SHORE in Minneapolis

I see SHORE first at its premiere in Minneapolis in June 2014. I don’t know Minneapolis well, though I know there is a strong, vibrant, politicized Native presence here. It’s a beautiful evening in that soft, warm, summer-in-the-Midwest kind of way. At the start of SHORE, “PERFORMANCE,” on the grass of the University of Minnesota campus, Johnson, with masklike circles painted in red around each eye, walks around with a sign that says “Gather Here” and greets some of us individually. It is both part of the performance and saying hello. A line of people down the way are singing tones without words that infuse the air, walking slowly in our direction, permeating the space with a sense of calm and awe. Then, climbing up on a pedestal, Johnson tells a story. It starts with a tree just down a ways from where we are sitting. It was there three hundred years ago, she says. “I think I remember that tree in my bones.” Then she tells about a dream she’s had during the SHORE production process, involving an eagle and a hawk and transformation: the eagle turns into a hawk, and the hawk, in front of it, turns into an owl, and the owl turns into a baby, so that the hawk (that was the eagle) is holding on to the baby. Next Johnson tells us about a few days earlier, when she was rehearsing, and she looked up and saw a hawk and a plane lined up high above it as if they would collide, and she had a sudden memory of the ground shifting beneath her feet. “I was here, and I was home. I was the tree, and I was me. I was alive, and I wasn’t yet born.” We squint upward. The story has us seeking and sensing the connections across time and space and entities she is telling about—how she is, to again cite Laura Harjo’s work, “jumping scale” from this here-and-now realm into others, above and below, dream and not dream, between human and other-than-human: tree, bird, not-yet born.60 “This is awesome,” she says, looking around at us all. “I’ve been trying to think of the most joyous moment in my life, but I wasn’t sure what it is. I think it might be right now.” People cheer. If we could all help each other get to the theater together, that would be really great. “And—if someone could help me down?” We have all exchanged our tickets for name tags. We have been welcomed, with our connections to her and to each other—and beyond, to the nonhuman world layered all around us on that campus green—recognized and acknowledged. Of course we’ll help her down.

Once we get inside, the line of singers continues to intone, and things remain both blurred and connected between multiple realms, like in the story Johnson has just told. We see the rigging on both sides of the stage; we see the costume changes; we see someone sitting on a stool the whole performance and then pulling a rope so that fake snow flutters down. The costumes don’t really look like costumes, at least in parts, like where the dancers wear bulky parkas over their outfits. The choreography doesn’t really look like choreography, at least in parts, like when the dancers do this hunched, galloping move, coming into and out of patterns and into and out of paths of contact with one another, back and forth across the stage. Watching, I have no idea what the pattern is. It seems both random and not random. The dancers turn and make sounds with their bodies; Johnson slaps on the ground with her feet. “If I could just . . . reach . . . a little bit . . . more,” dancer Aretha Aoki, wearing red, and red eye paint, and a mustache, says, lifting her leg higher and higher. Krista Langberg, the dancer in orange, flails her arms before making across-the-diagonal contemporary-dance-recognizable Impressive Dance Moves.

The next day, at the “COMMUNITY ACTION” (which involved cleaning up along the Mississippi riverbed and planting native plants along its shore), while we are hunched over planting seedlings in the rain garden next to each other, Johnson explains to me about the parkas: one of the studios they worked in was cold, so they put on parkas. The parkas became part of the piece. The feet slapping? That is the sound of basketball, her first love—the sound basketball makes, feet on the court, running. And the patterns I can’t make sense of? Those are from basketball: the dancers watched and learned the paths of one Chicago Bulls game, the 1991 championship with the LA Lakers. Johnson says it’s always somewhat arbitrary how you make choreographic patterns, so why not choose the paths a player makes in a basketball game as the ones to follow?

