Rachel Bernsen Never Stops Moving

The walls of Rachel Bernsen’s studio in Erector Square on Peck Street are bright white, adorned with posters from various artistic events. There are colorful throw pillows stacked in the shelving in one corner. A model skeleton greets visitors upon entering, hinting at this room’s purpose: it’s all about movement.

“A lot of things happen in this space,” Bernsen said.

Bernsen’s studio has played host to a wide range of performances, and is rehearsal headquarters for upcoming projects created by or featuring Bernsen, who is a dancer, choreographer, and trained dance teacher at the high school and college levels. It’s also home to Bernsen’s Alexander Technique practice, a kinesthetic educational process that involves teaching movement re-education to both individuals and groups, helping to alleviate pain and gain better mastery of one’s body.

It’s informally called The Big Room, and as Bernsen is currently using the space, she’s also contemplating its future.

That is, contemplating when she’s got the time.

On her docket this October is the completion and first performances of ​“I Know You So Well: A Sound and Movement Choir,” a commissioned piece that will debut in the final weekend of this fall’s City-Wide Open Studios from Oct. 26 to 28 at the Yale West Campus building formerly occupied by Bayer Pharmaceuticals near West Haven and Orange. Centering on this year’s CWOS theme of wellbeing, the piece — a collaboration between Bernsen as choreographer and writer Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, with musical direction by Taylor Ho Bynum (her husband) — focuses on healthcare in an authentic way: the performers all work in the healthcare field, and are not trained (or even amateur) performers.

“I Know You So Well” is the largest-scale project Bernsen has created, and the only one she’s worked on with non-professionals. The project encompasses choreography, text and song forms, she said, and performers — who answered an open casting call asking for ​“open minds and no experience necessary” — include a doula, a physical therapist, a home caregiver and the former director of CT Hospice.

“Without it being a narrative,” Bernsen said, ​“it creates a sense of community within this larger, fractured industry.”

She said it’s a ​“truly interdisciplinary project.” And ​“interdisciplinary” is something Bernsen clearly gravitates toward. The studio is also home base for a collaboration called Masters of Ceremony, featuring dancers Bernsen and Melanie Maar and musician Ho Bynum, who is a composer as well as a musician, and Abraham Gomez-Delgado, a musician, visual artist, and composer.

The group has performed in New York City and in Europe, and will perform in October at The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism in New York City. It creates performance pieces by exploring ​“shared energy through improvising in the space together,” Bernsen said. Then, they talk — and talk, and talk some more — and go from there.

“This is dancers and two musicians, exploring boundaries and really creating a language of our own,” Bernsen said of the group. Their hope, she added, is to regularly perform at various ​“rituals,” like weddings and funerals, helping individuals ​“move from one space at the next,” like they did recently, performing for a friend who was saying goodbye to a beloved apartment.

Past partnerships and projects have helped carve the way for the collaborative vibe that the studio (previously housed across the hallway) seems to inspire. Bernsen moved her business from Brooklyn to New Haven in 2008 and has worked in the past with visual artist Megan Craig on collaborations with both artists performing. Their 2017 ​“Traveling in Place” performance at the Yale Art Gallery featured wheels, fabric and ​“wearable sculpture.” Their 2015 collaboration titled ​“Colorada” (a Spanish word expressing redness, as a result of dying, coloring or blushing) was performed at a gallery in Neuenhaus, Germany. 

From 2010 to 2016, Bernsen curated a performance series in the studio called ​“Take Your Time,” featuring her own choreographed projects, as well as the work of local and international artists, including music, dance, film, and spoken word. Again, this project highlighted the ways different artistic ventures intersect. She currently hosts the occasional ​“contemplative dance practice” in the space, which begins with meditation, moving on to ​“movement improvisation.”

Finally, there’s the Alexander Technique, the figurative backbone of Bernsen’s work, which deals with actual backbones. The practice is 100 years old and ​“is really a method of self-care,” Bernsen said. ​“It gives you a set of skills that help you be more sensitive to movement habits that may be contributing to discomfort, pain or preventing you from mastering a skill.”

The associated lingo indicates the practice’s philosophy. Clients are called ​“students.” Sessions are called ​“classes” and incorporate hands-on and vocal instruction from the teacher. Exercises include methods of reaching, sitting, breathing and lying down. Bernsen sees individuals and teaches group classes (in the studio and offsite, for instance teaching faculty at nearby Neighborhood Music School). The practice is known more widely among musicians and other performers looking to have improved mastery of their bodies. Frederick Matthias Alexander, the technique’s founder, was a performer himself. But Bernsen has also seen individuals after knee and hip replacements and students who have chronic joint or back pain. While the structure of a class might differ considering the number of students or a student’s specific needs, the basic idea is a process of kinesthetic learning, or ​“body mapping.”

“It really gives you conscious control of your movement,” Bernsen said. 

And movement, after all, really is what this space helps facilitate. Everything Bernsen does in her professional career is starting to overlap. Projects are beginning to feed into each other. Her Alexander Technique work informs her dance practice, and her dance practice in turn informs her latest work of choreography.

“This is a container for all of those things,” she said, looking at The Big Room. She feels the space has perhaps moved beyond that name at this point. She thinks it deserves a name that truly recognizes the synergistic experiences that happen there.

Considering the nature of her innovative work, a fitting name is bound to evolve.