Linda K. Johnson In Conversation with Chisao Hata, Susan Banyas, Robin Lane, and Joan Findlay
Ancestral lands of the Indigenous tribal nations of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers, Portland, OR
PASTfuture
Long-Form Archival Conversations with Portland Dance Artists
Access notes: All conversation sites are ADA accessible.
Ticketing: All PASTfuture events are free. Conversations will be approximately 75 minutes long, followed by a short, all-level movement, composition, or somatic opportunity derived from the practice of each artist. Reservations are not needed, except for the conversation with Robin Lane at FLOCK. RSVP for FLOCK event here.
Embodied Archiving: Why and How?
Dates, Times: Sept. 14 at 10:00 AM
Venue: PICA, 15 NE Hancock Street
Capacity: 75
Embodied Archiving: Why and How? is a panel exchange about methods, practices, and perspectives for preserving the history of dance and contemporary performance with PICA Curatorial Fellow Jason Le, artist Linda K. Johnson, and other guests. The panel will be 45 minutes long and immediately followed by Johnson’s conversation with Chisao Hata at 11:00 AM.
Linda K. Johnson In Conversation with Chisao Hata
Dates, Times: Sept. 14 at 11:00 AM
Venue: PICA, 15 NE Hancock Street
Capacity: 75
Linda K. Johnson In Conversation with Susan Banyas
Dates, Times: Sept. 15 at 11:00 AM
Venue: Dekum Street Theater, 814 NE Dekum Street
Capacity: 85
Linda K. Johnson In Conversation with Robin Lane
Dates, Times: Sept. 21 at 11:00 AM
Venue: FLOCK Dance Center, 2516 NW 29th Avenue, #60
Capacity: 32
Space is limited and reservations are recommended. RSVP here.
Linda K. Johnson In Conversation with Joan Findlay
Dates, Times: Sept. 22 at 11:00 AM
Venue | Location, Address: Performance Works NorthWest, 4625 SE 67th Avenue
Capacity: 50
DESCRIPTION
Mycelium Dreams is an ongoing, durational dance cartography and interview project initiated in 2022 by Portland dance and interdisciplinary artist Linda K. Johnson. Archival in scope, the Mycelium Dreams project invites dance artists to reflect on and ultimately hand draw their singular artistic journeys in the form of maps that take their inspiration from the connectivity, reciprocity, and relational quality of the mycelium networks that exist in the soil beneath our feet. The interview component of the Mycelium Dreams project, PASTfuture, is intent on creating an inclusive, nonhierarchical oral record of the stories of artists in the Portland community who have committed their life’s work to the field of dance. The interviews, conducted by any member of the dance community interested in participating, will begin with Portland’s dance elders and continue through the generations. It is multiyear and potentially unending, suggesting a community-based method of remembering our history.
Dance is an embodied practice and as such suggests that its methods of archiving must include processes that reflect the embodied nature of the practice itself. While the preservation of choreographic work is essential, the transfer of the vast stores of embodied knowledge that artists and dance professionals have amassed - pedagogies, composition methods, somatic systems, and ways of knowing, is a vital aspect of remembering and preserving an individual’s complete body of work. It is the intention of the Mycelium Dreams Project to initiate forums to explore this less conventional archiving of knowledge - long form public interviews with dance artists and professionals, class series in pedagogical lineages, video screenings+conversations with the choreographer and performers, durationally-compressed ‘replays’ of works previously presented to highlight form and process, public interviews with audience members or casts of previously seen choreographies to capture the experience of seeing or performing works, etc.
The first group of Portland dance artists and professionals to be interviewed in 2024-25 include: Susan Banyas, Julane Stites, Carloyn Stuart, Toshiko Namioka, Nancy Martino, Chisao Hata, Pat Wong, Mama Ruby Burns-Johnny, Vaunda Carter, James Canfield, Mary Folberg, Tracy Durbin, Luciana Proano, Bobby Fouther, Martha Ullman West, Joan Findlay, Cathy Evleshin, Gregg Bielemeier, Keith V. Martin, Judy Patton, Robin Lane, Melissa St. Clair, Linda Austin, Jamey Hampton, Sahomi Tachibana, Jayanthi Raman, Barry Johnson, Mindy Aloff, Wendy Hambidge, Bill Boese, Jeff Forbes, Bruce Smith, Vincent Martinez-Grieco, Josie Moseley, Judith Catterall, Ray Terrill, +. This list is fluid and represents an evolving collection. The Mycelium Dreams Project is an initiative to include, capture, and honor, as it takes many stories to tell the complete picture of a community over many years of existence. All of the interviews will live in the Portland State University Dance Archive and be available to the public for listening and research. The PSU Dance Archive is a non-curated space where all professional dance artists are invited to contribute their work.
Access to the archive can be found here.
More extensive information about the Mycelium Dreams Project and how individuals can participate can be found here after August 1, 2024.