In other words, however puzzling the parkas looked to me, they were part of an experience accumulated in the piece and had meaning for those involved. However indecipherable the galloping pattern looked to me, it had a clear meaning to Johnson in relation to her personal, family, and basketball-loving history. There is clarity here, however murky my grasp of it. Later, Michael Tsosie explains to me how Native dance always has a purpose and a meaning. It is a visible display of concepts that are entirely legible within the community in which it is made—though perhaps not so legible outside of it, he says.61 Johnson’s basketball galloping, I come to see, signals this meaning making in a quirky and hilarious way. Even as it commits wholeheartedly to it (those dancers were committed to those pathways), it also signals its illegibility (I doubt many watching in Minneapolis in 2014 caught the specificity of the Chicago Bulls 1991 championship paths). Johnson could make it explicit, so the audience joins her in understanding what these paths are about. Or she can refuse that desire for comprehension and (literally) just embody the pathways of this game, as she does with such commitment, knowing they’re there, in the choreography, whether everyone sitting and watching sees it or not. The piece, in other words, shows a layered stage where all the relational movement that is and has been happening in and around it registers and where audience desire to comprehend is of little regard.

These meaning-full presences across time and space, that you may catch, or not, appear as well in the ways aspects of Johnson’s Yup’ik identity pop up in the piece. Early on, a huge, bright red curtain drops behind the Choir group that stands in rows before it. They shimmer in its glow, and two side panels descend, with photographs of Johnson’s family’s fish strips scanned and overlaid upon one another to create an abstract pattern. The word “Que’ana” is written on one: a version of “thank you” in Yup’ik (actually a misspelling, she tells me, as the known way, now, to spell it is “quyana,” but “Que-Ana” is how her grandma spelled it on the sign at her bar in Alaska, which is also the “Thank-You Bar” of the first part of Johnson’s trilogy62). Within the abstraction, in other words, are specific references to Johnson’s Yup’ik identity, in flickers. Then the red curtain and fish side panels rise, and it’s gone, and there’s Langberg in orange doing swoopy dances, with clawlike hands, neck arched up. Later, a five-year-old boy with a braid down his back, in long shorts and high-top sneakers, does grass dance steps across the floor before rejoining the Choir across the stage. I sense Yup’ik presence in the dreams, in the singing and drumming, in the parkas, in the evocation of birds traversing these realms (they seem like birds, the three main dancers, in their bright colors and red-masked eyes, though maybe Aoki, with that mustache, got caught halfway in the transformation process between bird and human, between male and female? Maybe she isn’t—maybe we all aren’t—only what we first appear to be?). Yup’ik stories, language, presence, cosmologies, seem deeply infused into the piece, whether or not Johnson points it out so we viewers can all recognize it.

These performed, performative assertions of relationality permeate SHORE, “PERFORMANCE.” Toward the end of the piece, Johnson kneels at the front of the stage and tells another story, about a whale. “The whale enters the room, opens its mouth, water pours over its teeth, out the door and down the stairs,” she says, but before she gets too far into the story, the singers who flank the front parts of the stage (they are there always, sitting or humming or singing or taking sips of water) sing loudly and forcefully over the story, repeating parts in ways that drown it out. All we get are snippets. Yet, as it repeats, it starts to make sense, if I listen hard enough and with more attunement within the cacophony and don’t get distracted. It gives a sense of something big—of loss and yearning, of ache to return to a mother-like, womblike embrace. The rest of the piece embodies these muffled connections and dreamlike flashes of definition and asserts them as crucial, and central, and entreats us to trust in their import even if we don’t fully hear, grasp, or understand. Things feel blurry, though not uncertain—just difficult to delineate. We sense the connections we still and always have had—to one another, to the human and nonhuman and once-were-human entities around us—as well as the yearnings for connections that, at any given moment, may not be quite so clear. On the pedestal at the start, before asking us to help each other get inside, Johnson says, “I think that our future, if we want it to be, could be really joyous.” SHORE, throughout, blows on these glowing, hope-filled sparks. It calls out the possibilities in the sensed connections: in the flashes, in what is there and what can be seen and felt, in the realms we can connect with—and, too, in the uncertainties and blurriness and things you can’t quite access and times you don’t know: the ruptures from legibility. That is part of it, too, because acknowledging the blur prods you to trust the meaning in connection, to trust you can leap over into other times and realms, even when you can only hear and feel the tone and not quite the words.

