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 Examining physical and emotional extremes by magnifying the most pervasive realities of everyday life, the intensely layered and detailed work of Catalyst, dances by emily johnson takes a fierce and empathetic look at what we put ourselves through in order to be the very best, how we handle the delicacy and explosiveness of our days, why we fit ourselves into the roles the rules tell us to take, and how we watch others live their lives more closely than we watch our own.
Yes, it looks a little different. This year's list of Austin Critics Table Awards has been slenderized from 51 categories to 37. So why are there fewer awards if Austin's arts scene has continued to expand? Because the scene is shifting, not just growing. Creative production across the disciplines — visual arts, theater, classic music and dance — has filled out more equally. The roster of indie galleries and visual art happenings — along with activities at museums — has exploded in the past few years. And local dance producers surprise with ever new ways to intrigue audiences while the classical music scene proceeds at a steady clip. How we wrap our minds around culture shifts, too. Fifteen years ago, the original Critics' Table Awards were roughly modeled after the Tony Awards, down to the gender distinctions between actor and actress. Perhaps that made sense when the Tonys started in 1947 as a means to celebrate Broadway. But does the gender divide make sense in 2007 in Austin when recognizing multiple arts disciplines? The Austin Critics' Table thought not. Hence, our informal and independent group of staff and freelance critics from the Austin American-Statesman and the Austin Chronicle refashioned the way we recognize annual achievement in the arts. Join us at the free, casual awards ceremony at 7 p.m. Monday, June
4, at Cap City Comedy Club, 8120 Research Boulevard. We'll celebrate
this year's inductees to the Austin Arts Hall of Fame and announce
Critics' Table Award winners.
On Saturday I found myself cycling through the drizzling rain to The World Financial Center, an office building on the western edge of the former World Trade Center site. The occasion was Lisa D’Amour and Katie Pearl’s astonishing site-specific performance piece, Bird Eye Blue Print, presented in several rooms in an abandoned office for small audiences of 22 at a time. Upon receiving my ticket in the building’s lobby, I was asked to jot down my “point of origin” on a scrap of paper and wait. In due time I was approached by an eager woman in a red dress and escorted with a few others down a hallway to a small “orientation room” where a hand-drawn map of the city had been illustrated with multi-colored lines charting each spectator’s path to the performance. It was a fitting reminder of our little temporary community’s interconnectedness. Mention was made of “The Raw Space” that we would sadly not be permitted to enter, and we were then led to a main office space, where the rest of the audience sat on the floor before the mysterious “Blue Dress Lady” (Lisa D’Amour). There was the sound of exotic birds punctuated by an occasional lion’s roar. Seven other “Red Dress Girls” drifted through the space, offering saltines or lounging on window sills. Before leading us on an ethereal and wildly imaginative tour through her home – the suite of offices – The Blue Dress Lady told us a little about her life; the way her sister used to dress her up like a tree and her contemplative lifestyle in the office, which used to have a glacier passing through it. With a spellbinding fusion of choreography by Emily Johnson, exquisite sound design by Jimmy Garver and visual design by Krista Kelley Walsh, the performers transformed the office rooms into a mystically-charged alternate reality, where a hallway could be an optical illusion, and a room covered with lists and hanging light bulbs could approach the sublime. There were far too many intimate moments, funny utterances and inspired details in this extraordinary performance to enumerate here; and unfortunately I cannot encourage you to see it for yourself – it ended yesterday after an all-too-brief four day run. (Don’t say we didn’t warn you!) But next time D’Amour and Pearl bring their enchanting work to town be sure to take it in; Bird Eye Blue Print sent me off into the rain with that sensation I’m always seeking in art, that sense of being ever so slightly more connected to myself and others. When the “tour” ended, each visitor was invited to reach into The Blue Dress Lady’s storage closet, which opened up into the forbidden Raw Space, and select one card from a little pile. Mine, now set in front of my computer monitor, bears hand-written text that reads: “and you are so close you could almost touch it.”
