Harbored Weight, Staging I — Space Station Dance Residency 2021
Dramaturgical Note
By Betsy Brandt
As the piece begins, sheer jumpsuits hang over the performance space. They look like a monochrome jester’s motley with their black and white color-blocked fabrics. Beyond the whisps of historical formalism suggested by the costumes, the piece itself is another kind of motley, defined by its incongruous juxtapositions, exaggerations, and contrasts. But like in the acts of the Shakespearean fool, the ridiculousness is a vehicle for something else. In this chaotic choreographic world, we find somber reflection, critique, and tenderness. How do we calculate loss? How do we carry the weight?
The piece is a collage. Snippets and shards of different elements, overlapping at the edges, never really add up to a cohesive message or story. Instead, they feel like a series of attempts—to gather, to carry, to mourn, to celebrate, to cobble together a collective ritual that will help these people figure out what happens next. What can these voices say? Here, sad whale songs morph into operatic arias and back again, set against a chorus of something that sounds like a mashup of beatboxing and a coughing fit. As the dancers lapse back into silence, Henss quietly inflates a baby pool. Breath, amid an ongoing global health pandemic and acts of institutional and political violence, resonates with uncomfortable and undeniable urgency.
There are gestures of care—intimate slow dances and tenderly arranged tableaus. The cast, diverse in age and background, gently (and sometimes clumsily) rotate through cycles of solos, duets, and groups. The moments of partnering are supportive, not heroic. Mutual support becomes communal empowerment as the dancers muster the collective energy they need for the splashy group sections. But, despite the sassy jazz steps and luscious layouts, these moments are also fleeting, and they soon settle back into familiar heaviness.
Let me end back at the beginning, with Henss performing a solo with a stool, balancing precariously, attempting soft feats of acrobatic extravagance. The red and blue fluorescent tubes that hang in the performance space rhyme with the white overhead emergency lights, the ones that stay on even when you flip off the light switch—a reminder that our emergencies persist. Sitting in the audience, surrounded by exercise equipment and examination tables, the real-world-ness of our context sits in amusing contrast to the theatrical illusions of Henss’s world. Like the jester’s performance, maybe that absurdity can help us sit with some heavier weights.
Harbored Weight, Staging II — University of Illinois 2021
Presented at Dance at Illinois and Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Urbana, Il, to complete a requirement for a Master's Thesis.
