Pictured: Friends of NDA at the Performance Mix Festival 2024 reception, photo by Elyse Mertz.
It’s a party! Extended program + a reception to follow…
🥂 💫 🥂 💫 🥂
Join us at Abrons Arts Center June 5th at 7:00pm for performances by NDA Executive and Artistic Director Karen Bernard and Lisa Parra, and June 7th at 7:30pm for the Saturday Night Special, an extended program including Karen Bernard, Lisa Parra, Montréal-based artist Lara Kramer, and a celebratory reception.
Meet the Artists
Karen Bernard
Pictured: Karen Bernard in Fleeting Glimpse, photographed by Jenna Westra.
About the Work A black wooden chair. A black sequined curtain. A black faux fur blanket. A black laptop. A woman with white hair dressed in black sequined shorts and a matching black top. Choreographer Karen Bernard offers these disparate visual elements to the viewer in her latest work, Fleeting Glimpse, only to connect them by revealing their hidden inner vitality. Through surprisingly spare and inventive movement, Bernard demonstrates that movement itself is life, and despite its fleeting and transitory nature, we experience its pulse through gestures, sideways looks, and subtle shifts that reflect an internal light. Fleeting Glimpse will be performed at PM39 by Johanna S Meyer.
Karen Bernard is an interdisciplinary movement-based artist. In her newest work Fleeting Glimpse, performed by Johanna S Meyer, she continues to explore the female body’s complexities, juxtaposing the mundane with the extravagant. From the age of three, she was immersed in dance, with her father, Steven Bernard, a company member of Charles Weidman’s pioneering 20th-century dance company. Growing up in his dance school, performance was not a separate activity but the rhythm of daily life. Bernard’s work has been presented in New York City at The Kitchen, Chashama, Center for Performance Research, Dixon Place, Performance Space 122, and Movement Research at Judson Church, and throughout Canada. Residencies include Bogliasco (Bogliasco, Italy) and Emily Harvey Foundation (Venice, Italy). She has received support from DCA, NYSCA, Puffin Foundation, and Meet The Composer. Bernard received a BAX 10 award for her invaluable service to artists in the founding and development of the Performance Mix Festival.
Lara Kramer
Pictured: Lara Kramer, photographed by Mathieu Verrault.
About the Work Anchored in this world and orbiting a universe beyond, a lone performer unfolds memories on stage through rhythmic scores. For Gorgeous Tongue, Lara Kramer embodies stories, dreams, and songs that stem from her Anishinaabe lineage. Entering Kramer’s artistic constellation is to embrace the past and usher in a new world. Gorgeous Tongue is a celebration of Indigenous transmission, transformation, and futurity.
Lara Kramer is a performer, choreographer, and multidisciplinary artist of mixed Oji-cree and settler heritage, raised in London, Ontario. She lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. Her choreographic work, research and field work over the last fifteen years has been grounded in intergenerational relations, intergenerational knowledge, and the impacts of the Indian Residential Schools of Canada. She is the first generation in her family to not attend the Residential schools. Lara Kramer is a Centre de Création O Vertigo – CCOV Associate Artist since 2021.
Lisa Parra
Pictured: Lisa Parra, photo by Phillip Martinez.
About the Workfamily reunion side two is an interdisciplinary solo performance based on audio tape recordings of Lisa Parra’s mother’s family reunion in 1999. With this work, Parra contemplates how prosody and memory resonate in both movement and vocalization.
Lisa Parra is an artist and performer. Her education includes a BA in Dance and Psychology from UC Irvine, MA in Dance/Movement Therapy from UCLA and is a Certified Movement Analyst (CMA) from the Laban Center in New York. She is a 2024 MAP Fund grantee for her current project family reunion side two. The project has also been supported by New Dance Alliance WORKSessions month-long residency at Chashama in March of 2023. In addition, she was a 2017-2019 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence funded by Mertz Gilmore. Her work has been presented by New Dance Alliance, Movement Research, and Center for Performance Research. She has received further commissions and residencies from Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, NY; Alkantara in Lisbon; Center for Arts and Architecture in Guimaraes; Portugal and Bilbao Eszena in Bilbao, Spain. Lisa was a Movement Research Exchange Artist with UCLA World Arts and Culture/Dance department in which she taught Advance Composition, Advance Improvisation and Faculty Lab course in the Spring of 2020. Her collaborations with other artists include Portuguese media artist Daniel Pinheiro for an ongoing research project LAND that focuses on embodied presence via the internet for both developing and performing work from remote locations; and as a performer she has collaborated with Emma Rose Brown and Karen Bernard.
We can’t wait to celebrate our diverse, inclusive community with you this June.
New Dance Alliance, along with hundreds of fellow arts organizations in the United States, recently lost any and all funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The budget cuts to NEA will slash access to the arts keeping our communities thriving. We share in grief with all our colleagues in the arts, but we also pledge to be resilient. NDA remains steadfast in our commitment to fostering inclusivity and diversity in the arts, and support for BIPOC performance artists in NYC.
We urge the community to come together in these troubling times to celebrate the values we hold dear. Support the artists in your community today — and always.
Friday, June 6th 10:00 am – 12:00 pm The Breakfast Mix is a convivial meeting and informal discussion with the international artists of the festival. The Breakfast Mix is free and held at the NDA studio. RSVP to admin@newdancealliance.org.
Unfolding Time, A Creative Workshop with Lara Kramer
Friday June 6th 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm This year the breakfast will be followed by a free workshop from Lara Kramer:
Working with temporality, we will give time to deceleration to allow new and old embodied knowledge and awareness to unfold, exploring a personal rigorous approach to minimalism. Underlying the creative workshop is a desire for experiential play, storytelling and sharing between us will strive to be open-ended, offering an invitation for reciprocity. RSVP toadmin@newdancealliance.org.
“Thank you thank you and thank you to everyone who made this residency (Black Artist Space to Create) possible. These past two weeks have been a blessing! Not only have I been able to deepen my own personal/artistic practices, I was given the space to connect with people that I love! I was given space to reflect on love, and to prepare for what this next year (2021) will bring! Shout out to New Dance Alliance, Modern Accord Depot and Angie Pittman for the time, the space, and opportunity! I am forever grateful! It felt like a good meal, with dessert!”
– Johnnie Cruise Mercer
New Dance Alliance
182 Duane Street
New York, NY 10013
All venues are wheelchair accessible.