In a world framed by imminent danger and constant environmental loss, how do people continue to live? Emily Johnson and her Minneapolis-based dance company Catalyst make a complicated stab at creating and populating that kind of anxious world in their evening-length work "Heat and Life," performed Thursday at Gallery Lombardi. With wit, off-kilter, yet aggressive movement, and small moments of simple beauty, the group confronted and nearly overwhelmed its audience. Constantly recostuming themselves, the six women in the cast appeared to represent characters ranging from a hazmat team in traffic-cone orange to camouflaged nature warriors whose boots and cargo pants matched the color of sod spread through the gallery. Always moving with absolute commitment and focus (which is what made me so willing to trust the dancers even when the work seemed most abstract), the cast ran back and forth, shouting each others' names into walkie-talkies. Frightened chaos gave way to beauty and humor at times. A projected film slowly lapsed from lush green fields to mountainous glacier walls with clips of oil refineries and other environmental hazards interspersed. Once two dancers lolled on their backs atop the sod as a voiceover remembered the pleasures of childhood-romps through grass. Near the work's end one dancer gave another quick instructions about how to move, creating a fast-paced, hilarious "Simon Says." All these vignettes occurred amid red, blinking lights and haunting live music by J.G. Everest, a constant reminder that breakdown, be it natural or human, always lingers.
Emily Johnson doesn’t consider her work “activist art.” Though the endangered natural environment has been her theme in several works, the soft-spoken, slender choreographer and dancer says she owes her vision as much to the exploratory vocabulary of contact improvisation as the natural world of her Alaskan childhood. Praised by Minneapolis critics for the clean, strong physicality of her movement as well as her readiness to take on pertinent issues, Johnson is winning grants and attracting national recognition. Performing on the spit/sluice we are outlaws this past June in a tiny theater adjacent to a bowling alley in Minneapolis, Johnson emanated a ferocity-laced sweetness in a duet, performed with dancer Susan Scalf, that she originally choreographed on a spit of land in her native Alaska. Johnson’s sharp, truncated movements contrasted with Scalf’s more robust presence and whipping limbs, with both styles interspersed with the occasional spoken word or shout. The props included a blue tarp, representing the Mississippi River, in which Johnson rolled herself. At one point, dancers threw glasses of water on windows, then quickly tried to staunch the downward flow with their fingers. In her freshman year as a scholarship student studying physical therapy at the University of Minnesota, Johnson took a dance class - and changed her major. She studied ballet and modern dance, but her biggest influence at the university was contact improvisation guru Chris Aiken. “Dance improvisation has been a huge force in my training ever since,” she says. “I feel that’s where my base is.” (She has also studied improvisation with Julyen Hamilton, Jennifer Monson, and Nancy Stark Smith.) Johnson, 30, who is on-eighth Yup’ik Eskimo, acquired her environmental sensitivity while growing up on the Kenai Peninsula, where she relished her family’s hunting, camping, and fishing trips. Her mother worked as a special-education teacher’s aide; her father was an electrician. Johnson played varsity basketball and ran cross-country in high school. As a child, her only dance training was a “tap and tumble” class, she recalls. After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1998, Johnson turned out a prolific body of lean, rigorous, abstract choreography performed by Catalyst, her company of powerful young women. Spoken text, sports metaphors, children’s games, and props entered into the work, while Johnson fused humor, drama, and movement into riveting minimalist pieces both thought-provoking and entertaining.” Works like Power Play (2001) examined competitive sports via Johnson’s muscular modern dance idiom. Never Meant to Hurt (2003) realized a beautiful text on love and loneliness through an unsentimental choreography of tension and release, grasping and flinging away, long open moves, and angled limbs - all of which enhanced the work’s mystery. In 2004, the Walker Art Center commissioned and produced Johnson’s most ambitious word to date, Heat and Life. Performed in an old soap factory near downtown Minneapolis, it was accompanied by an electronic ambient soundscape created by Lateduster, a group led by Johnson’s husband, JG Everest. The dances performed the stripped-sown choreography with single-minded purpose. They walked, ran, and reconfigured themselves like a SWAT team, representing her vision of a world already reeling from the effects of global warming. But Johnson’s use of the site and space, and music and movement were a flashback to the performances of dance makers in the 1960’s and ‘70s. it was the piece that Johnson brought this summer to New York’s Dance Theater Workshop and that she intends to perform in all 50 states. She’s crossed Alaska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and New York off the list; this fall Catalyst performs the work in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Iowa, and in March 2007 it will be at Links Hall in Chicago. After each show, the audience participates in a question-and-answer session with a local environmental organization. “I don’t feel this piece will change the world,” Johnson says. “But the feedback I get from the organizations I collaborate with is they feel it creates a vital intersection of art and science. They can talk facts and figures, but they can’t talk about the heart or emotion of the situation. they can’t paint a dire picture, which is where the performance comes in. that’s the role of art.”
