Click here to see Emily make one of the functional fish-skin lanterns featured in Niicugni!
Congrats to our friends at Northrop for receiving a Joyce Foundation Award for the commission of Emily John's final installment in her trilogy, "SHORE," to be premiered at Northrop in June 2014!
Read the press release here!
The O'Shaughnessy and Northrop Concerts and Lectures present
Emily Johnson/Catalyst A Women of Substance at St. Catherine University event
Sunday, April 21st, 2013, at 7:00 p.m.
Tickets Adult $31
Senior 65+/Student/UMN or SCU Community and Alumni**/Military** $27 **These options not available for online purchase.
Tickets include a $2 restoration fee.
*Please note: The artist has requested that there be no late seating for this performance. We will not be able to seat you if you arrive after 7:00 p.m.
"Fresh and fierce, evocative and disciplined." – Dance Magazine
Originally from Alaska and currently based in Minneapolis, director/choreographer/curator Emily Johnson has created work since 1998 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.
Niicugni -- the word -- is a directive to pay attention, to listen. Niicugni the dance quietly compels such attentiveness through its layering of multiple dances, live music, stories, and histories. Housed within a light/sound installation of hand-made, functional fish-skin lanterns, Niicugni asks - can we pay attention to the ways we do and do not listen to our bodies, histories, impulses and environments? Equating the molecules of land with the cells that comprise our bodies, Niicugni is also about how land, or plce, like
our bodies is a repository of past, present, and future. It holds, at once, myth and truth, magic and evil, hope and death, laughter and monsters, as well as ancestral histories and cultural identities. In the moment of each performance, Niicugni wonders if we can recognize
the importance of everyone in the room? Can we see ourselves as part of the whole? Can we absorb that everyone we see is here now and will be gone?
A post-performance conversation with the artists will take place immediately following each Women of Substance performance.
Part of the O'Shaughnessy's Dance Series.
This project is funded in part by the Art Works grant
from the National Endowment for the Arts.