The Dance Enthusiast: IMPRESSIONS: "Being Future Being:Inside/Outwards" by Emily Johnson at New York Live Arts

The Dance Enthusiast: IMPRESSIONS: "Being Future Being:Inside/Outwards" by Emily Johnson at New York Live Arts

In Collaboration with and Performed by:

Ashely Pierre-Louis, Jasmine Shorty, Stacy Lynn Smith, Sugar Vendil, Emily Johnson

Composed by Raven Chacon // Sound Design and Engineering by Chloe Alexandra Thompson

Lighting Design by Itohan Edoloyi // Scenic Design by Emily Johnson and Joseph Silovsky

Mask, Wearables, Portal Design and Construction by IV Castellanos

Video Mapping and Filming by Chloe Alexandra Thompson // Quilt Beings Designed by Korina Emmerich

Quilts Designed by Maggie Thompson // Portal Tattoos by Holly Mitiquq Nordlum

Costume Design by Raphael Regan // Costume Draping by Cathleen O’Neal

Climbing atop a parked car on West 19th Street, outside New York Live Arts, Yup’ik Nation member and creator Emily Johnson, with a megaphone in hand, encourages the assembled watchers to “pay attention to the gifts given - our hearts, our lungs.” Unhurriedly, we begin to breathe together and play our parts as fellow social protest activists. Our rapt attention reflects the charismatic Johnson’s persona.

Johnson’s conversational tone contrasts with her assertive rage. “I can never speak of the horror,” she shouts, “but then I do.” She refers to our collective knowledge of planet degradation, the genocide of Native peoples, and the inequities experienced by many. In response, we are invited to stomp, legs wide, in what Johnson refers to as “rising stomp.” This beat of outcry recalls the Land Back movement, an acknowledgment of Indigenous rights. “When I jump on you (land), you hold me,” declares Johnson.

Johnson’s skill turns this staged event into something beyond theater. It is as if we’ve willingly assembled to protest rather than have simply purchased a ticket for a show. The protest is real for ticket holders and passersby alike. This is our chance and the earth’s chance for a future being.  We travel “underneath,” journeying to a place where the spirits abide. We are essential to Johnson and her company.

Johnson invites 20 audience members from the sold-out crowd of over 200 to follow her, and I quickly scoot into the line of the self-chosen. We are escorted onto the spacious NYLA stage and take our places amidst three mysterious women ‘totems’ dressed in piled-high patchwork quilts. The totems represent sacred beings that serve as emblems for our NYLA clan community. A 10-foot mound of grass and dirt is situated upstage. In front of the mound, stands a woman cradling a folded quilt. Her demeanor, contemplative and mildly watchful, feels all-knowing and implies the immortal. Pulsing projections that resemble a petri dish of protozoa squirm on two walls.

The veiled, resplendent quilt beings swish between onlookers, pausing long enough for us to read messages written on the trains of their patchwork squares: "Patience, Security, Open-Mindedness, I want to be with my dog." Designed by Maggie Thompson, the quilts were stitched by hundreds of sewers and then sculpted by Korina Emmerich.  An eerie hum emanates from these spirits. One, the enigmatic Sugar Vendil, directs each of us with her mouthed whistle to sit on a chair.

“Hi, I’m Jasmine. Can someone open this door for me?” a persistent voice repeats. Finally,  a member of our group walks to the stage door and complies. Dancer Jasmine Shorty, who earlier was the quilt holder, a ritualistic figure,  now has become a regular, contemporary person.  She exits through the stage door, runs two flights into the lobby, and then bangs on the audience entrance door to come back in.  Again, someone finally lets her in. This continues for several rounds.  It's almost vaudevillian. The audience has been pulled in as problem solvers.

 Meanwhile, Vendil, long, dark hair fringed in blond, reenters the stage. Dressed in a handsome sage green jumper, ruffles swinging along her back, she splits into a deep, resonant second position. Fists clenched behind her thighs; she pounds the floor with weighted feet. The pounding seems to release the supernatural from the earth, thereby summoning the “underneath.” With this, the tenor of the room shifts.

