feel that maybe we had a common experience at one point, and some of us stayed true to our values, but many people did not stay true to the values that were generated.

SM (00:11:19):
Well, one of the things that the Boomer generation, when they were young, thought, and I know a lot of the people that I knew who were Boomers felt they were the most unique generation in American history, and because they were going to change the world for the better they were going to end racism, sexism, homophobia, bring peace to the world. Obviously, we still have these issues, but there was that feeling. What are your thoughts when you hear people say, "We are the most unique?"

KK (00:11:51):
Yeah, I think that the (19)60s-

SM (00:11:51):
Oh, Krissy?

KK (00:11:51):
Yes?

SM (00:11:52):
Could you speak up a little louder? I am not sure what is-

KK (00:11:54):
[inaudible] louder. I am talking really loud. So it is either my phone, or your phone. I cannot talk any louder.

SM (00:11:59):
Okay, very good.

KK (00:12:00):
What do I think they we are? I do not even to think that is interesting, actually. What would that be? We are talking about what is going on right now. We had a very amazing experience in the (19)60s, but we have a catastrophic environmental situation, and race and class situation right now, and it is much more interesting. What is that group of people doing about this problem, and what is the kids? What is everyone doing about this right now? You could see in Obama's campaign, underlying Obama's campaign was the organizing tactics of Caesar Chavez. Through Reverend Wright, there was a Black nationalist politics that Obama was aware of. There was community organizing. All of those things are (19)60s value systems that have been able to take through. At the same time, he had to capitulate and manage a whole very conservative Democratic Party wing at the same time, not to mention the ultra-right-wing Republican Party he has got to deal with every day. So, at a certain point, that is the whole spectrum that is happening right now. And how is that group of people dealing with the fact that all the polar ice caps are melting? We are in big trouble here. And so the Boomers sit around and pat themselves on the back. Who cares? It does not matter. What happened a long time ago, does not matter. It is what is going to happen in the next five years. It is absolutely essential that people stop consuming, and stop patting themselves on the back, and all of that. I always use the analogy of the co-op. In the (19)60s, the co-op was a small room, and it had a bin of rice, a bin of couscous, some tofu floating in some water, and some vegetables. Now you go into co-op health food stores, they are multi-billion-dollar conglomerates, 50 different choices on every kind of thing. It is sickening. It is sickening. That is where our values, in my mind, went completely south. That is where we, in the guise of doing something great, it is just as pathetic as if you walked into Kroger's.

SM (00:14:36):
How did you get to Oregon, when you went to Oregon? And secondly, how did you meet up and start Wallflower Order? And thirdly, what was the basic premise behind Wallflower Order?

KK (00:14:54):
I found out about Oregon through one of my friend's mothers who told me that I should go out there, because my grades were not that good in high school, and University of Oregon said, "If you get good grades in the summer, you could stay [inaudible] go to school here." Well, I did that. I was dancing with a group called Eugene Dance Collective. And out of that, we started the Wallflower Order. And it was 1975, the Vietnam War just ended, and we were a collective. Everybody was a collective. Collectives were sort of the organizational structure that people glommed onto, a lot coming out of Mao and Ho Chi Min and all of that kind of political thought that was operating in Asia, and started a collective like them. So my group was a collective, and Berkeley women's music collective, and all the hundreds of collective stores, and all of that. And we just started dancing together, and did some performances, and got hooked up with Holly Near. Her sister was in our group, and she took us on the road some. And then we just kind of created our own space nationally and toured all over.

SM (00:16:05):
Was there a magic moment early on between that time you left high school and your experiences in Oregon when you knew, I am an activist?

KK (00:16:20):
When I knew I was an activist? I was political in high school, so I was always trying to make sense of it in high school. So I definitely was, in 1975 when we started the Wallflower Order, able to say, "I am an artist as well as an activist." And it was always very important in the Wallflower Order that our dances have social relevance and reflect our community, which at that time was kind of the women's movement. The women's movement was definitely our [inaudible].

SM (00:16:59):
A lot of people, when they see dance, they think, certainly, it is an art, but they do not always see the linkage between politics and dance. And obviously from the get-go, from your first experiences in Oregon, to what you are doing today with the Dance Brigade, that is the definition of what you do, politics and dance. That is an activist type of a thing, and it is certainly a little bit different. Explain in a little more in detail?

KK (00:17:29):
Well, from 1975 on, the women's movement was all about your personal life as political. That was a big part. So we would make dance up, say, about being women, and we would also make dances up, about the environment, or we would make dances up about anti-war dances, or we made dances up about working class women. So we were all studying and thinking together. The whole movement was studying and thinking about all these issues about race and class. So we would use the poetry or the writings of feminist women who we considered part of our national art scene, the Holly years. We used that a lot. We used Baron's music. We used [inaudible]. We had a whole bunch of artists, women artists, that we could draw from. And telling our story was political. And then, as we kept going, we had study groups, and then we got involved in the movements to support the war in El Salvador against... We were involved in the women's solidarity movement, supporting struggles with Chile, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, that whole thing that happened in the early (19)80s. We were involved in that. We got involved in the environmental movements. We were involved in lots of different organizations and things that were working on different causes.

SM (00:19:04):
One of the things about the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement is that women were often put in secondary roles. And in some of the history books that have been written on the period, many of the women shot away from those groups and became part of the leadership of the women's movement that we saw in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s. And I know it has become a sensitive issue in the civil rights community and some of the anti-war community, but is there truth that, in some of these movements that took part when Boomers were young, and I even asked... I just interviewed Denis Hayes today, of-

KK (00:19:45):
Who is that? I do not know who that is.

SM (00:19:47):
He is the founder of Earth Day.

KK (00:19:50):
Oh, yeah-yeah-yeah.

SM (00:19:50):
He and Gaylord Nelson, Senator Nelson. And I asked him the same question about the environmental movement in the very beginning as well as the Native American, the Chicano, the gay and lesbian movement, did men dominate? And in a lot of them, they did.

KK (00:20:06):
Yes.

SM (00:20:07):
And just your thoughts on if you sensed this as a young person back in Oregon, and then as you came to San Francisco? But, basically, in Oregon you saw this sexism that happened and women had to take the lead on things?

KK (00:20:24):
What is the question, then?

SM (00:20:25):
The question is about the movements. Do you think most of the movements were sexist?

