Brianna Rae Johnson
Contributor
Interdisciplinary artist and teacher
MFA Candidate, Department of Dance
Biography
As an interdisciplinary artist and teacher, I seek collaborative communities that fervently investigate issues of power and representation. Interested in how people’s perspectives impact their perception, I combine interactive technology, choreography, and video to create performance and installations that invite imaginative and coauthorial relationships. Each experience creates representations one’s authorial power in their own reality.
Before coming to the Ohio State University and getting involved with Livable Futures, I researched the impacts if a changing climate on the artic and explored the intersection of racial justice and dance at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. I graduated with Bachelor of Arts degrees in dance and biology and an eagerness to examine the world through the lens of my concentration in American Racial Multicultural Studies. Immediately upon graduation, I began performing full-time under the artistic direction of Robin Stiehm with Dancing People Company in Ashland, Oregon. Throughout my seven years with Dancing People, I rehearsed rigorously, toured nationally and internationally, taught and choreographed in numerous residencies, and managed our social media presence. Now, in addition to creating performances, interactive installations, and videos, I continue to rehearse and perform with various project-based choreographers such as Paula Mann, Mathew Janczewski, and Erin Drummond.
Q & A
What makes more livable futures for you?
I think a livable future is possible through examining how history has a hold on the now (who/what benefits and who/what doesn’t), dreaming of a future that changes this course, and living for that future. What brought the world here need not bring it forward.
At the same time as I live for that future, I can’t fully trust my somatic knowing—it has steeped in the same history that brutalizes and excludes people and wastefully consumes. I am relearning and repatterning, and this means that I the future I dream of needs community, reflection, and consistent reevaluation.
What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?
Reading: As I think about power and the politicization of bodies while teaching dance composition and making my own work, I have recently been reading and rereading Miquel Gutierrez’s article in BOMB magazine, “Does Absraction Belong to White People: Thinking of the Politics of Race in Contemporary Dance.” And Ahn Vo’s responds interview, “On Whiteness and Abstraction.” I am also in the process or reading My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem and Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality by Sarah Ahmed.
Watching: To be honest, I’ve been watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Black-ish, and Mixed-ish.
Listening: I’m a podcast person. Some that I’ve found to be the most interesting are: Scene on Radio(particularly the seasons called “Seeing White” and “Men”), Gangster Capitalism, White Lies, 1619, and This Land.
What practices are sustaining you?
I am profoundly grateful for mutually supportive relationships in which we dream, grapple, do, discuss, and learn together! Dancing keeps my body and spirit happy, and I love witnessing plant growth and figuring out how to use the food in my CSA.