The dancers, including Ashley Pierre-Louis, Stacy Lynn Smith, and Johnson stir the space and audience areas with sticks. Large, ferocious bounding movements, leaps, and kicks contrast with small twinkling steps on releve. Arms swing above rotating wrists, fingers flick and spines undulate. Sounds in the throat, an ohhhh or a whisper, are discerned. This extended passage of unrelenting, captivating movement is rich with detail, both large and small. The mound is nominally ascended by two dancers who fling dirt onto the floor.

The entire cast eventually dances together in an enthralling build. As one seated amid the action, I am entranced. Accompanied by an electric electronic score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Raven Chacon, deep sonorous sounds resemble thunder, explosions, rumblings, and wind. Each crackling flash of sound slides into the next. At this liminal moment, all things are prophetically possible. The future looks to the present and the present gazes at the past.

Johnson has brought us to a different place altogether where each tree, animal, rock, flowing stream, and star is oracular. “The forest is an archive of breath.” Everything is part of this breathing spirit and central to Indigeneity. Johnson, with her many collaborators, has revealed the arcane. It's a compelling vision.

New York Times: A Choreographer Who Merges Art, Activism and the Natural World

A Choreographer Who Merges Art, Activism and the Natural World

On a warm fall Saturday, about 30 people walked together down Houston Street on the Lower East Side, heading toward East River Park. A trumpeter led the way, sounding occasional notes that marked the path forward. Close behind, two volunteers held a banner that read, in hand-drawn letters, “The Forest Is an Archive of Breath.” Passing cars honked, a reminder that this was something out of the ordinary.

While it might have looked unusual from the outside, the procession felt right at home within the larger body of work of Emily Johnson, the choreographer whose latest project, “Being Future Being,” had brought us together. Merging art and activism, Johnson’s expansive work often brings its viewer-participants into outdoor public spaces, drawing our attention to the land beneath and around us — to what has been here before and what could be in the future. She heightens our awareness that this place widely called New York is a part of Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people, Manhattan’s first (human) inhabitants. And that before colonization and concrete, there were forests, or what Johnson sometimes calls “our more-than-human kin.”

An Indigenous artist of the Yup’ik nation in Alaska, Johnson, who lives on the Lower East Side, has been a leader in protests against the projected destruction of 1,000 trees in East River Park, part of a flood mitigation plan known as the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project. In “Being Future Being” — which unfolded over two weekends in two parts, at the park and then New York Live Arts — she and her collaborators commune with trees in both direct and elusive ways. The trees, in a sense, are also collaborators, essential to Johnson’s imagining of a more just future, in which land is restored to its original people, and in which people live in reciprocity with land.

Our walk across town in “Land/Celestial” — the first part of “Being Future Being” — led us to the threshold between the bulldozed section of the park, where hundreds of trees have already been cut down, and the section stretching north that, for now, remains intact. At the chain-link fence that separates the two, we were greeted by guides known as land defenders and split into three groups to witness three short performances.

My group followed our guide along the sparkling riverfront to a shady grove, where colorful handmade quilts — a signature of Johnson’s gatherings, designed by Maggie Thompson — awaited us on the ground. After the heat of the midday sun, strong even in mid-October, the shade of the tall trees was refreshing. We sat and watched as two performers, one in a stunning sound-emitting quilt sculpture (designed by Korina Emmerich) slowly diverged from each other. As the Quilt Being (Jasmine Shorty) walked toward the water, Stacy Lynn Smith danced restlessly among fallen leaves, as if gnarled roots were snaking up through her limbs.

“Do you remember that story I told you about the tree? I’ll tell it again,” Johnson said in her 2012 work “Niicugni” and again in “Shore” (2014). Back at the chain-link fence, she told a story about a tree once more, but this time just to a single audience member. Johnson then peeled away and linked up in a duet with the dancer Sugar Vendil, leaving the listener to relay the story to the rest of the group. If the details were a bit blurry, the message about the intelligence of trees came through: They are capable of listening.

