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
The Artist Talks About His Upcoming Performance of FRE!HEIT with Michelle Jacques Get tickets now at www.counterpulse.com/fre-heit “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 David Brandstätter tells me about the inspiration behind FRE!HEIT, his evening length work that […]
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.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — CounterPulse is proud to be unveiling the new light sculpture titled “Elektra” on the façade of our building at 80 Turk St by the award-winning art and design studio FUTUREFORMS. The installation of this world-class public art installation marks the summit of CounterPulse’s current capital campaign to purchase their building in […]
“Traditionally, in Igbo cultures, we have had death as part of the conversation. We understand that life doesn’t end when you die. Ancestors are part of our life connection and day-to-day practice.”