Year: 2024-2025
DanceForce Member: Judy Hussie-Taylor
Artist: Emily Johnson
Community Partner: Catalyst Dance
Audience: 300
County: Delaware

Danspace Project’s New York State DanceForce project supported the early development process of a multi-year performance project by choreographer/interdisciplinary Yup’ik artist, Emily Johnson, and her company, Catalyst, who work and reside in Haudenosaunee lands in what is currently known as Hobart, Delaware County, New York. Led by artist-activists, their project, “Build and Reworld Now,” centers on Land Back and celebrates the intersections of art, movement, activism, Indigenous knowledge and care systems, food and climate justice. Their work includes creative residencies, public engagement, and performances, including an upcoming performance in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on August 7, 2025 (we are estimating 300 people but the free festival can draw up to 2000 per event). The company plans to organize public conversations and skills sharing sessions and performances in Hobart, NY, dates yet to be determined. Danspace will promote the summer Brooklyn performance through our social media and website. The NYSDF/Danspace Project residency support also helped to leverage a National Performance Network (NPN) US tour to Los Angeles, Houston, Massachusetts, and Florida in 2026.

Danspace’s NYS DanceForce project supported Johnson’s Fall 2024 residency in Delaware County, NY on Haudenosaunee lands— 36 acres of protected forest and 6 acres of rematriated cow pasture that now supports Native medicine and food gardens in what is known as Hobart, NY. Https://danspaceproject.org/calendar/fw24-johnson/

During the residency, Johnson collaborated with 4 primary artists, writers, and activists: Joseph M. Pierce, Cherokee Nation citizen, writer, curator; Kari Recollet, Urban diasporic Cree scholar of a pedagogy of care; Dylan Robinson a Stó:lō/Skwah, British Columbia-based artist, musician, writer and curator; and Camille Georgeson-Usher, Coast Salish/Sahtu Dene writer and artist. “Each collaborator created new writing during our Upstate residency which was an invitation to create a prompt for me to work with which I did via movement, walking, and time on and with the land and trees,” Johnson explains, “The writings will continue to be part of my developing score and exist as their own works in ways still to be determined.” Danspace and Johnson are in talks to publish some or all of the essays that were written during this time, on Danspace’s online Journal. The fall 2024 residency guided the early development of movement and live performance aspects of a larger project, a new version of which will be presented as part of BRIC’s Celebrate Brooklyn, a free public festival in Prospect Park, Brooklyn on August 7th, 2025. Johnson will blend dance, storytelling, and craft, immersing the large audience (estimated 2000) in over 4,000 square feet of handmade textile design by Ojibwe artist Maggie Thompson and composed of 84 individual community-sewn quilts that have been sewn for the past 10 years by volunteers across what is currently called the US, Canada, Taiwan and Australia. Over the next year, the new work will continue to develop and expand to include a 24-hour live and broadcast performance and storytelling event, entitled OVERFLOW RADIO, featuring contributions from Indigenous writers and storytellers.