MANCC Welcomes Emily Johnson

Emily Johnson (MN) Choreographic Fellow | September 9 - 23, 2012

Work in Development: Niicugni (Listen)

The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) welcomes Returning Choreographic Fellow Emily Johnson (MN) into residence.

Emily Johnson is a director/choreographer/curator, originally from Alaska and currently based in Minneapolis. Since 1998 she has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances often function as installations, engaging audiences within and through a space and environment – sights, sounds, smells – interacting with a place’s architecture, history, and role in community. She works to blur distinctions between performance and daily life and to create work that reveals and respects multiple perspectives. Allowing for the possibility of multiple meanings, her work stimulates reflection and emotional empathy between performer and audience, and between audience members. Emily is a 2011 Native Arts and Cultures Fellow, a 2010 and 2009 MAP Fund Grant recipient, a 2009 McKnight Fellow and a 2009, 2011, & 2012 MANCC Choreographer Fellow. The Thank-you Bar is touring through 2011 to The TBA Festival, The Dance Center at Columbia College, Northrop Auditorium, DiverseWorks, ODC Theater, Vermont Performance Lab, and Dance Theater Workshop with support from National Dance Project.

Emily Johnson returns to FSU for the world premiere of Niicugni (Listen) at the FSU Seven Days of Opening Nights Festival. Niicugni (Listen) continues with some of the themes of Johnson’s The Thank You Bar, her previous work exam- ining home and displacement. Niicugni (Listen) equates the land we live on with the cells that comprise our bodies and calls upon audiences to remember that land is alive with ancestry, memory, and possibility, and that our bodies also hold these things. The new performance, centered on movement, story, and sound, is housed within a light/sound installation of hand-made, functional fish-skin lanterns. The lanterns were inspired by Johnson’s lifelong affinity to Salmon and the craft of fish-skin sewing and were developed with community members in Vermont, Alaska, California, and Minnesota.

Niicugni has been influenced by Tallahassee locals involved in Emily’s previous residencies at MANCC. Johnson engaged community members to assist in the creation of the new work by examining the shared movement vocabulary of particular affinity groups such as knitters, wind players, and gardeners. For more information, please continue reading her previous residency descriptions below.

This residency was made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The presentation of Niicugni at FSU was made possible by the MetLife Community Connections Fund of the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project. Major support for NDP is also provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W, Mellon Foundation.

World Premiere

FSU School of Dance
Nancy Smith Fichter Theatre
September 21, 2012 @ 8:00 pm

*Reservation Required 

For tickets: sevendaysfestival.org/schedule-tickets

Please see www.mancc.org/artists/emily-johnson or email info@mancc.org for additional information about Johnson's residency.

Emily Johnson
Emily Johnson and Aretha Aoki share creative research and development to date during the Informal Showing of "Niicugni (Listen)".	Photo by Cameron Wittig	Aretha Aoki (performer) Photo by Ian Douglas

The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), at the FSU School of Dance, is a choreographic research and development center whose mission is to raise the value of the creative process in dance.

Banner image: Photo by Cameron Wittig.