Emily Johnson is an American dancer, writer, and choreographer of Yup'ik descent. She grew up in Sterling, Alaska and is based in New York City. She is artistic director of her performance company, Emily Johnson/Catalyst. Johnson is a organizer for the First Nations Dialogues New York/Lenapehoking. She has worked part-time at Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore owned by author Louise Erdrich.
Performative, administrative and choreographic work
Johnson has danced for Minneapolis-based choreographers Morgan Thorson, Hijack, and BodyCartography Project, and collaborated with New York-based playwright/ director Lisa D'Amour and music ensemble So Percussion, as well as Korean visual artist Minouk Lim. In 1998 Johnson founded a dance company, Catalyst, in Minneapolis, after graduating from the University of Minnesota with a degree in dance. Since then, she has created 22 original performance pieces, as well as several collaborative projects with other artists, including SHORE, the third part of a trilogy of works that began with The Thank-you Bar and Niicugni, and which was performed on tour through 2015. She has been central in organizing the Indigenous gathering Knowledge of Wounds starting in 2017.
Choreographic style
Johnson states that she began dance as a response to the grief of a close friend dying. Johnson's dances "...often function as installations", and her choreography "...considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance." In a presentation at the University of Minnesota in 2014, she talked about her choreographic practice as dance responding to the world.
Dance and community
One distinguishing characteristic of Johnson's work is community involvement in particular located places. Among the motivating concerns for The thank you bar were community and tribal responses to displacement. In Vermont, Minnesota, Alaska, California, and Arizona, she invited members of the community to sew fish skin together to form lanterns. These lantern were subsequently hung, with lights and speakers inside, to illuminate halls where Niicugni was performed. Shore included community feasting. Johnson organized a recent work, Then a cunning voice and a night we spend gazing at stars, with community quiltmaking workshops. The quilts became part of the set for the dance performance. This community involvement in dance echoes other dance forms, which are often less formal and outside of the usual definition of "contemporary" dance, such as participatory dance Participation Dance and ceremonial dance Ceremonial Dance. Johnson's oeuvre may be seen as a bridge between community and cultural contexts, on the one hand, and the world of contemporary artistry, on the other hand. As Vermont Performance Lab director Sara Coffey observes, there may be a tension between artistic vision and openness to community: "I think it’s very brave in the contemporary dance world to let all these others into your work... You don’t always have control of what that's going to be. I think Emily, as an artist, wants a place to rub off on her work as much as she wants to rub off on the place where she’s performing". Johnson attempts to resolve this tension through dynamism, described in the Anchorage Museum's Polar Lab blog as using "dance as a framework for constant transformation that refuses to stabilize, intervention immediately opens up for exchange, conversation and partnership".
Awards
Emily Johnson / Catalyst was awarded a 2012 Outstanding Production Bessie Award for The Thank-you Bar, created and performed by Johnson with collaborators James Everest and Joel Pickard.
