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."

Emily Johnson was born in Soldotna and grew up in Sterling. She is of Yup’ik descent on her father’s side, from the Yukon/Kuskokwim Delta—Bethel and Akiak specifically. She has family in Anchorage, Fairbanks, on the Kenai, in Bethel, and every two weeks, in Prudhoe Bay. She has lived for fifteen years in Minneapolis and is trying to learn the Yup’ik language. Her personal experiences and questions regarding home/displacement/origin/identity led her to an intensive study of storytelling, writing, and the Yup’ik language during the creation of THE THANK-YOU BAR. She received guidance on storytelling from Kate Taluga, an Apalachicola Creek storyteller in Tallahassee, Florida, and elder Sakim, a linguist who taught her about language histories in relation to displacement histories. She also received mentorship on her writing from Gwen Westerman Griffin, a writer who is Dakota, through the Native Inroads Program at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

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.