Emily Johnson, a native Alaskan now resident of Minneapolis, brings her all-woman contemporary troupe to New York in Heat and Life, which explores issues surrounding global warming. Multi-instrumentalist JG Everest performs his original score. Johnson and her collaborators have worked all over the west and north, as far as St. Petersburg, Russia; here they make their New York debut. A discussion will follow each performance. Through Sat at 7:30, Dance Theater Workshop, 219 W. 19th
New York - As a child growing up in Alaska, choreographer Emily Johnson lived close to nature. She was surrounded by spruce trees and streams, and she became acquainted with Alaska’s massive Ice Age glaciers. That experience informs “Heat and Life,” a dance about the threat of global warming that Johnson’s Catalyst Dance company brings to Dance Theater Workshop next week. “In elementary school we would go on field trips, every year, to Exit Glacier,” says Johnson, who is 30 and lives in Minneapolis. “Now they have ropes at the edge, but back then, in the ‘80’s we could crawl on it, peering down into the crevices and walking on the ice.” That was an innocent time. Awareness of global warming and the thought that Earth’s rising temperature could destroy age-old, natural beauty and endanger human life had not crept into the public consciousness. Yet the spruce bark beetle already had begun migrating northward. Advancing as the cold barrier retreats, these insects are swarming into Alaska and killing the trees. One day, Johnson heard the beetles had arrived in her family’s backyard in Sterling. “You can look out and see where there used to be a mountain of live trees; they’re all gray and dead,” she says. Tropical diseases are also moving north. The ironically named Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park, where Johnson played as a child, has shrunk radically in just a few years, exposing a fresh moraine of broken rock. The choreographer, who conducts most of her rehearsals outdoors, took her company to the glacier to work on “Heat and Life” in 2004. “I hadn’t been back in maybe six years, and I couldn’t believe how different it was,” she says, “I was shocked.” “Heat and Life,” which incorporates video footage of Exit Glacier, along with images of the smoking factories whose carbon emissions are partly to blame for global warming, received its premiere in Minneapolis in 2004. Johnson says she hopes to perform it all over the United States. Her experiences have been personal, but the effects of global warming will not remain confined to Alaska. “It’s an issue for everybody in the world,” says Johnson, noting that global warming experts will be on hand to take questions from the audience after the show. Bleak in tone, “Heat and Life” is set in a future world badly damaged by climate change. The piece is about adaptation. The dancers, communicating via walkie-talkies, “have to fight for their survival,” Johnson says. Her choreographic process involved creating movement phrases, then challenging her dancers to perform them in an unstable environment where the space is shrinking. Parts of the dancer were created outdoors, working in strong wind or on a sloping riverbank. The audience, too, may experience temperature contrasts during “Heat and Life.” Johnson’s goal is to share her direct encounters with nature and her fears for the earth’s safety. “We want to bring the outside in,” she says.