That idea extended into a third vignette, during which the dancer Ashley Pierre-Louis introduced us to a tree that she called Fire Tree, with which she had “built a very strong connection.” Its branches, she pointed out, arched away from the demolition to the south.

A week later, on Friday night, Johnson climbed on top of a parked car on West 19th Street, outside of New York Live Arts. The audience for Part 2, “Being Future Being: Inside/Outwards,” gathered on the sidewalk, as she spoke into a megaphone, at one point shaking with rage. “What if right now,” she proposed in a calmer moment, “every one of us turned every one of our cells toward justice?”

When we entered the theater, it was through a circuitous backstage route, which had us approaching the performance space not from above but from under. This felt emblematic of Johnson’s method: to come at seemingly immovable problems a bit obliquely, from the ground up, and in this way, to make us pay attention.

In the performance that followed, images resurfaced from “Land/Celestial.” Three Quilt Beings roamed among audience members who had been invited to sit onstage. A tall mound of soil rested in one corner, a bed of leaves in another. Black-and-white projections of tree branches formed a fragmented, rustling backdrop. Raven Chacon’s entrancing score suggested a mingling of nature and violence. The dancers cut fiercely across this landscape, adding layers to the sound with their audible breath and the rhythm of a step that Johnson, atop the car, had introduced as the “rising stomp”: feet wide apart and knees bent, heels lifting then digging into the ground.

On Friday, the show was followed by a moving conversation with Branch of Knowledge, a group of Lenape matriarchs representing all of the federally recognized Lenape nations. One of the women, Lauryn French, spoke about how her ancestors had been displaced 28 times to arrive at their current home in Oklahoma.

Generational differences emerged. Elizabeth French, one of the eldest, said with a laugh that taking back land is “not going to happen.” The artist River Whittle, who is younger, joyfully countered: “I am going to say ‘land back.’ I do expect it.” The group reflected on how visiting New York, which some were doing for the very first time, is a powerful homecoming. As one member of the collective said: “I love it. I belong here. I know it.”

Forbes: New York Live Arts Presents Work Of Emily Johnson ‘Being Future Being’

New York Live Arts Presents Work Of Emily Johnson ‘Being Future Being’

Being Future Being is a new work by artist Emily Johnson which combines movement, images, story and sound into a piece where the focus is Indigenous thriving. It will have a related performance outdoors on October 15th and a New York premiere at New York Live Arts from October 20th through the 22nd. The October 21st show will have a Stay Late post-show conversation with individuals from the Branch of Knowledge, a collective of Lenape matriarchs who are building power by gathering together and collaborating with accomplices who live in their homelands.

Johnson is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim and United States Artists Fellow and a recipient of a Doris Duke Artist Award based out of New York City. She is of the Yup’ik Nation and, since 1998, has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing a performance. Her choreography and gatherings have been featured across the country and in Australia.

“We are excited to welcome Emily to New York Live Arts for the third time. It is a privilege to witness the evolution of an artist who has been boldly forging Indigenous futurity in every aspect of her practice. We cherish the opportunity to learn and evolve as an organization,” said Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong, Artistic Leadership at New York Live Arts.

Being Future Being’s creative team includes Diné composer Raven Chacon, sound designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson, who is Cree; visual artist, designer and traditional tattooer Holly Mititquq Nordlum, who is Iñupiaq, IV Castellanos, who is mx Indige Quechua/Guaraní, created the masks and wearables and served as the production manager. Quilt-Beings were designed by Korina Emmerich, who is Puyallup, with quilts designed by Maggie Thompson, who is Fond du Lac Ojibwe. Costumes were created by Raphael Regan, who is Sisseton-Wahpeton, Eastern Band of Cherokee and Diné. Joesph Silovsky served as Scenic fabricator with lighting design by Itohan Edoloyi. The performers featured in the piece are Ashley Pierre- Louise, Jasmine Shorty, which is Diné, Stacy Lynn Smith and Sugar Vendil.

