SHORE is Emily Johnson/Catalyst's new dance work. It is the third in a trilogy of works that began with The Thank-you Bar, and continued with Niicugni. SHORE is a multi-day performance installation of dance, story, volunteerism, and feasting. It is a celebration of the places where we meet and merge—land and water, performer and audience, art and community, past, present, and future. 

SHORE is Emily Johnson/Catalyst's new dance work. It is the third in a trilogy of works that began with The Thank-you Bar, and continued with Niicugni. SHORE is a multi-day performance installation of dance, story, volunteerism, and feasting. It is a celebration of the places where we meet and merge—land and water, performer and audience, art and community, past, present, and future.

MOMENTS after walking into a Chelsea cafe the choreographer Emily Johnson accepted a compliment for her vintage black-and-white brocade coat. But there was a catch. “You do,” she said as her blue eyes twinkled mischievously, “have to take it off awkwardly.”

Emily Johnson at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, where her work will appear.

Ms. Johnson slipped her arms out of the sleeves, lowered the fabric to the floor and stepped out of it.

“It’s really a dress,” she said.

Fittingly, Ms. Johnson’s richly detailed dance-installations are full of surprises too. A Minneapolis artist originally from Alaska, Ms. Johnson returns to New York to present “Niicugni,” the second piece in a trilogy of works related to her Yupik heritage, at the Baryshnikov Arts Centerbeginning Wednesday. The presentation is part of Performance Space 122’s Coil Festival.

So much has happened between then and now. The usher told Baryshnikov (oh look, it’s Baryshnikov) how much she loves “the space.” The critics clustered on the sidewalk, debating what they liked. (For me it was “the dancing.”) Walking, waiting, talking; waiting, parting, walking. The theater of the to-and-from. The spectacle of everything that, officially, is not one.

I saw Emily Johnson’s The Thank-you Bar in fall 2011 at NYLA. The show began with a walk through the backstage area of the theater, signs mischievously posted along the way with incongruous labels: a white brick wall held one that read “Vaux Swifts nest in this beam.” We entered the stage floor to take one of the 30 seats available in the limited capacity show, sitting either in chairs or cushions on the floor. Our seats, located in the middle of the space, rather than along an edge, meant we were surrounded by the show’s installation, which through its simple construction prevented this immersion from overwhelming. The remainder of the performance—roughly an hour’s worth of interweaving story, music, movement, and light—continued with this intimate yet nimble quality that created a real sense of gentleness that was as soothing as it was powerful.

See if you can you snare a ticket to tonight's concluding presentation of Niicugni--an interdisciplinary, movement-based work by Minneapolis-based Emily Johnson/Catalyst.

Presented at Baryshnikov Arts Center as part of PS 122's COIL fest, the 70-minute work offers rich storytelling through poetic words, movement, soundscape and scenic design--all reflecting the values inherent to Johnson's Central Alaskan Yup'ik heritage. 

THE NATIVE PEOPLE OF AUSTRALIA LIVE WITHIN a phenomenology they call Dreamtime. At moments, Dreamtime may encompass the linear time of everyday life, otherwise known as “one-thing-after-another” time. But Dreamtime, or the “all-at-once,” is much more, too: a web in which the culture’s creation stories, generations of ancestors and their influence, and life and death and power co-exist in an infinite confluence of past, present and future.

In Western cultures, we consider our everyday awake time “real” and the hours in which we sleep our time for dreaming. Australia’s native people believe, conversely, that Dreamtime is what’s most real, a state in which all time is simultaneous and in a continual, natural and universal process of creation. All minds participate in Dreamtime, they believe, willingly (consciously) or not.

How do you listen to the quiet? This is no simple question, at least when it comes to describing “Niicugni” by Emily Johnson, choreographer and artistic director for Catalyst. The subtly beautiful and occasionally mystifying work had its local premiere Sunday night at The O’Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University in a co-presentation with Northrop Dance at the University of Minnesota.

Director / Choreographer Emily Johnson talks about Niicugni (nee-CHOOG-nee), the second part of her trilogy that began with The Thank-you Bar.

Why do you refer to your work as "performance installation", as opposed to "dance"?
The work I do is definitely rooted in the body – in dance. But I have a very broad definition of
what that means: our bodies, even in "stillness," dance. There's the blood moving through us, our hearts pumping, our cells dividing and growing and dying, the synapses in our brain firing...so we dance, always. And it isn't performance, but it is (to me), dance. And I think that is a beautiful thing. However, there's this problem with the word, too... it can direct expectations. I don't dislike the word, and sometimes I do use it. It is just not inclusive enough.
My hope is that "performance installation" is inclusive: of dance, of many methods of
communication (visual, aural, architectural, historical, implied), of all forms of performance and
specifically of the performances I make. Installation is really about how I try to immerse a place
and audiences within the context of a particular show. I want to engage many senses: have sound come from all over, offer something you might hold or take care of, something you might smell - it's all to encourage a broad way of paying attention to the place we are in and the people we are near.

