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The dancer and choreographer John
Bernd, who died in 1988.
Credit Don Chiappinelli, via John Bernd Archives
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One day in the middle of the 1980s, John Bernd
took a taxi to St. Mark’s Church in the East Village, where he did a
solo show for Danspace Project. Then he took a taxi back to where he had
come from: New York University Hospital, a few blocks away. A friend
had to sneak him out for his performance. Mr. Bernd had been sick with
AIDS since 1981, before the syndrome had a name.
His
final appearances, those of an emaciated, disoriented man, came in
February 1988 at Performance Space 122, another theater in the
neighborhood, where he had been a mainstay of the bold, innovative,
do-it-yourself performance art scene. After he died that August, his memorial service was held in St. Mark’s Church.
Danspace
Project would host many more memorials for dancers who died because of
AIDS — so many deaths that the memorials became marathons. The whole
dance world — ballet, Broadway, modern dance — was hit hard, and the
sanctuary of St. Mark’s Church became a site of mourning for what could
feel like a whole generation lost.
Mr.
Bernd’s memorial was one of the early ones, and his illness and art
were tangled up before that taxi ride. In his 1981 performance piece
“Surviving Love and Death,” he had wondered aloud whether his mysterious
disease might be “the new gay cancer.” Ishmael Houston-Jones,
who performed in all three versions of Mr. Bernd’s “Lost and Found” in
the early to mid-’80s, recalled how that work tracked the development of
its creator’s illness, growing darker as he grew more visibly sick.
Thirty
years later, Mr. Houston-Jones, 65, and now a mentor to many in the
Downtown dance scene, worries that many won’t remember his friend. Young
dancers might not recognize the influence of Mr. Bernd, who died too
soon, and of the many like him. Reminding and informing are among the
goals of “Platform 2016: Lost and Found,”
a six-week series of performances, conversations, film screenings and
print projects that Mr. Houston-Jones has organized for Danspace. The
performances start on Thursday, Oct. 13.
Speaking
recently during rehearsals with a group of young performers, several
not yet born in 1988, for a re-examination of Mr. Bernd’s work that will
debut on Nov. 3, Mr. Houston-Jones identified an upsurge of cultural
interest in the plague years. He cited theater pieces, performance art
and exhibitions like “Art AIDS America” at the Bronx Museum of Art. “People my age are ready to look back and deal with it somehow,” he said.
Not that looking back is easy. The choreographer Neil Greenberg,
whose evening in the platform is Friday, Oct. 14, likens the
psychological effect of the AIDS crisis on survivors like himself to
post-traumatic stress disorder. “So much death,” he said. “It was
painful and confusing and horrific.” His 1994 work “Not-About-AIDS-Dance”
addressed his own H.I.V.-positive status and the AIDS-related death of
his brother. But in the late ’90s, when antiretroviral drugs became
available, everything changed. “The imperative to survive relaxed,” he
said. “I ran away into my life. I wanted to move away from the pain.”
Lately,
though, Mr. Greenberg has been looking at things he hasn’t looked at
since the ’90s. He found a notebook in which he and the friends who were
taking care of his brother in the hospital kept track of each day’s
suffering: the vomiting, the diarrhea. Finding that impulse to record
has surprised him, as have memories of shame. “No matter how many Gay
Pride parades I went on, it didn’t go away,” he said. “It was hard not
to interpret AIDS as a punishment, even though I knew it was a virus and
a virus has no morals.”
Mr.
Houston-Jones did not want to organize the platform by himself, so he
brought in Will Rawls, a thoughtful 37-year-old choreographer, performer
and writer. Mr. Rawls grew up without seeing someone close to him die
of AIDS and had not heard of Mr. Bernd. Both men were very aware that
for every name they picked to spotlight — either as a performer or the
subject of a tribute — many would be left out. “These are very charged
choices,” Mr. Rawls said. “We have to admit it can’t be a complete
gesture.”
Mr.
Houston-Jones and Mr. Rawls, who are black, also agreed on the need to
correct the popular image of AIDS as affecting only gay white men like
Mr. Bernd. “It was never the case, and it definitely isn’t now,” Mr.
Houston-Jones said. And so although the platform focuses on the effect
of AIDS on experimental dance in the East Village (as opposed to the
world of dance more broadly), it is large and inclusive, with
contributions by more than 100 artists, black, white, Latino, male,
female, gay, heterosexual and transgender.
For
one feature of the program, called “Life Drawings,” young artists were
given dossiers of information about dead artists and asked to respond in
performance. Orlando Hunter and Ricarrdo Valentine of the duo Brother(hood) Dance!
(performing Nov. 17 to 19) were given a dossier on Mr. Bernd. “We
thought, This has something to do with us, but it has nothing to with
us,” Mr. Hunter said.
Mr.
Hunter, 25, and Mr. Valentine, 29, are both black and both
H.I.V.-positive. Mr. Hunter contracted the virus last year. Mr.
Valentine’s previous partner died from complications of AIDS at 36. Both
men spoke about continuing stigma, and skepticism is a mild word for
their feelings about the pharmaceutical industry. “Yes, there is
medicine,” Mr. Valentine said, “but there are days I don’t want to take
it because of what it’s doing to my body, and then I have to think, Do I
want to live another day?”
Mr.
Hunter acknowledged the influence of those who came before him: “Now we
have the courage, the support, the power to say, ‘Yes, I’m living with
H.I.V.’” But he and Mr. Valentine noted that while Mr. Bernd’s papers
are archived in the Harvard Theater Collection, the archives of Mr. Bernd’s black contemporaries are harder to find.
“John kept a lot of things,” Mr. Houston-Jones said. “I wonder about people who weren’t like that.”
And
even at Harvard, things get lost. Judy Hussie-Taylor, the executive
director of Danspace, was shocked to learn that the Harvard archive had
no one listed as being in charge of Mr. Bernd’s estate. She found out
from Lucy Sexton, one of the group of friends who cared for Mr. Bernd
during his illness, that these caretakers were supposed to be listed.
“That speaks to the young generation of artists creating new families
and new ways of taking care of each other,” Ms. Hussie-Taylor said.
“What happens to their belongings after they die?”
Amid
many memories of shame, silence, grief, fear, loss and love in the
“Lost and Found” printed catalog is a reproduction of a handwritten
weekly schedule made up by the friends who took care of John Bernd:
whose turn to take him to the doctor, whose to do the laundry. Scribbled
in for dinner duty one of those days was Dancenoise, the performance-art duo of Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton (who perform for “Lost and Found” Nov. 17 to 19).
Asked
about the platform, Ms. Sexton said she was ready for something like it
to happen 10 years ago. But she welcomes the opportunity to look back
at the art and the work of the lost, at “John Bernd not just as a person
who died of AIDS, but as a choreographer,” she said.
“A
big event like this can put an artist back into the fabric and gain the
attention of a new generation,” she said. “It would be wonderful if
that happened with John.”
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A version of this article appears in print on October 9, 2016, on page AR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Ready to Look Back and Remember.
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