I'm Emily Johnson, and I'm a Yup'ik woman.
I live on the Lower East Side of Manahatta in Lenapehoking.
I am an artist, a choreographer.
I've been a social justice artist in residence at Abrons Arts Center.
Though I think of all arts and art making as part of activism.
And for the past few years, I've been
hosting, along with my sister and thought partner, Cree scholar Karyn Recollet we've
been hosting monthly ceremonial fires in the amphitheater at Abrons Arts Center.
It's been so hard.
I mean, every week there's a completely different layer of grief, trauma.
There are some dark times and darkness.
And so to really be a witness, as so many
of us have been to this collective shift has been really something.
And sometimes the tiniest things that you
could do to take care of yourself and those you really love and the strangers
who you're not seeing anymore because they're not on the street, but somehow,
how can your actions always be in relationship?
I've been delivering food with Henry Street and with Vision Urbana.
Oh, my gosh, what a privilege and honor,
especially those first couple of weeks when everything was so quiet.
Gosh, the door would open just a crack
back then, like a tiny crack, you'd see this face in the crack
to say that there was food there, and it was a real honor to be able to share even
just that brief bit of time with people and know that sometimes I would probably
be the only person that person saw for days or longer.
And actions do absolutely matter.
And now I think this virus has really
highlighted the things that we need to change.
We must, we have to change now. We have to.
And the work that Henry Street does in community is so supportive.
And we've worked on Land acknowledgment
together to find pathways for Lenape artists who want to come to their homeland
to be able to work through and with Abrons Arts Center.
And this hard work to try to figure some of that out.
And now also with complications of what is
residency, what is travel, how do you support artists?
I don't mean that we do easy work together, but it's easy because there's
this flow and there's a desire to do good things at Abrons.
That's what I always feel.
And Henry Street totally adopted the Land acknowledgement process.
And now every building I go into in Henry
Street has the Land acknowledgement on the wall.
And people are speaking it and people are being in relationship with it.
And I feel the appreciation from Henry
Street and from Abrons, and I feel their commitment.
I'm part of the Phase One working group.
That's what we call ourselves who created this document called Creating New Futures,
to look at the inequitable and unjust ways that the performing arts field works, and
also to provide some beginnings of alternatives.
After the document was released, 7,000 people attended the Zoom slash livestream
on how around and this conversation is so needed in the performing arts world.
I think it's used to be going has not
changed actually it is a desire to be in a better future.
I hope that one of the things that we hold
dear collectively moving forward is the radical change.