Biographical/historical: John Bernd (born in Kansas in 1953, died in New York in1988) was a New York-based experimentalist choreographer and dancer and an associate director of Performance Space 122. He helped to develop a choreographic style in which autobiographical storytelling is blended with movement. He studied dance and performance studies with Sara Rudner, Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, John Cage and Jasper Johns. He began performing his own work in 1978. One of his best known pieces, the 1981 Surviving Love and Death, was made the year he contracted AIDS, and is focused on his illness. He also appeared in the dance and theater works of Meredith Monk, Jane Comfort, Jeff Weiss and Molissa Fenley, and he collaborated on dance-theater projects.