"...the complex wail of our collective past screamed in a back room somewhere."

"Spellbinding"

"Uncompromising intensity"

"...fresh and fierce, evocative and disciplined."

IN 2002, YOU COULD HAVE SEEN EMILY JOHNSON's Plain Old Andrea, with a Gun at the Southern Theater as part of the Momentum series. In 2004, you could have seen her Heat and Life at the Soap Factory, presented by the Walker. But since then, you'd have to be either lucky or savvy to catch Johnson -- she's performed primarily at various small venues (the BLB, the Rogue Buddha Gallery) or in site-specific explorations (Landmark at the Stone Arch Bridge). Recently, she's been even more elusive: the last chances Twin Cities audiences have had at Johnson's work have been work-in-progress or excerpt showings of her new work, The Thank-You Bar -- one at Franconia Sculpture Park in September 2009, one in Sally Rousse's backyard in October 2008. The casual local dance viewer would be justified in saying, "Oh yeah, Emily Johnson -- whatever happened to her?"
      What happened is she shot through the stratosphere. Where can you find Johnson now? Oh, completing a residency at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, enjoying funding from the National Dance Project, premiering choreography at PS 122 last month. Johnson's not the only Minneapolis choreographer garnering national recognition, but at thirty-three she's the youngest, and her caffeinated career is one to watch.

Let's examine that career a little more closely. Johnson rose rapidly to local prominence following her graduation from the University of Minnesota in 1998. The 2004 premiere of Heat and Life, her evening-length global warming drama, capped that rise. Johnson's success wasn't undeserved, but how did she soar so rapidly while other talented choreographers of her generation (think of Vanessa Voskuil or Suzanne Wiltgen) struggled to gain recognition? Can I, without casting aspersions on Johnson herself, say that her rise was assisted by the echo chamber of the reviewing-funding-presenting system? Reviewers are more inclined to look at and credit what other reviewers praise; funding follows positive reviews; a presenter picks up on the praise of reviewers and funders; other presenters look in the same direction; everyone, once invested, has an interest in being right, in passing the work along to a higher level.
      But then some delight in puncturing careers they see as prematurely puffed -- The New York Times critics, for example. Jennifer Dunning slashed and burned her way through Johnson's 2006 New York premiere of Heat and Life, going so far as to call its conclusion "merciful".
     Was she hurt by the NYT review? Personally, she says yes; professionally, she says she doesn't know. Certainly it hasn't prevented Johnson from performing around the country or receiving funding. But then an NYT rave might have opened the door to another level.

In 2007, after touring Heat and Life to fifteen states, Johnson dissolved her company, Catalyst. Not formally -- she still uses the Catalyst name -- but she's no longer working in a company form. Why? According to Johnson, she knew from the start the company was temporary, even though she loved it: "A company is not a viable lifelong structure. A dance company changes." Why did she cut the company loose after Heat and Life? "After that, I needed to find something that I was in again," she says. There was "no decision -- just a different impulse."
     Post Heat and Life, 2007 to mid-2008, Johnson returned to her busy life of performances here and there and continued her dance service projects, most of which she initiated in 2005: producing others' work (along with her own) in her Windfarm (live performance) and Capture! (dance film) series; curating Choreographers' Eve; writing for the now-defunct online magazine Mental Contagion.
     And now? Johnson has spent the last year and a half on two projects: an evening-length work, The Thank-You Bar, which premiered in October in Alaska, and a collaboration with Katie Pearl and Lisa D'Amour (Pearl D'Amour), Terrible Things, which opened late last month at PS 122 in New York. Will one of these take Johnson to the next level of her career?

LET ME SAY AT THE OUTSET that, though I'm curious about the path of this determined artist, I've got no desire to affect her career one way or another. Frankly, Johnson's out of my league (and out of the league of any provincial critic) -- I couldn't boost or bother her if I wanted to. But, more than that, gate-keeping doesn't interest me. So I'd like to position this article on the sidelines of her career -- off the record, if you will.
     Johnson calls Terrible Things "two shows happening at once," and it feels that way. Katie Pearl and Lisa D'Amour's endearing apologia about why one does terrible things (because one can't help it? because one is scarred from childhood? because everything possible is happening all the time, and we just happen to be in the world in which Pearl loves 'em and leaves 'em?) flirts in front of Johnson's intense, confrontational dance show, in which Johnson's basilisk smile seems to dare the audience to judge her. "So what if I am terrible?" Johnson might be asking. "Who are you to judge?"
      It's not the first time Johnson's played the black hole in a collaboration. In 2008, she worked with Hannah Kramer and Jessica Cressey on the melodramatically moody, kitsch-laden Pamela. Pamela vamped and moped through hilarious and creepy interludes until the final dance -- a tantrum of a solo for Johnson. For my money, Pamela's Weimar boredom was a better match for Johnson's infinite density than the bubblicious wit and sweetness of Pearl D'Amour's Terrible Things. Seeing the show, you might giggle at Katie Pearl's wide-eyed atrocities all night, then have nightmares about Johnson's fire-cold involutions.
     When I got back to Minneapolis, everyone asked me about Terrible Things. Was it good? Well, yes. You can trust Johnson (to say nothing of her dancers here, Karen Sherman and Morgan Thorson) to put on a good show.

     Moving people on and off-stage, duos, trios, a brilliant blue-lit duo in a back corner, like an internal transaction, liver vs. lungs -- you can't argue over whether any dance of Johnson's is well-done. Instead, for better or worse, watching Johnson's dance is like reading Jorie Graham's poetry: it's all personal.

Personally, then, I often get uncomfortable watching Johnson's work. I can't tell whether it's because Johnson is profoundly like me or the opposite, but I suspect it's the underlying similarity, spun perhaps the opposite direction, that makes me want to get a mile further from her work. Not to be out of sight of it, let me be clear -- more watching through a telescope.
     In person, off stage, Johnson presents a smooth surface -- even a smoothed surface. Studied languor permeates her gestures, the hang of her hair, the even and gradual turning of her neck. She doesn't speak quickly, doesn't get excited.
     But on stage, what I get from Johnson is purpose and anger. Her dance has a missionary zeal, a pioneering spirit. For the record, Johnson doesn't approve of "missionary" or "pioneering" -- she calls them "hateful, domineering, colonizing words" -- but I've ransacked the thesaurus and can't find anything else that expresses the conviction and the desire to reach others that I see in her dance. She works the raw, edgy charisma of a Joan of Arc. I'd compare her to a whirling dervish, reaching ecstasy through the flesh, except that a dervish takes a smooth path to a transparent release.
     A berserker, an oracle might be better comparisons. Johnson takes a tortuous, almost torturous, path to -- well, I don't know where. I've never seen her arrive. Instead, she almost seems to refuse arrival -- choosing instead to hang on the edge of breaking through and not do it.

