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.
Many of us ponder at times whether the “I” and the “Me” are equal parts of one unified organism that constitutes the “self.” While it’s true that we all can assume the “self” is a social process or an ongoing work-in-progress, we’re also aware of the magnitude when the “I”, which claims a certain position or privilege in society, outweighs the “Me” who is receptive and sympathetic to our constant social and political frictions. If we take the analogy of “what comes first, the chicken or the egg?”