Emily Johnson grew up in the wild open spaces of Alaska. While her U.S. contemporaries were hanging out at the mall, Johnson was hiking and mountain biking on the Kenai Peninsula. Part Yup’ic Eskimo, she and her family fished from remote beaches, picked cranberries from the local bogs, even hunted moose. “Since all my dances deal with something personal, environmental concerns were bound to come up sooner or later,” said Johnson, 30, who began making dances in the 1990s as a student at the University of Minnesota. “The Exxon Valdez oil spill emotionally affected me and many Alaskans. When you are involved in nature, when you live inside its cycles and currents, you actually feel it when nature is adversely affected.” Johnson certainly knows about living inside of a community powerfully linked to nature and its processes. “We relied on a week of fishing to supply the entire extended family for the winter,” said the soft-spoken Johnson. “We also relied on it to bring all the family from different parts of Alaska together. The process of the fishing itself—catching, scaling, gutting, brining, smoking, canning—would take the whole family into the wee hours of the morning. And we had to wait for Grandma’s okay for each phase.” Communal process has been central to the creation of “Heat and Life,” which deals with the affects of global warming. In 2003, Johnson took her company Catalyst, seven powerhouse female performers who have worked with Johnson for several years, to develop the work in the great outdoors. As they staggered up Wisconsin hills and slogged through Alaskan cranberry bogs, the choreography developed the kind of muscular grit that characterizes Johnson’s movement vocabulary. As the company worked, Johnson made room in the rehearsal process for people to drop by and ask questions. “People were curious, and we had many conversations, pro and con, about their views on global warming,” said Johnson. Now every performance is followed by a discussion of global warming, often with guest experts and activists such as Emmett Pepper of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, who will join Johnson for post-show discussions at DTW. The work, which was co-commissioned and presented by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, premiered in 2004 at an industrial warehouse on the Mississippi River. The audience stood around as performers wearing bright orange jumpsuits, goggles, and masks squawked out desperate messages on walkie-talkies—“We’re missing a dancer. Please stand by. Everybody get out of here.” To an ominous sound score played by composer JG Everest on a variety of instruments and enhanced by electronic looping and shrill-to-excruciating industrial noises, the dancers created a post-apocalyptic world. Illuminated by industrial flashlights, dancers moved at maximum voltage, flailing around the dusty space as if jolted by alien currents. They erupted in spasmodic moves, or huddled furtively in corners. At the first performance fire alarms were inadvertently triggered, and fire trucks raced to the scene with sirens blaring and lights flashing. “People thought it was just part of the event,” laughed Philip Bither, performing arts curator at Walker Art Center, who has long admired Johnson’s confidence and fierceness. “She has a clear vision of where she wants to go, and uncompromising intensity,” he added. “She’s saying something new through a powerful movement vocabulary relevant to her generation.” The intensity of the work, which will have its first performance in a traditional theater at DTW, is somewhat alleviated by moments of sharp wit. At a recent rehearsal in Minneapolis, one dancer ordered the others to “Take 19 steps toward the Hudson River. Take cover. Stand up. Fall down. Find a power source. Cover your mouth. Lift your left shoulder.” The rapid-fire directives read like a sinister childhood game. That fits with Johnson’s penchant for game structures, which evolved from her experiences as a serious teenage athlete. “As in basketball, I set plays within which we improvise,” said the petite and deceptively fragile looking Johnson. “These dancers know my work intimately. They know how a piece is supposed to build, expand, come down, explode.” While improvisation figures into the process, Johnson’s movement vocabulary is rigorously specific. “I like to create strict boundaries around my movement.” And indeed, there is no release here—only energized, high-powered dancing. When the performers rest, it’s with exhausted wariness, as if they are priming themselves for the next disaster. Johnson suggests the idea of land space diminishing as sea levels rise—an effect of global warming—through a claustrophobic sense of dancers having their physical space constantly encroached upon. Videotaped sequences of rural and urban landscapes enhance the sense of loss and disorientation.
Given the clear skies and balmy breezes last August 27, the Stone Arch Bridge would’ve been packed to the viewfinders even without Landmark - exactly as Local Strategy intended. The interdisciplinary art ensemble’s six members designed their 24-hour celebration of our loveliest pedestrian thoroughfare to enhance its setting, rather than to overwhelm it. They succeeded in every respect, including audience composition. Sure, lots of people turned out specifically for the event’s music, dance, performance art, props, installations, and sundry other free attractions. But art lovers tended to blend into the usual throng of bikers, joggers, and strollers, just as the latter joined the former once they figured out they were in the midst of something extraordinary. Distinguishing between the marathon’s countless micro-happenings and everyday life above and around the river was all but impossible, too. Was the kid doing skateboard tricks at noon part of the show? What about the pair of young women in vintage prom dresses, running along the railing at 2:00 am? Might instigators Lisa D’Amour, Eleanor Savage, Katie Pearl, Emily Johnson, Krista Walsh, and Jowl Pickard have conned the bunnies that frolicked brazenly at the bridge’s east entrance into joining their battalion of volunteers? Who cares? That the group blurred the boundary between life and art so completely was the payoff. Nobody who hung out, even for just a while, will ever forget that Landmark’s grandest components - the downtown skyline, Hennepin Bluffs Park, the Mississippi, the bridge itself - are all here for us to enjoy every day of the year.
