Emily Johnson/Catalyst: Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter
Tuesday, October 9, 2018 at 6:30pm
CFA Courtyard
FREE!
Join us by the fire for a gathering hosted by Emily Johnson/Catalyst that centers around Indigenous protocols and knowledges, as we welcome the evening with our campus community and neighbors. Come sit and gaze at the stars, and share stories, conversation and food (bring food to share if you wish—hot apple cider will be provided). Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is a community gathering. It is a way of being and a way of making. It is research and process as ceremony. It is dance. Come join us.
Rain Location: Beckham Hall (no fire)
Kinstillatory Mappings is co-hosted by the Center for the Humanities and the Center for the Arts. It was created with funding from The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. A Bessie Award winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award she is based in New York City. Originally from Alaska, she is of Yup’ik descent and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as installations, engaging audiences within and through a space and environment—interacting with a place's architecture, history, and role in community. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present, and future. Emily's written work has been published and commissioned by Dance Research Journal (University of Cambridge Press); SFMOMA; Transmotion Journal, University of Kent; Movement Research Journal; Pew Center for Arts and Heritage; and the recent compilation Imagined Theaters (Routledge), edited by Daniel Sack.
Her choreography is presented across the United States and Australia and most recently at Santa Fe Opera with Doctor Atomic, directed by Peter Sellars. Emily is a lead collaborator in the Indigenous-artist led Healing Place Collaborative (Minneapolis, MN), focused on the vital role of the Mississippi River in the life of residents along its path; she was an inaugural participant in the Headlands Center for the Arts’ Climate Change Residency, a member of Creative Change at Sundance, and served as a water protector at Oceti Sakowin Camp at Standing Rock. As a facilitator she has worked with artists and communities most notably during TIME PLACE SPACE, NOMAD in Wotjobaluk Country, Australia and during UMYUANGVIGKAQ with PS122 on Manhahtaan in Lenapehoking, a durational Long Table/Sewing Bee focused on indigenizing the performing arts and the world at large.
Her most recent work, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars—an all night outdoor performance gathering taking place on and near eighty-four community-hand-made quilts—premiered in Lenapehoking (NYC) with PS122 on Randall’s Island in summer 2017 and will tour to Chicago, San Francisco, and Narrm (Melbourne), Australia. Currently, she hosts monthly bonfires on the Lower East Side in Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Art Center and is, with colleagues in Australia and Canada, developing a Global First Nations Performance Network.