Bodies at Risk: Emily Johnson & Alice Sheppard

March 18, 2021

Bodies at Risk is a series of creative conversations between BIPOC performing artists, educators, activists, and other experts working to shift American society’s understanding of the racialized body and social justice. These events aim to engage, move, and surprise audiences through artistic demonstration and intellectual curiosity. Artist and audience chat included in each event.

A USA Artist, Creative Capital grantee and Bessie Award winner, Alice Sheppard creates movement that engages intersectional disability arts, culture, and history to challenge conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies. As founder and artistic lead for dance company, Kinetic Light, Sheppard works at the intersections of disability, dance, design, identity, and technology to create transformative art and advance the intersectional disability arts movement. Alice trained with Kitty Lunn and performed with Infinity Dance Theater. After an apprenticeship with AXIS Dance Company, Alice became a core company member and toured nationally and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs. Since becoming an independent dance artist, Alice has danced in projects with Ballet Cymru/GDance, and Marc Brew Company in the United Kingdom. In the United States, she has worked with Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton. Her choreography has been commissioned by CRIPSiE, Full Radius Dance, and MOMENTA Dance Company.

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, Emily is of Yup’ik descent, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and installations, engaging audiences within and through space, time, and environment—interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, 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.

Office, Minneapolis, MN, US612.597.7400emily@catalystdance.com

Emily Johnson / Catalyst is based on Mannahatta in Lenapehoking. We work to pay respect to Lenape homeland, people and ancestors past, present, and future by organizing with communities from the Lenape diaspora to build pathways for Lenapeyok return. We have been taught to name Lenape Nations and say cama’i to our relatives from Delaware Tribe of Indians in Bartlesville, OK; Delaware Nation of Oklahoma in Anadarko, OK; Stockbridge-Munsee and Mohican Community in Wisconsin; Moravian Delaware of the Thames in Ontario, Canada; Munsee-Delaware Nation at Munceytown in Ontario, Canada; Delaware of Six Nations in Ontario, Canada. 

We strive to be in good relations with our kin—human and more than human—and in effort to support growing kinstillatory relations and sovereign, liberated futures we are anti-colonial and abolitionist in all capacities. We are committed to on-the-ground water and land protection, consistent decolonization work, and Land Back. 

Quyanaqvaa-lli elpeni to all Sovereign Nations, Indigenous and First Nations people who live in relation to and from Lenapehoking and upon whose lands we work and tour.

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