KK (00:20:32):
Yeah. I think we all agree with that. I do not think there is any disagreement on that. And I think the sexism is actually what gave birth to the women's movement. And then I think what happened is the women's movement, actually it is kind of autonomous, had its own leadership, its own culture, and its own social relationships, and all of that. And I think now, for women to try to get involved in politics, and it is like you have not improved enough in relationship to being since 2010. I mean, the homophobia is still rampant throughout the country. There is enormous sexism, not that many women [inaudible] in the government really, not close to 50 percent. In San Francisco, it is very hard for women politicians to get elected, very hard. So, do I think it is improved? Actually, not that much.

SM (00:21:25):
Wow.

KK (00:21:26):
In fact, I think a lot of things are actually a lot worse than they were 20 years ago. I do not think we improved the environment at all. I think we dropped the ball on that completely. We dropped the ball on the war. We still have not been able to keep the United States going to war. We have not been able to rectify poverty at all. We have hideous class... When I was growing up, it was one out of 10 percent of the people own 90 percent of the wealth. Now it is 1 percent of the people own 90 percent of the wealth, and it used to be one out of four African-Americans had a relationship [inaudible], and now it is out of three. None of our social movements actually improved the last 30 years, and I attribute that a lot to what happened during Reagan's era. I think that was the goal, to put a brake on what kind of exploded in (19)60s.

SM (00:22:18):
You make a good point, because I can remember when he became President, his famous two words were, "America's back." And he was making a reference, I think, to the Vietnam War and the breakdown of the military and the army. And he was going to build the military back up again because, well, a lot of the issues from the (19)60s and Vietnam. And then, of course, President Bush, that followed him, said, "The Vietnam syndrome is over." So, between the two of them, they made those kinds of comments. And when I look at those comments, I say, yeah, maybe taking pride in America is what he wanted to see, but it basically a slap of what had been before.

KK (00:23:01):
Right.

SM (00:23:04):
How important were the college students in your opinion on the campuses in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s in ending the war in Vietnam?

KK (00:23:12):
I think very important. I think the draft is why we ended it, because people got sick of being drafted and watching their relatives die. And, unfairly, if you are drafted and you do not want to go, to have to go is completely... everybody [inaudible] that. After a while, so many people died, they got sick of watching it. So I think everybody started to rebel. It was very, very close to home. The fact that there is no draft, who is going is kind of removed in a way that it was not then.

SM (00:23:43):
Do you think the Boomers have, and, again, this is just subjective based on your experience in knowing people who are Boomers, been good parents and grandparents in terms of sharing what their experiences were when they were young in the (19)60s and early (19)70s? And in terms of activism, passing some of these lessons on to them?

KK (00:24:10):
Yeah. I am in the Bay Area, so they are the liberal backbone of the country. You know what I mean? I probably have a very different kind of pulse on it. When I see the Boomers, when I am in Cincinnati, are my friends in Cincinnati radical and political? No, they are not. And a lot of them are fundamentalist Christians. So do I go back to high school and have the same kinds of head space that was there? Absolutely not. But is San Francisco and Sonoma and that whole northern California area, [inaudible] people might think like me, yeah. You know what I mean? It is a geographical thing a lot.

SM (00:24:53):
Good point. Very good point.

KK (00:24:57):
Probably in Boston, the Boomers are on a certain, same page, and Cambridge, and Northampton, and that. It is true. The liberals want to sort of live with each other, and they create enclaves, but are the Boomers down in Miami, Florida thinking like me? I doubt it.

SM (00:25:14):
And certainly some of the college environments in different parts of the country may have had different experiences, too. In your view, when did the (19)60s begin? And when did it end?

KK (00:25:25):
(19)60s, okay, I would probably say with the death of Kennedy, probably, on some level. You are talking to somebody who was 12. I am not a historian, so I have not given it an enormous amount of thought. But I would say from Kennedy through the death of Martin Luther King and then Malcolm X, I would say that is when the shit the fan pretty much in terms of people getting out in the streets and all of that. And when did it end? I would probably say, when did Reagan get elected? When did Carter, lose get election?

SM (00:26:04):
He lost in (19)79, and Reagan came in (19)80.

KK (00:26:06):
Yeah, there you go. That was the end.

SM (00:26:11):
And again, this is purely subjective.

KK (00:26:13):
You have to see what happened, too. What I see happened in the (19)70s, when the Vietnam War ended, all of that energy that was out in the street turned into creating kind of a social change network of collectives across the United States. So people, instead of fighting the government, they started building a cultural movement in the communities. In Eugene, for example, there was the Woman's Press, there were women's restaurants, there was women's bicycle repair, there was dance companies, there was women's trucking collectives. There was women's [inaudible] collectives, there were dance collectives, there were karate schools, all huge amount of collective business, and they were doing social change work by doing that. So the emphasis shifted. We reported, were sharing resources and ideas, and trying to work together. That is what the end of the Vietnam era gave birth to in my opinion. Then, at the end of the (19)70s, the recession hit, Reagan came in, and it was all survival of the fittest again.

SM (00:27:29):
If I were to have 500 Boomers in the room from all backgrounds, and I am talking about male, female, all different ethnic groups, sexual orientation, you name it, and we were to ask them, "Is there one specific event that had the greatest impact on your life?", what is that event? And I know there would be different answers, but there would be one that would probably stand out. What do you think that one would be?

KK (00:27:58):
Well, when you would say, "What was the biggest part of our movement?", I would say, the music. So then you might say, "Well, maybe it was Woodstock," but it depends on if you were thinking politically with Democratic convention and what happened there. Was it the riots in Watts? I do not know. It depends on how you were kind of plugged in. The Beatles and the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely-Hearts Club Band coming out, that who Maharishi going off to India, I do not know. There is so many different parts of it, the assassination of Fred Hampton in Chicago. I mean, it is [inaudible]-

SM (00:28:46):
It is hard to pinpoint.

KK (00:28:48):
What you cared about. What do you think?

SM (00:28:55):
Oh, I am trying not to put my opinion in there. To me.

KK (00:28:59):
Off the record?

SM (00:29:00):
Off the record, to me, it would be John Kennedy's death. But that is been a lot, and certainly the death of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy in the year (19)68, and Kent State.

KK (00:29:13):
Yes.