What is remembered, lives.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Oregon native and Portland resident Linda K. Johnson has been a professional dance-based, interdisciplinary artist for 40 years. Over these decades of creative practice, Johnson has taught, performed, choreographed, curated, and produced extensively, influencing and forwarding the development of infrastructure (studios and dance programs), funding (support), and conceptual networks (information and training) for professional colleagues and students. Hybrid in her practice, Johnson’s concerns as an artist are social and environmental—curious equally about both the human and nonhuman, addressing our collective relationship to site, place and community. Since creating her first site-based, large-scale interdisciplinary performance in 1992, Finding the Forest, Johnson has gone on to author over 17 major dance/movement installations, most recently Mycelium Dreams, 2022 and Polka Dots/Pioneer Square, 2020, which have utilized forests, intersections, waterways, derelict lots, neighborhoods, green spaces, warehouses, and galleries, as well as formal performance spaces, as staging grounds for presentation. A recipient of the 1999 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, Johnson’s work has been consistently funded and commissioned by public, private, and individual sources, and has received critical review in many venues, including Dance Magazine, Landscape Architecture, NPR’s Living on Earth, Oregon ArtsWatch, and Metropolis Magazine. She has been awarded residencies at the Rauschenberg Artist Residency at Captiva, Yaddo, Caldera Arts, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology to further the development of her work. She is honored to be one of six international custodians of Yvonne Rainer’s seminal postmodern dance work Trio A, and to have been included in Kristin Timken’s 2015 book The New Explorers: Making Meaning in the 21st Century American Landscape, which includes a forward by Lucy R. Lippard. Now considered a “mother tree” (from Suzanne Simard’s work on forest ecosystems) in her community, Johnson’s current practice is devoted to advancing networks of inclusion and collective memory (Mycelium Dreams).
Chisao Hata’s grandmother, Chisao Tajima, came to Oregon as a “picture bride” in 1890. In 1942, her mother, Kasae (Kay) Tamiyasu married Tadashi (Ted) Hata in the Poston concentration camp in Poston, Arizona. Arts training and artists teachers in Iowa shaped Chisao’s early life. Moving to Oregon from Iowa, her years at the University of Oregon fueled her Asian American activism, community organizing, and pursuits as an artist. Chisao connected to the Portland dance community, where she eventually established a school and company. A life-changing study in Japan solidified her artistic vision and commitment to exploring how artful practices could address social issues and create change. In the Japanese American community, her early leadership led to the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and inspired her personal research and artmaking. Her studies in the Portland State Dance program abruptly ended with the decimation of the program. However, new opportunities thrust her into arts in public education, where her teaching philosophy as a dance educator influenced curriculum design and integrated arts programming schoolwide and impacted hundreds of students.
Her personal work incorporates community engagement with social action and includes omitted histories on themes of identity, culture, social action, and legacies. DrumSouls and We Are You were intercultural and intergenerational works visioning an inclusive America. Harmos, The Human Flag project created for Hiroshima Day, performed throughout Portland and Remember Us were community-based performances on a citywide scale. Gambatte-An American Legacy, The Assembly Center Project and We are Still Here incorporate Japanese American history, oral histories through the fusion of text, poetry, music, dance, and visual storytelling. Additionally, Ms. Hata has designed and directed numerous art-driven programs like Move Backs and Move On classes.
Her training in modern dance, expressive arts, physical theater, healing through the arts, community facilitation, poetry, taiko drumming, and classical Japanese dance integrate with her peace and justice work in diverse communities. Her original choreo poems and artistic collaborations root her artist voice. “There's not one group she hasn’t touched with her activism through art. Her themes are exigent for our times and urge participants to ponder their worldview and take action for change.” Chisao’s vision has consistently created innovative programs, artistic works and shaped community partnerships. Chisao is also an Artist Organizing for Change with the Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, Maryland where the scope of her work develops intergenerational institutes, mentors socially engaged artists, creates cross-cultural programming rooted in the philosophies held at the Dance Exchange. This work continues to inspire her work as an Oregon Humanities Conversation Leader, and community activist artist serving multiple organizations throughout the city of Portland and beyond.
Susan Banyas: My art is born from the everyday dance of life—landscapes, encounters, history, politics—and from the soul stories we tell each other—crystalline moments in time that hold a myriad of meanings, summoned through the nature of re-membering and witnessing. Movement & images & sounds & words are all at play in the experiments that form the choreography of a story. The eye of life comes alive through body imagination, in memory places where life and art intersect.
Collaborations with fellow poets of memory and history define the varying SO&SO&SO&SO projects, on-going since 1976. SO&SO dance and theatre works have been performed on stages, in studios, schools, and found spaces in the US and abroad. In collaboration with four other artists, I opened the doors to Dreams Well Studio, 1990-2002, a modest, lively petri dish for performance experiments and body-mind practices. Memorable offerings of dance, theatre, multi-media storytelling, kids’ performances, poetry, music, and community ceremonies came forth from this activated dream space/laboratory.
The creative lab is the bedrock of my teaching methods in universities, classrooms, and studios over the years and of continuing practice as a writer, choreographer, and community activist.
