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
CounterPulse was founded over 30 years ago in an oversized living room by a collective of artists who started producing shows and inviting their friends. They were fortunate enough to have that space to gather, so their community began to grow. We have always maintained the alchemy of those grassroots beginnings: part emergent and iterative, […]
Unsettled/Soiled Group is a group of East, Southeast, and South Asian diasporic movers, makers, and settlers on Ramaytush and Chochenyo Ohlone land. Unsettled/Soiled Group is led by June Yuen Ting, one of CounterPulse’s 2022 ARC Performing Diaspora artists and will debut Dwelling for Unsettling alongside VERA!’s Try, Hye!, Thursday through Saturday, December 8-10 & 15-17, 2022
We are so excited to introduce Alyssa Miller who is joining us as our Outreach Fellow at CounterPulse this winter. Alyssa comes to us from SFSU where they are studying professional writing and rhetoric with a focus on social media and graphic design. We asked Alyssa a few questions about themself and why they wanted […]
Try, Hye! by Vera Hannush/VERA! & Dwelling for Unsettling by Unsettled/Soiled Group December 8-10 & 15-17, 2022 // 8PM PT // 80 Turk St, SF // counterpulse.org/performingdiaspora2022 SAN FRANCISCO, CA — The 2022 CounterPulse Performing Diaspora program presents Try, Hye!by Vera Hannush/VERA! and Dwelling for Unsettlingby Unsettled/Soiled Group. In Try, Hye!, Armenian drag king VERA! […]
VERA! (they/them) is a queer Armenian American drag king, dancer, and community activist. They are one of CounterPulse’s 2022 ARC Performing Diaspora artists and will debut Try, Hye! alongside Unsettled/Soiled Group’s Dwelling for Unsettling, Thursday through Saturday, December 8-10 & 15-17, 2022