SM (00:29:14):
I might even say Kent State above Kennedy because of what it did. I am going to read this to you. I got a whole lot of questions here that are specifically based on your career, but this is a question that we asked Senator Edmond Musky before he passed away. I worked at Westchester University. We took 14 students leaders to meet him as part of our leadership on the road. He had just gotten out of the hospital, was not feeling very well, but he still met us. And he, I guess, had seen the Ken Burns series when he was in the hospital on the Civil War. And the students came up with this question because they thought he would respond by replying, "1968 and all the issues in America," but he did not let me read the question to you?

KK (00:29:57):
Okay.

SM (00:29:58):
Do you feel Boomers are still having problems from healing from the divisions that tore the nation apart in their youth? Divisions between black and white, divisions between gay and straight? Divisions between those who support authority and those who criticize it? Division between those who supported the troops and those who did not? And let us see here. Certainly, the Vietnam Memorial has helped a lot of the veterans, but the question is beyond the veterans. Do you feel that the Boomer generation will go to its grave, like the Civil War generation, not truly healing? Am I wrong in assuming this after 40 years? Or is there true to the statement that time heals all wounds?

KK (00:30:47):
Framing a question is not adequate. We are suffering. The [inaudible] suffering. The Boomers are not suffering. It is our parents' generation who would suffer, because it was their world that was rocked open. They had a certain idea about how it was supposed to be. We ripped the scab off the sore, but it was not a bad thing that we did that because it was a sore. You know what I mean? So your question demands certain supposition. I think it is backwards. I think we were liberated by that. And so I am not suffering. I am suffering because [inaudible] maintain it. When you say that the (19)60s made the division between gay and straight, there were no gay people that were allowed out of the closet in the (19)60s. So it was not like everything was hunky dory. There was a pretending that everything was hunky story. It was a pretending like Eisenhower and that suburban golf course, pill-popping housewife culture was okay. It was all screwed up. There is the trauma. The trauma was not in what we did. The trauma was the inebriated housewife sucking on Secanol, that is where the problem was, the women that did not have any jobs, women who could not work, the women who were only supposed to have children as their only alternative. That was the trauma. The trauma was not me running around without a bra on. Do you understand what I am-

SM (00:32:22):
Yes, I do.

KK (00:32:24):
Yeah. So that is how I feel about it.

SM (00:32:25):
That is very important because you talk about, what was it, in the (19)50s, these 70-plus million kids who seem to have solid homes, father and mother at home, even in the African-American community, the statistics will show that there was a mother and father at home in the (19)50s and then something happened in the (19)60s. But what was it in those times when parents were trying to give-

KK (00:32:53):
Let us talk about what is marriage. I mean, look at Tiger Woods. Look at what marriage is. Nobody even really wants to talk about what marriage is. What is monogamy? What is the expectation that two people are going to stay together, raise five kids, and are going to have enough money to do it throughout their whole life and their kids are going to go off to college and make more money than they did, that people are not going to get addicted to drugs an alcohol and end up in [inaudible] prison-industrial complex, and all of it. The whole thing is a mythology. The (19)50s was a mythology, and it was actually a very short amount of time. And who was really served by that?

SM (00:33:28):
Do you think the beats had any part in this too? The beats?

KK (00:33:34):
Absolutely. The beats were the beginning of the cultural revolution. Absolutely, absolutely.

SM (00:33:41):
Because they questioned authority and they did not like the status quo, and Kerouac and Ginsburg were such influences?

KK (00:33:47):
Very important, very important. Here is deal. I do not know how you describe the black working class in the (19)50s and early (19)60s. I grew up in South Carolina. It was virtually apartheid for black people. We had a maid in our house we paid 50 cents an hour. We were not rich. My mother and father had five kids. It was a young black girl that came in and ironed for my mother. She got 50 cents an hour. We drove her home. They lived in some shanty town. There was no economic base there at all. There was whites only everything, on every library, on where we washed our clothes. Whites and blacks were not allowed to be in the same space together. So where was the good old days? Tell me about that?

SM (00:34:39):
Well, you raised some very good points, and I have heard some other comments, too. I can remember when my dad won trips to Florida and we went from the Syracuse, New York area down to... And we did not have highways back then, and (19)57, (19)58 and (19)59, we stopped at these restaurants and went by these homes, and I kept asking my parents, "Why are these homes so terrible? They are just shacks." And I do not know if I have ever gotten an answer from them, but I tell you, it was a wide-opening experience for someone that was like nine and 10 years old starting to question.

KK (00:35:17):
[inaudible] swimming. Black people and white people were not allowed to integrate. Blacks whites were never together anywhere when I was growing up in South Carolina, 1953 until Kennedy was killed. So I do not know when... That is what I am saying. It depends on... It is like Howard Zinn. It is like, who is telling the history? You know what I mean?

SM (00:35:35):
Right.

KK (00:35:37):
From their point of view, I do not think it was so [inaudible]. Maybe from somebody else's point of view, it is when we all got along. It is not when we got along. It was when black people had no political power at all, anywhere in the United States. Women had no political power. Gays and lesbians had no political power. So did it appear to be okay? Yeah. But there was a rumble underneath the whole thing.

SM (00:36:01):
Right.

KK (00:36:04):
It was the, quote, calm before the storm. You cannot go back to that. You cannot go back.

SM (00:36:09):
As someone said to me when I was asking another scholar, she said to me, "You are talking as a white male. You are talking the way white males may have thought about what it was like in the 1950s, but it was not white females because if you ever really talked to your mom about how she felt, you never heard it."

KK (00:36:32):
Yeah, exactly. [inaudible], exactly. I totally agree with that, yeah.

SM (00:36:39):
There is another issue here, too. And one of the characteristics of the Boomers that is often been written about is that they did not trust anybody, and this lack of trust came from leaders that had lied to them. Obviously, we saw President Johnson with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which was a lie. But we all know about Watergate and Richard Nixon. Even in recent years, there has been questions about John Kennedy and his linkage to the overthrow of the [inaudible] regime and the issues with Cuba. Then President Eisenhower lied on U2. Then as Boomers aged, there has been issues within every presidency about truth. And Bill Clinton, "I did not have sex with that woman," and weapons of mass destruction by George Bush. Every president seems to have had something. And the question I am asking is this, when I was in college, I had a professor who told me and told our class that no one can be a success in life if they do not trust someone. And so the question I am asking, is the lack of trust that the Boomers have toward anybody in positions of leadership during when they were young, and that included everyone, university presidents, heads of corporations, ministers, priests, rabbis, no matter who was in position, they did not trust them, is that a truthful statement? That one of their qualities is they do not trust?