Let me say more about those underlying similarities. To begin with, Johnson has a need to do something. Talking about artistic process, Johnson mentions that not knowing what you're doing is "hard to justify to some people, in the larger realm of society. [Art-making] seems like a luxurious act."
     "I always hope it connects," she adds, gesturing outward. But "sometimes it doesn't feel like that's enough. Sometimes I want to do something tangible, physical" -- but she adds, "I think I'll stay dancing."
     Does her dance make the world better? Of course, Johnson's been asked this question before. She's ready with an answer: "I don't really think it does that -- really. But," she adds, "It exists -- and I think there is a power to it and a connection -- and I think that's important."

So... it does make the world better, then? Sincerity is always embarrassing. How much better to be cool and unconcerned, making little amusements for yourself, indifferent to their value in the world. I feel for her: for Johnson, things have to matter, to connect -- it's not enough for anything just to be. Paradoxically, her desire to connect only makes her work more unmistakably hers, just as her pioneer spirit remains an unshakable bedrock.
     Come with me out onto a ledge. I'm reminded of a line from T. S. Eliot: "Only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." Eliot's thought is characteristic of a certain set of people, people who are always in search of change but who remain fundamentally unable to imagine it. The problem is we can't change because we believe we are right. You see, although I'd rather not be, I'm in this group. And sympathy tells me Johnson is, too.

But let's get to the point, the reason for all the hubbub: Johnson's dance. It's that forceful, purposeful, propulsive dance I recognize from Heat and Life and everything else she does, limbs lashing a white space that becomes charged, through the violence of the dance, with opponents. Johnson's movement has evolved a bit, though -- I see more bodily rootedness, every move charged from the crotch, more of the curvilinear geometry of an adult female body -- but still aggressive, still punishing the air.
     Though she can do duos, male bodies (in Terrible Things, jujitsu wrestlers) -- even a tumbling threesome that reminds me of nothing so much as the flag of the Isle of Man -- the female solo is Johnson's base. A woman alone, in space, struggling but defiant.
     Or, take the pose I think of as Johnson's first position: facing the audience, legs apart and parallel, which with Johnson's slightly bow-legged stance means that the knees wing out, heightening the wide stability of the female pelvis. The arms hang loosely at the sides, the shoulder blades down in back and the shoulders taut. Her head might loll a bit to one side, her lips curl in an un-smile. She looks ready to shoot from the hip, to mow you down if you stand in her way.
      Should we chalk this fundamental aloneness up to the displacement she often references -- her distance from her native Alaska? Or, to the internal dislocation of being part indigenous (she's part Yup'ik)? Or, to the permanent edge of being a modern woman in America?
      Sure, maybe -- but with Johnson the politics often feel like labels for something that runs much deeper. The personal is the political; indeed, but for Johnson that split seems beside the point: the political is the personal, everything is personal.

I HAVE TO ADMIT, I'm having a hard time writing this piece. I keep running aground. I think Johnson's ambitious, but she won't cop to plans for world domination; all she'll say is "I don't have a grand plan, except to continue doing work and engaging with communities and collaborating with other artists and working hard to make the connections needed, so I can continue to do this work and present it in as many and as varied places as I can." I think reviews are crucial to Johnson's story, but Johnson says, "Other people's words should not really have a direct effect on what I as an artist make or feel about my work." I see anger, but the most Johnson will agree to is "intensity". More and more, I get the sense I'm just writing about myself.
     Who knows? Maybe Johnson's doing it intentionally -- performance as Rorschach blot. No, not blot, nothing that passive -- Johnson's performance confronts, provokes, demands reaction. In fact, reaction is very important to her. She likes to have talkback sessions after shows (which some artists abhor); she encourages feedback -- heck, she loves to tour because "I like connecting with communities." Your response is part of her art -- not just, not even primarily, your experience or your dream wandering, but your kickback, your recoil, your realization, your whatever.
     Perhaps that's why she refuses to arrive: that's your job. Catharsis is for sissies. Real people work for their breakthroughs.

Johnson promises The Thank-You Bar will come to Minneapolis sometime in 2010 -- where, she doesn't know; but if I were you, I'd keep an eye on small venues and untraditional spaces.
     Then what? "I want to learn fish-skin sewing," she murmurs, and work on "movement as contradiction and possibility at the same time" -- a typical Johnson tension. What she'll do with it, and how it'll make you feel, we can only wait to find out.

Last thought: despite all her skill, I'm not sure it's Johnson's choreography that has everyone looking in her direction. It's still less her content, which (to my eye) is mostly a door into her work -- a label, a handle. Instead, it's something in her flesh: a rapturous undoing that never undoes, like the flicker of a flame -- as if she were an animal in a human body, the strangeness burning under her skin.

James Everest: Where does the name “The Thank-you Bar” come from?
Emily Johnson: My grandma owned The Que-Ana Bar, down in Clam Gulch for many, many years. Quyana means thank-you and is the first Yup’ik word I consciously remember learning. Because my grandma and papa also lived there, the Que-Ana is where we went for Sunday sourdoughs and Thanksgiving dinner... it also served as our fishing and hunting headquarters - I have probably spent a million hours tying fish strips and cleaning clams there at grandmas! The bar had a jukebox filled with TRUE country music—my brothers and I kept it well supplied with quarters—and this music serves as the soundscape to my memories of family and food rituals. Making a dance about home and displacement, it seemed necessary to name it after this place. I also feel like the name ties to language—Que-Ana, Quyana—Thank-you.

JE: When did you begin working on this new piece? How did the process begin in its earliest stages?
EJ: I wrote a short story about Blackfish in November, 2007 and it ended up being the beginning of this dance. I told the story in a few theater settings—while text and stories have been part of my work with my dance company for a long time, I personally never spoke much on stage—so I had to get used to the idea and find the right way to do it. I respect the art and traditions of telling stories and I needed to find a way that made sense to me, in a contemporary art world setting. It took a lot of time. I was very scared. It is something I still work on.

I also rehearsed a lot outdoors at first, trying to dance in the ‘natural parts’ of the city. And, I spent a summer building a beaver lodge (that no beaver would see ft to live in!). I had a residency at the Blacklock Nature Sanctuary in Moose Lake, MN a while ago and an important part of my time there was watching the beavers—I guess they had an impact on me. In fact, a long time ago, there were beavers living across the highway from the Que-Ana Bar. We’d go over and watch them all the time. I did a science fair project on them in the 2nd grade... I guess beavers are part of my upbringing too and I’m fascinated by the architecture of their lodges.

Also, this past winter my collaborators and I had a three week fellowship at the Maggie Allesee National Center
for Choreography and the concentrated time we had to collaborate there was vital.

JE: Where did the ideas & themes for THE THANK-YOU BAR come from?
EJ: I grew up near The Que-Ana Bar, but have lived for the past fifteen years in Minneapolis. While there are things I love about urban living, I understand that as I work as an artist in a city far from home, I lose time to learn from my family and the elders of my ancestral community. It is a trade off. I choose to live where I do, but feel displaced and miss where I am from.

