The O'Shaughnessy and Northrop Present Emily Johnson/Catalyst, 4/21

Northrop at the University of Minnesota and The O'Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University and present Emily Johnson/Catalyst performing Niicugni (second in a trilogy of work) on Sunday, April 21, 7:00 pm at The O'Shaughnessy. The first piece in this trilogy, The Thank-you Bar was performed at Northrop in November 2010.

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 place, 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?

For more information, visit http://northrop.umn.edu/events/emily-johnsoncatalyst.

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