KK (00:38:09):
I think that that was a cultural collective consciousness. I would say that was a collective consciousness. It was also sort of a glib remark at the same time, although it did become a headline, never... do not trust anyone over 30. I would say that it was very driven by youth movement, between 18 and 30, or something like that. But I do not think that Boomers... Trust is the kind of personal sort of... I do not know. I would say the collectively, probably black people do not trust white people. Native Americans do not trust United States government. You can say that about groups of people that have been systematically ripped off by a [inaudible]. I would probably say there is all kinds of groups of people that do not trust other groups of people. And I do not know that, as the Boomers age, that they still do not trust. You know what I mean? I do not think [inaudible] was maybe disheartening, or maybe you, or some people, it is just that the Boomers [inaudible] stay true to their original values. And that is a real heartbreak. Not that they disrupted something, it is that what they have disrupted they have not been able to make good on. And I think that is the kind of heartbreak that is out about Obama right now. Obama, had the values of the (19)60s in his campaign. We were hoping, out of that, that he would take our values system and put it in the center rather than having it be some peripheral concept. And what we are seeing is that the whole thing that happened with Van Jones. Do you know who Van Jones is?

SM (00:40:17):
Yes, he quit, had to leave. Yes.

KK (00:40:20):
Yeah, he was forced out, kind of an ideologue, and he is only 40, or something. So for thinking Boomers, for political Boomers, for Democratic Party-plus, Green Party-type Boomers, people who still hold those anti-war social justice issues, they might be heartbroken and disappointed, but I do not think trust is very big. We do not trust, because why would you trust United States government? You know what I mean? That kind of thing.

SM (00:41:01):
I have three statements here that were at the time that I would like your response to see if they truly define the Boomer generation? The first one is Malcolm X, when he said, "By any means necessary." The second one is Bobby Kennedy, which he quoted the Henry-Henry David Thoreau quote, "Some men see things as they are and ask, why? I see things that never were and ask, why not?" And the third one is actually from a Peter Max poster that was very popular in 1971 when I was in grad school, and the words were, "You do your thing, I will do mine. If by chance we should come together, it will be beautiful." And what those three statements talk about is the more radical group, the people in the movements that were very idealistic for the betterment of society, and then you have got more of the hippie mentality. Would you say those three could define the generation?

KK (00:42:04):
Yeah. I would say that Malcolm X for my [inaudible] represented people that were very political and interested in building a different kind of political government, socialism and all of that, and just doing something really different. Who was in Washington? I would say Kennedy's statement is more philosophical, or perhaps forward-thinking for writing and intellectuals and all of that. And I think the third one was for people who were rebelling by hanging out. People rebelled by just not working.

SM (00:42:41):
Right.

KK (00:42:44):
They stopped plugging in. They stopped plugging in, and that became a value and a virtue.

SM (00:42:50):
What are the photographs that you think... I am going to change the side of the tape. Photography has always been used to define eras and periods of time and events. When you think of the Boomer generation, what are the pictures that you think of when you think of the (19)60s and the early (19)70s? And I am concentrating a lot in when Boomers were young, which is in the (19)50s, (19)60s, and (19)70s.

KK (00:43:23):
Well, I think that the child from Vietnam running from the Napalm, I think all the Kennedy assassination pictures, Jackie and the pink dress and the hat and all of those pictures, but those have also been played over and over and over again. I would think the Life Magazine photos of the American people wrapped in the American flag, maybe those were from Woodstock, somebody in America, the way people started wearing the American flag, that whole kind of thing. Photos from photos from Woodstock, to see all people that were there. Kent State, the woman on her knees at Kent State.

SM (00:44:13):
Yeah, Mary Vecchio. You have you have listed just about all of them. The other one is Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the (19)68 Olympics with the black power fists up.

KK (00:44:24):
That one.

SM (00:44:27):
And, obviously, some of the Vietnam pictures too, that were classic of the troops, and certainly My Lai and the guy shooting-

KK (00:44:34):
The Beatles. I think Beatles played a big part in the whole thing. I am an artist, so I track the influence of art and stuff like that. But the music was very diverse, and everybody tapped into all different kinds of music, from rhythm and blues, to Beatles, to acid rock that came out of San Francisco, to Ike and Tina Turner, the whole thing. Everybody, they are all listing all of that together, and those photos of Timmy Hendrix playing his guitar, for lots of people, that is as big of an icon as the napalm child, you know what I mean? It was all of it was all it together. You cannot have one without the other. It was all hooked up.

SM (00:45:26):
Would you believe that the social commentary, just like your dance, that the arts... I would like your thoughts, just some general thoughts, on the arts of the period, which you have gone on with your career? But the music, you talked about the Beatles, but I always kind of defined it, and the Motown sound was important.

KK (00:45:48):
Totally important.

SM (00:45:51):
And certainly the rock music, and the different types of rock music, and folk music.

KK (00:45:55):
Totally important. Or, Marvin Gay, Sly and the Family Stone, Diana Ross, pop, the whole thing, I mean all of it. The Coasters, the Four Seasons, I mean the whole thing. That is what was so amazing. It was so much, and no matter which song you hear from that era, it reminds you of a particular time.

SM (00:46:22):
Did the (19)60s make the music and the art? Or did the art and the music make the (19)60s?

KK (00:46:26):
No, they happened together. They happened [inaudible] what happens with leftists, with the intellectual left [inaudible]. They underestimate power of art to actually hold and transform [inaudible]. And so they do not give enough credit to it. But I think that Jimmy Hendrix smoking pot [inaudible] broke people open, just like the Vietnam War broke [inaudible]. So it is just everything about what your parents told you just was not true. And how you got there just was all different kinds ways. But lots of people were not in the university. Lots of people dropped out of college, so they were not having the Kent State experience. They only had the Kent State experience through the newspapers. They were having their own experience somewhere else sitting in a park smoking pot, you know what I mean?

SM (00:47:23):
What did you think of the communal experiences from that era?

