You need Flash player 8+ and JavaScript enabled to view this video.

Being Future Being: Inside/Outwards

Emily Johnson

Yup’ik artist Emily Johnson creates performance gatherings that center reworlding practices, Indigenous knowledge, and the sovereignty of communities. Being Future Being: Inside/Outwards invites audiences to become part of creating a radically-just and Indigenized future.

Details

Celebrated for a distinguished body of dance works, Yup’ik artist Emily Johnson creates performance gatherings that center reworlding practices, Indigenous knowledge, and the sovereignty of communities, land and more-than-humxn kin. Being Future Being conjures present joy and delves into the power of creation to build an aural, visual and ancestral landscape of Indigenous power.

Featuring a stellar cast of performers and an original score in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, Being Future Being is a multilayered performance for the stage, and beyond—a portal, a care processional, a site for transformation. As it (re)builds new visions of the forces that brought this world into being, Being Future Being invites audiences to become part of creating a radically-just and Indigenized future, one we can live in now and foster for generations to come.

Credits

Produced by Emily Johnson/Catalyst
Creation, Performance and Set Design Emily Johnson
Created with and performed by Ashley Pierre-Louis + Brandi Norton + Stacy Lynn Smith + Sugar Vendil
Music composed by Raven Chacon
Lighting Design Itohan Edoloyi
Mask, Wearables, Portal Design and Construction and Production Manager IV Castellanos
Sound Engineering Sonya Well-Off-Man
Quilt Beings Design Korina Emmerich
Quilts Design Maggie Thompson
Portal Tattoos Holly Mititquq Nordlum
Costume Design Raphael Regan
Costume Draping Cathleen O’Neal
Management Support George Lugg
Additional contributors to the creation process Zachary Crumrine + Joelly Dundorf + Kevin Holden + Sara Lyons + Drew Michael + Chloe Alexandra Thompson + Tyler Rai + Joseph Silovsky + Jasmine Shorty

Commissioned by BroadStage at Santa Monica College

With the support of National Performance Network Creation and Development Fund

Co-commissioned by Bunnell Street Arts Center (Homer) + New York Live Arts + Portland Institute for Contemporary Art + National Performance Network
with contributions from Doris Duke Charitable Foundation + Ford Foundation + National Endowment for the Arts
Additional commissioning and development support Dance/NYC’s Dance Advancement Fund made possible by The Howard Gilman Foundation & Ford Foundation + Abrons Arts Center (New York) + University of Massachusetts Amherst Fine Arts Center + Portland Ovation + Jacob’s Pillow – Pillow Lab Residency (Becket)

Creative residencies Movement Research Residency funded by Scherman Foundation’s Katharine S. & Axel G. Rosin Fund + New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Residency funded by Rockefeller Brothers Fund & Partners for New Performance

Creation was made possible in part with support from Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT: Transformative Change and Indigenous Arts Award + New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project with funding from Doris Duke Charitable Foundation & The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

This engagement is supported in part by Mid Atlantic Arts through USArtists International, a program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts + the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation + Trust for Mutual Understanding

Presented in association with Espace Libre

Premiered at BroadStage at Santa Monica College, on September 8, 2022

Interview conducted by Nayla Naoufal
Translated by Kacey Chagnon

Courtesy of the artist

Emily Johnson (Lenapehoking/New York)
Catalyst

Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty and well-being.

Full biography

Emily is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, United States Artists Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award. She is based on Haudenosaunee lands and Lenapehoking / New York City. Emily belongs to the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment — interacting with a place’s architecture, peoples, history and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral part of our connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.
Her choreography and gatherings have been presented across what is currently called the United States, Canada, and Australia. Her large-scale project, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars is an all-night outdoor performance gathering taking place amongst 84 community-hand-made quilts. It premiered in Lenapehoking (NYC) in 2017, and was presented in Zhigaagoong (Chicago) in 2019. She choreographed the Santa Fe Opera production of Doctor Atomic, directed by Peter Sellars in 2018. Her work Being Future Being premiered on Tongva Land in Los Angeles in 2022.

Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera 2018-2020, and a lead organizer of First Nations Dialogues. She was a co-compiler of the documents, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and Notes for Equitable Funding, was a member of Creative Time’s inaugural Think Tank, and serves as co-lead for First Nations Performing Arts.

She has previously appeared at FTA in performative exchanges part of FTA Playgrounds activities: Gather In, a Speculative Architecture of the Overflow in 2023 and Umyuangvigkaq in 2022.

Being Future Being: Inside/Outwards

Emily Johnson (Lenapehoking/New York)
Catalyst

Edition 2024

Performances

Infos

Being Future Being: Inside/Outwards

Emily Johnson (Lenapehoking/New York) Catalyst

Edition 2024

Performances

Infos

Emily Johnson (Lenapehoking/New York)
Catalyst