Also—living outside—I get asked about igloos a lot. Sometimes this happens when people learn I am from Alaska, but especially it happens when people learn I am Native. This fascinates and horrifies me at the same time. This preconceived notion of a place and of Alaska’s indigenous people is so prevalent—even in the 21st century! My
fascination with this igloo-myth perception inspired me to work with actual and metaphorical architectures of natural and urban home structures—hence the beaver lodge that used to be part of this piece.

JE: How is this work different from your previous dances?
EJ: I think language is the biggest difference—I am trying to learn Yup’ik, my grandma is helping me and I have some tapes and books, and as I gain a little familiarity with Yup’ik word construction and meaning (though I have only just begun!) I begin to have a new way of understanding. Now, I don’t speak Yup’ik in this piece, nor do I dance traditionally. But in my dances, I try to make personal response and experience one of the essential weight bearing structures of composition so, as I learn more about Yup’ik worldview through language, then themes of displacement, particularly of language in relation to displacement, come out—albeit in an abstracted way—in THE THANK-YOU BAR. I am trying to starkly question miscommunication, preconceived notions, and the effects of a dominant language on a land with multiple indigenous language realities. And, because these issues are often subtly present in our lives, I am trying to do it in a subtle way in this piece. I think THE THANK-YOU BAR is the beginning of a new artistic process for me—a more integrated process. And I think it is the first in a series of works.

JG: How did you choose your collaborators for THE THANK-YOU BAR?
EJ: This project exists because of the amazing artists I get to collaborate with!

James Everest—who is also my husband—has been musical director for Catalyst since 2003 so we’ve collaborated on many projects. He composed the score and played live for my dance, HEAT AND LIFE. We toured that piece to fourteen states (including AK) over three years. Joel Pickard and I are part of a multidisciplinary team of artists who make art for public spaces. We once did a 24 hour art event on and around the Stone Arch bridge in Minneapolis. When I was writing my Blackfish story Joel was working on deconstructing country music standards, and the two efforts seemed intertwined. My work with James and Joel has surrounded the tradition of country music and the interplay between western expansion ideas and guitar—between silence and apathy. They are amazing musicians and we have really worked together to create this piece.

I first saw Karen Beaver’s work at Ancient Traders Gallery in Minneapolis and then as part of CHANGING HANDS: ART WITHOUT RESERVATION, a touring exhibit of the Museum of Arts & Design. I saw these Yup’ik style masks with intricate beading and a different kind of color palate than I was used to. I looked at her bio and sure enough,
she was from Bethel. Our conversations have centered on story and image, based on things we remember being taught and things we remember seeing. We talk a lot about Alaska and about missing it. Karen lives in South Dakota and so we share an ancestral home and the experience of displacement. Karen is doing a storied beadwork on my costume.

Kari Multz is from Homer. She owns a boutique there that sells locally designed clothes. James and I were there
this summer and I saw a shirt that immediately made me think of THE THANK-YOU BAR—it was like beautiful fish scales and country music rolled into one. We’ve had a great time sending ideas and measurements back and forth. Kari is making James and Joel’s shirts.

Carolyn Anderson and I both work at an amazing independent bookstore in Minneapolis, Birchbark Books. Carolyn is a painter who works closely with landscape and the often forced intersection between land and “development.”
We are a really good team.

I have worked closely with both costumer Angie Vo and lighting designer Heidi Eckwall for almost ten years,
and with such an intensely personal piece, I wanted to work with people who know me, my process, and my work.

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.

The name of the saloon is a play on "quyana," the Yup'ik Eskimo word for "Thank you." Johnson's latest piece of performance art, premiering at Out North on Thursday, is "The Thank-You Bar."

Part dance, part storytelling, part art installation, "The Thank-You Bar" is not easy to categorize. None of Johnson's works are, but they've garnered attention in the Lower 48.

Johnson, of Yup'ik descent on her father's side, was born in Soldotna in 1976, raised in Sterling and went to college in Minnesota. Originally she planned to become a physical therapist but, in her first year, she took a class in modern dance and was hooked.

She graduated ("summa cum laude," she stresses) from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dance and started her own company, Catalyst. With two other women she created a trio piece and took it to a festival in Toronto, then returned to Minneapolis and produced her own show. Awards and fellowships soon came her way and critics took notice.

"Johnson, whose choreography can be as fierce as she is sweet, is one of the most entrepreneurial dance artists in town," wrote Minneapolis Star Tribune dance critic Camille LeFevre. LeFevre also praised her "clean, strong physicality... as well as her readiness to take on pertinent issues," including relationships, feminism and the environment.

The themes of "The Thank-You Bar" are not easy to pinpoint. It sprang, she said, with her memory of a story told to her by a cousin in St. Mary's. The story is about the slippery, elusive, eelish, carnivorous, tenacious blackfish.

"But it's not narrative," she said, opening her hands like a book.

Johnson uses her hands constantly and with great precision when talking. When describing a piece with "dramatic lighting," she turned her wrists toward the reporter and spread out her fingers in front of her eyes in imitation of spotlights.

The hands almost hint at Yup'ik dance, which uses only the upper part of the body. But none of her work is in any way "traditional." It's all cutting-edge, abstract, contemporary performance art; LeFevre calls some of it "post-post-modern."

Johnson herself has called her pieces "dance experiments."

She admitted, however, that she is increasingly interested in finding out more about her Alaska Native heritage. She had her grandmother record Yup'ik phrases to help her become more familiar with the language. "I have sticky notes around the house with the names of things in Yup'ik," she said.

When she attended a performer's showcase in New Orleans, she told the audience of art presenters more about her plans, concluding, "If anyone knows a Yup'ik artist who'd like to work with me, let me know."

In that audience sat Mike Huelsman, the executive director of Anchorage's Out North and a former resident of the Yup'ik village of New Stuyahok.

"I said to myself, 'This is my chance!' " he recalled. He caught up with her and introduced himself by saying "Hello" in Yup'ik. Out North wound up co-commissioning "The Thank-You Bar" along with the Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota.

Johnson often performs in unexpected places like sculpture parks, street corners, art galleries -- and bars. In 2004 she performed in a store front in Homer.

"I like to do that because it has a different sense than you get in a place where you might usually expect to see a performance," she said.

For the Out North performance, the bleacher seating is out. The audience will instead sit in three concentric rows with the performers in the center. And the audience will be limited to 30 people for each show.

"My work is always very personal," Johnson said. "I want this to be very intimate, to perform for a nice, small group. I try to create a place in the theater that can be our home for the hour."

Some Catalyst performances include several dancers, but "The Thank-You Bar" as we see it will use only three performers: Johnson herself and musicians James Everest and Joel Pickard.

The performers have been connected for some time, she said. Everest was a fan of Catalyst and Johnson was looking for ways to work live music into the pieces when an artist friend introduced the two.

Pickard came up with the idea of exploring implications in classic country music, which made Johnson recall the juke box at the Que-Ana Bar. The three pulled their lines of thought together and worked out "The Thank-You Bar" last winter during a three-week fellowship at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography in Florida.