Forbes spoke with Johnson about the process of creating Being Future Being during the pandemic. We also discussed what she learned while creating this piece and what the audience response has been so far.

Risa Sarachan: Being Future Being is a vast collaborative effort. How did you gather your collaborators?

Emily Johnson: Being Future Being is a team of collaborators who are powerful within a strong kinstillatory network, working with the intention of being in the better future we desire, deserve and work for. The makers and performers of Being Future Being are activating technologies of transformation.

The dancers, Stacy Lynn Smith, Ashley Pierre-Louis, Sugar Vendil, and Jasmine Shorty, are dancing at the cellular level – turning the attention of their cells toward justice, a reorientation that could be learned. We protect one another in the process of performing this work and we collaborate with more-than-human kin in exchange for deepening reciprocal protection and communication.

IV Castellanos, who works as Interkinnector with our Architecture of the Overflow structure then thinks through these protections and crafts ways to build replicable, locally responsive, Indigenous-centered actions that encourage collective community self-determination, direct response, support, and action with local land protection efforts.

Sarachan: What initially inspired it?

Johnson: Being Future Being came from a desire to conjure a better future in the present. My friend Allison Warden recently reminded me that we, Inuit peoples, are always living in our future and so in a way there is no future, and yet, what an Indigenous futurism this is.

Raven Chacon, who composed the sound score for Being Future Being, once told me he doesn’t think of the future. Indigenous peoples are not and were not meant to have futures vis-à-vi the ongoing settler colonial project. Our existence, our thrivance: is always. I think this is a radical way to think of the future, too.

Sarachan: What did you learn while working on it?

Johnson: In many ways, each of the performance works I make teaches me what is next. For more than a decade, I have been working with collaborators and communities of people who think through and activate the questions, “What do you want for your well-being? For the well-being of your chosen friends and family? Your communities? Your world?”

Thousands of ponderings to these questions and hundreds of ideas were written on 84 hand-stitched quilts, themselves made with communities across what is currently called the United States and Australia, and Taiwan. A student, then a recent refugee to Australia, looked at the quilts and the answers they and their colleagues were talking over and said, “Oh, I see, these are like maps to the future.”

My dear collaborator Karyn Recollet and I like to think of these quilts as vessels, as transportation devices. They were designed by Fond du Lac Ojibwe artist Maggie Thompson and have served as house and home, warmth and comfort for multiple performances and Kinstillatory gatherings through the years. They are transformed again for Being Future Being by designer Korina Emmerich who crafted them into grounded and fantastic worn structures, which we call Quilt-Beings. I think these quilts, or rather, everyone who stitched and transcribed their real hopes into them – told me to start making Being Future Being. Something said, we need to live in that better future, now.

Sarachan: Did COVID change the process or delay it?

Johnson: Making this work through the realities of the pandemic became part of our work. In a related performance, The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better, Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being, a cast of ten came together outside in late summer 2020 to rehearse. We gathered in a wide circle with lots of distance between us in our masks, and we recognized each other and that this was the first time most of us had seen and been in proximity of others in months. What a responsibility, to remember what the pandemic taught and is teaching us.

In early 2020, along with most performing artists, all of my contracts and promises of contracts were canceled. The ensuing document co-authored by a collective of arts workers, Creating New Futures: Working Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in Presenting Dance and Performance and initiatives like We See you White American Theater called for structural change and justice in the performing arts world and beyond. We are still in the midst of demanding the necessary outcomes.

The biggest threat to Being Future Being actually came before the pandemic with realities of racial injustice, sexism and structural violence. The experiences of which are detailed in a document I published in early 2021 titled, A Letter I Hope in the Future, Doesn’t Need to Be Written.