KK (00:47:28):
I thought they were pretty amazing. I think that is what I was saying about my experience with all the collectives all over the country. I felt like we tried to create dual power structure of business, a dual power structure on how to relate socially, how to make money, how to share power, share money, and get something done at the same time. That was pretty amazing and I am really glad I went through it.

SM (00:47:54):
Let me ask you some question also about the books? Were there any books that were popular with you and your peers?

KK (00:48:03):
Oh, I do not know. There is all the Richard Brautigan. I am sure I am not kind of... It depends on what era. When I was in high school, it was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Richard Brautigan, and Kurt Vonnegut, and mostly male writers, Ken Kesey, all of those guys. Then I switched over to the women's movement in the (19)70s, so then it was [inaudible] and Joyce Carol Oates, I am kind of lost right now for all of them, Judy Braun, all the kind of women lesbian poets and writers from the early (19)70s. And then Ginsburg and all those guys had a huge impact.

SM (00:48:50):
Well, before I ask some questions directly about your experiences in San Francisco and what you are doing now, I wanted you to respond to... You do not have to be long on any responses, but just gut level reactions to these terms or words or people? Are you ready? What does the Vietnam Memorial mean to you?

KK (00:49:13):
Not very much. I have never seen it, so I do not have a feeling about it.

SM (00:49:19):
What does Kent State and Jackson State mean to you?

KK (00:49:23):
Trauma, total trauma.

SM (00:49:26):
What does Watergate mean to you?

KK (00:49:28):
The end of the Presidency as he knew it.

SM (00:49:34):
Woodstock? Summer of love?

KK (00:49:39):
Transformational.

SM (00:49:42):
1968?

KK (00:49:44):
Traumatic.

SM (00:49:46):
The term, counterculture?

KK (00:49:50):
Far out.

SM (00:49:52):
Okay. Hippies and yippies? They are two different groups.

KK (00:49:58):
I think they are sort of the same, really. They are all part of the same cultural movement. I know they separated themselves from each other, but it is just that era, a certain era in time.

SM (00:50:10):
Any thoughts on them?

KK (00:50:11):
No, mm-mm?

SM (00:50:13):
No? How about Students for a Democratic Society?

KK (00:50:18):
I appreciate what they tried to do.

SM (00:50:20):
How about the Weatherman?

KK (00:50:22):
I appreciate what they tried to do.

SM (00:50:24):
How about the Vietnam Veterans Against the War?

KK (00:50:26):
I appreciate what they tried to do.

SM (00:50:34):
Jane Fonda?

KK (00:50:35):
I appreciate what they tried to do, very much.

SM (00:50:39):
How about Tom Hayden?

KK (00:50:40):
Yeah, same.

SM (00:50:43):
Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin?

KK (00:50:45):
Yes.

SM (00:50:46):
The same? How about Timothy Leary? How about the Black Panthers, which is Angela Davis?

KK (00:50:55):
Far out, yes. God, they had their day.

SM (00:50:59):
Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, [inaudible 00:51:04] Brown, Stokely Carmichael, that whole group?

KK (00:51:05):
They were important.

SM (00:51:08):
How about Richard Nixon?

KK (00:51:13):
Well, he played his part. That is the heartbreak. Very few people make it to that level of power without having to stop being a criminal.

SM (00:51:27):
How about Spiro Agnew?

KK (00:51:29):
I do not have a big opinion on Spiro Agnew?

SM (00:51:32):
Eugene McCarthy?

KK (00:51:32):
Yeah, I like what he tried to do.

SM (00:51:35):
George McGovern?

KK (00:51:36):
Yeah.

SM (00:51:38):
John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy?

KK (00:51:43):
Rich people. Bobby Kennedy, I actually think really suddenly really got it. He actually was a hero. He really got it, all of it. He got what class war was, but tried to do the right thing.

SM (00:51:58):
How about LBJ and Hubert Humphrey?

KK (00:52:01):
Not that interesting.

SM (00:52:03):
Not that what?

KK (00:52:04):
Not that interesting. I do not think about them.

SM (00:52:07):
Okay. Robert McNamara?

KK (00:52:09):
Well, he is interesting because he turned state evidence, right?

SM (00:52:14):
Yeah.

KK (00:52:14):
Yeah, I appreciate what he tried to do.

SM (00:52:18):
George Wallace?

KK (00:52:20):
Yeah, another fool of the right wing.

SM (00:52:23):
Ronald Reagan?

KK (00:52:25):
Big problem. Big problem.

SM (00:52:29):
Daniel Elsberg?

KK (00:52:31):
Good guy.

SM (00:52:34):
Benjamin Spock?

KK (00:52:37):
Good guy. Yeah.

SM (00:52:40):
What about the Berrigan brothers, Phillip and Daniel?

KK (00:52:42):
Do you realize you have only mentioned one woman in the whole group?

SM (00:52:45):
No, I am coming to them.

KK (00:52:47):
The Berrigan brothers? Yeah, good guys.

SM (00:52:50):
Gloria Steinem?

KK (00:52:51):
Good. Great. Right on. Good.

SM (00:52:54):
Bella Abzug?

KK (00:52:56):
Good.

SM (00:52:57):
Betty Friedan?

KK (00:52:59):
Good.

SM (00:53:00):
How about Shirley Chisholm?

KK (00:53:02):
Yes, great.

SM (00:53:05):
Barry Goldwater?

KK (00:53:08):
Republican, probably a nicer guy than what we have right now.

SM (00:53:12):
The ERA?

KK (00:53:14):
Equal Rights Amendment? Yeah, [inaudible].

SM (00:53:19):
And, let us see, I guess that is... no more names. And I think the last one was John Dean here?

KK (00:53:28):
John Dean, you mean the actor?

SM (00:53:29):
No, no, no. The guy who was came out at Watergate. That move from Eugene to San Francisco, that was in 1984, correct?

KK (00:53:46):
We moved from Eugene, Oregon to Boston and lived there for a year-and-a-half. And, in that time period, we traveled over to United States, Europe, and we went Nicaragua with a group called Grupo Raiz, R-A-I-Z, from [inaudible]. And we did anti-war work around El Salvador and Nicaragua.

SM (00:54:09):
One of the things that was in some of the literature I read on the web is they defined you as a politically committed choreographer.

KK (00:54:17):
Yes.