This may be the first time wind farms and post-modern dance have appeared in he same story. But choreographer Emily Johnson, 29, finds her inspiration in places where humans, machines and nature intersect. Johnson also likes to self-produce her dance pieces on street corners, in sculpture parks, and in art galleries. So it’s no surprise the “Windfarm” addresses her concerns about environmental degradation. “Right now, wind farms, for me, inspire a great deal of hope,” Johnson explained. “they’re a technology that really collaborated with nature. They’re huge and mechanical, with the wind turbines arranged in inspiring patterns. And they produce this thing we humans eat up like crazy: power.” The first “Windfarm” segment, inspired in part by land in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that is threatened by oil drilling, was performed by members of her dance company (Catalyst, dances by Emily Johnson). While the work was often obscure, it included illuminating moments: delicately cupped hands that cradled an invisible bird, scraping movements that recalled the hoof pawing of caribou, dynamic industrial dancing performed in rubber boots. The second installment, “Mass,” takes place Wednesday evening and includes 20-plus dancers and non-dancers (this writer included) whom Johnson invited to participate “because they’ve inspired or been part of or been related to the dance work I’ve done.” The group will perform simple walking patterns and gestures as the audience listens to music on Walkmans. (Bring headphones.) As with wind farms, Johnson says, this segment “has something to do with creating power from huge masses of people. It’ll be kind of like at the State Fair when you’re watching crowds of people and random interactions.” The last segment, “one. for resolve,” on April 19, is Johnson’s first solo since 2001. Eventually, these three segments will be incorporated into a larger work, said Johnson, who has earned a Bush Fellowship as well as several fellowships from the Jerome Foundation. But don’t call it activist dance. “I call them dance experiments,” she says of the series. “And because my primary concerns outside of dance are environmental ones, I can’t help but investigate environmental problems and solutions through art.” Johnson, a native of Alaska whose choreography can be as fierce as she is sweet, is one of the most entrepreneurial dance artists in town. She curates the Capture! dance-on film series at the Bryant Lake Bowl. Her feminist-cowgirl parable “Plain Old Andrea, with a Gun,” rigorously minimalist “Wingspan 5’2’’,” and post-post modern “Heat and Life” are available on DVD. She collaborates with musicians in her performances, particularly JG Everest (now her husband) and his ambient -electronica group, Lateduster. The Walker Art Center, Southern Theater and Red Eye have all presented Johnson. In June, her company performs “Heat and Life” at the prestigious Dance Theater Workshop in New York City. But she’s determined to continue self-producing in nontheatrical venues. “The way I present my dances is as much my work as the actual dance I make,” she explains, “Bringing elements of these places into the dance is an important part of the work I do. And I’m just determined to make this my livelihood, which takes both that independent spirit as well as the stubbornness I have.”
Emily Johnson is the most exciting young choreographer in the Twin Cities. Since graduating from the University of Minnesota Dance Department in the early 1990's, Johnson, a native Alaskan, has pushed her dance practice into the outer reaches of the form, while maintaining a high standard of artistry. This month she premieres Heat and Life, her newest work of movement, video, and sounds, ant No Name Exhibitions @ The Soap Factory. It will challenge, if not completely transform, your understanding of dance as an art form. Heat and Life, which is part dance concert, part installation, is set to take place in a big warehouse space - sans seating - and filled with a case of powerful women, portable heaters, walkie-talkies, tape recorders, and the sublime electronic sounds of musician James Everest. The show addresses global warming and how we feed and respond to the problem. Rather than belaboring the issue's politics or science, the performance points to our interconnectedness as people inhabiting the same place. The power of Johnson's work isn't just the precision of the movement, the obvious talent of her dancers, or her clever sense of fashion. It's also her innate, genuine curiosity. She's hungry to understand the world she lives in and share her knowledge in the most appropriate form. The result is thoroughly researched movement-based art that exudes a completeness rare in most dance work. She asks, "Why is dance a relevant art form in today's world?" and consistently presents audiences with compelling answers. Make time for Heat and Life.r Heat and Life.
