14 minute read
ARTS & EVENTS
Emily Johnson/Catalyst’s new evening-length performance, “Being Future Being,” integrates movement, images, story, and sound in a kinetically rich social architecture that centers Indigenous thrivance.
Conjuring the Future
Indigenous performer summons audience into healthier relationships with the natural world
By Bridgette M. Redman
Many people are eager to leave the present and all its woes behind. Emily Johnson is determined to move beyond wishful thinking and dance the future into being. Performing at BroadStage from Thursday, Sept. 8, to Saturday, Sept. 10, the world premiere of “Being Future Being” will take place on stage and outdoors in two site-specific performances. The work integrates movement, story and sound in a way that is uniquely indigenous. Johnson, who belongs to the Yup’ik Nation, created the evening-length performance not only to summon a better future, but to create space for relationships with the natural world around us. It is a project that has been growing for many years, in part because she said her current work always leads her to the next thing, teaching her what is to come. “My process has always been to work in relationship with people and our more-than-human kin and the land upon which we’re gathered,” Johnson said. “I make work that tries to create space for relationships to develop or to create an opportunity for showing where relationships are not. Part of that project was to work with multiple community members on this visioning of our future.” The work asks a lot of questions: What do people want for their well-being? What do people want for the well-being of their chosen family? What do people want for the well-being of their neighborhood, of the place where they live, of the world? As the process evolved, the world hit a crisis mode with the pandemic, social injustices, economic downturns and other events that plunged the world into a shared depression. “I had this very sudden, ‘Oh, we need this better future now,” Johnson said. “‘Being Future Being’ is a process of conjuring that better future in the present.” “Being Future Being” launches BroadStage's season. Johnson developed it with her company, Catalyst, and they commissioned Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon to create the score. “‘Being Future Being’ imagines a future for human beings on this planet,” said Rob Bailis, executive director of BroadStage. “It considers the possibility of a much more symbiotic relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world.” When Johnson talks about “more-than-human kin,” she is referring to the inhabitants of the natural world. “This is an articulation within indigenous scholarship and communities that we are in relation not only with other humans, we are always in relation to everyone and everything all the time,” Johnson said. “Thinking about the more-thanhuman kin is every other being in existence, so that is plant and animal and tree and air and soil and water. It’s a way of thinking about relationship and relationality.” She explores in “Being Future Being” the collaborations and relationships that humans have to the world around them, how they might, for example, connect with a tree. “The idea here is something as simple and also as grand as, what if we were to see trees, for example, as partners in breathing as opposed to plants that are in our way when we would like to put down a sidewalk,” Bailis said. “What if we were to imagine that we saw ourselves as intrinsically embedded partners in the sustainability of the natural world as opposed to something that is dangerously parasitic? How do we get ourselves into that mindset and what would that future look like?” Johnson explained that there are many things we could learn or unlearn if we put ourselves into a collaborative process with a tree. She talks about how she’s learned a lot about how trees have a different death process than we do, that they are on a different time scale. She contemplates how a tree might articulate a core vision for the future and how we as humans could take that into account. The discussion in this case is drawn from and formed by First Nations’ wisdom and ideology. Bailis described Johnson as being equally a choreographer and a land protector who is invested in these questions. While the work has been in development for many years, the final bit of it is being created at BroadStage. There will be both indoor and outdoor experiences in multiple locations. “A lot of Emily’s work is about gathering in smaller groups and having very specifically tailored experiences before easing into the more performative aspects of her work,” Bailis said. “You might spend an entire weekend learning how to make a salmon skin lantern and then find out about the dance. She is a marvel and we are very excited about that work and kicking off the year with this sort of broader sensibility of what can human
