Performance as confrontation. Art as necessity.
Dennis Leroy Kangalee is AN interdisciplinary ARTIST working across film, theatre, poetry and live performance.
His work confronts the role of the artist in a world shaped by violence, memory, and survival—blending political urgency with intimate human experience.
Dennis Leroy Kangalee is a 2025 recipient of the Action Lab’s Artist-in-Action fellowship & a Venturous Theater Fund Arts Initiative Grant.
An outsider artist, Kangalee takes his cue from the outliers of jazz, the visionaries of poetry, The Black Arts Movement, Theater of the Absurd, and the mavericks of independent filmmaking…
“I am not interested in performance as illusion. I am interested in performance as encounter.”
Dennis Leroy Kangalee, Studio 111 in November 2022. Photo: Kofi Yeboah.
“Somehow failure has never been an option, success never a goal, art never a thing to do, but an energy to be lived. To be an artist is to possess a special point-of-view, it is a way of seeing and living life. And if I am so concerned about fighting oppression and dismantling the tentacles of hatred - then I should start with myself, no? The artist is the most beautiful and practical avatar of social change because they rule the realm of the imagination. And the horror in life 'is not what is imagined, but in what is real.' Real life can often be brutal and terrifying. The artist illuminates all this and the actor, specifically, guides us towards liberation -- on screen, on stage...hoping to spill over into life."
“In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.”
As Godfrey Kafka, the drug-addicted and embittered radical radio DJ in "My Dying City (or The Social Justice Suicide Hour)" - a messy, incomplete work-in-progress about the chaos and malaise of our times. (Courtesy of the Action Lab, 2025. Photo: Pamela Rozon)