Choreographer Emily Johnson speaks with writer/director/actor Ain Gordon about Niicugni, co-presented by Performance Space 122 and Baryshnikov Arts Center as part of COIL 2013.  Niicugni is part 2 of her trilogy of works, which include The Thank-you Bar, winner of a 2012 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performance, and part 3, SHORE, to premiere in 2014. She discusses her research around the act of gathering, her Alaska upbringing, storytelling in performance, the impact of physical land and cultural heritage, and the importance of paying attention.

As far as immersive installation performances go, Emily Johnson's "Thank-you Bar" is as disarming as they come. Much of that is due to the light touch of its creator, who has lived in Minneapolis for 17 years but was born in Alaska of Yu'pik descent. Everything about her exudes charisma.

In this work, which started its run at New York Live Arts on Wednesday, Ms. Johnson layers memories and movement to explore ideas about displacement and identity. The title is derived from her grandmother's bar, Que-Ana Bar — the word is Yup'ik for "thank you" — which, for Ms. Johnson, evokes home.

"When I was growing up, it was grandma's house. There just also happened to be these strangers getting drinks at the bar. And we could also sit up there and get Shirley Temples," Emily Johnson said with a laugh. "It is probably still the coolest place."

This was mid last week, and I was sitting in the lobby of New York Live Arts with Johnson and her musical collaborator James Everest, who were finally opening up mid-way through our conversation, having began a bit blurry-eyed due to the fact they'd just finished loading-in the set for The Thank-you Bar (Nov. 9-12; tickets $16 advance/$20 DOS) after a three-day drive from Minneapolis.

"I want to make work that looks at identity and cultural responsibility — that is beautiful and powerful — full of myth and truth at the same time," choreographer Emily Johnson explains in her mission statement. "I want to be grounded in my heritage, supported by my community, and giving back — always." Born in Alaska of Yup'ik descent and based in Minneapolis, Johnson has been creating site-specific dance installations in collaboration with visual artists and musicians since 1998, exploring ideas of home, identity, and the natural world through different modes of storytelling. Her latest multimedia performance piece is The Thank-you Bar, running at New York Live Arts from November 9 to 12. A collaboration with musicians James Everest and Joel Pickard of BLACKFISH, who will play a special set on the final night, the performance installation also includes beadwork by Karen Beaver and paper sculptures by Krista Kelley Walsh.

Anna Marie Shogren, a Brooklyn-based artist and dancer converses with Minneapolis choreographer Emily Johnson about naming, homesickness, and the emotional lives of places. Johnson will perform The Thank-you Bar, named for her grandparents' bar in Alaska, at New York Live Arts this November 9-12.

Anna Marie Shogren: So you've been traveling with this show [The Thank-you Bar] for a few years already?

Emily Johnson: Yes, we premiered in 2009 in Anchorage and then brought it to Homer, Alaska, which is a small town about three, four hours south of Anchorage. We've been to Tulsa and Portland at the TBA Festival; Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Houston, Vermont, Tallahassee, and now we are coming to New York.

Halfway through the video by Emily Johnson that documents her process and concerns while making the multi-media performance piece The Thank-you Bar, the pace of its narration rapidly shifts. It transitions from a discussion of displacement to her interests in storytelling, specifically oral traditions as they enable a sense of belonging. This shift is abruptly demonstrated through an edit in the video, a sharp pause between images. After a moment her contemplative voice enters and says, "What is becoming more clear to me is what I'm missing."

Somewhere toward the end of the 20th century, many young American choreographers became tired of cool abstraction. Their strategies changed, and they engaged audiences through emotional themes and narratives without abandoning form. Minnesota-based choreographer Emily Johnson is one such choreographer, and her highly personal The Thank You Bar is a stunning example of an emerging contemporary American aesthetic.

Radio Interview with Emily, James, & Joel talking about The Thank-you Bar w/ short live BLACKFISH performance at ODC, San Francisco.

The November performance of The Thank-You Bar, created by Minneapolis dance maker Emily Johnson with musicians James Everest and Joel Pickard of Blackfish, didn't begin inside a theater. Instead, audience members entered a gallery space in the Northrop Auditorium building. The exhibition on view, curated by Johnson with Carolyn Lee Anderson and titled "This Is Displacement: Native Artists Consider the Relationship Between Land and Identity," set the tone for a deeply personal examination of the constants and changes that shape an individual's relationship to home.

"The Thank-You Bar" is designed for an audience of just 50 people and yet it unfolds on the vast Northrop Auditorium stage. Despite the dramatic difference in scale, this project created by choreographer Emily Johnson with James Everest and Joel Pickard of music duo Blackfish delivers a thoroughly intimate and quietly rewarding interactive performance experience.

ONE OF OUR FIRST GLIMPSES OF EMILY JOHNSON, choreographer and co-creator of the luminous new performance piece, The Thank-You Bar, is on video. She's lovely and engaging, even if the words of the story she's telling come not out of her mouth, but from the remove of pre-recorded narration (emanating from a tape recorder tucked in her shirt), and through her facial expressions. Johnson light-heartedly recounts the long and winding tale of a tree, a house, Northrop, and a door in the hallway leading to the Northrop stage that was posted with a handmade sign that reads: "This is a very heavy tree."