beings be that is, in fact, helpful to the survival of the planet.” Johnson said she thinks of her performances as gatherings, ones in which people come together and try to acknowledge the ways they are or are not in right relationship with one another and with the lands that they are gathered on. There are many ways she expresses this—sometimes through dance, sometimes through stories, sometimes through exchanges with the audience. “I ask for reciprocity,” Johnson said. “I try to make a work where exchange is possible in multiple forms. We might make a very specific ask of the audience.” She described how one time she had a work that was 15 hours long—from sundown to sunrise and was outdoors all night. The audience had to work together to make dinner and breakfast. Each person held a different responsibility. There is a challenge to the audience to ask themselves whether they’ve been taking responsibility and whether they are in relationship with the land. As part of the BroadStage performance, there will be outdoor site-specific events where Johnson introduces the audience to three or more different trees at three different sites. The audience will move between those three areas to “be introduced to those more than humans.” The site-specific activation will take place on the Santa Monica College Main Campus starting at 11:15 a.m. Thursday and 1 p.m. Saturday. The trees they will visit were planted in the 1950s and the audience will be called upon to honor and protect them. Participants in this free experience will walk between the three locations and view 20-minute performances. Johnson described her collaboration with the composer, Chacon, as being beautiful and useful. Both, she said, have a way of working deeply. “When I am doing work, I am thinking about the land underneath,” Johnson said. “I don’t know how Raven would describe his work, but I think of Raven’s work like that as well. There was a way in which we complemented one another. We both have expressions of joy, of rage, of curiosity that comes out in different forms—Raven through sound compositions and mine through movement compositions.” The work itself is a collaboration, one expressed as bringing in four inter-related groups: the branch of knowledge (a group of womxn and femmes from nations across the Lenape diaspora), the branch of scholarship (visionary scholars and organizers including those from the nations of Cree, Cherokee and Coast Salish/Sahtu Dene/Scottish), the branch of action (an architecture of the overflow that crafts replicable, locally responsive, indigenouscentered actions) and the branch of making (“Being Future Being's” creative team). Together, these collaborators create a work of art, a work of transformation that draws upon Indigenous power. Their goal is to reshape the way people relate to themselves, the environment and to the human and more-thanhuman cohabitants of our world—to usher into focus a new future. The performances are “pay what you choose.” BroadStage announced that they recognize that the land on which they stand is the ancestral unceded territory of the Tongva, Gabrielino and Kizh peoples. As a way of honoring the indigenous caretakers of these lands, a portion of all ticket sales will be given to a Los Angeles-based, Indigenous-led organization that is devoted to revitalizing indigenous ways of being and knowing. They encourage audience members to consider paying a higher ticket price as a symbolic/nominal land usage fee. Meanwhile, Johnson is ever focused forward. She said that one of her main curiosities now is what happens after these performances. “I’m curious what will come from this piece because the thing that I’m interested in is listening—can we aim to activate a better future together? How do we keep that activation going? What is the overflow from the performance moment? How do we keep tending to the relationship to the call to action to local land protection efforts, to indigenous local calls for justice?”)
“Being Future Being” by Emily Johnson/Catalyst
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 8, to Saturday, Sept. 10 WHERE: BroadStage, 1310 11th Street, Santa Monica INFO: broadstage.org
Paid to Pursue the Arts
By Oliver Grynberg
On a warm August morning in the sun-filled studio that houses Venice Arts’ main offices and teaching spaces, proud parents, siblings and faculty members gathered to celebrate the graduates of Venice Arts’ summer Film and Digital Media Career Pathways Fellowship. Following a groundbreaking partnership with Los Angeles County, the program’s second graduating class members were the first to receive compensation for 160 hours of training and education in visual storytelling, editing and production. “It’s a huge step forward,” said Lynn Warshafsky, founder and executive director of Venice Arts, referring to the paid learning made possible by the partnership. Founded in 1993, Venice Arts has been committed to nurturing creativity and opportunities in creative fields for lowincome youth for almost three decades. “We are LA serving and Venice based,” said Warshafsky on the reach of their afterschool programs, mentorship work, and creative career development fellowships like the media arts pilot. Beginning with a 10-person photography workshop hyper local to Venice, the organization now works with over 450 low-income youth around LA, charging nothing for its programming. In November 2020, six months into the pandemic, Venice Arts received a request for proposal from the LA Film Office for an LA County service contract. A 2018 motion written by county supervisor, Sheila Keuhl, and City Councilman, Ridley Thomas, proposed funding for a creative career development pilot program, which was a perfect fit for Venice Arts’ mission. “We have been including elements of creative career development into our curriculum for decades, but we never had the means to scale it up,” Warshafsky said. “We had 10 days to write a 100-page Venice