Everest and Pickard, who use electronic music loops in conjunction with guitars (sometimes bowed) and pedal steel, call their duo "Blackfish" in honor of the animal's role in "The Thank-You Bar," Everest said. They'll be presenting improvised concerts in conjunction with the show as it's presented in Anchorage, then in Homer, and plan to record them, he said.

The performance also coincides with an art show at Out North featuring work by Native Americans, titled "This is Displacement: Native Artists Consider the Relationship Between Land and Identity."

The art in the show reflects some of the thematic material in "The Thank-You Bar." On some level, it's about home and displacement, Johnson said.

"I still consider myself an Alaskan," Johnson said, "but in a way, I'm displaced. I've been away from home for 15 years and have this feeling that I need to come back."

She'll have to talk over any move with her husband, Everest. Their artistic collaboration morphed into matrimony in 2005.

The wedding reception took place -- where else? -- at the Que-Ana Bar.

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.

The idea of displacement drives The Thank-You Bar, a performance art piece created by choreographer Emily Johnson with composers/musicians James Everest and Joel Pickard. The piece combines dance, live music, storytelling and visual imagery to create connections between ideas of displacement and longing.

Originally from Alaska and now based out of Minneapolis, Johnson knows firsthand the unrest of being physically in one place and emotionally in another. She believes this feeling ties everyone together.

Displacement is something that all creatures know something about, Johnson says in the development video of The Thank-You Bar that is featured on her website.

Johnson, who is of Yup’ik descent, grew up in South central Alaska. She moved to Minneapolis at the age of 18 where she became a choreographer and performer. Her company, Catalyst, has been performing since 1998, including works commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts, and Macalester College as well as Out North Contemporary Art House here in Anchorage.

Johnson’s performances and teachings have brought her to all parts of the globe, including Montreal, St. Petersburg and Amsterdam, but she still feels emotionally drawn to her home state, even though she has adapted to 14 years of life outside Alaska.

The Thank-You Bar will bring Johnson back to Alaska where she will perform in Anchorage and in Homer. This piece commissioned by Out North and Minneapolis’ Franconia Sculpture Park is a collaborative effort between multiple artists to create a complete emotional experience.

“I know there is no one picture of displacement, no one story that matters most,” Johnson says in a press release.

“I want to offer audiences a wide spectrum of images to contemplate.”

Johnson developed The Thank-You Bar with James Everest and Joel Pickard of Blackfish at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. Johnson performs alongside Everest and Pickard, who provide live music in The Thank-You Bar—Everest on nylon and steel string acoustic guitars, Pickard on pedal steel guitar. These instruments are played through effects and looping pedals to create sounds that are both jarring and beautiful. The piece is designed to limit audience seating to 30, allowing the audience to sit in three semi-circles on the stage. In the intimate studio setting of Out North, Johnson will give the audience a place to call home for an hour.

Acting as a companion piece, the art exhibit This is Displacement: Native Artists Consider the Relationship Between Land and Identity, will appear alongside The Thank-You Bar. The exhibit features original pieces by emerging indigenous artists that include Carolyn L. Anderson and Johnson, as well as Jim Denomie, Star Wallowing Bull, and Andrew Okpeaha Maclean.

Co-curated by Johnson and Anderson, the exhibit further stresses the idea of displacement and asks the question: What is a true home?

Anderson also understands the effects that displacement can have.

“I was born and raised in Minnesota, but my maternal heritage is Diné,” Anderson says in a press release.

“It’s as if half of my heart is here in Minnesota and the other half is in Dinetah.”

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.

Johnson moved from Alaska to Minneapolis to study physical therapy, but shifted her focus after taking a modern dance class. She graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree in dance and started her own dance company, Catalyst, which has been performing since 1998.

Johnson is now a nationally recognized choreographer who refers to her pieces as dance experiments. She explores current issues, including socialism, the environment, relationships and displacement. Her dance pieces are intended to be thought-provoking and entertaining, and include dance, music and visual art.

Johnson's resume is extensive and continues to grow. From commissions to presentations to performance projects to dance films to teaching in the United States and abroad, Johnson has received numerous art grants, residencies and fellowships. She also writes about dance and performance in the online magazine, Mental Contagion.

Johnson hopes that The Thank-You Bar will have a touring life. After the debut in Anchorage and Homer, Johnson will present the piece at a Living Arts Festival in Tulsa, Okla., and in Minneapolis in the fall.

"I would like to think that my dances are for everybody and that maybe they even enlighten small aspects of our existence," she says in her Web site bio.

A collaboration of Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer and Out North Theatre Company in Anchorage, The Thank-You Bar was commissioned by Out North and the National Performance Network.

"We are so fortunate to have access to cutting-edge artists out in the thick of things" said Adele Groning, Bunnell Street Arts Center's executive assistant. "Emily is pushing the boundary of what is performance and what is installation."

Johnson creates performance pieces that include themes that range from climate change and the environment to home and relationships to memory, regret and hope. For the past 11 years, Johnson's creativity has come from a place of social consciousness and passionate perspectives.

"I've always had a political sense and a passion for the environment," she says.

Johnson's personal experiences regarding identity tie into her Yup'ik heritage. Living away from Alaska and her family, she knows what it is to feel displaced.

"When I'm away from Alaska I remember the land and the light and the ocean. Memories of the land have influenced me and still do," she says.

Trying to learn the Yup'ik language so far from home, Johnson writes on her Web site: "As I gain familiarity with the Yup'ik language and meaning, I begin to have a new way of understanding. As I learn more about Yup'ik worldview through language, the theme of displacement comes out.

"The Thank-You Bar is my way of questioning miscommunication, preconceived notions and the effects a dominant language has on a land with multiple indigenous realities."

"The purpose of this performance is for people to think about where they live in a different way, in a way that they perhaps haven't done so before," she writer.

Johnson designed The Thank-You Bar for a smaller, more intimate audience so that she can connect with her audience, making the Bunnell Street Arts Center the perfect venue.

Johnson is the director, choreographer and curator of The Thank-You Bar, but the piece is very much a collaborative effort and includes musicians James Everest and Joel Pickard, who call themselves Blackfish.

Pickard plays pedal steel guitar and Everest plays nylon and steel string acoustic guitars. Along with Johnson, Everest and Picard, The Thank-You Bar also includes visual art by other artists, including Homer's Kari Multz.

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, Hannah Laraux Stormo, who was born in the Kuskokwim region.

“Going to Grandma’s house was going to the Que’Ana Bar,” Johnson said. “It holds so many of my memories. It had one of those big, old jukeboxes that had all this country music. That is the soundtrack to my memories. In a dream, you get pieces and parts and feelings that are larger than life.”

Johnson, now 33, lives in Minneapolis and runs a dance theatre called Catalyst. She has produced a theatre piece called, “The Thank You Bar,” which explores layers of memory and themes of displacement. She is traveling to Homer to perform it Oct. 16-17. This week, the show – as well as the exhibit, “This is Displacement” – are at Out North Theatre in Anchorage.

Being far from home, away from her family and not able to pursue her Native customs gave Johnson plenty of fodder for thoughts about being displaced.

