Gather here: Walking Minetta Creek trail with Emily Johnson

Gathering at the basketball court of Chelsea's PS 11
for the opening passages of
Emily Johnson's SHORE in Lenapehoking (NYC)
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Dance artist Emily Johnson with audience member
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

I view our bodies as EVERYTHING: our bodies are culture, history, present and future, all at once. Out of respect for and trust in our bodies and collective memories, I give equal weight to story and image, to movement and stillness, to what I imagine and to what I do not know.

-- Emily Johnson, Artist Statement

Emily Johnson (Emily Johnson/Catalyst), a Minneapolis-based dance artist born in South Central Alaska of Yup'ik descent, seeks to use her art and knowledge to reawaken people to their environment and to one another, to realize connections that offer meaning and dignity. Her mission springs from her own deep longing for the landscape of her native state and for its indigenous traditions.

She has taken up this healing work in a celebrated trilogy, including The Thank-You Bar, which won a 2012 Bessie, and Niicugni (2013). The trilogy concludes now with SHORE, originally presented in Minneapolis and now manifesting in our city as SHORE in Lenapehoking (NYC), a multifaceted ceremony spanning several days and venues, with multiple artistic and community partners. The project involves volunteer activities in the Rockaways and on Governors Island, storytelling and readings, bike rides and potluck feasts, and a silent procession to dance installation performances at New York Live Arts.*

All parts of SHORE engage with the larger world beyond theater space. According to Johnson, each bears equal importance. Certainly, total immersion in SHORE should offer not only the most complete understanding of the project but likely provide its intended benefits. Regrettably, I could only take part in last evening's event--a dance/vocal prelude and silent walk from the basketball court of Chelsea's PS 11 along a serpentine path, once the large Minetta Creek, to the New York Live Arts's theater for the rest of the performance. I'm glad I did at least this much.

A sliver of moon hung above the city, and a crow winged across 21st Street, quickly disappearing. Audience and performers gathered, greeting friends and colleagues in the sudden dramatic chill of this late April evening. Johnson provided heavy red blankets as wraps for several folks, and the rest of us made do with winter gear we thought we would have stored away by now.

Performers at PS 11 basketball court
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

A cluster of performers began an unhurried dispersal. Meanwhile, beyond the court's gate, other dancers took slow, intermittent strides along the sidewalk. Eventually, members of the inside group picked up their pace, even sprinting around us in a wide orbit. Through their movements, the ground seemed to come a little more alive, indeed provoking curiosity about who and what once coursed through this region.

Above and below: Emily Johnson at PS 11
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Johnson, her face sporting a band of red makeup across her eyes set with thick, jet-black false eyelashes, mounted a wooden stand to relate her dream of an eagle, a hawk and a baby. A dream that, in her impassioned telling, felt numinous and ecstatic and right for this stark weather. She then asked us to make our way to the theater, walking the creek trail together without talking.

We walked, guided by soothing, pulsing sounds from little portable speakers and human voices. We moved forward, united in purpose, as if part of an invisible watercourse, an invisible ceremony feeding through the busy, darkening Chelsea streets. We held no signs, wore no identifiable costumes. We could have been any stream of pedestrians making our way through traffic and street noise. In fact, outsiders unwittingly strode in and out of our procession. I'd like to think the sonic and kinetic energy reached them on a level just beneath everyday consciousness.

At New York Live Arts, SHORE performers
L-r: Krista Langberg, Emily Johnson and Aretha Aoki
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Johnson's stagecraft at New York Live Arts works boldly with the visual and kinetic energy. SHORE straddles a line between stark abstraction and subtle representation. Performers mass in large groups or lines that recall swaying, rustling trees or pound footfalls like earth tremors or recede like a damaged, vanishing habitat. Dancer Aretha Aoki makes no obvious bird-like moves, but the lash of her arms, jutting turns and impetuous attacks on air seem avian to me. Gasps, electronically amplified, connect human breath to the life force within all living beings. Pairs of dancers sometimes move right into each other's space, nose to nose, so close that they might breathe as one. Kettledrums blare out another potent voice of nature.

There is gracefulness and power, a sense of empty distances, quiet and loneliness as well as a certain homeyness and intimacy--the presence of houseplants at the edge of the space, sounds of a televised basketball game, the flicker of false eyelashes in the otherwise stillness of a hunched over body. Late in the performance, you might become aware that the theater's houselights have gotten a little brighter because, really, you're not just watching from over there, are you? You're part of the story and the song, too.