SM (00:54:18):
Could you define the meaning of that? And I know what the meaning is, but just to-

KK (00:54:27):
I am a choreographer, but I consider myself part of the social justice movement. I form and work for... do my work [inaudible] forward-thinking, and they use that. They call me that because it is easy to understand what [inaudible]. For me, I [inaudible] based on the [inaudible] Book of the Dead. I did it about the environment. I did a birthday letter Fidel Castro. I mean, my work is crosses the gamut. I did [inaudible] 10th century, so I have pieces about all those things, but I can get pigeonholed being called a political choreographer. But I do not really care what people say.

SM (00:55:24):
One of the things, I listed some things here when I read the material. You have what I call spirit in the performing arts. And of course spirit was a very important part of the (19)60s and the (19)70s, too, within the Boomer generation. I think it is an important quality. When did you have that sense of spirit that what you do can truly influence your audience? And give some examples of where your performances, you know that it has really had an effect on people?

KK (00:55:59):
Well, I can tell when I do a show that it is successful because I would say 95 percent time that I have performed in all different venues all over the world, I have gotten a standing ovation for my work. And what that means is that, at a certain point in the evening, audience and the performance got into a groove together and we had epiphany, or a yes, me too, kind of experience at the end. So I can watch that happen in my work. Then I get feedback and letters from people that say, "I have come to see this show three times. It is really helped me out. It is an important part in my time in my life when I was really depressed, or contemplating breaking up in a relationship, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." So it has just been, throughout my career, I have had enough of the same experience to know that it was working on some level.

SM (00:57:04):
One of the other things too, I look at all the issues that have been involved in your work, the issues you care about, whether it is about class and justice, war, racism, violence against women, even the issue of breast cancer, and certainly people's indifference to the AIDS crisis in the beginning. And I know, I lived in the Bay Area, and I know people out there in terms of the gentrification and the taking away of homes, and that was a big issue when I was out there, and I got so furious as a citizen that people would actually do that. These are great things to put into your work. They are really the spirit of what the (19)60s is all about. And, again, you have what I call, I wish all the Boomers had, a concept of longevity.

KK (00:57:54):
Yes.

SM (00:57:57):
And do you find in your audiences, and beyond San Francisco now, that you see a lot of people that are like you? That longevity is very important in terms of making a difference in the world?

KK (00:58:11):
No, I do not know. Longevity, people either stay true to the original impulse, or they did not at all, or they stayed true to part of it. Or they see me and... When I go up to Sonoma, there is so many lesbians that live in Sonoma. And when I go up to Sebastopol, they look at me and they maybe have not danced in 20 years. They are like, "You used to be in Eugene, Oregon in the Wallflower Order." You know what I mean? There was something that we did then that people resonate with. The fact that they remember me from then means something about their life is still similar to what it was. And I really think that the Bay Area is unique because people go to the Bay Areas so they can live among like-minded people. All the real bashing up of social issues, how you deal with social problems, the best and the brightest ideas come out of the Northern California. And not in Cincinnati. I would ask those questions. If I was in Cincinnati, I would feel completely defeated. But see there, everybody around me, all my women friends, we were all biting up the bit talking about Obama and what he has been able to do and what he has not been able to do, and where the disappointments are, and how we are trying to raise our kids feminists, and how we are dealing with the overt sexuality that is all over the news, the media, that our daughters are having to look at. I 400 kids in the kids program. I have 80 girls in the Girl Brigade. People send their kids to me who are feminist women because they want their kids to be raised in a feminist setting. So I have a very active and very committed (19)60s-2009 life that is very connected to the original impulses there. Our city council in San Francisco is radical. We have the biggest gay lesbian population in Oakland in the whole country. Gay men run San Francisco. It is happening. And we are- it is still living it. We are still living it in Northern California. Also, a ton of money though, and there all is a lot of over-consumerism, I will say that. But a lot of people have the same values in Northern California.

SM (01:00:56):
Would you say San Francisco... I lived out there and I know how important it is. I felt great out there because just about every issue is discussed.

KK (01:01:07):
Openly.

SM (01:01:07):
I mean openly and Jesus, there is a sense of community out there, and a community with a sense of what the (19)60s tried to do, to create a sense of community where people were around people that agreed with them or disagreed with them. Would you say that, when you look at the United States, that San Francisco is the one area that is still like the (19)60s?

KK (01:01:28):
Yes, I would say so.

SM (01:01:31):
One of the things that I found very interesting in looking at your background was you did a program called Women Against War after 9/11.

KK (01:01:42):
Yes.

SM (01:01:42):
And that you performed in the facility where the United Nations Charter was signed?

KK (01:01:49):
Yes.

SM (01:01:52):
Wow. To me, that is a wow experience. Can you explain that? A little bit about that experience?

KK (01:01:58):
Well, the first thing we did was, the anniversary of 9/11, we did a women against war event because it was when Bush was beating the war drums. And we kind of did it in collaboration with Code Pink, and we had Dance Brigade and Holly Near, and [inaudible] and Naomi Newton, all kinds of women artists I cannot even forget. And then in the spring, right before Bush announced the war I think, we went up to Sonoma and went down to Santa Cruz. And then on the anniversary of war four years later, we did the whole concert again. And these were very well attended events of women, mostly from women's music network cultural things. And they were strong anti-war events to give a voice to women who were trying to think about the whole thing in a very different way. And the fact that it was at the [inaudible] Theater was that much more interesting. It made it have more depth, stuff like that.

SM (01:03:17):
Well, I tell you, Eleanor Roosevelt would probably have been in the room and giving you high-fives, because this is the 125th anniversary of her birth.

KK (01:03:28):
Oh, really?

SM (01:03:29):
Yes. It was the 10th of December is when she was born, 125 years ago, because I think what you do is what she would be so pleased with. I do not know if there is any way you can link up with the Eleanor Roosevelt papers, or with Alita Black, to do something because what you do is what she was all about?

KK (01:03:52):
Right, yeah.

SM (01:03:55):
And I would probably have to say that her spirit was probably in the room that night.

KK (01:04:00):
Yeah. Oh, that is nice [inaudible].

SM (01:04:02):
No, I really believe that, because I am a big Eleanor Roosevelt fan and I have done a lot of studying, and we have done programs on her. Oftentimes, the best history books are written 50 years after an event, and of course are a period. Like, World War Two, the best ones have come out in the last 10 years. When the sociologists and historians 50 years from now write about the Boomer generation, what do you think they will say?