Sarachan: How does your activism inform your creative work?

Johnson: There is no separation between anti-colonial futures and present LandBack, abolitionist and solidarity efforts. Just as there is not a separation, for me, between the making of performance, the structural decolonization work that occurs during and within, and the lived joy of gathering with other humxns and our more than human kin - in effort. I suppose Being Future Being has been teaching me, in the present, to understand this more expansively than I did before.

Sarachan: What do you hope Being Future Being will bring to its audience? What do you hope it might bring to Indigenous communities?

Johnson: Being Future Being is in relation to the ground. Even if we are on a stage, we are thinking of the land underneath. We are with that ground. Being Future Being, through its sound, movement and activating attention takes down the walls. I understand this doesn’t actually physically happen in the moment of performance, but we become part of the vital activation against barriers, imposed limitations, structural violence, and colonial notions of the border. And we ask audiences to become part, too.

Being Future Being is necessarily agitating. And I believe it agitates the right people. During our premiere in Los Angeles, some of these people walked out of the theater. This is part of the definition, part of a crucial discernment; this is finding our allies, our accomplices. We can all gather here. And those who choose are invited to stay in a long process of the overflow, to show up again and again for local land protection efforts, in the ways they are explicitly asked to.

Fjord Review: Land Back Now

Land Back Now: Emily Johnson’s Latest Work Brings An Indigenized Future to New York Live Arts

“That dancing in/of past, present, and future is a shaking, is a way of transforming this place we are caught up in, this place of knowing only one way of knowing, of forced worldview, of bunkers on mountains, of concrete levee, of rising heat, of 1000 dead trees, of nothing in promise, no sound of bee or bird or place to fish or carry on, for career, for nothing real, for what you have been sold, for a future you…”

—Emily Johnson, excepted from “That dancing in/of past, present, and future is a shaking…,” The Poetry Project Newsletter #266, Fall 2021, East River Park Feature.

It is the end of September, and I am sitting on a bench in East River Park in Manhattan with choreographer Emily Johnson. Before colonization, this area was known as Manahatta, the hilly island home of the Lenape people. It feels impossible for me to be in Johnson’s presence and not acknowledge this fact; as we talk she continually draws my attention away from the construction trucks obscuring our view of the waterfront and back to the land of Lenapehoking.

We sit just north of 25 acres of park that have just been bulldozed as part of New York City’s East Side Coastal Resiliency Project. This contentious public works project was unveiled last year in the final days of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration and replaced an award-winning, community-backed flood mitigation plan called the Big U that addressed all of lower Manhattan. I am shocked to learn that 700 old-growth trees have already been cut down to relocate the park on top of an 8-foot seawall. In the second phase of construction, 500 more trees will be lost. I am also stunned by my own ignorance: I had no idea there was anywhere in Manhattan, outside of Central Park, where that many trees had still existed in one place. But Johnson has been keenly aware of their presence, having spent some years enjoying the wildness of her neighborhood park and then, for the last year, protesting daily in it. Adding to the trauma that is so deeply felt by Johnson and many other allies in the community and neighborhood, the southern tip of this park-turned-construction site, Corlears Hook, is also the site of a Lenape massacre.

Johnson belongs to the Yup’ik Nation and grew up in Alaska. Her long and deep relationship with trees, and her efforts to save them, informs her latest dance work “Being Future Being.” On the heels of its premiere at the Broad Stage on the Tongva land known as Santa Monica, Emily Johnson/Catalyst brings Johnson’s multi-faceted production and activism to New York Live Arts October 20-22, with a special off-site performance of “Being Future Being: Land /Celestial on October 15” (location in Lower Manhattan will be shared with ticket holders on the day of the event). Rich in texture and featuring an original score from Pulitizer Prize-winning Diné composer Raven Chacon and larger-than-life quilt beings from designer Korina Emmerich (Coast Salish Territory, Puyallup tribe), this evening-length performance has been years in the making and involves a dizzying number of creators and collaborators.