SHORE, a title that names that liminal space between ground and water, traversed by birds who can cross between them, evokes both a sense of yearning for connection (we want to hear, we want to remember, as Johnson says in the whale story) and these layers of connection (“I was here, and I was home. I was the tree, and I was me. I was alive, and I wasn’t yet born”). And the piece entreats us, even if we mostly live in this moment’s fog, with only glimmers of understandings of these other realms—the dreamed memories from other times and manifestations, before being born, hundreds of years ago, as a tree, as a whale, the sounds of our mother’s womb, a championship basketball game—it’s all there, and we can get there, perhaps even easily. Perhaps we already are there. What we see and hear, and clearly, here in this realm (and on this stage) and on its surfaces, isn’t necessarily where we have to stay or where meaning lies. Isn’t it exciting? Within the fog is fun, and brightness, and basketball, and joy.

SHORE in Lenapehoking

In April 2015, I take part in SHORE, “COMMUNITY ACTION,” on Governors Island in New York, which involves working with the Billion Oyster Project to restore the oyster habitat in New York Harbor.63 I spend the morning shoveling oyster shells so they can bleach in the sun (which takes about six months, Sam Janice, the oyster project guy tells us) and cleaning trash. We meet to learn more about the project and its plan to reintroduce habitable oyster habitat into New York Harbor, in the hope that oysters will inhabit it. “It’s really up to nature if it’s going to work or not,” Janice says. “Nature bats first and last and all throughout.”

After we hear about the “restoration research” students are undertaking, Emily Johnson talks about oysters, and abundance, and the abundance of oysters. “Oysters were a staple food for Lenape,” she says, “so bountiful and such a base for the ecology.” Then she talks about rooftops and how “they used to be so totally accessible, not so sectioned off and not so fancy.” Like oysters. She says she’s been thinking about how abundance here has shifted, from everyone to the few. “I mean, it’s all going to shift again, right?” she asks us.

At lunch, the man I sit next to says he didn’t know anything about Johnson being Yup’ik or this having anything to do with Indigenous stuff. “What do you mean, Indigenous?” he asks. I talk about how (thank you, Mary Louise Pratt), yeah, it’s a troublesome term, it basically means who is here before the colonizers arrive. “Before that, they’re just the People, right?” I say. “Emily is Yup’ik. So interesting that you didn’t know that.” Later, this conversation repeats, with others, almost verbatim. We talk about SHORE’s name here, SHORE: Lenapehoking, which no one at this event knows (here in April 2015) is a Lenape term for this territory.

At the performance the next day, we gather at PS 11 on 21st Street, are given name tags, and stand around. It is really cold, and some people are wrapped in red yoga blankets as they wait. Johnson is playing basketball with some kids. She makes almost all her shots, with some impressive blocking too. The rest of us are milling around, taking it all in, smiling at each other. Is this the show? A group of performers (I presume they are performers) are huddled in a mass at one end. They are looking out, staring quietly. Along the street are performers (I presume they are performers too) starting to walk by, evenly spaced apart from one another, with a measured step-forward-then-back cadence so that they are all in rhythm. They intone a bell-like sound with their voices, filling the streets and calling our attention. Johnson is still playing basketball, so we are watching that too, and the huddled group is still huddling. But it is becoming clearer that this is the performance event: we are already in the midst of it. The Choir makes its way, one by one, into the space and lines up, its resonant vocables filling the air. The huddled group breaks and starts running around. All of us are wearing regular street clothes, dressed for going out seeing art in this weather, so it’s the sense of purpose to their running that indicates they are part of the show.

Johnson stops playing basketball and goes up to a tree where there’s a podium stashed and carries it down. She asks someone to steady it and climbs up to welcome us all. She tells the story about the birds, and the baby, and the tree, and memory. The text is exactly the same as the text in Minneapolis, almost, except she points to a building and says it was a pigeon she saw that made her think of this dream. Then she tells us that we’re going to walk together to the theater, and the directions, which follow the path of the creek that is underneath us—we won’t see it, but it’s there—around this street, that corner, past the sex shop, past the three ducks, turn here. And she asks those of us who can walk (otherwise, we can make it to the theater on our own) to do so together, in silence.