KK (01:04:38):
It is 50 years from now?

SM (01:04:40):
Yes, 50 years from now? Or even after all the Boomers have passed away?

KK (01:04:46):
It depends on what happens in the next five years around the environment. I do not [inaudible] talk about them in 50 years so all of what is happening in the world with the demise of capitalism and the disruption of United States' number one imperial power, and all of those things that are going on, on top of the fact that we have no idea if we are going to be able to maintain our food belts inside the United States and all of that. So let us assume that something... I really believe that what happened in the (19)60s was trying to rectify contemporary culture, contemporary history. And contemporary history, I would mean probably the last 500 years of history, the founding of the United States, the beginning of the slave trade, all of that. I would say that last 500 years is contemporary history. And really the hippies, the Boomer generation, rights, and international too, France, they had a big wake-up in France and England, and Western civilization had to really sit back and look at itself. And that was a moment when western civilization had to look at itself in the mirror and the mirror cracked, and we have been reeling from that ever since.

SM (01:06:11):
Wow. One of the questions I want to ask too, is-

KK (01:06:16):
That is a good thing. That is where I feel like that was so important that that happened.

SM (01:06:25):
In my last interview with Mr. Hayes, he mentioned that many Boomers have gone on to take the leads in many corporations as CEOs and all the other things, and there is positives and negatives with what they have done. But the question I want to ask is about universities. The university, the free speech movement, was in California back in (19)64, and I think universities learned a lot from that experience in terms of students and student empowerment. But today, most of the universities are being run by Boomers. And this is my thought. I think today's leaders in higher education are afraid of activists, not volunteers now, because volunteerism is so crucial. But they are afraid of activism coming again on university campuses like it is at Berkeley right now, because it sends messages back that there is disruption on the campus. And when there is disruption on the campus, parents are a little uneasy and they do not want their kids to go there, and they will take their kids out of school. And so they do not want any remembrance of that time, and I think what is happening at Berkeley and wherever there is activism is scary to them, and they are Boomers and they knew about it. And so a lot of the people that run the universities today are both Boomers and generation X-ers, the group have followed them. Do you think universities learned anything from the (19)60s, especially with respect to student protest or activism?

KK (01:07:59):
Bring in the police faster.

SM (01:08:01):
Yeah. Pardon?

KK (01:08:03):
Bring in the police faster.

SM (01:08:05):
Oh, you think?

KK (01:08:06):
Less tolerance.

SM (01:08:08):
Yeah. Am I right in thinking this?

KK (01:08:13):
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I think everybody's thing is, the (19)60s was sort of unprepared. What happened in the (19)60s, they were not prepared for, and now they are prepared. Now they have SWAT teams. Now they bring them in quicker, they break it up faster. They have less tolerance. When the Boomers took over ideologically, a lot of the parents also collapsed, because they were living in unhappy marriages. They were all alcoholic and drug-addicted. So everybody kind of rolled their heads together. I think now they maneuver much quicker to [inaudible]. So I think that is what is happening.

SM (01:08:57):
I want to go back to your roots again, because each of these interviews is not only about general questions about the generation, but it is about each of the individuals, too. I know you already mentioned about the influence in your high school, the hippies and all the other stuff, but what was it growing up in Cincinnati in the 1960s and (19)70s, and maybe late (19)50s, (19)60s, (19)70s, that made you who you are?

KK (01:09:24):
My parents, my mother and my father. My mother has her own wild, very free spirit. And she was personally very liberated on a lot of levels, so she modeled that. And my parents were young, and I do not know. I feel like it sort of was [inaudible] fate, sort of. And I think that I was lucky enough to be an artist, and I have a certain kind of inquisitive mind and a really good memory. So I always wanted to be putting things together and understand what my own... trying to understand myself and my... because, like what I said earlier, I had a rough high school experience. I got into a lot of trouble. It all backfired. I got busted, had all kinds of own personal traumas during that time. I almost flunked out of school. I got suspended all the time, but my energy was not really channeled. It was more reactive. I was very reactive as a kid. And so I feel like having experience on top of the education of what was happening around me, and then going into the collective model, I do not know, I just feel like it all unfolded in a really great way. And I still am kind of a hippie. I identify with being a hippie, and I identify with it as a good thing. When I say I am a hippie, people say, "Oh, you are not a hippie." People have a bad idea about the hippies did not do anything. But what I mean is I am a counterculture Boomer girl. I say that I am on the baby on the tail end. I was born in (19)53, and I was not in college during the height of the whole thing. I was in high school. That is experience, too. I did not have the personal freedom. I still had to be home at 11 o'clock and all of that. I did not have that experience that college people had.

SM (01:11:30):
How do you respond to those people that say, "Oh, the hippies were irresponsible, laying around, having sex and not really responsible."

KK (01:11:39):
I do not believe that.

SM (01:11:40):
Okay. There people that say that. And now the yippies were the more political wing, but they were more into theater.

KK (01:11:47):
Yeah. I think of the movement. I do not think it is necessary to pick one part of the movement out to criticize. It all supported everything. And even Carter, the whole thing. When we had the energy crisis, Carter told everybody to put on a sweater, turn the heat down and put on a sweater. Reagan came in and told everybody to jack up the heat, work harder, snort cocaine and work 80 hours a week, and get cars in your garage, and zoom, and we went into the lifestyles of the rich and famous. And in the (19)70s, the best movie was... What was the name of that movie where that young boy was in love with that 80-year-old? Harold and Maud?

SM (01:12:31):
Oh yeah.

KK (01:12:31):
It went from Harold and Maud into that Michael Douglas film where she boiled the rabbit alive, Fatal Attraction. That is the flip that happened. We went from peace and love and warmth and comradery into psychopathic behavior in our relationships. That was like 1981-82, or (19)86 or (19)87 when that killing the rabbit movie came out, when Michael Douglass did that. And that set stage for the rest of our culture. We never went back to Harold and Maud, and that is what I am talking about. There was a head space that was created and we were not able to maintain it. Some of us still hold it, and we are fighting, basically, a loose battle at this point. We are not going to get out of it. That is my feeling. My feeling is the polar ice caps are going to melt and it is going to be mass migration over six or seven years, like that.

