Featuring choreography by

Hannah Price, Hanna Pierce,  Josiah Gundersen, and Jacob Henss

Sponsored by 

Sports Medicine & Training, Jordan Henss, and Jacob Henss

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A text about “Do not go Gentle”

written by Betsy Brandt

With Do not go Gentle, Henss strives to “better understand the world around us, how we fit inside of it, and how we may aid it.” How can performance address problematic pasts, safely occupy and amplify our precarious present, and ideate new futures? What does it mean to make a dance in the summer of 2020? 

These questions drove the creation process of Do not go Gentle, but also remain embedded and open-ended in its final iteration. Dancers move with urgency and hesitation as if trying to simultaneously shake off something old and tentatively try on something new. The “shake-off” ranges from ecstasy to exorcism. The piece opens with a solo that could happen at the end of either a very bad day or a very good one. Either way, something substantial is coming up, coming off, and coming out.

In contrast, there are moments of tender experimentation. Dancers balance and sway, their floating limbs tasting the currents of the surrounding air. Fragmented questions go unanswered. They teeter, and that suspension never fully resolves.

The ambiguity is balanced by a more compositionally ornate structure than Henss has explored to date. The piece consists mainly of solos framed by complimentary group phrases, tableaus, or tasks. We see a deconstructed parade of dance tropes—pompom squads, kick lines, and the ubiquitous “5, 6, 7, 8.” Everything is overtly juxtaposed, one thing after another. The musical collage is obsessively structured, braiding pop anthems and cringy nostalgia with spoken text and ambient drones. The pop songs are used without irony. It is uncomfortable.

Henss makes dances that usually need to be last in the program so the crew has time to clean up the water, hair, tequila, or garbage. Things ooze and smear, and everyone goes home afterward for a (probably cold) shower. Not here. These dancers wear masks. They don’t touch, except for one duet performed by sisters. Without giving away the ending, there is no messy after-scape. They don’t end up ruined and ravaged but perched and precarious. As the lights fade, I think, “Maybe they are finally just…ready. Prepared, somehow, for whatever steps need to happen next.” 

In the summer of 2020, many of us were overwhelmed by the paralyzing grief of a global pandemic and the urgency to address our city and country’s legacies of violence against Black bodies; some next steps are clear. The white supremacy embedded in contemporary dance education and production models, evidenced here in the lack of diversity in the cast, must be more intentionally dismantled. Dance artists and audiences must boldly pivot resources to better care for each other amidst the economic, physical, and emotional risks of the pandemic. Do not go Gentle reminds us that this is messy work. Our discomfort is suspended, jarring, complex, and emphatically unresolved.

Produced by

Jacob Henss

Featuring choreography by

Josiah Gundersen and Jacob Henss

Sponsored and Hosted by 

Sports Medicine & Training

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A text about “Harbored Weight”

written 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.

Produced by

Jacob Henss, Marissa Beccard, and Sports Medicine & Training Center

Featuring choreography by

L. Mattson, Kayt MacMaster, Ramona Orion, and Jacob Henss

Sponsored by

Sports Medicine & Training Center and Leverage Dance Theater

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Space Station is a dance residency hosted each summer in the greater St. Louis area, featuring local St. Louis choreographers and performers. We strive to explore our world through experimental dance, hosted by Sports Medicine & Training Center, produced by Jacob Henss & Marissa Beccard, and sponsored by Sports Medicine & Training Center and Leverage Dance Theater. We then offer an opportunity to share it with the St. Louis community.

For our third summer residency, we have a triple bill featuring local choreographer Jacob Henss (St. Louis/Urbana, IL) and a duet collaboration with two St. Louis choreographers, L. Mattson and Ramona Orion. We have a special guest choreographer from Urbana, IL bringing her recent solo “hog ranch, hogwash, or putting lipstick on a pig,” Kayt MacMaster. She has collaborated with Josiah Gundersen, dancer, choreographer, and historian, on St. Louis history to incorporate into her choreographic work.