There’s More Than One Bed (2024) is the second collaboration between Tristan Koepke and Minneapolis-based dance artist Benny Olk. It is, in a sense, a direct sequel to their duet There’s Only One Bed (2023), which premiered to two sold-out runs at SPACE Gallery in Portland, ME. Koepke and Olk’s first collaboration explored themes of queer longing, desire, devotion, masculinity, and melancholy.

Inspired by the creative and amorous relationship between Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Instagram thirst traps, speculative masculinities, and romance novel tropes, this new performance work interrogates what devotion and commitment to love, longing, and process can look like when you make room for more than two. Koepke, Olk, and their diverse cast of dance artists created this work through experimentation, play, and embodied critical fabulation in reverence for queer dance histories. There’s More Than One Bed was commissioned by the Candybox Dance Festival, where it premiered in April 2024, and includes original music by experimental artist and scholar Ethan Philbrick.

Dance scholar Emily Gastineau wrote in a review of the performance that it “hold[s] a temporal tension in relation to [its]medium, time inherently tugging at [its] form.” Following a recent creative residency at the University of Iowa, Koepke and Olk are building an expanded iteration of this work that will premier at Cove Street Arts in Portland, ME in April 2025.

Performance stills from Tristan Koepke and Benny Olk, There’s More Than One Bed (CANDY BOX Dance Festival, Southern Theater, Minneapolis, MN, April 25–27, 2024). Photo: Bill Cameron.