“There are emotional repercussions in displacement, whether it’s from the self or imposed by an outside force,” Johnson said Thursday.

“I think of it as something that every creature knows something about. When we build something or walk somewhere else, we are always creating displacement.”

Though Johnson loves to come home and spends twice yearly visits with her family, Minneapolis is where she can do her performance work.

And, she enjoys the urban setting.

“It’s a strongly supportive city for contemporary dance and experimental theatre,” she explained. “And my husband is a musician.”

Johnson said she may be able to move back to Alaska if she can find a way to continue her work here, adding that she misses her family, “ … and the land itself.”

Johnson’s parents and two brothers live with their families in Sterling, Soldotna and Kenai. Sometimes she brings her entire dance company home with her.

“I have a very supportive family,” Johnson said. “In 2004, we came here and rehearsed in my parents’ yard. We sort of made up this residency program, and my family was cooking dinners while we rehearsed.”

According to Johnson, her Grandma Hannah will be at her opening night in Anchorage. It will be the first time she has seen the show.

“The Thank You Bar” is a piece designed for a small, intimate audience, which is why Bunnell provides such a “great venue.”

Johnson resists describing the narrative, saying she wants people to experience it fresh.

“The dancing happens all around you – the dancing encompasses the architecture of the building,” she explained. “We’re used to looking at these places we build as if it is an end to our vision. We stop thinking of what used to be here, what was here before we came and what will it be like in the future. We get stuck in our architecture as being a solid thing.”

Johnson performs in the context of four separate stories about growing up at the Que’Ana Bar. She said the purpose of the performance is to – for one hour – “think about where they live in a different way perhaps; a way they haven’t thought of before.”

Her costume includes a beaded headpiece created by another displaced Yup’ik woman, Karen Beaver of Bethel. Beaver now lives in North Dakota, but is coming home for the show.

“I just love it that we are creating these expanding circles of people,” Johnson said.

While there are some opportunities to learn the Yup’ik language far from home, Johnson said it is not easy to do it that way. She made tapes of her grandmother’s talk and uses books, foreshadowing a possible theme of language in the displacement process as her next focus.

“As I learn more about the Yup’ik world view through language, themes of displacement come out – albeit in an abstracted way – in The Thank You Bar,” she said.

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.

“Displacement” includes poetry and painting, ink-work and sculpture, through materials as traditional as beads and fiber, and as fundamental as blood.

Emily Johnson, a co-curator of the show, used Yup’ik blood—her blood—smeared or dappled on new and recycled freezer paper. Eight of these blood stained canvases sit in frames filled slightly with sand from Mini sota (the Dakota word for Minnesota) and Alaxsxaq (the Aleut word that led to the Russian word for Alaska).

In some, the paper that looks worn and wrinkled with smudges of blood; in others, a smooth canvas holds a single, thick drop.

Here, she speaks to the distance and connection between where she lives and where she comes from.

Co-curator Carolyn Anderson painted a self-portrait with a woman in the Buddha pose with her body as the central image and a tree and its roots spreading down her torso and toward the bottom of the canvas. Around her, a traditional dwelling, skyscrapers, a road, a river, an oilrig or two.

Here, the conceits of development look small against the ancestry of a single human being. The piece has almost an eastern sensibility, the figure appearing almost godlike while the human creations look fickle and inconsequential.

On another wall, poetry by Jay Thomas Bad Heart Bull takes a much more personal approach to displacement. His handwriting falls down long, scroll-like spans of paper in narratives of loss and pride.

When he writes of where he’s from, he does not allude to a single place or even a memory, but rather to a sense of the way things should be. “It’s the soft graze of horsehair and wool blankets on your skin in the winter.”

A drawing by Star Wallowing Bull takes an entirely different approach by engaging and confusing the eye through a colored ink visage of “Modern Day Indian” in an industrial environment. The piece looks beautiful and skillfully drawn, yet disjointed from assumptions about indigenous culture as existing only in the past.

The show only has ten pieces, making it thin in volume despite the variety of media and themes. Seeing more work by each artist would certainly add to it. Also, one of the drawbacks to seeing an art show this late in its run is that sometimes things get ratty in the gallery. Last week, I couldn’t get the video piece to work, but there’s usually someone on hand to help out.

In about a week, altars celebrating the Day of the Dead will go up in the same space. “Dia de Muertos” involves a handful of artists and groups, including the always reliable Mariano Gonzales, Indra Arriaga and Angela Ramirez, along with Hospice of Anchorage, students from West High School and the Rodriguez-Zinn family.

The altars welcome the dead with food, colorful objects and fetishes from the realm of the living. There might be paintings and sweet breads, candles and skulls—definitely skulls, sometimes in bonnets and often surrounded photos, flowers and crosses.

The main event takes place starting at 3 p.m. Sunday, November 1, with dance, music and food starting at 5 p.m., but the show opens the previous Friday, October 30, with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m.

On Halloween, storytellers from Anchorage will scare teens and adults with stories of doom at 6 p.m. (Leave little ones at home.)

But festivity, not fright, is the main reason for celebrating this Mexican holiday. Whether contemporary or traditional, the elaborate altars of “Dia de Muertos” will certainly remember ancestors or honor the life of someone important.

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.

Why marshmallows? Well, that's not exactly clear, but when it comes to work by Katie Pearl and Lisa D'Amour, "why," is typically eclipsed by "wow." In 2007, their site-specific show Bird Eye Blue Print turned an abandoned downtown office space at the World Financial Center into a portal to another universe, unleashing a swirl of idiosyncratic dance, oblique poetry, and absurd humor. Though not as immersive as that production, Terrible Things still sneakily transports the audience into a surreal, temporary astonishment zone.

The marshmallows are really just one small part of it. The text, written by longtime collaborators Pearl and D'Amour, is spoken entirely by Pearl, who directly addresses the audience for much of the show, while the dancers hustle around rearranging marshmallows and intertwining. The choreography by Emily Johnson (who also performs in the piece) is an imaginative mix of angular obsessiveness, lunging, tangling, and indescribable contortions. Center stage, Pearl unspools eccentric stories about all her turbulent romantic relationships, which eventually expand to include everyone who just bought a ticket—at least until they're dumped with the line, "Did you notice that I just broke up with all of you?"

It's all very amusing and fascinating, but after a while I began to wish for just a bit more friction. Then [SPOILER!] two college wrestlers (NYU and Hunter) ambled in wearing singlets and took turns wrestling spunky little Katie Pearl, whose diminutive height is a recurring theme in Terrible Things. It wasn't quite a "wow!" moment, but it was hilariously "WTF?!" After pinning her, the two lumbering jocks incongruously joined the dancers/marshmallow herders for the duration of the performance. Why not? As Pearl herself put it, "Anything is possible and everything is happening."

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).