Attending to the path of the creek beneath us feels familiar. In the Conjuring Future Joy workshop Johnson led a few days earlier at Gibney dance studio, we practiced this attention to what is there beneath us: we closed our eyes and felt the spaces between our feet and the floor that we stood on, down through the building’s floors and through the concrete to the wet earth beneath us, and from there spreading through the earth and outward, to each of the buildings and the trees and all that is also supported by the earth. As we walk along the streets of Chelsea, along the path of a creek we cannot see, I feel the workshop’s link with this walking we are doing now: following a path with an awareness of what Esselen writer Deborah Miranda describes as connection to the land felt through the “underground rivers that never see the light of day, but run alive and singing nonetheless.” Along the way, guiding us, the Choir singers stand in groups and regroup again along the route; the sound of their singing lingers. Others walking with us carry small wooden boxes with white fur on them that seem alive. They wiggle and chatter and rattle. It feels as if we are floating. The quiet of our movement together fills the streets. Others walk by, talking, not seeing us, it feels, or barely noticing, wrapped up in their conversations. I keep an eye out for the sex shop, chuckling when I see it. Once in a while, the people in the street look at us as if to say “what’s that?” for an instant, before continuing along.

I feel spectral, in these streets, as twilight falls, quietly seeing and taking in all that is there, and has been, in these streets. These are the streets of the car accident that killed my father, I realize: not far from here, streets like these, with these layers of footfall and sound and sparkle. Except death is not quite death in this realm, just another layer of presence. My heart leaps and calms, walking enveloped in this hum of sound, this river of bodies, spectral and earthly, these sparkling New York streets with people laughing and talking and eating behind the glass of restaurant windows as we pass by in silence, mostly unremarked, but there en masse. I arrive at the theater in an altered state and weave through the lobby into the performance space (though isn’t this all the performance space?).

Inside, the Choir members are already on stage, and we snuggle into our seats. It is warm inside, and cozy, and the seats are graded so we can see the whole space, and are part of it, looking down. My glasses fog from the shift in temperature. On the sides, smoke is coming in along the floor, and I feel in a cloud, enveloped, like we are here in this dreamscape realm, with these performers, these Choir members, watching us as we arrive. The performance is about to begin, except it already did, back before, and well before that even. The theater space feels intimate and comforting. Women in pairs face each other, making little whimpers like sex but not exactly sexual; I think of throat singing. I write in my notes: vision of a world in which women are in charge. The basketball part starts with just the sound of stomping feet, and then a sportscast recording: we hear the names Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, the words Chicago Bulls, LA Lakers. It’s much clearer, in this version, with this voice-over, what the patterns are. Throughout, I have a sense of increasing clarity, which also accompanies a sense of misty obscurity and of clarity in obscurity: an awareness of presence even in what isn’t seen. Maybe it’s because I am in New York, where I was born, where I’ve lived, a space that has always had a yearning, spectral presence for me (as opposed to Minneapolis, where I have almost no connection). Maybe it’s that I’ve seen the piece already, so its obscurities are starting to clarify. Maybe it’s the piece’s clarifications. At any rate, I feel almost embarrassed at all the layers I can sense now that I couldn’t see before.

I return the next night with Aunt Judy, who is awesome, and with whom I am staying. As we walk through the streets, we are quiet and floating through, looking, walking. Nobody notices us except now and again, startled. They are all there going about their lives. The sky is luminescent. I think again about the streets, and the theater, as liminal space between here and there, now and gone and not yet born, and about the stream singing beneath us. I think again about what is seen and about what is not seen. I think about how this piece is not asking for audience recognition or waiting for us to catch up to what it is clear about.

“It’s sort of an experience,” Aunt Judy says afterward. We talk about how much we loved the walk over from the school to the theater, in silence. She says it felt so calming and beautiful and moving, and how wonderful to watch everyone watching (or not watching) us all walk, and oh! To walk through those tenements, and all the layers of history that were there, and feel “the spirit, or whatever it was. Just so powerful.”