Shortly after graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1998, Emily Johnson became a presence in the Twin Cities for her rigorous, abstract dance works performed by Catalyst, her company of lithe, tough women. Her choreography was fresh and fierce, evocative and disciplined, her use of staging, costumes, and live music surprisingly mature. Critics hailed the young choreographer as a fresh talent with tremendous potential. In her much-anticipated new work, Heat and Life, Johnson displays a more experimental bent. Although the work's theme is the future perils of global warming, Johnson's use of site and space, costuming and props, music and movement conjures flashbacks to the performances of dancemakers in the 1960s. Heat and Life takes place inside (and at times outside) the cavernous rooms of a former soap factory. The seven dancers eschew "dancerly" costumes for pants, boots, blaze-orange vests or ponchos, goggles, and face masks. In the stripped-down choreography, they walk, run, and assemble, dissemble, and reassemble with the orderly purpose of a SWAT team. Everyday items like industrial electrical cords, blocks of ice melting in red plastic bags, and the walkie-talkies the dancers use to shout out each other's movements add a touch of realism. As if intending to subvert our notions of performance, the dancers yell to each other using their real names, sell dust masks before the show, and order the audience to another part of the factory at the end of the performance. Throughout the 80-minute piece, the aura of hazard rarely lets up. The dancers negotiate squares of green turf (vibrant pieces of nature in an otherwise barren world) on the concrete floor like dangerous terrain. Standing on tiptoe, they stumble or collapse, legs crumbling beneath them. They crab walk, hum like bees, stand at attention with their hands clasped behind their heads.One woman gets left behind, twisting in place before pulling her shirt over her head and rocking herself. Another woman tears apart a square of turf with a garden shears. Like giant birds, the dancers slowly bow their heads, raise and lower their arms-or are they signaling through the flames? Repetitiveness, multiple endings, and a lack of focus marred an otherwise ardent venture. For more information: www.catalystdance.com Copyright 2006 Dance Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved.
When modern dance wed rock band, nobody expected it to last. But the fine romance between Catalyst and Lateduster proves opposites do, indeed, attract. Couples often form through common friends. Catalyst and Lateduster - a modern dance troupe and ethereal rock band - met through a common fan. After a whirlwind courtship and quiet elopement, the artists from different corners of the twin Cities arts community are publicly airing their romance. "Fierce:Whole," this weekend at the Red Eye, is an evening of dance and lice music Catalyst and Lateduster created with, for and through one another. The artists are using the performances to release a DVD with all the trappings of a video wedding album - threaded with interviews, glimpses into their collaborative process and artful footage of their shared performance. "We both wanted to push ourselves in new directions, but neither of us thought of this direction until we were introduced," says Lateduster guitarist JG Everest. "This was just laid in our laps." Artists have collaborated across disciplines for decades, but successes are rare. Inevitably, they differ in vision and direction; one artist makes sacrifices for the sake of forward movement, and the process often leads to resentment rather than fulfillment. Lateduster and Catalyst clicked, as it often happens in romance, when neither party was necessarily in the matchmaking market. Lateduster, a trio without a vocalist, has made two full-length records and earned a modest following on the Twin Cities club circuit. Emily Johnson, the 27-year-old founding director of Catalyst, is among the young darlings of local dance. The Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board and Walker Art Center have supported her early work. Both groups already had experimented outside the bounds of traditional dance and band life. Lateduster, whose three members use digital samplers in addition to drums, hand percussion and guitars, has performed live to a German silent film during the annual Sound Unseen Film and Music Festival. Johnson choreographed a piece about women's competitiveness to ta taped play-by-play radio broadcast of a high school girls' basketball game. ARTIST IS MATCHMAKER A visual artist familiar with both groups recommended they meet. Johnson caught a Lateduster show at the 400 Bar in Minneapolis. The members of Lateduster sat in the audience for a Catalyst show at the Barbara Barker Center at the University of Minnesota, where Johnson had studied. "I had no idea how to watch or understand dance. It's like listening to jazz for the first time," Everest says. "But it was obvious (Catalyst was) dealing with very real emotions, and they were communicating so clearly to me with their body language." In Lateduster, Johnson heard "an intellectual