Audrey Johnson (she/her) is a queer Black mixed-race movement artist with roots from Detroit and Plymouth Michigan, currently rooting in Oakland, CA. Audrey’s work lives, arrives, and changes in the realms of embodiment, movement, food, relationship, magic, ritual, plants, and land. Audrey’s project at CounterPulse will explore Black freedom practices in food, farming, and rootwork through dance, ritual, interview, and performance.
[and then we must be] is a performance and ritual, storytelling and research process, honoring Black American relationships with land and plants through food, farming, medicine-making, and magic. Movement and interviews bring stories to life, honoring these practices as communion with the divine, and Black liberatory healing technologies.
Inspired by ancestral, community-centered, and spiritual relationships to land and plants, [and then we must be] is a research and ritual project honoring Black American practices with land and plants through the modes of food, farming, rootwork, and magic. The work honors the practices that get passed down through recipe, spell, and story, as well as the memories active and activated in the body, plants, the land (soil, clay, mycelium, strata), and in spirit. Weaving together interviews with loved ones, the voice of the work speaks from the mouths of many. The dancing is a movement offering, ritual, and prayer: in communion with spirit, plants, and land. [and then we must be] is the process of meeting and being met by plants and land, and of allowing oneself to be changed.
Movement Collaborators
Bae Laurel O’Connor
Laila Shabazz
Photo by Audrey Johnson. Pictured: Bae Laurel O’Connor
Learn more about the ARC Edge 2022 Residency Presentation
featuring Audrey Johnson & Nkeiruka Oruche
Thursday – Saturday June 2-4 & 9-11, 2022
Directed by Krista DeNio Created & performed by Chloe Crotzer, Diana Lara, Tanja London, Heidi Erickson, Ashley Munday, Maicha Folch, Midy Zarem, Rosemary Hannon, Grace Shaver Presented by KD>>MovingGround, CounterPulse, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program July 2-3, 2022 • 4:30-7:30 PM PT counterpulse.org/network the NETWORK project addresses human survival and what we truly need– from […]
The ABJD Series • Directed by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto • Presented by CounterPulse Saturday, June 11, 2022 • 4:00 PM PT • The Roxie Theater • counterpulse.org/the-abjd-series Tickets available here at a range of $14-$24. The ABJD Series is a four-part film series and finale of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s six year multi-media project, Tomorrow We […]
The Artist Talks About His Upcoming Performance of FRE!HEIT with Michelle Jacques This performance has been postponed until the Fall of 2022. Subscribe to our newsletter for more updates. “I felt I was lacking freedom, but I couldn’t find out what made me feel so unfree,” performance artist and co-founder of Shifts– Art in Movement […]
Inspired by ancestral, community-centered, and spiritual relationships to land and plants, [and then we must be] by Audrey Johnson is a research and ritual project honoring Black American practices with land and plants through the modes of food, farming, rootwork, and magic. The work honors the practices that get passed down through recipe, spell, and story, as well as the memories active and activated in the body, plants, the land (soil, clay, mycelium, strata), and in spirit.
Paying homage to Black American spirituality and African Diasporic rites of community, the 2022 CounterPulse Edge program presents [and then we must be] by Audrey Johnson and, in partnership with Afro Urban Society, Mixtape of the Dead & Gone #1- Egwu Onwu Ahamefula by Nkeiruka Oruche + Gbedu Town Radio. This year’s Edge performances invite the audience into conversation with the land, spirits, the afterlife, and the legacies that inform the rituals and practices around them.