Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd was originally conceived and performed as part of Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost and Found. Its 2023 reprisal continues to explore and recover the legacies of a generation of artists lost from AIDS complications, centering the choreography and writing of John Bernd, a performance artist active in New York City’s downtown dance scene during the 1980s. Bernd’s piece Surviving Love and Death, performed at Performance Space 122 in 1981, is one of the earliest performance works to address HIV/AIDS, before it even had a name. Co-directed by Miguel Gutierrez and Ishmael Houston-Jones, a friend, collaborator, and caregiver of John Bernd’s, Variations collages and reshapes his body of work, carrying its spirit into the present.
Live audiences return for a new platform at Danspace Project featuring Mayfield Brooks, Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, Iele Paloumpis and Ogemdi Ude.
What s a dance theater without an audience?
The Henry Street Playhouse, part of the Abrons Art Center in Manhattan, which has been used as a food pantry since the pandemic closed performances, Feb. 2, 2021. Todd Heisler/The New York Times.
by Brian Seibert
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- At the Henry Street Playhouse on the Lower East Side, the seats are empty but the stage is crowded. The audience is gone, banned by pandemic restrictions, yet since last summer the stage has been covered every Tuesday in hundreds of bags of groceries, lined up to be delivered by stagehands, theater staff members and artists to nearby housing projects and senior homes.
Whatâs a Dance Theater Without an Audience?
A food pantry or a place to vote â or a place to make dance with different expectations: âWhat weâve taken off the table is the pressure of the result.â
On the Lower East Side, the Henry Street Playhouse, part of the Abrons Arts Center, is being used as a food pantry.Credit.Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Feb. 9, 2021
At the Henry Street Playhouse on the Lower East Side, the seats are empty but the stage is crowded. The audience is gone, banned by pandemic restrictions, yet since last summer the stage has been covered every Tuesday in hundreds of bags of groceries, lined up to be delivered by stagehands, theater staff and artists to nearby housing projects and senior homes.