Emily Johnson

Emily Johnson

Emily Johnson is a director/choreographer/curator, originally from Alaska and currently based in Minneapolis. Since 1998 she has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances often function as installations, engaging audiences within and through a space and environment – sights, sounds, smells – interacting with a place's architecture, history, and role in community. She works to blur distinctions between performance and daily life and to create work that reveals and respects multiple perspectives. Allowing for the possibility of multiple meanings, her work stimulates reflection and emotional empathy between performer and audience, and between audience members. Emily is a 2011 Native Arts and Cultures Fellow, a 2010 and 2009 MAP Fund Grant recipient, a 2009 McKnight Fellow and a 2009 and 2011 MANCC Choreographer Fellow. Her current works, The Thank-you Bar and Niicugni are supported by National Dance Project.

Emily grew up in her native Alaska playing basketball and running long distance. At 18 she left rural living, moved to Minneapolis, and quite by accident, learned to be a choreographer and performer. For the past 17 years city living has swirled around her, dragging her away from the physical space of Alaska and the summer and fall family rituals of hunting and fishing, then smoking, drying, canning and freezing food. She is pulled back when midwesterners and others ask her if she lived in an igloo (myth), if she has an Eskimo name (no), and if it is OK to say the word "Eskimo" (rarely). She is of Yup'ik descent, though she does not speak the language – yet. Emotionally, she is tied to the landscape of South Central Alaska where she was born and to the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta where her father's family is from.

Her work includes commissions by the Walker Art Center, PS122, Out North, Franconia Sculpture Park, and Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts. She has been presented by theaters across the USA including the Walker Art Center, TBA Festival, ODC Theater, New York Live Arts, DiverseWorks, Northrop Auditorium, The Dance Center at Columbia College, Vermont Performance Lab, PS122, Franconia Sculpture Park, Links Hall, Dance Umbrella, Velocity, and OutNorth. She has toured with Scuba and NPN and self-presented in numerous venues including Dance Theater Workshop, Rogue Buddha Art Gallery in Minneapolis, and The Que'Ana Bar in Clam Gulch, Alaska. She has embarked on performance projects in Montreal and St. Petersburg, Russia and her dance films have screened at the Walker, DTW, Chicago Cultural Center and university film festivals.

Emily has made large cast dances for public spaces with people of varied genders, ages, cultures and physical abilities. She has collaborated with musicians, visual and video artists, sculptors, writers and geothermal scientists. She takes inspiration from the annual migration of salmon who swim upstream for thousands of miles because they must. She has watched these salmon swim up waterfalls and believes humans are also called to do amazing things. She has been told that she makes dance for "dance-lovers" and for "people-who-generally-don't-like-dance." She would like to think this is true; that her dances are for every body and that maybe they enlighten small aspects of our existence.

Returning Choreographic Fellow | January 16 - February 6, 2012

Niicugni (Listen) 2012

Johnson was in residence at MANCC in 2012 to further the development of the performance/installation, Niicugni (Listen). Movement, story and sound are housed within an audiovisual installation of hand-made fish skin lanterns created specifically for the work by community volunteers across the country. Niicugni (Listen) equates the land we live on with the cells that comprise our bodies and calls upon audiences to remember that land is alive with ancestry, memory, and possibility, and that our bodies also hold these things. It takes into account the simultaneous forces that build and break down our bodies and earth, bringing life and death - the ultimate contradiction - into the conversation.

Guided in part by her initial inspiration for the work, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and resulting map of her families' land parcel, Johnson met with FSU Geography Professor Dr. Victor Mesev and Map Quilt Artist and FAMU Professor of Architecture Dr. Valerie Goodwin (www.quiltsbyvalerie.com). Johnson asked both scholars to consider how their respective fields might approach the task of creating a map of her work.

During the residency Johnson continued to explore how to layer groups of community members into the work. She met with knitters, wind instrument players and gardeners from the local community to distill small common motions that were then incorporated into the piece. Her residency culminated in a public showing in which the community members participated by joining Emily on stage to perform their common movement.

This residency was made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Collaborators in Residence: Aretha Aoki [performer], Heidi Eckwall [lighting designer], James Everest [composer and multi-instrumentalist], Bethany Lacktorin [violinist/electronic musician], Slideshow photos by Al Hall and Chris Cameron.

Returning Choreographic Fellow | February 20 – March 8, 2011

Niicugni (Listen) 2011

Johnson was in residence at MANCC in 2011 to begin developing a new performance/installation, Niicugni (Listen). During the 2011 residency, Johnson worked with groups of community members, specifically, artists, hula hoopers, roller derby girls, tango dancers and knitters, to collectively find a sound and movement gesture related to their common interest. Emily worked with the groups to find the small, common gesture: the bend in the knees before a backspring or the twist of the hips required of a hula hooper before she swings the hoop into motion. She is researched how these tiny, known actions layer individually with cooperation and how the actions and interests of our neighbors might create the landscapes we live in. She explored if she can layer this small community dance upon Niicugni, interested to know if the presence of individuals and their actions is heightened by their appearance on stage or by the moments after their departure.

Johnson also shared nine performances of The Thank-You Bar at the 2011 Southeastern American College Dance Festival, which took place at FSU in the days that followed her Niicugni residency.

This residency was made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Collaborators in Residence: Aretha Aoki [performer], James Everest [composer and multi-instrumentalist], Bethany Lacktorin [violinist/electronic musician], Heidi Eckwall [lighting designer]. Slideshow photos by Al Hall and Bayard Stern.

Choreographic Fellow | January 24 – February 14, 2009 and August 9-16, 2009

The Thank-you Bar

Johnson conducted research on home, origin and displacement, partially by way of roving outdoor experiments with students, and by meeting with local animal behaviorists and a storyteller from the Pine Arbor Creek Community. The Thank-you Bar is a performance/installation of dance, live music, storytelling and visual image connecting ideas of displacement, longing, and language to history, pre-conceived notions, architecture, and igloo-myth.

The Thank-You Bar premiered at Out North, in Anchorage, Alaska in 2009 and toured to TBA Festival, ODC Theater, Vermont Performance Lab, DiverseWorks, Living Arts, New York Live Arts, The Dance Center at Columbia College, Northrop Auditorium, and ACDFA through 2011.