*****

The SHORE Choir: Margot Bassett, Pareena Lim, Jules Skloot, Erika Banks, K.J. Holmes, Emma Brown, Lisa Loew, Tatyana Tenenbaum, Peter Sciscioli, Michael Becker, Carime Santa-Coloma, Jack Gray

The Physical Choir: Marýa Wethers, Ben Weaver, Madeline Sayet, Koliane Rochon, Tara Willis, Erica Ricketts, Pavel Machuca, Mary Kate Sickle, Monica Gonzalez, Steph Lee, Maré Hieronimus, Erica Chen, Brooke Wheeler, Greer Dworman, Tyler Rai, Lariza Reyes, Gavino Limon

Concept, choreography and writing: Emily Johnson
Direction: Ain Gordon
Soundscore: James Everest and Nona Marie Invie with Fletcher Barnhill
Lighting: Heidi Eckwall
Costumes: Angie Vo
Scenic design: Johnson, Gordon, Everest, Ecwall

*****

REMINDER

It's going to be another cold night. If you're planning to see SHORE tonight, wear sufficiently warm clothing for standing around at the school and walking to the theater.

Do not arrive at New York Live Arts. Performances--tonight and tomorrow at 7:30pm--begin in the basketball court of PS 11: The William T. Harris School at 320 West 21st Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), Manhattan.

GET TICKETS HERE

*Additional SHORE events this Sunday

SHORE: FEAST Group Bike Ride*

Sunday, April 26 at 12:30pm
Red Lantern Bicycles, 345 Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn

Bicycling songwriter, poet, and SHORE cast member Ben Weaver, will lead a group bike ride starting at Red Lantern Bicycles in Brooklyn and ending 6 miles later at the North Brooklyn Boat Club where SHORE: FEAST will take place.

*Riders are responsible for getting themselves home from the feast.

Pre-register (FREE)

SHORE: FEAST (potluck celebration) at North Brooklyn Boat Club

Sunday, April 26, 2pm-6pm
North Brooklyn Boat Club, 49 Ash Street, Brooklyn
Under Pulaski Bridge, on Newtown Creek

Outdoor event: Please dress for the weather.

Pre-register (FREE)

For all information and tickets or RSVPs, click here.

Emily Johnson: A vision board for neighborhoods

Emily Johnson

What a treat to take part in Emily Johnson's Community Visioning workshop at Gibney Dance Center 280 Broadway this afternoon! It was totally fun.

All photos (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Born in south central Alaska of Yup'ik descent, Johnson is an internationally acclaimed performer and choreographer on the Minneapolis scene. She won a 2012 Bessie for The Thank-you Bar (Outstanding Production) and made another deep impression last year with the beautiful Niicugni at Baryshnikov Arts Center (read here). Now Johnson is building a New York edition of SHORE--originally presented in June in Minneapolis--for next spring at New York Live Arts. As part of her local research and development process, she offered today's free workshop, an event of Gibney Dance Center's Community Action Hub, inviting participants to think about where we live and work and what parts of our city hold special meaning for us.

Johnson started us out with black-and-white maps of the five boroughs taped to the wall, but they soon came alive with color as we decorated them with stickers (for our place of residence) and doodles (for places that strongly resonate with us).

Later, we brainstormed hundreds of ideas for fostering wellbeing for ourselves, our families, friends, streets and neighborhoods, and we turned the studio's wall into a candy-colored vision board. Choosing a few of these items at random, we gathered in small groups to further brainstorm individual actions that might help manifest those specific desires.

Visions take shape.
all photos (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

We had a great, and fairly sizable, bunch of folks, and our collaborative work took off right away with much good-natured laughter. It was wonderful to honor parts of New York that, though I might not have seen them in years, have shaped my life. I loved sharing, with everyone, a city's worth of hopes and dreams.

Learn more about Johnson and her upcoming projects at her Web site:

catalyst, dances by emily johnson.

InfiniteBody preview: New project due from Bessie-winning Emily Johnson

Emily Johnson
(photo by Cameron Wittig)

In this video, Emily Johnson--Minneapolis-based Bessie Award winner and 2013 Creative Capital grantee--looks ahead to her intriguing new project, Shore, set to premiere in June 2014. Shore is a work about "gathering to create connections" and warmly invites participants to forge community in numerous ways.

from Creative Capital on Vimeo

Shore is a multi-day performance/installation of dance, volunteerism, feasting and storytelling. It is a place audiences choose to visit once or many times, as participants or observers. The project develops in each venue over an extended period of time, requiring conversation and collaboration among organizations. Shore begins with a feast, followed by a night of curated storytelling. During the day, participants propose and carry out volunteer activities needed in their home communities. Staged performances that move from outdoors to the stage take place at night.

Learn more about Shore here.

Catalyst, Dances by Emily Johnson Web site

Explore videos from other Creative Capital artists here.

All that is: Emily Johnson at Baryshnikov Arts Center

See if you can you snare a ticket to tonight's concluding presentation of Niicugni--an interdisciplinary, movement-based work by Minneapolis-based Emily Johnson/Catalyst.

