Carolyn Lockhart Schoerner: A Dance in Two Acts

Exhibition Dates:
January 10 - February 21, 2026

Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 10, 2026, 5-8 pm

839 is pleased to present A Dance in Two Acts, the first solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist, dancer, and choreographer Carolyn Lockhart Schoerner. The show includes May I Have This Dance? (2025), a new video documenting the artist's performance on a public basketball court in Gowanus, as well as five recent drawings that double as instructions for a modified version of the dance shown in the video. Visitors are also offered a takeaway zine including the drawings from the exhibition. 

For over two decades, Schoerner, who is classically trained in ballet, has integrated the practice into her everyday life, working within the constraints and affordances of proximate, generally non-theatrical spaces, often including vacant apartments adjacent to her own. Rather than treating dance as a discrete performance event, Schoerners’s approach to the medium situates it as a practice that can seemingly, if not quite effortlessly, coexist alongside her daily routines. By not performing live in the gallery, the artist subverts expectations of a dancer/choreographer working in art spaces. Instead, the show uplifts the medium by spotlighting the work’s creation, documentation, and distribution.  

The video component documents a brief, self-contained 10-minute, 59-second dance. Schoerner traverses the basketball court through a restrained choreography: walking, stillness, and transitional steps that give way to moments of heightened energy. The documentation is accompanied by a found violin recording of “Farewell ye Green Fields,” a melody Schoerner remembers from her youth. She performs here in public, at a site intended for recreation and movement. Not unlike the vacant apartment spaces that feature in many of the artist’s videos, the court was not intended for dance, but is perfectly suitable for it. Also, like the apartment videos, the camera is fixed in a single, slightly distant position, framing the full court as a complete spatial field, and suggesting that the artist largely works alone.

While Schoerner’s movement vocabulary is rooted in ballet, her practice is informed by a sustained engagement with postwar and contemporary choreographic models, including the work of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Blondell Cummings, Trisha Brown, and Merce Cunningham. Rather than adopting their formal languages directly, she approaches their work as a set of challenges: to loosen inherited structures, to reconsider the relationship between movement and site, and to test how dance circulates beyond the stage.

The drawings in the exhibition and in the zine, May I Have This Dance? comprise a sequence of step notations elegantly rendered in black marker on white paper with economy and precision. Together, they function as a loose choreographic score. Each page pairs a diagram, such as battement tendu (an L-shaped form), with a succinct, typewritten definition: “stretched, one leg slides outward; keeping toes on the ground.” The instructions encourage visitors and readers to rehearse, adapt, or reinterpret the movements within and beyond the space of the exhibition, positioning dance as a system of signs that exceeds any single performance or site.

A Dance in Two Acts considers dance as both an embodied practice and a highly personal system of transmission: drawn, typed, recorded, observed, and re-enacted. Across its components, the exhibition foregrounds questions of access, authorship, and use; asking how and where art is made, movement is shared, and space is claimed, however provisionally, into a dance.

Carolyn Lockhart Schoerner (b. 1982, Lansing, Michigan) is an artist, dancer, and choreographer living in Brooklyn. She received her training from the Kirov Academy of Ballet and her BA in Art History from Indiana University. Often examining dance within domestic settings, she explores the practice  intimately, allowing it to serve as a performative, diaristic view of life. Her video pieces have been screened at 839 (Los Angeles), Lubov (New York), and Ed. Varie (New York). She has also performed collaboratively with various artists at Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA), Cleopatra’s (Brooklyn), Simone Subal (New York), Essex Flowers (New York), and Signal (Brooklyn).

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839 N. Cherokee Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038

Open Saturdays, 12-6 pm, and by appointment

Accessibility and Parking: For the opening reception, we recommend public transit or parking in front of Bancroft Middle School on Las Palmas Ave., a short walk from the gallery. Please note that the gallery has a porch with four steps.