DANCE

DiverseWorks presents Emily Johnson: The Thank-You Bar Thursday, April 28 through Saturday, April 30.

DiverseWorks ArtSpace is proud to present Alaska-born, Native American choreographer Emily Johnson and Catalyst Dance with latest work, The Thank-you Bar. The performance/installation of dance, live music, storytelling and film asks, “What is a true home?” connecting ideas of displacement, longing, and language to history, pre-conceived notions, architecture, and igloo-myth.

The Thank-you Bar, created by Johnson with composers/musicians James Everest and Joel Pickard (Blackfish), is designed for an intimate, onstage audience, The Thank-you Bar is intended to engage many levels of perception and expression. Through a sophisticated concept of theatrical space, unique and powerfully minimalist dancing and a multi-layered original sound score, Johnson’s stories ride the confluences of truth and myth.

The residency includes an additional concert performance by experimental music duo Blackfish, James Everest on nylon and steel string guitars and Joel Pickard on pedal steel guitar performing live improvised duets.

Come As You Are: Houston! artists are politically charged, multi-generational, and totally uninhibited. 

The Thank You-Bar is presented in conjunction with This is Displacement: Native Artists Consider the Relationship between Land and Identity.

I speak about the bottom of a river, but lay in a plastic kiddie pool. I talk about a fish that can swim to your belly and never truly die. I play my Yup’ik drum, but no one in the audience ever sees it. We hear deconstructed country music on guitar and pedal steel. We see storied images relayed through beading onto my costume. And, while the audience is seated in a semi-circle around the musicians, they swivel on their chairs to see me walking toward them on stilts. They see a movement vocabulary that is part somersault, part hand gesture, part animal imagery. They hold illuminated lightboxes and become part of the image. They see a beaver lodge, they see an igloo-myth, they see the theater walls and I offer the question: What is a true home?

About Emily Johnson:
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 and 2011 MANCC Choreographer Fellow. Her recent work, 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.

About Blackfish (James Everest & Joel Pickard):
James Everest - Multi-instrumentalist/composer James Everest is based in Minneapolis where he has been involved a variety of musical projects including Lateduster, Roma Di Luna, Vicious Vicious, Halloween Alaska, Fresh Squeez, The Dijonettes, Sans Le Systeme, Unguided, The Sensational Joint Chiefs, BLACKFISH, and as a solo artist, “JG Everest”. He has collaborated with many past and present Minneapolis musicians, including Walter Kitundu, Martin Dosh, and Slug (Atmosphere). From 2002-04, Everest also worked with electronic/multimedia pioneer Riz Maslen in her UK-based group, NEOTROPIC. Since 2002 Everest has been a close collaborator with choreographer Emily Johnson and Catalyst, writing and performing original scores for several performances with Lateduster, as a solo artist, and most recently with Joel Pickard. He has been Catalyst's music director since 2004. His music has also been used in several independent film scores, including Journey To The Moon (2009) and The Red Tail (2010). He frequently employs effects and looping pedals in creating multilayered compositions in real-time performances, using a variety of instruments. Since 2005, he has hosted and curated the MAKING MUSIC conversations series at the University of Minnesota's Whole Music Club and the Walker Art Center.

Joel Pickard - Joel Pickard is based in Portland, Oregon and works as an improviser and composer creating music for dance, theatre, video, commercial advertising, and performance. In 2003 he created Hatfarm (a music production company) as a name under which all of these various projects come together. 

Recent works include scores for 'Llano Del Rio', a video created by Andrezza Valentin and Guilherme Marcondes for the exhibition 'Geometry of Ruins', and 'Kneeling Down at Noon', a play about Islam produced in Austin, Texas. In 2005, as part of 'Landmark-24 hours at the Stone Arch Bridge'; Joel created Drone Score a 24-hour composition that utilized over 40 musicians in an attempt to harmonically alter the sonic drone of the nearby water processing plant in an effort to redirect the path of the Mississippi River.
Joel has an MA in Composition from Mills College in Oakland, CA where he studied with Fred Frith, Alvin Curran, and Pauline Oliveros. As the subject of his masters thesis in 2005, Joel recorded a CD for the Foxglove record label documenting his explorations on the pedal steel guitar and the development of a musical language that incorporates balloons, knitting needles, music boxes, and chopsticks. Active as a performer, Joel plays guitar in Jigsaw with cellist Jacqueline Ferrier-Ultan and pedal steel guitar in Mire with electronic artist Elise Baldwin, guitarist William Collins, and drummer Seth Warren.

About DiverseWorks ArtSpace:
DiverseWorks is a non-profit art center in Houston, TX dedicated to presenting new visual, performing, and literary art. DiverseWorks is a place where the process of creating art is valued and where artists can test new ideas in the public arena. By encouraging the investigation of current artistic, cultural and social issues, DiverseWorks builds, educates, and sustains audiences for contemporary art.

Appropriate for all ages.

The show is intended for a small audience. Please book now before the show sells out!

The presentation of The Thank-You Bar is supported by the National Performance Network and the National Dance Project.