reasoning with sound. It was smart music." Dance doesn't mix easily with live music. Choreographers generally map steps - and dancers rehearse them - to recorded music. Dancers' pacing and timing rely on consistency, and live music in anything but consistent. Even slight changes in dynamics and tempo, let alone blatant mistakes, can throw off a choreographed dance. From Johnson's perspective, the Catalyst- Lateduster collaboration started from a point of great risk. Johnson asked the group to make music for a piece she had already choreographed without music. "Plain Old Andrea With a Gun," the subject of the DVD and a cornerstone of "Fierce:Whole," is Johnson's take on violence and women with literal and figurative grips on power. "The pieces are so intimate, and I had to impart to these musicians that's going on inside me," Johnson says. "It's letting them in on my vulnerability, and that's something a lot of choreographers don't even give to their own dancers. But if I couldn't be honest with these guys, how could I be honest with my audience?" Despite the inherent challenges for a dance company working with live musicians, the collaboration had a greater impact on Latedusters'' process. The band attended rehearsals for inspiration, them composed music on their own. Lateduster rejoined Catalyst in the dance studio with instruments in hand, playing music through their headphones to see what worked. "Sometimes we're rehearsing , and we'll ask for some kind of abrupt change or transition, " Johnson says. "We pushed them to collapse their structured thinking and just do something now." "They had all these ideas they'd been working on for six months, and I was terrified we'd come up with something that wasn't appropriate, " Everest says. "But it was thrilling too, because it gave us a new purpose. Instead of just the music, it was music for this greater cause." GAINING 'MOMENTUM' Catalyst and Lateduster debuted "Plain Old Andrea With a Gun" last summer through Walker Art Center's "Momentum" dance series. Both groups felt the one-weekend showcase did only surface justice to the collaboration, chiefly because the series trains audiences to focus on dance. "This was so special, and it was here and gone in three days. We just felt it wasn't done," Everest says. "Plus, there's definitely a difference between dance audiences and music audiences, and most of our people didn't really catch onto this the first time. But people who want something smart and challenging are the same." "Plain goLd Andrea With a Gun" meshes Old West and film noir kitsch, to the eye and ear. The action on the floor at times seems impervious to the music. In one moment, dancers are lunging, stomping, thrusting, and grunting against plaintive, atmospheric tones without tempo. Once the music gains a pulse, three dancers move against the beat while two others roll on the floor in lost, naive serenity. "Fierce:Whole" is a second phase of evolution in the groups' shared venture. Along with the evening's centerpiece, the program features pieces Johnson choreographed to three existing Lateduster songs, and Johnson and the band worked together from scratch on solo danceworks for Johnson. Lateduster and Catalyst continue working separately, but Johnson has asked the band to take part in her next project, and both groups see their futures entwined. For his part, Everest sees Lateduster's relationship with Catalyst not as two separate groups but rather as nine creative friends working together. "Not to say we won't keep playing the (7th Street) Entry and the 400 Bar, but you get tired of having your success dictated by how many are getting wasted," Everest says. "Once you've expanded your horizons and see the possibilities you want to keep on exploring."
Catalyst Dances by Emily Johnson There's something to be said for a performer who can put on a pair of pants five sizes too big and dance around to Dolly Parton with a serious look on her face - and, in the the process, thoroughly convince us that she has a very bright future. Emily Johnson, of course, doesn't have to explain what she does. She does most everything with such clear intention that we believe - even during the more absurd moments - that she's making perfect sense. Appearing with her company a the Best Feet Forward series in January, Johnson presented a program of considerable maturity for an artist still in her mid-20's. "If I Shut My Eyes, you Can't See Me," set among a forest of hanging lamps, showcased a canny knack for gesture. And "Everywhere Doing This" gave the tenacious Vanessa Voskuil the opportunity to transform a set of repetitive movements and tasks into a punk-rock-cum- minimalist romp. After exploring such dynamic tension, Johnson, a former basketball player in her native Alaska, let down her postmodern guard with "Power Play," a tongue-in-cheek glimpse into team sports. Suddenly boxing gloves, coaches, and bags of lime acquired new significance. "Defense! Defense!" the dancers shouted as they clambered over one another. Johnson, we suspect, won't have to put up such a fight to reach the top of the dance scene. |
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