the rising stomp: emily johnson, future beings, and me

Emily Johnson has a knack for bringing people together (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

I am not and never will be a performer.

I’m terrible at karaoke. I played a tree in the first-grade play. I appeared in my temple’s 2021 virtual Purim spiel only because my wife could record my small part over and over again until I didn’t get it completely wrong. The prospect of any kind of public speaking terrifies me.

That said, in 2008, I joined the crowd onstage at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park at the conclusion of the Public’s revival of Hair, tripping on some cords in the back and falling on my butt. In 2013, I volunteered to shadow Christopher Lloyd and put on his jacket in Classic Stage’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Also in 2013, I did a brief solo dance onstage at an Angélique Kidjo concert in Rockefeller Park when the Benin-born singer insisted I go to the front. In 2014, Alvin Ailey dancer Belén Indhira Pereyra pulled me onstage to dance with her in Ohad Naharin’s Minus 16 at City Center. Thankfully, I didn’t have to say anything in any of those cases.

Which leads me to my hero, Emily Johnson.

In works such as Niicugni, Shore, The Thank-You Bar, and Then a Cunning Voice and a Night We Spend Gazing at Stars, Johnson invites the audience to become part of the performance. You don’t have to sing or dance or tell stories, but you can put on a blanket and march from an outdoor school basketball court to New York Live Arts (NYLA), tracing the route of the long-gone Minetta Creek. You can carry a glowing lantern and hear your name called out. You can sleep on a quilt outside on Randall’s Island, becoming part of an overnight community gathering together to make and share food and art.

In September 2021, Johnson, who was born in Alaska and is of Yu’pik descent, presented The Ways We Love and the Ways We Love Better — Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s) in and around Socrates Sculpture Park, a hybrid outdoor work with a limited audience that was also livestreamed over Facebook and Zoom. It was the first live show I had seen since the pandemic lockdown; it started at the shore of the East River estuary before we all walked to the park, and it concluded with the planting of tobacco. It was a moving and marvelous way to reenter the world of live entertainment while honoring and celebrating Indigenous peoples and cultures.

Johnson and her Catalyst company are now back at NYLA with the stunning Being Future Being, which began October 15 in East River Park (Land/Celestial) and continues October 20-23 at NYLA (Inside/Outwards). On opening night on West Nineteenth St., as people congregated in the NYLA lobby, Johnson walked through and got on top of a car roof. Using a megaphone, she defended the land of the Lenape and asked everyone to do what she referred to as the rising stomp, a jump with knees bent and feet wide that puts you in touch with the vibrating ground lifting underneath you. “What if right now every one of us turned every one of our cells toward justice?” she yelled out as passersby wondered what was going on or just didn’t care, unruffled by yet another strange happening in the city.

After several minutes, Johnson asked for twenty volunteers to go inside and join her onstage. I would follow her anywhere, so I wiggled my way into the line. We walked into the theater and onto the stage, where we were told to stand on small squares of colored tape on the floor, spread across the space, which was otherwise occupied by three giant quilts and a fake mountain with real soil. Projections on the back and side walls depicted green trees blowing in the wind, with occasional humans stopping by to look at nature.

Quilt creatures Ashley Pierre-Louis, Sugar Vendil, and Stacy Lynn Smith meet up with dancer Jasmine Shorty in Being Future Being: Inside/Outwards at NYLA (photo courtesy Emily Johnson/Catalyst/New York Live Arts)

Once the audience was fully seated, the quilts came to life; inside were dancers Ashley Pierre-Louis, Stacy Lynn Smith, and Sugar Vendil, who slowly weaved around us to a subtle soundscape by Raven Chacon (Navajo). I could read some phrases on the quilts, which were made at previous events hosted by Johnson, including “To travel freely” and “Equity.” Among those of us standing were Jasmine Shorty (Diné), another of the dancers, barefoot and wearing regular clothing.

Soon we guest participants each took a folding chair from the back and brought them to our spots. But before we sat down, the three quilt creatures gestured to each of us to sit elsewhere, not in the chair in front of us. Moments later, Johnson, holding up a speaker attached to her arm, whispered to us individually to move into a corner. (You can see a photo of the group, with me in it, here.) Johnson might have been smiling at us, but it was a clever way of first giving us our own personal space, then taking it away. Next we were told to sit in one corner, as if forced onto a kind of reservation, a separate place for us away from everybody else.

The quilts now removed, the four dancers stomped, glided, ran, and soared around the stage. Shorty banged against a door and demanded someone let her out, then in again upstairs. Johnson joined the dancers in unique movements set to louder, more dramatic music punctuated by bursting percussion. The performers wandered into the regular audience, one set of steps covered in yellow tape arranged in a ritualistic format. Shorty did numerous gymnastic headstands into Vendil’s arms.

Sticks, stones, and leaves were used as the dancers never stopped moving; as exhausting as it was to watch, it must have been even more exhausting to perform, especially with more stomping near the end and the mountain on the move. And then, suddenly, it was quiet; everyone took deep breaths as we realized that was the finale, the performance was over. We applauded the cast and crew, and they applauded us.

I didn’t sing. I didn’t dance. I didn’t speak.

But I was part of something special, an accumulation of souls who could only have been assembled by Emily Johnson into a warm and loving extended family, an involved and understanding throng who knew we can, we must, be better beings in the future while acknowledging our past.