Terrible Things takes the idea of parallel universes as its central premise. In a long monologue scripted by Pearl and D'Amour, the former offers a précis of her life in which she explores alternate choices and circumstances. If she had kept growing, she might have become a ballerina. If she had stayed in college, she might never have embraced Downtown theater. If she had not subjected "a long line of lovers to terrible breakups followed immediately by dating their best friend," she wouldn't have so much amusing material to draw upon.

As Pearl summarizes her 39 years, in a process her own father describes as "trying to pawn off your self-absorption as some metaphysical experiment," three dancers and two jujitsu wrestlers swirl and stumble around her. Sometimes they mirror her gestures, sometimes she mimics theirs—seemingly an attempt to explore the physics premise, well, physically. Pearl engages and her stories entertain; the choreography and the varieties of lighting, sound, and setting components can sometimes seem surplus to requirements. Yet, as in their previous collaborations, Pearl and D'Amour prod the boundaries of theater and performance art, working to transform straightforward narrative into something richer, stranger, and ineluctably feminine. Perhaps Terrible Things does not require a floor grid composed of 600 marshmallows (courtesy Anna Kiraly), but their presence makes the play that much sweeter.

In Crime or Emergency, Kempson conducts a quantum mechanics experiment on her own body. While barely altering her posture or voice, she splits herself into nearly a dozen characters, who form a soap-opera-like story centered on ideas about violence. One of those characters muses, "How often do we discover a new part of ourselves?" In Kempson's case: constantly. While Kempson flings herself from one personality to the next, Iveson provides underscoring and contents himself with a mere two roles—Figgie, an accompanist, and Mary, a journalist. (At two performances, titled Emergency or Crime, the actors will switch. Kempson will play Figgie and Mary; Iveson will attempt the other parts.)

The script itself appears both over- and underwritten, a piece of hysterical realism that plays out in a doctor's office, in a parking garage, at a rodeo, on a boat, etc. As both actor and playwright, Kempson has a gift for rendering the fairly normal as intensely weird. She's never better than when portraying Milcha, the cabaret artiste who dons a sequined vest and speak-sings her way through Bruce Springsteen's early singles. There's a "Darkness on the Edge of Town," and a zany, glittery lightness at the center of the show.

"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.

A lot of artists, particularly performance artists, have delved into the Uncertainty Principle and its implications in their work—most famously in Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen. The principle not only evokes the realm of possibility, it also touches on the completeness of human ignorance, it gives rise to metaphysical questions in many people, and it also taps into what I think is a basic human fascination with really smart people and the theories of theirs that we would like to feel we can understand. And science is sexy. Its popular appeal waxes and wanes, but people who can figure things out have long been way hotter than blonds blinking through tired sex tapes.

In this play, Pearl and D'Amour, along with their collaborator Emily Johnson, who provides the choreography, seem to want us to embrace the possibilities that our imagination offers us—possibilities that may or may not come true in life. For instance, at one point in the play Pearl describes an argument with her father in which he feels theater does not constitute the real world and Pearl responds by asking him if he could imagine his librarian wife becoming not only a celebrity of sorts, but also a librarian action figure, which, if you listen to a lot of NPR, you'll know actually happened in the "real world." They want us to "what if" a bit, not only about Pearl's life, but also about our own role as audience members—what if we got up on stage and made the show our own, about where we are in the universe—what if the theater took off into space, and about the choices we've made in our own lives.

This kind of engagement of the audience in the ideas of the play is characteristic of pretty much all of Pearl and D'Amour's work, much of which has taken place outside of traditional theater spaces and often involves site-specific texts. It's one of the enduring successes of most of their work as well—this ability to literally and figuratively take their audiences along with them. In fact, there's a moment towards the end of the show when Pearl is off-stage, continuing to speak, and describes retrieving a ladder to place in the center of the stage so that we, the audience, might climb it and join her on the roof of PS122. As she spoke, there entered a very palpable expectation in the audience that this might actually happen, and I gather, from the expressions on people's faces that for many of us, despite the cold, it seemed like an interesting thing to do. (After all, what is up there on the roof of PS122, it's been surrounded by scaffolding for so long? And who doesn't like being on any roof in New York?) This last 30 minutes or so of the show gave me a feeling similar to being in an IMAX theater or on one of those space rides at science museums where 10 or 20 people huddle into a machine that rocks and jumps as you view images of hurtling through galaxies. In other words, I felt briefly transported. And that seems to be the intention of the work entirely—to take note of those moments where we feel separated from ourselves, to entertain a reality we weren't entirely sure we would ever entertain.

Terrible Things achieves this transportive effect, in part, because it has one of the strongest and clearest aesthetics of any play I've seen at PS122. I could easily imagine the design (both set and costume) on the slick stages of BAM, where visual impact in a production is often paramount. It has a surprisingly mid-century feel, something like the illustrations of Charley Harper—all black, white, grays and primary colors. It evokes all those heavily designed and simplified images of science that have been in vogue for some time now in the crafty set and in design work in general. Wrestlers dressed in bright blue singlets orbit the stage, grappling with one another, while a grid of marshmallows morphs into wide curving illustrations. Dancers is gray and red move deliberately through the space while Pearl, often literally lifted onto blocks or plastic heels, speaks. To the eye it reads like a stark version of Disney's 1959 classic Donald In Mathmagic Land, which just seems extremely appropriate for this performance.

Happily, just as Terrible Things asks us to wonder freely, it resists whimsy. The story is based on reality, and like the electron's bounded atomic reality, the subject of the work is bounded by Pearl's own experience. She is everywhere simultaneously that she can be, but where she can be is within her own life or her own head. This grounding in fact seems to keep the show from losing track of itself, but also makes it hard to watch the show and not wonder what possibility means outside the circumscribed world of an atom or Pearl's life.

I ran into someone I know leaving the theater after the show, and after our conversation I couldn't help but think that it's generally people who have achieved certain dreams of theirs, who have lived lives of possibility, so to speak, that can really say something like "Let’s say anything is possible and everything is happening." It's an optimist's outlook, which I don't mean as a slight, though I know some might interpret it that way. It makes me think a little bit of the speakers at a recent event I attended related to the TED Conference, where speakers who have attained a certain amount of success in their fields share stories of achieving unlikely outcomes. All of it is very exciting and hopeful, and imagination is, I believe, the key to solving any problem, but it's also one of the things that I think contemporary society has the hardest time cultivating in children, despite so much lip-service being paid to improving education. After listening to Pearl and the speakers at the TED event, I can't help wonder about those people whose possibilities are dramatically limited, or who believe that they are for any number of reasons.

This, of course, is a larger question that grew out of seeing Terrible Things and is not meant as a critique of the show. I point it out to express the fact that ideas grow out of good works of art. It's the way in which I think art and science relate the most—they create more questions than they answer. And what's crucial about the idea of an electron obtaining multiple outcomes is that those outcomes are in fact dramatically limited, bounded by the space of an atom. The electron cannot be everywhere in the universe doing all things, only those things that an electron does within its atom. And that's a provocative paradox, I think, when you consider artists' attraction to the Uncertainty Principle's promise of possibility.

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 and Katie 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 Cruz and Adrian Czmielewski).