The development of this work began during the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. Johnson began to have daily Zoom calls with her longtime collaborator, the Urban Cree scholar Karyn Recollet. Through “Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter”—an ongoing project at Abrons Arts Center that gathers community around a ceremonial fire—Johnson and Recollect have long been committed to fostering connections between people and nature.

There was one tree Johnson could see out of her window during those days of isolation and she moved her to desk to face it. “It’s a way of being in relation with one another and more-than-human kin,” explains Johnson. “Through this many year collaboration with Karyn and the kinstillatory fire, Covid and our daily calls, and the tree outside the window, we started the process of thinking about how to work with trees collaboratively.”

Simultaneously, Johnson and Chacon had a series of conversations.

“We began the process by just talking to each other, discussing ideas, talking about our individual philosophies of the world we live in,” says Chacon. “In her case, it was this interest in protecting trees and connecting with the plant world and the ways they communicate and interact with us, and the knowledge that they hold. That led to discussions about forms and shapes and patterns, things that I could start thinking about in terms of music or notation or durations of sound.”

Once Chacon took in rehearsal with the dancers and got a sense of the movements and physical gestures, he knew where he wanted to begin. His process involved gathering various sounds while also utilizing Johnson’s text: the wind, sticks breaking, sticks tracing words into the ground, Johnson’s whispers. The resulting sound score is highly responsive to the environment.

“In line with my practice, it’s constant and perpetual improvisation,” says Chacon, “that’s where Emily and I connected. We feel that this piece is malleable, and sounds might change. They have to change because the site will change, meaning things have to be tuned every time.”

 A bubble residency at Jacob’s Pillow folded Diné dancer Jasmine Shorty into the process. Nearly alone on the famed campus in the Berkshires, Johnson and Shorty tapped into the language of the trees.

“It really started with, all right, how do I physically spend time with a tree? And which tree?”Johnson laughs. “At first I went up to the tree, but then there was a feeling that that wasn’t quite the thing. And so we spent a lot of time and figuring out what is that first introduction.”

Through their deep listening and trying to take in the wholeness of a tree, they found the most resonance when they stood under the outer branch spread of the tree, which also happened to mirror the reach of the roots system. Eventually, they could trace a circle around the tree with their eyes closed.

“If I closed my eyes, I could feel that magnetism on the outskirts of the tree,” says Shorty. “I could walk really slowly around the tree and if I opened my eyes I’d be exactly in the perimeter. It opened me up to being able to feel and be guided by this kind of inner energy.”

New to experiencing trees in this way, Shorty found that this slow work altered her relationship with time, offering her a quality she can use on stage: “It’s not like I have 10 minutes and I do the choreography and then I’m done. It’s almost like I’m moving before the dance piece starts and I tap into this slow-moving river that extends after the piece ends.”

But not all the movement, and sounds, are calm or meditative. Johnson has been working with a movement she calls a “rising stomp,” where feet pound into the earth from a wide-legged stance, focusing on the oppositional energy coming up from the ground. She also notes that there are challenging moments in Chacon’s composition. Chacon emphasizes that his conceptual process means that some of the sounds in the score aren’t necessarily sounds he likes or even listens to:

“From a listening perspective, the sounds themselves might have nothing to do with trees. However, they are made is through these actions of great respect to the trees and to the land and the communication of the people involved, and all the dancers making actions that create sound, which then get recorded and put back into the soundtrack that they’re working with.”

And then there are the “quilt beings.” Emmerich crafted these wearable textile sculptures from quilts designed by Maggie Thompson (Fond du Lac Ojibwa) and stitched by hundreds of people for Johnson’s 2017 durational work “Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars.”

“We didn’t want to cut up the quilts, so I draped folds and did a lot of hand sewing on them,” says Emmerich. “The armature creates a different head, so the dancer is almost 12 feet tall when she has it on, looking a little bit otherworldly.”

