Jennifer Bewerse is a multi-media performer and R+D For Parents/Guardians artist. Her work in progress, Double Spaces, is an ongoing, posthumous collaboration with artist and close friend Heather Barnes. Jennifer investigated more of inner-workings of the piece through a residency and workshop performance at Antaeus Theatre as part of her R+D fellowship.
About Double Spaces
Heather Barnes and Jennifer Bewerse were in a long-distance soprano and cello duo for 10 years. In March 2020, Heather was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. In the 14 months between Heather’s diagnosis and death, they created art together driven by a need to memorialize our friendship and grieve Heather’s diagnosis and her coming death. The materials they created are permeated with dualism: their duo collaboration, the separate places they lived in, live and recorded sounds, the past and present, grief and hilarity, the extraordinary and mundane, memories and future dreams, life and death. Double Spaces forms these materials into a live performance that shows the rich, messy, and complicated last moments of their friendship in a way that reminds us of the importance and impermanence of relationships in our lives.
Report by Jennifer Bewerse
This residency was an unsticking for me. It took the overwhelming idea of being the sole steward for my and Heather’s work and all of the grief that came with it and gave me the boundaries of one week in a space. I really needed those boundaries. I needed to know I could dip into the work and all of my questions and find my way back out again…
Does this “mean” anything or is it just important to me?
Will any of this stuff in my head work in the real world?
Are the production ideas I have necessary? Should there be less? Does it need more? I mean, what even is the scale of this production?
How can I perform with Heather if she’s not here? Will people sense her? I want her to feel rich, complex, alive but I don’t want to pretend she’s not dead.
How can I make it clear that we’re still a duo?… this can’t be a solo project, it just can’t be.
Can I even get through this material and hold myself together?
Is this all just too sad?
While I worked in the theater, alone… with Heather… part of me wanted to share more — to document, publicize my gratitude for the residency, give the project some daylight — but I felt profoundly private while I worked. Those parts were just for me. Just for us.
But, as one of the paradoxes in the project (and really paradox is what underpins everything — the “and” not the “or”), I also needed to share the project to answer my questions. And so, at the end of the residency, I invited a few trusted friends and members of L.A. Performance Practice and performed a workshop of the piece. What a gift. We cried, but we also laughed! We held our breaths but we also exhaled. My chest tightened and I didn’t lose myself.
Not all of my questions were answered, and there are more that I don’t know how to put into words or don’t want to share. But enough were that I can see the shape of things more clearly and know how to move forward. This piece is going to take a long time — or really, it’s going to take as much time as it needs. I certainly can’t rush it, not even if I wanted to. Grief is too slow and unpredictable, and our future isn’t promised.
About Jennifer
Jennifer Bewerse is a multi-media artist and performer whose work is informed by her background as a musician. She sees herself as a collagist where she collects and arranges the elements of each piece of music, art, or performance then draws them into conversation with each other to generate collective moods and make space for listeners to draw new connections in their perspectives and experiences. As an award-winning cellist she has premiered over 150 works and is described as “[drawing] from her instrument every possible sound short of a human voice” (WholeNote). Performance highlights including the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, REDCAT, Monday Evening Concerts, CAP UCLA, Wende Museum, and Banff Centre Chamber Music Residency. Her projects have been supported by awards from The Eastside Arts Initiative, Earl Brown Foundation, Center for Cultural Innovation, New Music USA, Women’s International Study Center, and the Human Resources Time Space Money Residency, and she was recently a guest artist at the Fivesparks Harvard Music Festival.