Arts' Center for Creative Workforce Equity celebrated the expansion of its Film + Digital Media Career Pathways Pilot, which represents the County's first-ever investment of this scale in creative career development for low-income youth. proposal, and we did it.” With the help of the LA County Department of Economic Opportunity, Venice Arts’ proposal was accepted and their new funding put to use immediately. “We got the contract in December, we launched the first Digital Film and Media Pilot on Feb. 1,” Warshafsky said. In an entertainment-centric city like LA, opportunities like Venice Arts’ Film and Digital Media Career Pathways Pilot are deeply needed but rare. “You'd think in LA this would have happened, but it hadn’t,” Warshafsky said. The pilot is the first investment of its kind in low-income county youth. For participants, Venice Arts spreads the word about its programs with the help of community partners and its own links to LA’s diverse communities. Open to any low-income youth in the county, the program seeks applications from individuals who show creative promise and commitment to their development at any level of experience and training. No matter what you know about film and digital media, the pilot program covers all the bases and hinges on honing fundamental skills. Students begin with a soft skills workshop, “to help them identify skills they already have and how they can be applied to their career and goals,” said Venice Arts director of education Julia Villarreal. Then students turn to basics of production, visual storytelling, camera skills and key concepts like continuity, cover, characterization. Yet, the most valuable experience comes in the active practice that the pilot program offers. All students write and direct a narrative short with each acting as the Director of Photography for a day. Students cut a documentary from over 10 hours of footage, each edit a commercial, and create three versions of a personal project for YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. The work produced is professional, poignant and moving. One short film, shown at the graduation, profiled a young man struggling to stay in school. When he finds a toy car from his childhood, a simple but apt motif for time passing and one’s yearning for youth, his life as a young man is put into new perspective as is his struggle to survive. One commercial, also shown at the graduation, was a seamless and richly enticing promotional video for a canned sparkling water. Students leave Venice Art’s pilot program with an impressive selection of tangible skills, but they still face an uphill battle. A former child actor, Keuhl shared in her virtual comments at the graduation: “I understand how meaningful a life in the creative arts can be but how difficult it can be to get your foot in the door and get your voice heard.” Perhaps the most difficult part about pursuing a career in the creative arts and entertainment is creating the connections needed to help realize these goals. Having the knowledge is one thing, but being paid to use that knowledge is another. Amber Bolden, a participant in the first pilot and a Venice Arts after-school program alumnus, was strapped with doubts after graduating college with a film degree. “How am I going to get myself in the industry?” she said. To quell questions like these, she enrolled first in a series of talks and masterclasses with industry professionals offered as an introduction to the career pathways pilot at Venice Arts and continued by applying for the Film and Digital media program. She was accepted and fostered the industry relationships she was looking for. Venice Arts helped her secure an internship with production company Team 626, and the rest was history. “I was an intern for about two weeks, two weeks later I was the executive assistant and now a year later, I'm a program manager,” Bolden said. “I felt that Venice Arts was always looking out for me,” she added, and, for this reason, she has returned as a mentor and
Founded in 1993, Venice Arts has been committed to nurturing creativity and opportunities in fields for low-income youth for almost three decades. teaching assistant for Venice Arts’ Spring and Fall programs. Eventually, Bolden plans to open a nonprofit in South LA doing, as she put it, “What Venice Arts does.” Success stories like these, and the many others that seem to be the bread and butter of Venice Arts’ work, bring deep meaning and a sense of fulfillment to the staff at Venice Arts. “It just warms my heart,” Warshafksy said in reference to the Venice Arts alumni she gets to welcome back as teachers and witness making headway in their creative careers. For many of the students Venice Arts works with, creative arts are first dismissed as viable career options or worthy extracurricular pursuits. To see students legitimize their artistic dreams is one of the most meaningful parts of the work for Warshafksy. With the attention and support of LA County, she hopes to grow the career pathways pilot program and bring the Venice Arts experience to other determined youth around LA. For, in the city with the most largescale entertainment production in the world, there is an equally impressive collection of young artists looking for the opportunity to showcase their talent. Luckily, an expanding Venice Arts provides them with the platform and mentorship they need.
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