Photo: Salt Dance.
Dancer and choreographer Alex Ketley is also a lecturer at Stanford University.
Alex Ketley, the choreographer behind a confidence-building college class based on “bad dancing,” has a way of looking at things differently. For example, he befriended an unusual death-row inmate during Covid and later created a theater piece with him. More about that later.
First, Tracie White at Stanford Magazine has an article that explains the college class.
” ‘Welcome to bad dancing,’ says Alex Ketley, a professional choreographer and former member of the San Francisco Ballet who teaches Dance 123: Hot Mess & Deliberate Failure as Practice. Ketley, an advanced lecturer in the department of theater and performance studies and a former Guggenheim Fellow, says it’s his most popular course.
“About 20 undergraduates and graduate students have signed up for what the course catalog describes as ‘a dance class in how we become the worst dancer possible.’ …
“ ‘Run with absolute abandon,’ Ketley says. And, like kids at recess, the students swarm onto the floor at Roble Gym, prancing, leaping, and stumbling into one another. Next, ‘make crazy monster faces,’ Ketley instructs. Now, he says, ‘Repeat the phrase: “I’m alive and filled with watermelon.” ’
“After class, Ketley says that his objective is for students to challenge and expand their perception of what is beautiful by performing silly pantomimes and reacting to movement prompts that are virtually impossible to do well.
” ‘What happens,’ he asks, ‘if we accept failure as a creative virtue?’ By letting go of perfection, students might discover something unexpected a’obsessively’ explored movement. He designed the course after using chaos in his own process and watching thousands of other performers: ‘I noticed a type of brilliance when people relinquish control.’
“Why is dance the right medium? ‘It’s fun,’ he says. “So much of our dance training is claustrophobically serious. Happiness, in a repressive culture, is transgressive.’
“The class culminates in a group performance when, Ketley says, students discover how far they’ve come from feeling fearful and embarrassed to dancing in front of complete strangers. …
“Elijah Williams, ’26, took the course hoping it would be a confidence booster. Several weeks in, it’s become one of his favorite classes — a helpful lesson in how to break out of your shell. Plus, he says, ‘I feel more able to express myself through failure.’ ”
About the project with the prisoner: “Winner of a National Dance Project Award and generous multi-year funding from the Luger Family Trust, ‘An Approximation of Resilience’ was a portrait of Bill Clark, a 71 year old artist and writer who has spent the past 33 years confined to a 4ft x 10ft cell on California’s Death Row. Despite this, he has become an inspirational figure through his artwork and his educational outreach.
“In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, choreographer and Guggenheim Fellow Alex Ketley became increasingly worried about how the pandemic was affecting our incarcerated population. He went on a website called Write-A-Prisoner, and was struck by Bill’s profile, primarily that he said he experienced a crushing loneliness being nearly perpetually confined to his cell. Ketley wrote a one page letter saying hello, and two weeks later received a seven page handwritten letter back from Clark. This began a close friendship. After the quarantine lifted, Ketley visited Clark almost every week for five years.
” ‘An Approximation of Resilience’ was an hour long dance-theater installation, created with a stellar group of performers and artists, that takes the premise that beauty exists anywhere if it is given the opportunity to be seen and celebrated. … It premiered in the spring of 2025 at City Dance Studio in San Francisco and was performed across a four weekend run. …
“In 2026, Alex Ketley won an Isadora Duncan Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Bay Area Individual for his work on ‘An Approximation of Resilience.’ “
More at Stanford Magazine, here, and at Ketley’s website, here.
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