Inside these elements are intense movement scores created in collaboration and performed by Johnson and Shorty, along with Ashley Pierre-Louis, Stacy Lynn Smith, and Sugar Vendil. One of the scores asks the dancers to “orient all of your cells toward justice.”

For Johnson, justice seems to be synonymous with the Land Back movement. Even the sticky notes she puts up on the wall of her apartment to help her plan Catalyst’s projects are all arranged under the note reading, “Land Back.”

Land Back is a term that encompasses various methods for re-establishing and respecting Indigenous political authority. Though the movement’s name derives from the largest of these reparative goals—ceding Indigenous lands back to Indigenous peoples—Johnson is committed to the supporting efforts too. 

“It’s been the call for 500 years, but it is the call of the moment. Land back is title transfer, yes. But it’s also a multitude of other things. Sometimes creating the possibility for what can be next, and people being in relation to land is the most important thing. It is up to Indigenous folks and our allies and accomplices to figure out multiple, different ways.”

In a way, “Being Future Being” is an embodiment of this movement. The performances are only one element, or branch, of Johnson’s multi-pronged approach to create a radically just and Indigenized future we can all share in now. “Being Future Being” is also informed by the Branch of Knowledge—a group of womxn and femmes of the Lenape diaspora organized and stewarded by River Little of the Caddo Nation and Delaware Nations Oklahoma (Lenni Lenape)—and is arranging support for 20 members of the Lenape community to visit Manahatta for the first time.

This outreach is important connective tissue for Johnson and something she does not take for granted after a negative experience with a presenter almost derailed this project. “Being Future Being” was originally set to be presented at Montclair State University as part of Peak Performances. On January 20, 2021, Johnson wrote a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts detailing, among other questionable and unethical experiences, the verbal abuse she suffered during a meeting when she inquired about Peak Performances’s Land Acknowledgment and requested a commitment to the decolonization process. The letter explained why she found it necessary to break off the relationship, foregoing the $100,000 commissioning fee (to which the NEA had contributed grant money) and rallied a diverse group of arts workers to collectively draft Creating New Futures: Working Guidelines for Ethics & Equity in Presenting Dance & Performance.

Catalyst now codifies such commitments like “engag[ing] directly with Indigenous community,” in their Decolonization Rider and Johnson has even led a cohort of presenters, including Live Arts, including Live Arts, in an 8-month Decolonization Track. In the recently created role of Interkinector, IV Castellanos endeavors to make sure Catalyst “walks in a good way, in every aspect,” in every community they touch, whether it is drawing attention to saving East River Park in New York City or spending some hours in solidarity with Indigenous people trying to save a sacred spring while they are on tour in Santa Monica.

“It’s just being conscious,” says Castellanos. “The Interkinector is the attempt to try to micro-analyze all of those little parts. We can shape all these aspects of how we’re operating as a company, as people, and then that can actually make a difference. And if everyone was doing that, we would be able to shape and shift things in a better way consistently.”

While many choreographers tackle political issues in their dances and can be credited with bringing awareness to them, Johnson stands out for the deliberate actions she takes to move the work beyond the stage and inspire real world change. She has even invented a term for it: the Architecture of Overflow.

“How can a performance project that has a certain moment where people gather together, how can that serve as just the starting point?” Johnson asks. “What is the architecture of the overflow that can support local land events going into the future? Is that physical? Is that spiritual? Is that financial?”

She intends for the philosophy and values that have guided Catalyst, started a reckoning with presenters and funders, and birthed “Being Future Being” to extend beyond the performance. Ultimately, she wants to transform your relationship to the land you inhabit. Right now. And she is still determined to save what is left of East River Park.

Walking back past the construction site together, I ask her how she manages the grief she feels over the loss of so many trees. Her eyes begin to cloud as she tells me about the network of Land Back movements that are happening all over Turtle Island. These pockets of resistance give her strength and perspective.

