RBGG is proud to sponsor a modern dance performance at City Dance in San Francisco featuring the ground-breaking collaboration of Alex Ketley, a choreographer, filmmaker, and the director of The Foundry, and Bill Clark, an artist and writer who has been incarcerated on California’s Death Row for over three decades.. The performance is titled An Approximation of Resilience, and has already won the prestigious National Dance Project Award from the New England Foundation for the Arts. The show will open on March 22, 2025 – more information and tickets are available here.
Alex Ketley’s An Approximation of Resilience explores our carceral system from the intimate vantage point of his friend Bill Clark, who has spent the past 33 years in a 4×9 foot cell on Death Row at San Quentin Prison. Even though Clark is in prison, his spirit, generosity, and wholehearted embrace of life are magnificent to experience. Created with a stellar cast of performers, the core of the work is that beauty lies everywhere, even in prison, if it is given a chance to be seen and magnified.
Principle Collaborator: Bill Clark is a writer, artist, and educator who has been incarcerated on Death Row for the past 33 years. Bill was born in Los Angeles in 1953 and went on to found a successful merchandising business called Paradigm, representing an array of companies and artists including Michael Jackson, New Edition, Motown Records, Aire LA Studios, Miller Brewing Company, Sears Department Store, and the Mattel Toy Company. Since 1983, he has maintained he was wrongfully identified and convicted for a robbery and murder he did not commit and has subsequently spent the second half of his life behind bars. Instead of feeling defeated, Clark has become an inspirational figure through his extensive body of poetry, short stories, children’s books, and theater and movie scripts. In recent years, he has shared his artistic knowledge by mentoring young artists, most significantly as a guest for Dance(A)cution, a class in a performance practice offered at Stanford University. Clark is a father and grandfather and is deeply proud of the lives his children have fashioned for themselves. Relentlessly optimistic, He is hopeful that he will soon regain his freedom and be able to see his family and to pursue his passions in the way the fullness of freedom would afford.
Director Biography: Alex Ketley is a choreographer, filmmaker, and the director of The Foundry. Formerly a classical dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, Ketley left the company in 1998 to explore his interests in alternative methods of devising performance. In addition to his work with The Foundry, he has been commissioned extensively and has received acknowledgment from the Hubbard Street National Choreographic Competition, the Choo-San Goh Award, the Princess Grace Award for Choreography, four MANCC Residencies, the Eben Demarest Award, the National Choreographic Initiative Residency, a Kenneth Rainin Foundation New and Experimental Works Grant, and the Artistry Award from the Superfest Disability Film Festival. His pieces have also been awarded Isadora Duncan Awards for outstanding achievement in the categories of Choreography, Company, and Ensemble. In 2020, he became a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, one of the most prestigious honors in the United States, recognizing individuals “who have demonstrated exceptional creative ability in the arts.” In 2025, he was awarded a National Dance Project Grant for An Approximation of Resilience. He is an Advanced Lecturer at Stanford University’s Theater and Performance Studies Department as well as a Board Member of Death Penalty Focus, an organization striving to abolish the Death Penalty.