For a Moment / No longer
2024
For a Moment / No longer was a dance in study of moving from the heartbeat as resist/persist-ence practice. in study of breaking open and re-assembling. of letting go and staying. About turning towards each other, the necessity of heartbreak, and trusting the pulse as a rhythm to follow home. With pulse as downbeat, the work moves in reverence, study, and praxis of Black feminist improvisation and breathing. The work is in conversation with mountains, tides, breath, earth, tree, fog, and other known and unknown forces.
Choreographic Direction and Concept: Audrey Johnson
Performance + Collaboration: Audrey Johnson, Tessa Nebrida, brooke terry
Understudy: Cauveri Suresh
Soundscore: Madre Guía
featuring a sampled sound by The Lijadu Sisters, 1979
Dramaturgy + Creative Collaboration: Laila Shabazz
this offering comes out of periods of research that have been supported by: Djerassi Resident Artists Program; The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences and the National Endowment for the Arts; CA$H Dance (Bay Area); ODC Queer and BIPOC Space Residency.
Photos: top right Haley Caminiti, remainder Robbie Sweeny
land | body | memory
2022: pop up at Fort Mason in San Francisco curated through Gravity
2023: work in progress at ODC State of Play
land|body|memory is a call and response between the land and the body, an iterative dance performance and research project occurring as place-based movement prayers.
Collaborator and Performer (2023): Laila Shabazz
“Breath and space are characters in their worshipful dance. Arms and chests rise skyward and then fall gently back toward the sacred land. Responding to, moving toward, in unison with each other, we feel their deep abiding connection and observe their awareness of the environment. I find their mindfulness contagious.” ~ Jen Norris, 2023
[and then we must be]
June 2022, Counterpulse ARC Edge Residency
Inspired by ancestral, community-centered, and spiritual relationships to land and plants, [and then we must be] was a research and ritual project honoring Black American practices with land and plants through the modes of food, farming, rootwork, and magic. The work honors the practices that get passed down through recipe, spell, and story, as well as the memories active and activated in the body, plants, the land (soil, clay, mycelium, strata), and in spirit. The dancing is a movement offering, ritual, and prayer: in communion with spirit, plants, and land. [and then we must be] is the process of meeting and being met by plants and land, and of allowing oneself to be changed.
[and then we must be], premiered June 2-4, and 9-11 at Counterpulse in San Francisco.
Vision and Choreography: Audrey Johnson
Performer Collaborators: Bay Laurel O’Connor, Laila Shabazz, Clarissa Dyas
Soundscore: Rhae-Dawn Royal
Projections and Film: Ariel Appel
Lighting Design: Stephanie Johnson
Photos: Robbie Sweeny
towards
towards premiered at Arab American National Museum presented by Daring Dances, in Dancing Identities/Defining Place, a shared evening with artist Leila Awadallah, November 2019.
towards was also presented through FRESH Festival Exchanges, at Brava Theater in San Francisco, January 2020.
shared as an excerpt / work in progress titled towards is no longer a direction at FROLIC, Queering Dance Festival in Berkeley, CA, 2019.
[opening]
[opening] was a solo performance presented at Sidewalk Festival in Detroit, August 2019 and as an evening length performance event in March 2019 at 2727 California Street in Berkeley, as a culmination of a month long residency.