“This is an active site of destruction but also of protection . . . we don’t have to destroy this half [of the park]. This can still become a truly resilient project, which it isn’t right now. So, there is hope too.”

Review: The Eli and Edythe BroadStage: Emily Johnson/Catalyst - Being Future Being

Review: The Eli and Edythe BroadStage: Emily Johnson/Catalyst - Being Future Being

Commissioned by BroadStage, Emily Johnson /Catalyst presented the world premier of “Being Future Being,” a highly engaging and multi-dimensional performance piece that integrates movement, story, imagery, ritual, social practice art in the context of  honoring an indigenous perspective to how we relate to our humanity and the environment we share. The work was created by Doris Duke and Bessie Award-winning choreographer and writer Emily Johnson, who belongs to the Yup’ik Nation, and features a commissioned score by Pulitzer Prize-winning Diné composer Raven Chacon.

We initially gathered outside in the theater courtyard under a dark sky, cool breeze and light drizzle where we are welcomed, with a statement common to many public gatherings in Santa Monica, to recognize that the land on which BroadStage currently stands is the ancestral unceded territory of the Tongva, Gabrielino, and Kizh peoples.

Emily Johnson, wearing shorts and megaphone in hand, and whose demeanor is warm, casual and comforting, invites us to follow her around the building to a starting place at the rear of the theater. Here she tells some family anecdotes and poses a few reflective questions, “What if we were meant to be right here, right now?” and “Notice all the gifts we brought?” She then leads us, with legs bent, to stomp on the ground, and to consider “What if the land lifts us up?

This movement and idea, a theme that runs through the evening’s performance. As she is known to blur the boundary between audience and performers, she invites 21 people to join her and enter the theater to take places on the stage and to be present there throughout the performance. I choose to be one of these people. After we take our places standing on assigned marks and the audience is seated, the performance more formally begins as a trio of ”Quilt Beings” moving sculptures hum and float amongst us. 

Afterwards chairs are brought out for us as we continue to “witness” the ritualistic movements of the dancers. We are then motioned to take our chairs to the side of the stage as the dancers begin a sustained choreographed performance. The scene and mood evokes a shadowy cavernous primordial mountain setting where the earth quakes as the dancers explore the environment, rush about and stomp in energetic emotional release.. Sitting calmly on stage with the lights in my eyes, I am able to closely see the dancers expressions, hear their heavy breathing and feel the vibrations of their movements. As the performance concludes with rousing applause, I slowly rise to leave the stage, relaxed in-my-body feeling in a slight altered state as I navigate through the theater into the rainy night.

There is so much to appreciate about Johnson’s work that is described in the  program notes as well as in a cover story article in the September 2022 issue of “Dance Magazine.” She takes her work into social action feeling that we need a better future now and “Being Future Being” relates to what she calls the “Speculative Architecture of the Overflow”, which is Indigenous-led and developed in collaboration with community organizers, land defenders, and water protectors in ways that foster Indigenous kinship, accomplices, and audience relationships.

The creative team includes choreographer/writer/performer Emily Johnson; composer Raven Chacon; sound designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson, who is Cree; visual artist, designer, and traditional tattooer Holly Mititquq Nordlum, who is Iñupiaq; IV Castellanos, who is mx Indige Quechua/Guaraní, made the masks and wearables and is production manager and interconnector for the “Speculative Architecture of the Overflow.” Quilt-Beings are designed by Korina Emmerich, who is Puyallup, with quilts (redistributed from Johnson’s “Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars)” designed by Maggie Thompson, who is Fond du Lac Ojibwe. Costumes are by Raphael Regan, who is Sisseton-Wahpeton, Eastern Band of Cherokee and Diné. Scenic fabricator is Joseph Silovsky, lighting designer is Itohan Edoloyi, and performers are Ashley Pierre-Louis, Jasmine Shorty, who is Diné, Stacy Lynn Smith, and Sugar Vendil. “Being Future Being” is produced by George Lugg. The administrative steward is Kevin Holden, who is Diné.