Book Karen as speaker for your next event.

Karen Kohler is an outstanding storyteller!

…said Dr. Linda Restifo, Professor of Neurology at the University of Arizona, after hearing Karen speak at the 2022 Science of Consciousness Conference.

Karen’s life story in art, music, love and long marriage, in sickness and in health, reverberates with authenticity, courage, resilience and humor. Alongside her celebrated career as singer and actor, she’s a sought-after lecturer, historian, host, guide and moderator. To book Karen for a speaking engagement, please complete the contact form.

These themes are available as LECTURES and TALKS:

SONGS, PSYCHEDELICS AND SEIZURES

A One-Woman Flow

Lectures - Artful Marriage

ARTFUL MARRIAGE

A Journey of Y-E-S

Lectures - Tenth Muse

THE TENTH MUSE

A History of Cabaret

Lectures - Room

ROOM

The Great Big Art of the Small

Karen Kohler is an outstanding storyteller. I heard her give a riveting monologue at the Science of Consciousness Conference, focused on the impact of temporal lobe epilepsy on her creativity. She wove this together with descriptions of her baseline creative process and the impact of occasional use of psychedelics in the past. Karen’s first-person account of partial complex seizures, which she did not realize were manifestations of a medical condition, was very impactful. There is no textbook description that so well captures the feeling of the episodes and the effects on one’s life.

 

Dr. Linda L. Restifo, Professor of Neurology, University of AZ

SONGS, PSYCHEDELICS & SEIZURES

A One-Woman Flow

In the spring of 2022, Karen was invited to give a presentation at the Science of Consciousness Conference in Tucson, AZ. Sponsored by the University of Arizona, her alma mater, she jumped at the opportunity to share her perspectives on various flow states with which she is deeply familiar. A performance monologue was born.

MONOLOGUE

In “Songs, Psychedelics and Seizures: A One-Woman Flow”, Karen employs her talents as storyteller to share what glimpses music, plant medicine and the mystery of epilepsy have given her into the nature of mind and reality. Through these three flow states, or Flow Gates as she calls them, and aided by forces both animal and ethereal, she’s experienced a connection into a larger matrix by becoming a channel of creativity.

If what science is identifying is that a psychedelic quiets the Default Mode Network (DMN) and avails a person of other regions of cognition and conscious attainment, this has existed in art since forever. The artist’s profession is all about functioning outside the DMN. Artists are hired and paid to flow and to insert their tiny little straw into the vastness of consciousness. Psychedelics is a quick way to normal and essential IS-ness. And a seizure state is another way to look through the lens of the altered tiny box at something vast and mysterious.

In this performance piece, Karen talks about a singing experience so peak and optimal that when she left the stage she said aloud: “If that’s the last song I ever sing, I will have chosen a great one.” She explains the nearness of death that has been a staple in her life since her first psychedelic trip ended. To begin it all, she shares a story about a certain special hawk.

(Length: 45 minutes with option of Q&A afterwards.)

In my evolving experience, I can lay down a flag right here and say that with my experiences in these three states of being, these sacred lenses, I’ve been able to return to my essence and draw a cosmic umbilical cord back to Source. Flow is our natural state. Inside time and space, we can play and discover and return at will to the numinous, essential, vastness. Artists, epileptics and psychedelic trippers have access intermittently. And what if that were the case for everyone…human beings in natural flow states. Is this not our salvation? Everyone finds their thing. We’re drawn and called to our stuff from a young age. What have you been doing since you were a child?

Lectures - Artful Marriage

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

Henry David Thoreau

ARTFUL MARRIAGE

A Journey of Y-E-S

With more than half of marriages ending in divorce, and recent deliberations on what and who is qualified to recognize marriage and be married, the private covenants that precede any legal union have gone missing. What might it mean to be “married,” regardless of what the state or one’s religion says?

DIALOGUE WITH KAREN & MAC KOHLER

Karen and Mac Kohler fell in love in Italy on a college singing tour in 1983. The two share stories from their journey together through friendship, romance, separation, loss, reunion, family, career, and the radical openness with which they navigate the pathways of matrimony today with their families, both born and chosen.

(Length: 1 to 2hrs with option of Q&A afterwards.)

We put a cap on love when it comes to marriage. A hard limit. Now imagine loving with the heart of a parent. Think of it: your first child comes along and you love them with your whole heart. Then along comes your second child and you don’t say, “Gee, I’ve only got this much love, so let me take some love away from baby A and give it to baby B because that’s all the love I have to give.” That’s not what happens at all, is it? What happens is that you grow your heart, you grow it into something much much bigger. It grows with every birth that comes along. So why would you have a different kind of heart for your union than you have for your children?

