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
Year after year, CounterPulse brings you a little taste of everything that the Bay Area art scene has to offer and this Spring Season is no different! From contemporary dance to nightlife experiences to board game nights, there’s something for everyone coming up at 80 Turk! Want to bring a plus one to the show? […]
2022 marked a historic shift for CounterPulse – we raised the funds we need to buy our building in downtown San Francisco! As we work to make our dream a reality, we’re counting on our supporters who have seen us from the beginning of this campaign to support our work year-round. I want to offer […]
Written By: Alyssa Miller As queer performance art becomes more mainstream nationally and in San Francisco, it is important to recognize and support those queer artists who are eccentric even within their own communities. Drag performance artist Pseuda embodies the essence of unconventionality. They incorporate dark imagery and themes that are not common within the […]
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