Signaling Through The Flames
My expressions in cinema and live performance are not meant to be works viewed as separate from my writing and but rather complementary and examples of how one can spill blood on the stage as I intend to on the page. How to communicate? This has always been my question.
Being an actor first and foremost, and of the theater principally, it is silly for me to pretend that I don’t write from that perspective and that it doesn’t permeate everything I do. My artistic ancestry informs who I am as much as my radical politics. My work with Dionysus 2000 and later Arch Productions in NYC in the 1990s-early 2000’s, honed and sealed my acting and directing skills but also brought me to a premature retirement from both.
The pandemic of 2020 changed all that. My critical voice developed a shape and rancor of its own as my entire approach to acting changed, bringing a state of grace I had longed for…
I am pleased to say that I shall be returning to the stage in October 14-16, 2022 in a production of KRAPP’S LAST TAPE by Samuel Beckett. It has been a passion project of mine since my days at Juilliard in 1995. It is, interestingly enough, an intriguing extension of my own investigations into solo performance, monologues, and the absurd, but necessary, ‘passion of the clown’ as both truth teller and satirist. In fact, it is something of a homecoming as my work in satire as a monologist has something I have always returned to throughout my life. Where Shakespeare was always too emphatic on “Kings” and “Queens,” Beckett expressed the pathos and antics of the powerless. (Documenting this approach, as well my own inclinations towards professing similarities between Black American Blues and Irish gallows humor – will be part of an on-going process documented in a complementary essay film about the experience of returning to performing via Beckett and its results in Box Three, Spool Five)
Updates on this as well as the next phase of my “Clowns” projects, Propaganda Restored: A Romantic Comedy for Rebels, a satire about a group of middle-aged radicals, will follow soon. Stay tuned.
Beckett’s haunting play about memory and deterioration was workshopped in February-March 2022 [photo: O.Villegas]
Vagabond preps Kangalee for a run-through of Krapp’s Last Tape for a filmed rehearsal, Brooklyn Studio 111, March 2022 [photo: S.Kingsland]
Below are brief dramatic offerings from my past.
Click on the title of each work to learn more about the project and sample clips.
Gentrified Minds – a live rendition of my poems about gentrification became a punk-rock experience; its expression was crying out to be heard within the context of a real DIY musical performance.
My narrative feature, As an Act of Protest was an attempt at creating a cinematic protest poem that was both an expressionistic political melodrama and ‘dogma’ film. Decades later, for better or worse, it remains the most crystalized vision of my aesthetic and political ideas, as well as my approach to acting.
AS AN ACT OF PROTEST (2001) – NARRATIVE/FEATURE
144 Minutes, Digital Video
NYC
An urgent and expressionistic narrative feature film about the psychological effects of racism and one man’s journey to eradicate racism as he slowly goes insane…
*
GENTRIFIED MINDS: THE NY HORROR VOL. 2 (2011) – THEATER/POETRY
47 Minutes, Digital Video
NYC
Written & performed by Dennis LeRoy Kangalee “The Nomad Junkie”
Directed by Nina Fleck
Music composed by Bob Kuch
A satiric-“punk” performance piece about the “suburbanization” of NYC, the vicious gentrification of Harlem, and the homogenization of the world at large.
*
Dennis Leroy Kangalee 