The Blue Hour
conglomerated by Kym Bernazky
The Blue Hour is a multi-media performance about the darkest part of the night and the in/ability to emerge from it. Using autoethnography, I created this project to embody my own relationship with living between light and dark after testing positive for a very rare disease called Huntington’s and the “prognosis” limbo I have been living in. Mosaicing sound collage, video, fabric manipulation, movement, light and puppetry, Kym and the audience travel through the liminal space of the theater to face 4 AM, like Persephone emerging from the underworld. Inspired by James Baldwin’s writing in"Nothing Personal," he writes, “4am can be a devastating hour.” Four AM parallels the limbo we all exist in between birth and death. We dig into the experience of waking up at 4am and facing the struggle we have to make it to the next day, dramatizing that razor-thin line between night and day, inhale and exhale. I use Dorothea Tanning’s surrealist painting "Insomnia" as mise-en-scene. The ethereality and fogginess of the painting haunt the mood. However, I don’t want my audience to be traumatized. There has to be a balance struck between loss and hope. Hope comes in the shape of laughter, kindness and light. On the flip side of the 4am, there's waking up, there’s the sun rising, there’s rebirth. There’s the morning. Different chapters explore the the tyranny of technology, suicide, a under-the-covers bedtime reading of Balwin, sleep positions as choreography and the puppets of my Ukrainian family immigrating to the US.
Workshop performance at Dixon Place. This is the second part of the project. 4/11/22