No Strangers Here Today (premier 2008) and The Hillsboro Story (premier 2010) are multi-voiced investigations that illuminate the role my hometown of Hillsboro, Ohio, played in American civil rights history and the journey to encounter that history directly. Both theatre works, with soundtracks and live music scores by David Ornette Cherry, toured nationally and are expanded into a non-fiction book, The Hillsboro Story/A Kaleidoscope History (Spuyten-Duyvil Press, NYC).
Nu History, an educational model designed to empower students to investigate history directly, and Great Serpent, a multimedia performance score, are in development in concert with Mr. Music/theme & thought, featuring the collaborations and vision of jazz/world music composer, the late David Ornette Cherry.
I am deeply grateful to walk this path and give thanks to the great teachers who have led the way and the collaborators with whom I have shared and continue to share this journey. I believe that creative practice is essential to nourishing and understanding oneself in relationship to the natural and social worlds. The intention is to awaken the senses, embody the voice, ignite the action, and enjoy the process.
Robin Lane began studying dance, gymnastics, theater, and visual art as a child. At fourteen, she created her first evening-length performance at the Robert Frost Auditorium, combining her high school gymnastic team with the dance club and creating an original score with the school orchestra playing office equipment. As a director/choreographer/writer, her focus has always been telling stories, linear and nonlinear, bringing to life the visual images, metaphors, and stories she sees in her head. She uses whatever vocabulary the images demand. Her intent is always to hone each new work to communicate and connect with her audiences. Exploration, collaboration, and ensemble building are core elements of her creative process.
In 1977, Lane founded Do Jump to explore her unique genre. Lane has created 19 original, full‐length works and countless smaller site‐specific pieces, events, and spectacles.
In 1983, Lane and company renovated the Echo Theatre in southeast Portland, OR, creating a permanent home for Do Jump! The following year she opened the Do Jump Physical Theatre School, sharing her unique teaching style with children and adults, providing a training ground for the company. Lane has toured extensively with Do Jump, including multiple extended runs in the New Victory Theater in NYC, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. “That Happened,” Lane’s first feature film, just had its first screening at PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon
Robin is the recipient of the Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship in Dance, three creativity grants from the NEA, and the 2010 Regional Arts and Culture Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Performing Arts. Lane attended a joint program between Reed College and the Portland Museum Art School. She studied the LeCoque Method and was a member of Theatre Elan Company. In 1973, Lane studied aerial dance with Terry Sendgraff in San Francisco and Bill & Arnie Zane in NYC. In Portland, Oregon, she created and choreo/directed original works for Storefront Theater, Tygres Heart Shakespeare, Portland Family Circus, and others.
Joan Findlay: Lifelong neurodivergent artist.
Two main pathways: abstract painting and dance/performance.
As a painter of close to 50 years, my work is equal parts improvisation and design: chance elements sometimes kinesthetically generated, a studied compositional eye, and a deep love of color, movement, architecture, and gesture. I create abstract acrylic paintings with many layers and sometimes collage elements. My studio is in The Drawing Studio in SE Portland, which I co-own with Phil Sylvester, adjoined by the Findlay/Sylvester Gallery, in which my paintings can be viewed.
As a contemporary modern dancer I have created and performed my own, mostly solo performance work. Also worked extensively for many years with these choreographers:
Beginning in 1980 with Jann McCauley Dryer in CIRQUE (formerly Portland Dance Theater), Gregg Bielemeier and Gregg Bielemeier Dance Project, Catherine Egan and Eggshell Productions, and Bonnie Merrill, who, in addition to the many works I danced over the years, choreographed a solo for me that I performed while heavily pregnant.
Helen Buckingham, Kiken Chin, Linda K Johnson, Kimi Okada, Mary Oslund, Sara Padilla, Judy Patton, Ray Terrill.
Collaborated with artists in performance: Alva Bradford, costumer/puppet maker, Cristina DeGennaro, visual/performance artist, Van Findlay, singer/violinist, Daniel Storto, fashion/costume designer, Tyrrell Sweetman cellist, Phil Sylvester, composer/musician, and painter/set designer.
Designed and constructed sets, costumes, props, and hair designs for many choreographers/directors, including Gregg Bielemeier, Jann Dryer, Catherine Egan, and Randee Paufve.
Studied visual art and dance in the 1970’s at Portland State University with instructors who were creative working artists. In addition to modern dance have studied tap, ballet, African, improvisation, jazz, flamenco, as well as piano and drums. Influential teachers include Gregg Bielemeier, modern dance; Ruby Burns, African dance; Jann Dryer, modern dance; Cathy Evleshin, modern and jazz dance; Fred Heidel painting; Jim Hibbard drawing; Michi Kosuge sculpture; and Vincent Martinez-Grieco, modern jazz dance; Bonnie Merrill modern improvisation and tap dance; Judy Patton modern dance and performance collaboration; Barbara Remington ballet; and Claire Roche, tap dance.
SPONSORSHIP
Supported in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council.