Presented at Baryshnikov Arts Center as part of PS 122's COIL fest, the 70-minute work offers rich storytelling through poetic words, movement, soundscape and scenic design--all reflecting the values inherent to Johnson's Central Alaskan Yup'ik heritage. It demonstrates and encourages empathy with all life--most memorably, those little red foxes imagined by Johnson and Aretha Aoki, on their nimble run through a forest and a batch of just-folks who periodically emerge from the audience to exalt in being part of the fabric of life.

If you manage to un-guard your heart and pay attention to subtle things--which is what the title, Niicugni, explicitly invites--you will perceive a gracefully-integrated, seductive work of art at the core of which is one rare, exquisite and charming performer, Emily Johnson. Oh, how I long to see more of her work!

Niicugni concludes its run tonight at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

It's alive!!! Radiohole at The Kitchen

I'm so mind-spun by all the APAP-connected presentations and confused by PS 122's peripatetic condition of late, that I ran a small risk of ending up at Baryshnikov Arts Center last night instead of The Kitchen where, for PS 122's COIL festival, the experimental, interdisciplinary theater troupe Radiohole (Erin Douglass, Eric Dyer and Maggie Hoffman) put on their Inflatable Frankenstein show in front of a hip and actually rather cool (not in a good way) audience. I'd had "The Kitchen" in my head, rightly, but had written "Baryshnikov Arts Center" on the dry erase board that helps keep me organized and my wife informed, and it was only until I was preparing to leave for the show that I realized that I'd been glancing at the exactly wrong thing all day, and the mistake just hadn't registered. I go to BAC tonight to see Emily Johnson!

Never having seen the legendary Radiohole--okay, relax: dance shows keep me a little busy--I'm unable to guess how high Inflatable Frankenstein would rank in their repertory, but the audacity of the hour-long show's elaborate design and execution impresses and tickles me. Hey, kids, let's "liberate Frankenstein from the long shadow of Boris Karloff!" Let's blow up Mary Shelley (literally and in more ways than one)! Go!

The troupe has littered Kitchen's performance space with everything from hi-tech whiz-bang to lo-tech aluminum mixing bowls filled with a pinkish substance like a particularly runny Silly Putty. In the recesses behind the central action, there's a whole big jumble of colorless...something (to be revealed later). We gaze on it apprehensively, past the actors and scenery, for nearly the entire time. Characters continuously shift names and identities (who's who? who's where? when's when?). What's the purpose for all of this mess? One of the play's funniest sequences happens right away when the actors discuss how Inflatable Frankenstein came to be and offer surprisingly competing views of what the show is about. Informal discourse quickly degenerates into speakers stepping all over one another's statements and, finally, a rapid plunge into artistic theoritizing so dense and garbled it might as well be baby-talk. Purpose? Purpose lurches this way and that throughout the hour like a big, misshapen creature stitched together and shot through with high voltage.

It's a good time. One can love it to pieces and love individual pieces--the sharp, wacky performances, the clever sound and visual elements, the allusions to James Whale's films--all spliced together with a sense of desperation and aggression, the kind of desperation and aggression that brings forth humor. I can't answer the question, What does it all add up to? Maybe there really can't and shouldn't be an answer--the troupe's notes quote Artaud: "...to be more precise would spoil the poetry of the thing"--but maybe that's why last night's audience, at the end, sounded polite but less than smitten.

See Inflatable Frankenstein at The Kitchen--for sure!--through January 19. For schedule and ticketing details, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

D'Amour and Pearl bring us "Terrible Things"

A bunch of bright lights worked on Terrible Things, which you can enjoy at Performance Space 122, now through December 20. Written by longtime partners-in-crime-and-OBIE, Lisa D'Amour and Katie Pearl, choreographed by Emily Johnson, the piece is wonderfully performed by Pearl, Johnson, Morgan Thorson, Karen Sherman and a couple of amiable wrestlers (Rudy De La Cruz and Adrian Czmielewski).

If you're typically overwhelmed at this time of year--by the bigness, the brashness, the commercial-ness of it all--you might appreciate the compact intimacy of Terrible Things. Compact, yes, but big in personality. Just like Pearl, its undisputed star.

Everything/everyone here seems to be located somewhere in Pearl's busy cranium, a place bustling with memories, like the legion of plump marshmallows aligned with impeccable, subatomic regularity across the theater's floor. In the opening, dancers carefully, efficiently move through this strange, snowy field, delicately scooping aside some marshmallows with their elongated, velvety arms and making shapes of small quantities of the sweets. This sets the stage for the space to open up and light up with room to move freely, the vividness of primary colors, Pearl's non-stop, embodied storytelling, and the mystery of parallel--but not perfectly sync-ed--worlds in the time-space continuum.

Terrible Things is a modest delight, a fine corrective for the excesses of the season.

Schedule details and ticketing here.