Karen Bernard / Solo
"Removed Exposure"
Karen Bernard
(photo
by Sheilagh O'Neil)
Artistic Statement
Karen Bernard's solo dances catch the audience off-guard like a surprise dinner guest-- and then rewards them with a parade of quickly-shifting personalities and voices. Her single mid-age "robust" figure is in continual dialogue with the music, the audience, and herself as she approaches the issues of femaleness, romanticism, and learned behaviors, with dark and sophisticated humor. Vivid images of a woman looking for a dance partner coupled with a woman pulling cash from inside her underwear disarms and engages the viewer. The use of repetition and deconstruction of popular dance and music reminds the viewers of succession -- "the past literally moving into the present". In facing real and imagined danger, courage becomes the only answer. The works are self contained, either pure movement or with low-tech props such as a hand held boom box, wearable battery lights and household objects that can be "packed in a backpack and ready to go."
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"Karen Bernard has a simplicity and earthbound directness that make
her
November 25, 2004 DANCE REVIEW How to define the art of performing? Karen Bernard, a New York solo dancer and producer, and Nathalie Claude, who works in dance, theater and television in Montreal, came close on Saturday night at Dixon Place on the Bowery. Their material was decidedly offbeat. Ms. Bernard burrows into a middle-aged female self in "Removed Exposure," performed to music that included songs by Cher, Etta James and Outkast, with a film of her performing what looks like a striptease, except she is clothed. There is no easy feminist self-celebration here. Instead, Ms. Bernard's choreography, directed by Maureen Brennan, probes unlovely flab and all that comes with it with an interest that is strangely tender. The solo is sensual, too, as when the live dancer slowly strokes her leg with a mirror - a family heirloom, she says. Ms. Claude tackles loss and melancholy in her three-part "Sadness Trilogy," performed to popular and classical music, a soundtrack by Isabelle Lussier and a spoken excerpt from Sophocles' "Electra." She plays three characters in the dance's segments. First Ms. Claude is a plump, white-suited angel, with a large, bleeding wound over her heart, from which she extracts a tomato that she later crushes with a mallet. Next comes an over-the-top mourner, followed by a game-show contestant in a red space suit. The contestant is challenged to depict sadness vibrantly, and she does, in clowning that is breathtaking in its funky audacity. Ms. Bernard and Ms. Claude share an interest in themes that are most often treated with violin-accompanied seriousness. But they also inhabit the stage with such fearlessness, adroit timing and quiet authority that they draw in the audience to live, with them, in their performing. We follow them wherever they go.
If Wishes Were Horses, Bernard
Would Be a Flamenco Dancer Karen Bernard is middle-aged, plump, and in control of every facet of her dancing body. In Removed Exposure, light sometimes lifts her handsome face out of the darkness, as if painted by a Renaissance master. Were this Europe, she'd be a revered film star and sex symbol. Her solo confronts us with a body type we don't expect from dance, but even more, it reveals an authentic person who, with luck, could be ourselves. Bernard gazes at her flesh in an antique mirror and follows her soul: She can be a pinup girl, a haughty flamenco dancer, anything. On opening night, discovering that a crucial prop had wedged too deep within her bra, she merely excused herself to find a replacement. Her honesty plus the intimate room equaled unforgettable theater. Montreal's Nathalie Claude shared the bill, performing an amusing exorcism of sadness. |
Originally from Marblehead, MA, Bernard began studying dance at the age of three with her father, Steven Bernard, a former company member with Charles Weidman. In 1969, while studying at the London School of Contemporary Dance, she began to perform and create work. In London, she collaborated with conceptual artist, David Tremlett, tap dancing within an installation of visuals at The Tate Gallery; and choreographed and performed a satirical variation of Les Sylphide for Captain Beefheart's 1973 British tour, premiering at The Albert Hall. She moved to New York City in 1974, and began to create group and solo work in collaboration with a number of composers and her husband, visual artist, Scott Wixon. Since 1980, Bernard has developed a body of solo works. In New York City she produced several full-length concerts of her work between 1986-1998 at Dia Center for the Arts. Her work has been presented in New York City through Summer Warm-Up at PS1 MOMA, One & Only series at HERE Arts Center, Fresh Tracks at Dance Theater Workshop, Draftwork at Danspace at St. Mark's Church, Dixon Place, Movement Research at Judson Church, New Stuff and Avant Garde Arama at Performance Space 122 and Dance In Progress at The Kitchen. She has conducted choreographic process workshops through Movement Research and was a Movement Research Artist In Residence. She has performed, taught and lectured through Festival of New Dance (St. John's Newfoundland), Trinity College (Hartford, CT), SAW Gallery (Ottawa), Philadelphia Fringe Festival and Community Education Center (Philadelphia) La Rotande (Qu?bec City), Movable Beast Dance Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Studio 303 (Montreal), School for New Dance Development (Amsterdam), and Tanz Tangente (Berlin). Bernard has been featured on public television through New Arts Alive, Pennsylvania, BCTV, EGG, Channel 13, "Who's the Art Boss?" and Eye On Dance -- "Dance And The Plastic Arts: The Visual Impulse In Dance." In 1993 Bernard received The Field's Independent Artist Challenge Program Grant and from 2002-2005 Managed their Sponsored Artist Program. She continues to facilitate Fieldwork and the Artward Bound Residency Program at Earthdance in Plainfield, MA.. Bernard is the curator and producer of New Dance Alliance's Performance Mix Festival presented in association with Joyce SoHo.
MAUREEN BRENNAN began directing and mentoring Karen Bernard in 2002. Brennan directs dance and theater performance for the stage and multi-disciplinary installations for unusual spaces in New York and regionally. Her stage work has been called "compelling storytelling" by the Chicago Sun Times. Brennan is also co-founder and resident director of Red Dive, a site-specific creator of multi-sensory tours & events. In 1999 she received a BESSIE for 'Performance Installation and New Media' for Red Dive's inhabited. Her other Red Dive projects include the upcoming City of Refuge in lower Manhattan, last spring's Peripheral City, a boat voyage down the Gowanus Canal ("Must-sea Theater" Newsday), One Less Sense-a blindfolded tour, and The Foundry Theatre's Food for the Soul. Brennan received her advanced degree in Dramatic Arts from The University of Kent at Canterbury England in 1991 as a Rotary International Scholar.
"Removed Exposure"
