Cloven I — Space Station Dance Residency 2023
Cloven II — Millikin University 2023
Cloven III — Space Station Fundraising Show 2024
Also performed at Millikin University and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
“Cloven III” is an evening-length work by Jacob Henss and Betsy Brandt. This duet, performed by both creators, is the third installment of an exploration of the rural relationship between farmer and bovine as a lens for personal reflection.
Dramaturgical Notes
by Betsy Brandt
In Douglas Adams' s 1980 sci-fi novel "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, diners meet the dish of the day, a cow who tenderly offers up parts of their body for consumption during the final moments of cosmic existence. In the darkest and thickest of times there is horror, absurdity, ridiculousness, and reckoning.
In "Cloven III," Henss pulls materials from several past works and drags them into the present, a moment rife with personal and global precarity. By overtly stating that "this piece is about cows” we hold space for it to be more. Sometimes specificity is the only way to speak to the vast unfathomable.
This is a work-in-progress that is not an apology. It is an admission that this piece is consumed with the fundamental nature of performativity. That research can only be deepened through the methodology of performance itself. This is the first 45 minutes of our last 45 minutes on earth, a moment that will reset over and over again as the piece takes shape on tour during the next few months.
Review from St. Louis Dance HQ (Excerpt)
BY MELISSA MILLER
How might levity (or a touch of lunacy) serve us better? Can we play our way through pain as we were apt to do as children? Can our silliness preserve our humanity in moments of difficulty? These questions came to mind during post-show Q&A when co-choreographer and performer Betsy Brandt remarked that an approach she and collaborator Jacob Henss explored in Cloven III was how “absurdity works in a moment of crisis.” A graceful approach to the telling of a story which, as Henss put it himself during the Q&A, is touched by sentimentality and reckoning.
In Cloven III, we are told a story. [...] This piece occupies a delicate space between performance art and concert dance; an overlapping place concerned with process over product, where performance space serves as laboratory, failure and risk are creative fodder (no pun intended), all possible outcomes are embraced, and lived experiences become visible on bodies in performance.
My experience of Cloven III took me by surprise. I was expecting to have questions and to be challenged. I was not expecting to be quite so moved. I was not expecting to feel recognition. The piece moves like a body of water, swelling and growing, threatening to overflow the space which contains it. The metaphors and images are stretched too; extended to the brink of collapsing on themselves before being brought back to form just in time. Bombastic absurdity bookended by moments of risky vulnerability: a quiet beginning, and a poignant finale.