If you're typically overwhelmed at this time of year--by the bigness, the brashness, the commercial-ness of it all--you might appreciate the compact intimacy of Terrible Things. Compact, yes, but big in personality. Just like Pearl, its undisputed star.

Everything/everyone here seems to be located somewhere in Pearl's busy cranium, a place bustling with memories, like the legion of plump marshmallows aligned with impeccable, subatomic regularity across the theater's floor. In the opening, dancers carefully, efficiently move through this strange, snowy field, delicately scooping aside some marshmallows with their elongated, velvety arms and making shapes of small quantities of the sweets. This sets the stage for the space to open up and light up with room to move freely, the vividness of primary colors, Pearl's non-stop, embodied storytelling, and the mystery of parallel--but not perfectly sync-ed--worlds in the time-space continuum.

Terrible Things is a modest delight, a fine corrective for the excesses of the season.

Yes, it looks a little different. This year's list of Austin Critics Table Awards has been slenderized from 51 categories to 37.

So why are there fewer awards if Austin's arts scene has continued to expand?

Because the scene is shifting, not just growing. Creative production across the disciplines — visual arts, theater, classic music and dance — has filled out more equally. The roster of indie galleries and visual art happenings — along with activities at museums — has exploded in the past few years. And local dance producers surprise with ever new ways to intrigue audiences while the classical music scene proceeds at a steady clip.

How we wrap our minds around culture shifts, too. Fifteen years ago, the original Critics' Table Awards were roughly modeled after the Tony Awards, down to the gender distinctions between actor and actress. Perhaps that made sense when the Tonys started in 1947 as a means to celebrate Broadway. But does the gender divide make sense in 2007 in Austin when recognizing multiple arts disciplines?

The Austin Critics' Table thought not. Hence, our informal and independent group of staff and freelance critics from the Austin American-Statesman and the Austin Chronicle refashioned the way we recognize annual achievement in the arts.

Join us at the free, casual awards ceremony at 7 p.m. Monday, June 4, at Cap City Comedy Club, 8120 Research Boulevard. We'll celebrate this year's inductees to the Austin Arts Hall of Fame and announce Critics' Table Award winners.

Touring Show, Dance
'Heat and Life,' Catalyst, Dance Umbrella
'Fetish and Other Dances,' Hijack, Fuse Box Festival
Hubbard Street Dance Company, UT Performing Arts Center
'Noche Flamenca,' One World Theatre
'The Bends of Life,' Wideman/Davis Dance, Dance Umbrella

On Saturday I found myself cycling through the drizzling rain to The World Financial Center, an office building on the western edge of the former World Trade Center site. The occasion was Lisa D’Amour and Katie Pearl’s astonishing site-specific performance piece, Bird Eye Blue Print, presented in several rooms in an abandoned office for small audiences of 22 at a time. Upon receiving my ticket in the building’s lobby, I was asked to jot down my “point of origin” on a scrap of paper and wait.

In due time I was approached by an eager woman in a red dress and escorted with a few others down a hallway to a small “orientation room” where a hand-drawn map of the city had been illustrated with multi-colored lines charting each spectator’s path to the performance. It was a fitting reminder of our little temporary community’s interconnectedness. Mention was made of “The Raw Space” that we would sadly not be permitted to enter, and we were then led to a main office space, where the rest of the audience sat on the floor before the mysterious “Blue Dress Lady” (Lisa D’Amour). There was the sound of exotic birds punctuated by an occasional lion’s roar. Seven other “Red Dress Girls” drifted through the space, offering saltines or lounging on window sills.

Before leading us on an ethereal and wildly imaginative tour through her home – the suite of offices – The Blue Dress Lady told us a little about her life; the way her sister used to dress her up like a tree and her contemplative lifestyle in the office, which used to have a glacier passing through it. With a spellbinding fusion of choreography by Emily Johnson, exquisite sound design by Jimmy Garver and visual design by Krista Kelley Walsh, the performers transformed the office rooms into a mystically-charged alternate reality, where a hallway could be an optical illusion, and a room covered with lists and hanging light bulbs could approach the sublime. There were far too many intimate moments, funny utterances and inspired details in this extraordinary performance to enumerate here; and unfortunately I cannot encourage you to see it for yourself – it ended yesterday after an all-too-brief four day run. (Don’t say we didn’t warn you!)

But next time D’Amour and Pearl bring their enchanting work to town be sure to take it in; Bird Eye Blue Print sent me off into the rain with that sensation I’m always seeking in art, that sense of being ever so slightly more connected to myself and others. When the “tour” ended, each visitor was invited to reach into The Blue Dress Lady’s storage closet, which opened up into the forbidden Raw Space, and select one card from a little pile. Mine, now set in front of my computer monitor, bears hand-written text that reads: “and you are so close you could almost touch it.”

In a world framed by imminent danger and constant environmental loss, how do people continue to live? Emily Johnson and her Minneapolis-based dance company Catalyst make a complicated stab at creating and populating that kind of anxious world in their evening-length work "Heat and Life," performed Thursday at Gallery Lombardi. With wit, off-kilter, yet aggressive movement, and small moments of simple beauty, the group confronted and nearly overwhelmed its audience.

Constantly recostuming themselves, the six women in the cast appeared to represent characters ranging from a hazmat team in traffic-cone orange to camouflaged nature warriors whose boots and cargo pants matched the color of sod spread through the gallery. Always moving with absolute commitment and focus (which is what made me so willing to trust the dancers even when the work seemed most abstract), the cast ran back and forth, shouting each others' names into walkie-talkies.

Frightened chaos gave way to beauty and humor at times. A projected film slowly lapsed from lush green fields to mountainous glacier walls with clips of oil refineries and other environmental hazards interspersed. Once two dancers lolled on their backs atop the sod as a voiceover remembered the pleasures of childhood-romps through grass. Near the work's end one dancer gave another quick instructions about how to move, creating a fast-paced, hilarious "Simon Says."

All these vignettes occurred amid red, blinking lights and haunting live music by J.G. Everest, a constant reminder that breakdown, be it natural or human, always lingers.

Emily Johnson doesn’t consider her work “activist art.” Though the endangered natural environment has been her theme in several works, the soft-spoken, slender choreographer and dancer says she owes her vision as much to the exploratory vocabulary of contact improvisation as the natural world of her Alaskan childhood.

Praised by Minneapolis critics for the clean, strong physicality of her movement as well as her readiness to take on pertinent issues, Johnson is winning grants and attracting national recognition. Performing on the spit/sluice we are outlaws this past June in a tiny theater adjacent to a bowling alley in Minneapolis, Johnson emanated a ferocity-laced sweetness in a duet, performed with dancer Susan Scalf, that she originally choreographed on a spit of land in her native Alaska. Johnson’s sharp, truncated movements contrasted with Scalf’s more robust presence and whipping limbs, with both styles interspersed with the occasional spoken word or shout. The props included a blue tarp, representing the Mississippi River, in which Johnson rolled herself. At one point, dancers threw glasses of water on windows, then quickly tried to staunch the downward flow with their fingers.