Lectures - Tenth Muse

Your passion for this music and all the history that surrounds it is stunningly palpable. Thank you bringing these many personalities to life through your stories and all the archival material you’ve collected. As a veteran who fought in Germany where I discovered my Lili Marlene, I can tell you that you are an ambassador for your mother country and your adopted country…a bridge between!

 

Fred Fox, WWII veteran, Texas
Karen was very generous with our theater students and provided them with many valuable tools with regard to performance, the history of cabaret and the life of a professional performer in New York.

 

Jennifer Engler, Professor of Theater, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth
You’ve really left an amazing impression at Long Island University. People are still talking about it. Many agree with me when I say that it was the best Convocation we’ve had since all of us have been here.

 

Andrzej Kozlowski, music student, LIU/Post, Brookville, NY

THE TENTH MUSE

A History of Cabaret

Cabaret is an aesthetic extension of late 19th and 20th century social and political turmoil.

PRESENTATION/LECTURE

Part 1 of this course opens with a survey of the origins of the cabaret artform during the Belle Epoche of 1880’s Paris, and journeys on through Berlin of the 1920’s, New York in the 1950’s, and the pockets of interest in the artform throughout the world today.

Part 2 presents the era that has been Karen’s career focus as singer, director and producer: the years of the Weimar Republic when cabaret reached its 20th century zenith. She combines story-telling with photography, and various video/audio clips to bring this genre, era and its diverse cast of characters to life. Among the artists, composers and interpreters are: Toulouse L’Autrec, Yvette Guilbert, Kurt Weill, Arnold Schoenberg, Edith Piaf, Friedrich Hollaender, Mischa Spoliansky, Marlene Dietrich, Kurt Gerron, the Comedian Harmonists, Jacques Brel, Leonard Cohen, and many more.

Part 3 surveys the landscape that links mid-20th century Europe with our present moment when viewed against the framework of art, politics, socio-economics, race and gender. How is our time different, how is it similar? Which lessons from the past are being ignored, which are being heeded? What is blooming, what is dying?

(Length: 3 hrs. with intermission and optional live performance component, half-day, or tailored to suit.)

 

Lectures - Room

A staggering range of music…purest aural ecstasy.

 

David Noh
I believe it’s the hallmark of a true artiste not only to perform with all the heart and passion and love for music but to be willing and able to share this with others too. As you have.

 

Doris Vissher

ROOM

The Great Big Art of the Small

Karen Kohler has been performing in rooms worldwide for over 20 years. As soloist, collaborator and ensemble leader, she crossbreeds a range of musical and theatrical influences – everything from jazz, blues, classical, folk-rock, cabaret and chanson.

DISCUSSION/DEMONSTRATION

Since 1995, Karen has also been an acknowledged exponent and historian of 20th century European roots cabaret and Kleinkunst. Yet her identification as a cabaret singer outside of known cabaret hubs like New York, London, Paris and Berlin has often drawn blanks or comments like “You do burlesque!”, “You’re a lounge act!”, “You’re a show girl!”, “You’re a shantuce!”

In 2019, at the end of a break she took from the active performing life, Karen returned with a new music label and on-line channel for the intimate arts, Ars Intima, two new solo projects,  and a new genre for the intimate performance art she makes that she calls ROOM.

In this discussion, Karen opens up about the nature of her songs, how they reveal the soul of a story, a person, a character and Karen herself. She explains how she landed on the name quite naturally. Rooms are where her eclectic range of songs have succeeded most as has the level of intimate connection she endeavors to cultivate with her audience and on-stage collaborators. “Delivering a show-stopping interpretation of an American or European standard in a large concert hall is a thrilling experience, “she notes. On the whole though, spaces with 500- to 5000-person capacities easily overpower the nuance, urgency, subtle humor and details of her silhouette and gesture that make her interpretations memorable. “Size matters,” says Karen. “Bigger is not better when it comes to this type of performance art where music, movement, theater and poetry meet.” Words and melodies come from all over the world. They are timeless, era-less, gender-less, genre-less.  The room’s the thing. Camera, chambre, cuarto, Kammer, kamer, sala, salon, Zimmer. ROOM. Read more about it on her Singing page.

(Length: 2 hrs. with optional live performance component.)