A look back at Space Station Dance Residency’s 2025 Fundraiser Performance.
"The main theme of the piece for me was the Ephemeral Time Capsule, treating music and dance as if they are tangible things that we can preserve and save for our future selves and/or future humanity. Or at least this is how the piece first started. It wasn’t until halfway through the process that I decided to add religion as another layer. My thought was to create a culture around art and dance that encourages audience members to become disciples of the arts, blindly trusting in us that dance is changing our world, even if we can’t always measure this. In this context, our time capsule becomes a relic, an item that we direct our intent towards and doesn’t become special until after this exchange."
“I’ve heard of its beauty, and in some ways… it’s bizarreness too. Um and I felt it… And I felt it.” These words, spoken by Marlee Donniff in their solo work “I Drove Through West Virginia in the Dead of Night,” capture perfectly the essence of the performance series at which they were uttered. Space Station Dance Residency, co-directed by Jacob Henss and Robbie Van Nest, truly is no stranger to the bizarre and the beautiful. Now in its 5th year, Space Station serves as an incubator for St Louis artists to probe at their most experimental ideas, a gamble that has routinely laid host to some of the most unexpected and thought-provoking works of dance theatre in the St. Louis area.
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.