Enter the Whale

Emily Johnson

I acknowledge the Kulin Nations, the Boonwurrung and the Wurundjeri people, upon whose lands and waters we depend on today. I pay my deep respect and offer gratitude to their elders and ancestors past, present, and future.

Emily Johnson and Tania Isaac in Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars on Randall’s Island, Lenapehoking, August 2017 | Image by Paula Court

Breath.

Whale enters the room. Undulates its spine. Rolls its huge belly forward. Opens its mouth water pours over its teeth out the door down the stairs. There is, smell of rain. Whale’s soft eye is gazing at everyone in the room. Whale takes a deep breath. And then there is the sound of breath. The floor sinks a bit under its weight. Creaks And then There is a sound the world has never heard. All the people in the room drop their heads their shoulders their arms their hands to the floor. We are crawling forward in the sound. Each one of us Toward whale. And we want to touch it We want to remember We want to hear We want to rock into that belly. We are whispering. We are whispering without knowing we are whispering ongoing everlasting forgotten sounds Sounds we forgot of our mothers Sounds our mothers made when we first entered the world.

The house I grew up in was made of plywood. And when my parents built their new house, which they still live in, I went outside, pressed my little body up against the plywood and said, “I’m sorry.”

Breath.

The first time I told this whole story - I told a story right now about how the ground we’re on is connected to the next bit of ground bit by bit across the world, each bit of ground connected to the next bit and the next, under rivers, over mountains, there were about a thousand people in a circle all around me. They were all crying.

Could you kiss my fingertips? Could you raise up your arms?

What is it like to stand in one place for seventy-five years? What is it like to stand in one place for seventy-five years? What is it to stand in one place for seventy-five hundred years? What is it to be in one place for seventy-five thousand years?

OK. Try this.

Stand up.

Stand at the banks of the Birrarung River. Stand at Newtown Creek. And the Mississippi, the Kuskokwim River. Stand along the edge of all the Great Lakes. And all the little ones. Stand at the edge of the Nile, the Timor and the Caspian Seas. Stand at Merri Creek and The River Daugava. Stand with your toes along the little trickle of LA River. Stand with Lake Oahe and The Pacific, The Arctic Oceans. Stand along the edge of Three Gorges Dam, Pebble Creek, the Murray River. Each ocean and stream and harbour and basin. We are standing at all of the lands that make up all of the shores. And we face the water. And we are incredibly still. And the water. It kind of regards us. Then, it backs away. So. We take a step forward onto the newly exposed shore. The water backs away again. We step forward. The water backs. We step forward, the water backs. This is gonna go on for days.

Step step step.

Deep breath.

We reach out our hands. Our bodies beg. Deep squat. Someone begins to sing. Then millions of voices are singing. Those of us not singing realise it is our grandmas. We realise in a simultaneous second it is our grandmas who are singing. The grandmas amongst us who had children born and or cut from their bodies, who donated eggs for other bodies to carry, who had children whether or not they wanted to, whose children - some of whom aren’t alive anymore - went on to have children of their own; fifteen, twelve, sometimes fifty, more, years later. These grandmas. They’re the singing ones. The millions of grandmas are singing with their arms and their hands outstretched. And the rest of us, billions - have laid our arms down to rest and with our arms down, we take a step back. So our grandmas, past and future - wail.

Out of breath.

Smell of rain.

Camai, I’m Emily Johnson. I’m a Yup’ik woman who grew up on Dena’ina and Kenaitze land in Alaska and I live now on Mannahatta in Lenapehoking, on the Lower East Side, quite near to the East River. I make dances and have eyes that are very similar to my dad’s eyes. They’re blue, my dad’s eyes. And mine. Big blue eyes like King Salmon, we say. Because where else did they come from? Did someone drop them in the snow, freezing them whole, for more life to come when warm and birthed and safe? Did they walk themselves across a bridge? Jump up into our heads? Or, were they forgotten? Left, upon leaving. Left, when done with skins and pelts. In these eyes, did someone find use? Did someone find some eyes, some left behind eyes,

some frozen blue eyes and put them to use? Is someone missing some eyes? Did you lose your eyes somewhere, where you came, looking for skins and pelts, where you saw more than skins and pelts, where you took more than skins and pelts. Take my eyes. Take my eyes. Not my life. Or hers. Or ours.

Big blue eyes, like King Salmon, we say.

I just hope there was a, nice man somewhere along the way who, for a moment or more loved instead of killed, blurring history enough to notice these blue eyes are strong. Not mine, but how we pass the blue down and on, down and on.

Or maybe, there was a nice man here who, for a moment or more loved instead of killed, blurring a history, creating a long line of blue eyed warriors and fishers and weavers and drunks.

These blue eyes are strong. Not mine but the code, the digits that send them on, makes blue and blue and blue. And we resolve to be warrior fisher weaver drunk, if we must be something more than just alive.

And alive we are. Standing at the river and the ocean and that other ocean and at all the oceans of the world, including the one that laps the shores of our would be conquerors, who came

and did not conquer but mingled, mixed, and left stories behind, and blue. Left furred, broke, rich, dead, or dead themselves.

Or maybe, there was no kass’aq leaving semen and a penchant for things.

