Kinstillatory Mappings and Speculative Invitations to Otherwise Spaces of Care: Emily Johnson in conversation with Karyn Recollet

Friday, March 26, 2021 4:30-6 p.m. ET | Free Event
Hosted by Five College Dance in partnership with UMass FAC

 

Bessie, Guggenheim, and Doris Duke award-winning dance artist Emily Johnson will discuss her practice as a choreographer, a land and water protector, and an activist for justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and well-being. Johnson's dances function as portals and care processions, engaging audiences within and through space, time, and environment — in projects designed to interact with a place's architecture, peoples, history and role in building futures. Johnson will be joined in conversation by collaborator Karyn Recollet, an urban Cree scholar, artist, writer and Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto. Johnson and Recollet will advance this conversation in a second public talk on April 23, hosted by Smith College Dance with support from Five College Dance.

CART captioning will be provided. For inquiries about the accessibility of this event or to request modes of facilitating your participation please contact Sean Conlon sconlon@umass.edu. Please make requests no later than Friday, March 19 to give implementation time. However, in all situations, a good faith effort will be made to address all requests up until the time of the event.
 

Artist Bios:

Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an activist for justice, sovereignty and well-being. Emily is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim and United States Artists Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award. She is based in Lenapehoking / New York City. Emily is of the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment — interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, history and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral part of our connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.

Her choreography and gatherings have been presented across the United States and Australia. Recently she choreographed the Santa Fe Opera production of Doctor Atomic, directed by Peter Sellars. Her large-scale project, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars, is an all-night outdoor performance gathering taking place amongst 84 community-hand-made quilts. It premiered in Lenapehoking (NYC) in 2017, and was presented in Zhigaagoong (Chicago) in 2019. Her new work in development, Being Future Being, considers future creation stories and present joy.

Emily's writing has been published and commissioned by ArtsLink Australia, unMagazine, Dance Research Journal (University of Cambridge Press); SFMOMA; Transmotion Journal , University of Kent; Movement Research Journal; Pew Center for Arts and Heritage; and the compilation Imagined Theaters (Routledge), edited by Daniel Sack. She was an advisory committee member for Creative Time's 10th Anniversary Summit and a Phase One working group member of Creating New Futures. She serves on the advisory committee for Advancing Indigenous Performance Initiative of Western Arts Alliance, The Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Native American Arts Program Expansion Committee for Idyllwild Arts. Emily is the Pueblo Arts Collaborative Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera, and a lead organiser of First Nations Dialogues.

Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on the Lower East Side of Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center. She is part of a US based advisory group—including Reuben Roqueni, Ed Bourgeois, Lori Pourier, Ronee Penoi, and Vallejo Gantner—who are developing a First Nations Performing Arts Network.


An urban Cree scholar/artist/and writer, Karyn Recollet’s work focuses on relationality and care as both an analytic and technology for Indigenous movement-based forms of inquiry within urban spaces. Recollet is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Women and Gender Studies Institute. Her research and writing explores Indigenous performance, hip-hop culture, and Indigenous hip hop feminism, with a particular focus on new Indigeneities produced in urban hub spaces as they shape solidarity movements and social activism. Recollet works collaboratively with Indigenous dance-makers and scholars to theorize forms of urban glyphing. Recollet is in conversation with dance choreographers, Black and Indigenous futurist thinkers, and Indigenous and Black geographers as ways to theorize and activate futurist, feminist, celestial and decolonial land-ing relationships with more-than-human kinships, and each other.  
 

Emily Johnson's residency is made possible with funding from the "Gathering at the Crossroads: Building Native American and Indigenous Studies program of the Five College Consortium," an initiative underwritten by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.