Charles Dennis, one of the shining lights of the Hudson Valley arts community, passed away in his home in Hurley after a brief illness. This gifted artist and indelible spirit departed our dimension with his wife of 40+ years, Mona Banzer, by his side in the early evening hours of May 8th.
Dennis was an internationally known interdisciplinary artist whose singular work fused dance, film, and performance art, as well as an arts producer with a long-standing presence in New York’s downtown avant-garde community. With his move to the Hudson Valley in 2019, Dennis became a tireless champion for dozens of local artists with an experimental spirit by launching Avant-Garde Arama here, the long-running festival he co-created and produced in New York City in the early 1980s.
Dennis began his career in the arts when he joined theater director Robert Wilson’s company, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, in 1971. He went on to perform in many of Wilson’s legendary early works, including the original production of “Einstein on the Beach,” which premiered in July 1976 at the Avignon Festival and later toured the world. In 1979, Dennis co-founded P.S. 122 (now Performance Space New York) in the Lower East Side, one of the world’s most active presenters of new dance, theater, and performance art. At P.S. 122 and other venues, Dennis refined his personal art form, a unique combination of movement, video, sound, and storytelling labeled “physical theater” by Dance Magazine. His many works, as a soloist and for large groups, earned him fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Franklin Furnace Fund, among others.
Avant-Garde-Arama was originally created in 1980 by Dennis and musician/visual artist Jeffrey Issac at P.S. 122. For over 40 years, these periodic festivals featured some of the boldest expressions of art’s leading edge—performance art, dance, short theater pieces, video, puppetry, spoken word, music, and much more. Early iterations of the festival in New York City featured notables including Eric Bogosian, David Cale, Phillip Glass, Tim Miller, and Ethyl Eichelberger, among others.
In 2019, when Dennis and Banzer moved from Brooklyn to Hurley, he began searching for opportunities to present avant-garde and experimental works in the Hudson Valley. The area’s first edition of Avant-Garde Arama was a two-day spectacular at Woodstock’s Mountain View Studios in July 2021. Here he performed one of his signature works, “2x2x4,” a movement piece with an electronic solo guitar score by Spaghetti Eastern Music. This initial Hudson Valley festival also featured puppetry and performance video from Shana Strype and modern dancer Edisa Weeks and many more.
Beginning in 2022, Dennis presented four editions of this two-day festival at its new home, the Lace Mill in Kingston. These events featured artists including musicians Doug O’Brien and Peter Wetzler; dance works by Alex Romania, Stacey Smith, and Hanna Bass; live painting to jazz by Nancy Ostrovsky; film works by Ian McLauglin; and movement/spoken-word pieces by Mona Banzer and Claire Porter. The last piece Dennis performed at the March 2024 edition of Avant-Garde-Arama was the autobiographical, “Dreaming Out Loud.”
Dennis was also a noted filmmaker who produced both his own creative shorts and videos for musicians and other multidisciplinary performers through his company, Charles Dennis Productions. These included Feet with the Beat (1985), a film featuring the feet of NYC’s hectic urban walkers set to a catchy Latin-flavored score by Bob Telson, and NY 1985, a vision of a post-apocalyptic Manhattan with a dancing, gas-masking-wearing traveling salesman, originally screened at The Kitchen.
His recent work included Onteora Ice Dance (2021), featuring drone footage of Dennis skating patterns on a frozen lake in Kingston with a score by Peter Wetzler and Drone Girl—Destination Zena, a quirky tale of a young woman’s escape from the oppressive summer heat of Brooklyn to a bucolic field in Woodstock, where she dances a duet with a drone. He also produced two feature films: Homecoming, a documentary about P.S. 122, and Echo, a three-screen compilation showcasing the work of more than 100 artists.
Fourteen of Dennis’ short films were showcased in a sold-out retrospective at Upstate Films in Saugerties in October 2024.
Since 1978, Dennis has shared his knowledge by teaching dance, drama, and video workshops at a variety of universities and arts centers, including the Lincoln Center Institute. Dennis also produced “Alive and Kicking,” a dance show featured on Manhattan Cable which aired more than 100 episodes, which is now in the libraries of notable universities.
Dennis met his wife-to-be, Mona Banzer, in September 1984 when he was teaching a workshop at Tanzfabrik, an arts center in Berlin. After traveling in Europe, Banzer relocated to New York City, and they married in September 1987. Banzer, who is also a dancer, performance artist, and costume designer, has collaborated with Dennis on many projects over the years. She is intent on continuing the work Charles forged with Avant-Garde Arama in the Hudson Valley. Charles Dennis will be celebrated at the next Avant-Garde Arama to be produced by his Banzer at Lace Mill in Kingston in October. For further details, visit the Lace Mill Arts.