In her freshman year as a scholarship student studying physical therapy at the University of Minnesota, Johnson took a dance class - and changed her major. She studied ballet and modern dance, but her biggest influence at the university was contact improvisation guru Chris Aiken. “Dance improvisation has been a huge force in my training ever since,” she says. “I feel that’s where my base is.” (She has also studied improvisation with Julyen Hamilton, Jennifer Monson, and Nancy Stark Smith.)

Johnson, 30, who is on-eighth Yup’ik Eskimo, acquired her environmental sensitivity while growing up on the Kenai Peninsula, where she relished her family’s hunting, camping, and fishing trips. Her mother worked as a special-education teacher’s aide; her father was an electrician. Johnson played varsity basketball and ran cross-country in high school. As a child, her only dance training was a “tap and tumble” class, she recalls.

After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1998, Johnson turned out a prolific body of lean, rigorous, abstract choreography performed by Catalyst, her company of powerful young women. Spoken text, sports metaphors, children’s games, and props entered into the work, while Johnson fused humor, drama, and movement into riveting minimalist pieces both thought-provoking and entertaining.”

Works like Power Play (2001) examined competitive sports via Johnson’s muscular modern dance idiom. Never Meant to Hurt (2003) realized a beautiful text on love and loneliness through an unsentimental choreography of tension and release, grasping and flinging away, long open moves, and angled limbs - all of which enhanced the work’s mystery.

In 2004, the Walker Art Center commissioned and produced Johnson’s most ambitious word to date, Heat and Life. Performed in an old soap factory near downtown Minneapolis, it was accompanied by an electronic ambient soundscape created by Lateduster, a group led by Johnson’s husband, JG Everest. The dances performed the stripped-sown choreography with single-minded purpose. They walked, ran, and reconfigured themselves like a SWAT team, representing her vision of a world already reeling from the effects of global warming. But Johnson’s use of the site and space, and music and movement were a flashback to the performances of dance makers in the 1960’s and ‘70s. it was the piece that Johnson brought this summer to New York’s Dance Theater Workshop and that she intends to perform in all 50 states. She’s crossed Alaska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and New York off the list; this fall Catalyst performs the work in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Iowa, and in March 2007 it will be at Links Hall in Chicago. After each show, the audience participates in a question-and-answer session with a local environmental organization.

Emily Johnson, a native Alaskan now resident of Minneapolis, brings her all-woman contemporary troupe to New York in Heat and Life,  which explores issues surrounding global warming. Multi-instrumentalist JG Everest performs his original score. Johnson and her collaborators have worked all over the west and north, as far as St. Petersburg, Russia; here they make their New York debut. A discussion will follow each performance. Through Sat at 7:30, Dance Theater Workshop, 219 W. 19th

Given the clear skies and balmy breezes last August 27, the Stone Arch Bridge would’ve been packed to the viewfinders even without Landmark - exactly as Local Strategy intended. The interdisciplinary art ensemble’s six members designed their 24-hour celebration of our loveliest pedestrian thoroughfare to enhance its setting, rather than to overwhelm it. They succeeded in every respect, including audience composition. Sure, lots of people turned out specifically for the event’s music, dance, performance art, props, installations, and sundry other free attractions. But art lovers tended to blend into the usual throng of bikers, joggers, and strollers, just as the latter joined the former once they figured out they were in the midst of something extraordinary. Distinguishing between the marathon’s countless micro-happenings and everyday life above and around the river was all but impossible, too. Was the kid doing skateboard tricks at noon part of the show? What about the pair of young women in vintage prom dresses, running along the railing at 2:00 am? Might instigators Lisa D’Amour, Eleanor Savage, Katie Pearl, Emily Johnson, Krista Walsh, and Jowl Pickard have conned the bunnies that frolicked brazenly at the bridge’s east entrance into joining their battalion of volunteers? Who cares? That the group blurred the boundary between life and art so completely was the payoff. Nobody who hung out, even for just a while, will ever forget that Landmark’s grandest components - the downtown skyline, Hennepin Bluffs Park, the Mississippi, the bridge itself - are all here for us to enjoy every day of the year.

In her dance series “Windfarm,” Emily Johnson wrestles with environmental threats and energy hopes for the future.

This may be the first time wind farms and post-modern dance have appeared in he same story. But choreographer Emily Johnson, 29, finds her inspiration in places where humans, machines and nature intersect. Johnson also likes to self-produce her dance pieces on street corners, in sculpture parks, and in art galleries. So it’s no surprise the “Windfarm” addresses her concerns about environmental degradation.

“Right now, wind farms, for me, inspire a great deal of hope,” Johnson explained. “they’re a technology that really collaborated with nature. They’re huge and mechanical, with the wind turbines arranged in inspiring patterns. And they produce this thing we humans eat up like crazy: power.”

The first “Windfarm” segment, inspired in part by land in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that is threatened by oil drilling, was performed by members of her dance company (Catalyst, dances by Emily Johnson). While the work was often obscure, it included illuminating moments: delicately cupped hands that cradled an invisible bird, scraping movements that recalled the hoof pawing of caribou, dynamic industrial dancing performed in rubber boots.

The second installment, “Mass,” takes place Wednesday evening and includes 20-plus dancers and non-dancers (this writer included) whom Johnson invited to participate “because they’ve inspired or been part of or been related to the dance work I’ve done.” The group will perform simple walking patterns and gestures as the audience listens to music on Walkmans. (Bring headphones.)

As with wind farms, Johnson says, this segment “has something to do with creating power from huge masses of people. It’ll be kind of like at the State Fair when you’re watching crowds of people and random interactions.” The last segment, “one. for resolve,” on April 19, is Johnson’s first solo since 2001.

Eventually, these three segments will be incorporated into a larger work, said Johnson, who has earned a Bush Fellowship as well as several fellowships from the Jerome Foundation. But don’t call it activist dance.

“I call them dance experiments,” she says of the series. “And because my primary concerns outside of dance are environmental ones, I can’t help but investigate environmental problems and solutions through art.”

Johnson, a native of Alaska whose choreography can be as fierce as she is sweet, is one of the most entrepreneurial dance artists in town. She curates the Capture! dance-on film series at the Bryant Lake Bowl. Her feminist-cowgirl parable “Plain Old Andrea, with a Gun,” rigorously minimalist “Wingspan 5’2’’,” and post-post modern “Heat and Life” are available on DVD. She collaborates with musicians in her performances, particularly JG Everest (now her husband) and his ambient -electronica group, Lateduster.

The Walker Art Center, Southern Theater and Red Eye have all presented Johnson. In June, her company performs “Heat and Life” at the prestigious Dance Theater Workshop in New York City. But she’s determined to continue self-producing in nontheatrical venues.

“The way I present my dances is as much my work as the actual dance I make,” she explains, “Bringing elements of these places into the dance is an important part of the work I do. And I’m just determined to make this my livelihood, which takes both that independent spirit as well as the stubbornness I have.”