SM (01:13:32):
If that happens, we are in deep trouble. I got two more questions and I will be done. One is, again, to go back to the arts, you are in dance, of course there is dance theater, there is movies, TV, and painting, and sculpture, and all the other things. What was it about the arts in the (19)60s and early (19)70s that was so unique? And give some examples of how not only dance, but theater and-

KK (01:13:57):
Everything with the Living Theater was really big. San Francisco [inaudible] Group was really big. There was all of that European theater that was really important. The music, I have talked about the music a lot. The music really held us all together. Then there was all the poetry that came out. There was a lot of... People are really dancing now in a way that I do not think they ever have before with television picking up on it so much. But, again, a lot of it was collective. A lot of it was political. A lot of it was oriented around demonstrations, which is still happening. Every movement has had its poets and its artists, from the New Song movement in Latin America and Chile, and nueva trova, and all of that. So I think every movement has this.

SM (01:14:53):
And, of course, Andy Warhol and Peter Max were big names in that era with their paintings. You ran against Nancy Pelosi in the primary.

KK (01:15:06):
Yes.

SM (01:15:07):
And, of course, she is a stalwart in the Democratic Party. She is part of the established Democratic Party. That took a lot of courage. And when did you decide to do it? And why did you decide to do it?

KK (01:15:22):
Well, part of the reason I decided to do it was everybody always told me I should run for office because I am so opinionated and he generally talk pretty well. And I have kind of a personality for making speeches and stuff like that. So that is probably the main reason I did it is people kept saying to do it, do it. I learned a lot. I did not really know what I was doing at all. And the unfortunate thing is she was poised to be Speaker of the House, which I did not really get that that was going to happen. So once that became clear, I knew I was never going to get any real traction. And I wanted to raise the issues against the war, and I really thought that Bush should be impeached. I never understood why they did not impeach him. I feel like without an impeachment, you do not have any barometer for justice. That was a terrible, terrible mistake on the Democratic Party not to impeach him. And I have been obsessed about the polar ice caps melting for the last 15 years. So, I raised that in the campaign. That was before Al Gore put out his movie. So again, global warming, war, some people are paying attention, but lots of people are not. So it was very of interesting to have that conversation when people were not really talking about it.

SM (01:16:49):
Yeah. I had heard rumors that the person Sheehan was going to run against her, the woman who lost her son in-

KK (01:16:57):
Yeah, Sheehan ran last year against her.

SM (01:17:01):
A lot of people thought she was going to win.

KK (01:17:04):
Mm-mm.

SM (01:17:05):
No. Next to last question, and I am done. Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr are Boomers, and they are the only Boomers that have been in the White House. President Obama is a Boomer. He was two years old the last two years of the Boomer era, (19)62. But your thoughts on when people say that Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr. are the epitome of the Boomer generation? The qualities they both possess, if you knew who they were and how they ran their government and what they did in their lives, ah, they are Boomers?

KK (01:17:45):
What does that mean? Be a little more specific?

SM (01:17:48):
Well, it is that they had the qualities that-

KK (01:17:50):
Is that like a character defect? Is that what you are saying?

SM (01:17:55):
Yeah, or something like that they epitomized some of the strengths, the qualities that were in the Boomer generation through their actions and deeds. And I just asked that. Do they typify Boomers?

KK (01:18:10):
Well, they are Boomers. So that is what I am trying to say is I do not think that you can... Well, okay. I would say that Bush had a very freewheeling relationship to drugs and alcohol, which I can say probably has got some, quote, Boomer characteristics to it. When I look at Hillary and Bill Clinton, I see inside of them very much affected by the Hillary and feminists and social justice advocates at one point. I think being the President of the United States is a whole other ballpark. So it is kind of hard to say what is different between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama? Would it be Bill Clinton's promiscuity? Well, Tiger Woods is not a Boomer, you know what I mean? So I do not know what about that, how you talk about that, really.

SM (01:19:33):
And my last question is two qualities that were defined about your dance brigade, because I am fascinated by the organization you created. In an article I read, and I think it was in the Chronicle, they gave that a lot of your work is because you are enraged and engaged. Could you explain that a little bit more?

KK (01:19:59):
Well, I think that part of my personality type is I am quick to anger and outrage at injustice. I am a defender of the underdog, and I often do it by getting mad. And people who know me have dealt with that about me. I have no problem getting up and saying what I do not like about what is happening. So that is probably a [inaudible]. And I am very much engaged. I pay attention and I give people feedback. And I am surrounded by lots of people all day long. I run a business. There is 400 kids that come in every week. There is 300 adults. I have seven people in the office, and we are always engaged in talking and making it work. So I am very engaged, and I am a mother, and I have my own friends, and I have a dance company, so I have a lot going on.

SM (01:20:49):
Is there something that you have not done that you would like to do down the road?

KK (01:20:55):
Reach enlightenment.

SM (01:20:57):
Pardon?

KK (01:20:58):
Reach enlightenment.

SM (01:21:01):
Are there any questions that I did not ask you, you thought I was going to ask in the interview that you expected?

KK (01:21:08):
Did you read the C Magazine interview?

SM (01:21:10):
Did you see the what?

KK (01:21:12):
Did you read the C Magazine interview?

SM (01:21:14):
No.

KK (01:21:14):
Okay, well, read that. Go [inaudible], go to the magazine and read November's issue. My dance company, Dance Brigade, is on the cover. And then there is a really good interview in there of me by Holly Near.

SM (01:21:29):
Oh?

KK (01:21:30):
Yeah, read that. And then if you have any more questions, you can call me back. Okay?

SM (01:21:34):
Great. And what is the magazine?

KK (01:21:36):
C? Just the letter C.

SM (01:21:39):
I have that magazine.

KK (01:21:41):
Okay.

SM (01:21:42):
I have not read it yet. It is the November issue?

KK (01:21:45):
Yeah.

SM (01:21:46):
Oh, you are in there? Okay.

KK (01:21:47):
Well my dance company, Dance Brigade, is on the cover.

SM (01:21:52):
Oh, I did not know that.

KK (01:21:52):
There is an interview, an article with me and Holly Near. So read that, and if you have any questions, call me back. Okay?

SM (01:21:58):
Super. Well, thank you very much. My condolences.

(End of Interview)

2001-12-16

Stephen MeKiernan

Krissy Keefer

82:04

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

Dancers; Choreographers; Social justice; Political activists--United States; Keefer, Krissy--Interviews

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