There is dislocation in Emily Johnson’s dance performance The Thank-you Bar, but there is no disarray; there is displacement, but there is no rupture. Things are fragmented, but thereby, miraculously, they emerge in a greater whole. The world is broken open, but precisely to understand that it is not broken. History accumulates, but you become distinctly aware that you are experiencing something new.

October smells bittersweet. The month of frost and chills mingles with the sweet aroma of decay and ghostly awakenings.

Fittingly, Out North hosts two art exhibits that cross paths this last week of October, each of them speaking to lost and found souls, to darkness and hope, in its own way. “This is Displacement,” a reflection on the relationship between land and identity by Native artists, closes on Sunday to make room for “Dia de Muertos,” with opens next Friday and runs through November 15.

On the Sterling Highway, near Clam Gulch, an old-fashioned bar made of logs carries a Yup’ik name that’s spelled wrong; mostly to help people pronounce it correctly: Que’Ana Bar.

It means “thank you,” and is the place resting fitfully in the memory of a young woman who visited her grandparents there for many years.

As Emily Johnson grew up, she attended Thanksgivings and Sunday dinners there, and helped process salmon from the family’s nearby setnetting site. In these activities, Johnson was influenced by her Yup’ik grandmother, Hanna Laraux Stormo, who was born in the Kuskokwim region.

What do Clam Gulch, blackfish and experimental dance have in common? How about the latest performance piece, The Thank-You Bar, by choreographer Emily Johnson? Born in Soldotna and raised in Sterling, Johnson spent much of her childhood visiting her Yup'ik grandmother at the bar she owned in Clam Gulch, the Que'Ana Bar. The bar was a hub of activity, including family gatherings, friends, strangers and music. Johnson's memories are filled with the faces and stories of the people who frequented her grandmother's bar.

Growing up Emily Johnson looked forward to spending Sundays at Grandma's. It wasn't just the family, the sourdough pancakes, the country music. It was the ambiance.

"It was a very social place," she said. "It was a bar."

Grandma owned the Que-Ana Bar in Clam Gulch, which doubled as her home. It also was where Emily and her relatives congregated for Thanksgiving, moose hunting expeditions and putting up salmon.

To build a house, you have cut down a tree, leaving any creatures that used to call that tree home shelterless. The house itself becomes home to generations who live in it, love in it and leave it to find a new place to call home. Each being moves on and adapts. But the memory of where they began sticks with them. A sense of longing overtakes them. They feel displaced.

To build a house, you have cut down a tree, leaving any creatures that used to call that tree home shelterless. The house itself becomes home to generations who live in it, love in it and leave it to find a new place to call home. Each being moves on and adapts. But the memory of where they began sticks with them. A sense of longing overtakes them. They feel displaced.

"Let's say anything is possible and everything is happening." This is a line from the newest play by Katie Pearl and Lisa D'Amour, a pair that has been creating performances together for 14 years now. This new work, Terrible Things, follows a largely autobiographical story about Katie Pearl's life, with a particular focus on the thwarting of her childhood dream of being a ballerina, along with a history of her lovers. The metaphor that binds the anecdotes in the show, as well as the idea that the play explores in general, is possibility. Specifically, the notion, borrowed from quantum physics, that because we cannot presently measure the location of a single electron at a given time, that electron can be described as being in all of its possible locations at any specific time. In other words, it's everywhere that it can be simultaneously. This theory is related to theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle.

According to one interpretation of quantum mechanics, in the course of any event in which multiple outcomes are possible, every outcome occurs—one in this world, others in an array of parallel worlds. So in one world, I might write that I despise Katie Pearl and Lisa D'Amour's Terrible Things and Sibyl Kempson and Mike Iveson Jr.'s Crime or Emergency, both at P.S.122. In another, I might champion one show at the other's expense. In a third, I might never pen a word, as a racetrack win enables me to abandon my career and light out for regions rum-soaked and tropical. But in this world, I will celebrate both shows as appealing and eclectic (and perhaps heave a quick sigh for daiquiris unsipped).

A bunch of bright lights worked on Terrible Things, which you can enjoy at Performance Space 122, now through December 20. Written by longtime partners-in-crime-and-OBIE, Lisa D'Amour andKatie Pearl, choreographed by Emily Johnson, the piece is wonderfully performed by Pearl, Johnson, Morgan Thorson, Karen Sherman and a couple of amiable wrestlers (Rudy De La Cruzand Adrian Czmielewski).

Those Tibetan Buddhists who spend their days toiling over sand mandalas are going about it all wrong—they'd have a lot more fun making marshmallow mandalas instead. Lovers of those gelatinous white sugar puffs will be alternately tantalized and tortured by Terrible Things, a new theatrical dance piece that just opened at Performance Space 122. Upon entering the theater, an army of 1,000 marshmallows are found arrayed on stage in orderly rows. It's a simple pattern, but a hypnotic one, and as the performance unfolds, three female dancers meticulously herd the marshmallows into ever-evolving patterns. Only two are eaten, and none are offered to the audience.