Sarah Beth Oppenheim she/her I come from: 38 dance studios, 4 particular kitchens, and 2 synagogues from the Wild Wild West, skyscrapered NYC, trampoline sidewalks of Berlin, and begrudgingly beautiful sunsets over the Potomac. I like to use scraps, abandoned tools, and painters tape to cut and paste curious inquisitions into everything from pelvis-motored site-specific choreography to burritos. I believe in deepest plie to bend traditions, antiracist pedagogy to bend academia, and dance as an everything salve. As a teaching artist mom, I mine, swap, and alchemically mix choreographic research, antiracist pedagogy, and arts & crafts between stage, studio, classroom, and nursery. 

Educational letters include BFA SUNY Purchase and MFA University of Maryland. Work/love finds me teaching/making/womanifesting as a Teaching Artist at Dance Place, Adjunct Professor at American University and University of Maryland, Mentorship & Education Coordinator at BlackLight Summit, and Artistic Director of Heart Stück Bernie (HSB). HSB makes site-specific and proscenium extravaganza works in museums, theaters, stairwells, back rooms, and other places I convince you to engage with dance. Recent career highlights include Artist in Residence at Dance Place, commissions at The Kennedy Center, National Gallery of Art, and U.S. Botanic Garden, and 2022-2023 Fillmore Studio Prize Winner for creating and curating art at the nexus of dance and social impact.

I live in Silver Spring, Maryland where I subject my family to artistic procedurals and cardboard extravaganza reckonings, but they secretly love how warm it is by the construction paper fire and the every-floor-a-dance-floor.

Heart Stück Bernie (HSB) is a decidedly non-mathematical theorem whose rigorous proof is its hyper-particular choreography, cut & paste aesthetic, and riddle-me-this dancers. The company is often part of inaugural residencies and first time performances that open up unconventional dance spaces and previously unutilized utility closets to community gathering, spirited discussion, and off-kilter performances. 

Our work flies through space with utter/udder abandon, until it grounds itself. It explores conversational and emotive duet work, and it plays at unraveling causation in tight-knit group work. When the curtain rises, opens, or gets thrown aside with gamine intention, an HSB dance looks like a been-around-the-block broad – full of accumulated propositions and proposals. She’s been dressed up and stripped down, and she knows how to ask the hard questions.

HSB site-specific and proscenium choreography has been presented in or by Berlin’s Tacheles and dida e.V. Raum für Kultur, Long Island City’s The Creek and the Cave, Brooklyn’s Bookcourt, the Rooftop of the Chelsea Hotel, the very dirty East River, Dance Omi, P.O.R.C.H., all up in, around, and under the Mayflower Square Apartment Complex in Alexandria, VA, the first annual On Site/In Sight: A Downtown Winston-Salem Dance Festival, The Kennedy Center, the opening festival for The Reach, Sidney Harman Hall, Metro Micro Gallery, McLean Project for the Arts, the U.S. Botanic Garden, the National Gallery of Art, The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Baltimore Theatre Project, Dance Loft on 14, American University, SUNY Purchase, National Performance Network, Rhizome, The S&R Evermay Foundation, Dance Place, and Extra Space Storage Facility. 

HSB is a recipient of a 2009 Brooklyn Arts Council Regrant, Dance Metro DC’s 2015 Choreographer’s Commission, the Kennedy Center’s 2016 Local Dance Commissioning Project, the inaugural AIR Residency at the U.S. Botanic Garden in 2018, the inaugural Dance Place AIR residency from 2018-2020, a 2018-2019 Montgomery County Individual Artist Grant for Snake Telegram, a 2019 Maryland Creativity Grant for Wren Print Cess Pool Cutty Sark, a 2020 Covid Relief Grant from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County (AHCMC), a 2022 Artists and Projects Grant for Cultural Exchange Workshops from AHCMC, a 2023 Maryland Creativity Grant for Many Extra Only More, and The 2022-2023 Fillmore Studio Prize to create and curate art at the nexus of dance and social impact. This summer, HSB will be in two Parent Artist Residencies via GALLIM in NY and Marble House Project in VT - beginning research and development for the new work Wolver Maroon.

Aside from creating work, HSB is also a Think & Move Tank: holding space, curating programming, gathering artists for conversations, offering grant writing consultation, and mentoring artists through choreographic processes and DIY production. HSB’s side project Milk Milk with Juliana Mascelli is an honest/tired/reprioritized/survival mode/kickass multitasking look at mom arting. Ready with saggy breasts and wrinkles, or not!

We are many, much, and always on the move - as a collection of dancers, designers, and production collaborators. Join us. We always have a snack, a thought, and a dance to share.