About the Artistic Director
Her first aerial experience came from jumping off the roof of her house into the family swimming pool in Barre, Vermont with her siblings and friends when her parents were not home. also placed second in the state for spring board diving competition in high school…another great primer for her career as an aerial dancer.
After graduating from the University of Maryland with a B.A. in Dance, she moved to New York City to train, perform and go to graduate school at Teachers College, Columbia University where she was awarded a Master of Arts in Dance Education. Jayne studied modern and composition with Alwin Nikolais, Murray Louis and Hanya Holm, among others. She worked extensively with several leading post-modern choreographers including: Bill T. Jones, Stephen Petronio, David Gordon and Pooh Kaye and presented her choreography “For Beach Sakes” at the Nikolais/Louis Choreospace. Jennifer Dunning (New York Times)....Bernasconi’s work is remarkable and stands out among others……
In 1989, she moved back to Vermont and founded Jayne Bernasconi and Friends performing at First Night Burlington and Midsummer venues in Montpelier. She was also a regular at the Burlington Jams from 1990-1995 practicing the art of contact improvisation. In 1992, after reading an article in Contact Quarterly by Steve Paxton, she traveled to Eugene, OR, to participate in the annual DanceAbility workshop lead by Aleto Alessi, Emery Blackwell and Steve Paxton. Jayne later invited Paxton to help facilitate FORCES OF ABILITY, a similar workshop in Burlington, VT along with Sarah Brutzman and Felice Wolfzan. FORCES later moved to Boulder, Colorado and became a performance company throughout Colorado. On May 21, 1999, the Mayor of Boulder wrote a proclamation establishing a PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES DAY after a memorial performance for company member Al Goldsmith. Upon her arrival in Boulder in 1995, she discovered aerial dance classes with Nancy Smith, Artistic Director of Frequent Flyers Productions, Inc. Jayne became a company member of FFP for the next 4 ½ years and quickly learned the art form of flying on a single point low-flying trapeze.
In 1999, she relocated to Baltimore and introduced aerial dance to the Baltimore/Washington metropolitan area. She founded Air Dance Bernasconi,(ADB) non-profit aerial dance company which has been seen throughout the Baltimore/DC area as well as New York’s International Dance Festival, Virginia (Yes, Virgina Dance Festival), West Virginia, (Claymount Court) Tennessee (East Tennessee State University) and Colorado (Aerial Dance Festival).
Throughout Jayne’s career in dance, her teaching style has been strongly influenced by Rudoph Laban and Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), Irmgard Bartenieff (Bartenieff Fundamentals), Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (Body Mind Centering) and Joan Skinner (Skinner Release Technique). Jayne has received numerous awards, fellowships and grants for her choreographic and artistic achievement. In 2008 she published the book/dvd AERIAL DANCE co-written with Nancy Smith. Currently, she is on faculty in the Dance Department at Towson University where she teaches all levels of modern dance, composition and fundamentals of dance. She also teaches and gives private lessons in aerial dance at Gerstung in Baltimore.
