emily
Emily has been artist-in-residence at STEIM in Amsterdam; SUMU Space in Turku, Finland; and PRISMA Forum in Oaxaca and Mexico City. She has performed in the work of Emily Johnson/Catalyst Dance and with Amnesiac Dance + Music and Philadelphia New Music + Dance Ensemble (Nicole Bindler, director). From 2006 – 2008, she was a member of the Mascher Space Cooperative management team and co-producer of paraphrase/NEXUS, a performance series that paired performing and visual arts and brought many international performers to Philadelphia. The philosopher Alva Noe, and others, have asked, “What can dance contribute to theoretical knowledge?” In looking for my own answer to this question I have cooperated with thinkers from disparate academic, scientific, and artistic disciplines. Much of my work originates in bodies resonating: with one another, with space, with sound. For the past two years, my collaborator Bilwa (a sound artist) and I have been investigating sine waves and how they interact with bodies, using them to map trajectories through geographic and energetic spaces. In this context, I have also been exploring feedback loops, one of the basic patterns of our life experience. I have worked as a soloist and in collaboration with other dancers, using choreographed and improvised movement (where choreography-improvisation is a spectrum). My work has been sculptural, durational, and nonlinear, and I have generated it in visual arts galleries, dance/theater spaces, and nontraditional sites. My current project focuses on dance as a form of knowledge and is based on what is made possible by the physical/emotional relationships of dancers, even when we are separated by time and space. I am working with three dancers with whom I have collaborated extensively, drawing from countless hours spent observing one another to develop practices that allow us to focus on the exact points at which our body/minds make contact. Through experiments with meditation, shared rituals, and distance improvisations, we visit one another via our imaginative bodies, meeting in a shared somatic space to regenerate it and create movement in it “together.” My recent readings in neuroscience and noetic science have led me to think about our shared somatic space as existing in the physical world, as long as we are consciously able to bring it to mind. Dancers are in a unique position to explore the connective and transformational potentials of body/minds. We embody a form of distributed identity, sharing movement experiences that can dissolve strict body/ego boundaries, opening ourselves to the possibilities of the body as a complex system that can shift itself through perceiving and acting in the world. Works by philosophers Antonio D’Amasio, Steven Johnson, Benedictus de Spinoza, Alva Noe, and others provide connective tissue, helping me to interweave their ideas with my physical experiences. |