Maybe it was King Salmon all along.

Besides, this is the same ocean we share the same shores. Besides, I would never draw the Blue out. I would never extract the Blue. Quyana for the Blue and for my Blue, thank you. Thank you for my Blue. Thank you, King Salmon, for my Blue.

RIGHT FOOT AND LEFT FOOT. RIGHT FOOT AND LEFT FOOT.

My great-grandmother, Lena - she was in Anchorage. And all the birds lined up to see her.

Imagine, birds coming to see you, flying from where they were last night, asleep, perched, branches, wind. Imagine,

their take off, bright, silent.

Their flight,

bright, silent, too.

Imagine, my dad - with his blue eyes, and he also has this bright silver hair - he looks up and sees the birds.

The birds are lined up, he says. The birds are perched above Anchorage. The birds have come, he says. The birds are perched above Anchorage. The birds have come to see grandma, he says. The birds are perched above Anchorage. The birds will be gone when we come back, he says none of this out loud.

The birds are silent. We look up. Silence

makes us look up.

The birds.

They came to wait,

he says, out loud.

For her, he says, out loud. It is a long way, he says, out loud. And they know the most direct path.

Where else do a million birds go so quickly? From silence to more than silence.

Do you hear that wind? Your grandma,

your great grandma,

her grandma

and the birds, came to Anchorage all of them.

Millions. It took that many.

They flew all night in silence, bright silence and they will be gone when we come back.

Look, he says, my dad.

And they are.

Imagine. and her grandma

The water is still. Which is strange.

Our grandmas begin to move their feet.

Right foot and left foot, right foot and left foot.

Their stomping and their singing lights up in volume and the grasses and the sands and the salts and the muds beneath the feet of our grandmas splashes up onto their calves and the solid ground beneath us tips. No. I think it undulates. So. The land and the grandmas are calling the water back, back to before these grandmas and their grandmas and theirs had children and children and more children and children and children who decided to just take and take and take continually, whatever they wanted, all the time. Us.

Scream.

My body. MY BODY comes from generations AND GENERATIONS and generations OF LOVE. My body COMES ALSO from men who took, who raped, who tried, ABOVE ALL ELSE to conquer. But MY BODY, scream MORE THAN ANYTHING comes from women who unfurl again scream AND AGAIN, heated, un-accepting of scream force and scream FORCED RAGE - who in their own wisdom direct their anger and grief to scream MOVEMENT scream ACTION scream PEACE.

Now.

We stand behind our grandmas watching the women discuss matters with water. Their feet are still moving, their legs are covered in debris, their voices are still singing. The water is still still which is still strange and we realise in a simultaneous second it is us our grandmas sing for. Of course. Also, us the

water would rather be rid of. Our hands are for some reason still scream hanging useless at our sides. And it takes a really long time. But once a decision is reached, the millions of grandmas turn toward us. The water is waiting at their backs. And it is silent. Across the world. It is silent. Until, “I’m sorry,” they say. “I’m sorry,” the grandmothers say.

And as the water moves toward them and then past them and toward us and then over us, the grandmas, they keep singing. And that is when we decide to join.

The above is an excerpt from a keynote, offered at WaterFutures - part of ASIAtopa in February 2017.

EMILY JOHNSON

Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. A Bessie Awardwinning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, she is based in New York City.

Originally from Alaska, Emily is of Yup’ik descent and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as installations, engaging audiences within and through a space and environment — interacting with a place’s architecture, history and role in community. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to one another, our environment, our stories; past, present and future.

Her choreography has been presented across the United States and Australia. Recently she choreographed the Santa Fe Opera production of Doctor Atomic, directed by Peter Sellars. Her large-scale event, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars is an all-night outdoor performance gathering that takes place among 84 communityhand-made quilts. It premiered in Lenapehoking (NYC) in 2017.

Emily’s writing has been published and commissioned by Dance Research Journal (University of Cambridge Press); SFMOMA; Transmotion Journal, University of Kent; Movement Research Journal; Pew Center for Arts and Heritage; and the recent compilation Imagined Theaters (Routledge), edited by Daniel Sack. She is an advisory committee member for Creative Time’s 10th Anniversary Summit and the Advancing Indigenous Performance Initiative of Western Arts Alliance. She serves on the Native American Arts Program Expansion Committee for Idyllwild Arts, and is the Pueblo Arts Collaborative Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera.

Emily is a lead collaborator in the Indigenous-artist led Healing Place Collaborative; she was an inaugural participant in Headlands Center for the Arts’ Climate Change Residency; a member of Creative Change at Sundance; and served as a water protector at Oceti Sakowin Camp at Standing Rock. As a facilitator she has worked with artists and communities most notably during First Nations Dialogues (NYC and Australia); TIME PLACE SPACE, NOMAD in Wotjobaluk Country, Australia; and during UMYUANGVIGKAQ with PS122 in Lenapehoking and LA Performance Projects in Yaanga (LA).

Each month, Emily hosts ceremonial fires on the Lower East Side in Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Art Center and Lenape Center. andWith a transnational consortium—including BlakDance, Vallejo Gantner, Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance, ILBIJERRI, and others — she is developing a Global First Nations Performance Network.