On Sunday, I go to SHORE, “FEAST,” with a friend. We are all asked to bring some food to share and the recipe for it; I make a kale salad. It is being held at Newtown Creek, a tributary of the East River, and a hyperpolluted Superfund site that is being cleaned up. They are offering canoe rides out to the river from it. There are loads of salmon and oysters, lots of salads and roasted vegetables, wine in a wooden box, local beer in a keg, and lemonade. There are kids running around. There are squares of fabric where you can write what you want for yourself, your family, your community, and hang them on a clothesline. There’s a small letterpress poem you can take. We canoe, and eat, and sit by the fire, and watch them shuck oysters and cook sockeye salmon, and talk. There are lots and lots of people there. When Jack Gray shows up—he had performed in the Choir—he says, “Who are all these people?” and I turn and say, well, this is Shawn, who I met oystering on Friday. Shawn (Shafner, I learn his name) joins in and laughs and jokes with us. It is like we know people now.

In Lenapehoking, SHORE’s muffled, foggy glimmers—what’s scarce, unseen, ruined, spectral, missing, in between, gone, there only in flashes—start to shimmer more brightly and to seem, somehow, almost magically, not actually so absent or even so in between, but still here and like this feast, with its oysters and friendships, a sign of plenty, even abundance.

SHORE in Yelamu

In August 2015, SHORE comes to where I live: the San Francisco Bay Area. This time, I make it to SHORE, “STORY,” held at Rob Hill Campground in the San Francisco Presidio. The night before, Johnson and I had been invited to a Bear Dance ceremony being held at the campground by Rumsen Ohlone chief Tony Cerda’s dance group, who is up from Southern California, where they now live, and where there is a weeklong culture camp happening for Native youth and families from the region. As the sun goes down, the fire shines out against the blue ocean sky, gorgeous, and Tony Cerda and his group sing songs for the water, the women, the trees, the hummingbird. Pomo dance leader David Smith speaks of how he has come to support. Razzle Dazzle (Richard Raguda), a Shingles Springs Miwok Dancers traditional leader, is there as well, participating. When we are invited into the circle, he blesses us, with a little teasing. The next day, I arrive back at Rob Hill early and talk with Mary Jean Robinson, who runs the Webworks: Voices of the Native Nation radio show on KPOO 89.5. We talk about stepping forward and stepping back and how there is a time and a place and a need for both. She tells me there’s an Ohlone dance she loves that is about the ocean waves coming in and out that is like that, that forward and backward rhythm. We talk about the hopes and plans for a cultural center and for a place for Native Elders to live. We share some gluten-free cornbread I’ve brought and relax. In a bit, we share dinner with everyone (roasted chicken, beans, chili, salad, my cornbread, an amazing peach coffee cake). Later we gather up a ways, around a fire. That is where SHORE, “STORY” opens, with songs from Natalie Smith, with her dad David Smith singing too. Then Tria Blu Wakpa (then a Berkeley grad student) reads a poem while her husband, Blu, performs alongside in sign language. Then we hear from a man who talks about us being there in the Presidio, and about his family from the Philippines, and reads a wonderful piece about his travels and connections. Johnson, kneeling close to the fires so it glows on her, tells the blackfish story from The Thank-You Bar. Razzle Dazzle tells a Coyote story.

No one here is unaware of an Indigenous context to SHORE, “STORY” in Yelamu.

I also take part in the “COMMUNITY ACTION” part of this SHORE. It is at Hunter’s Point/Candlestick Park, with Literacy for Environmental Justice (LEJ). I bring my three children along, and we plant native grasses and pull up mustard, which is a nonnative plant. LEJ leader Anthony Khalil says, “They want a monoculture. We are striving for biological diversity. . . . These complexities are evolving as we speak.” He talks about his Filipino relatives and how they planted. “Some of these plants have kept their native names,” he said, mentioning islay cherry as the main pit fruit indigenous to this region. He says the point, what they are striving for, is “not to restore what was but to look towards what could be.” We also learn how to twine—using raffia—making a loop on your finger and holding it in your mouth, then twining them both in one direction and crossing them in another. It takes me three tries to figure it out. It feels joyous to be outside in the sunshine, digging and working and near the water. I know many of the people here now. At the closing circle, Johnson offers a Yu’pik word that means the currents under the water where all you see are the ripples.

As we are leaving, I am talking to activist and organizer Neil MacLean, who has worked with parts of the Ohlone community for decades and has helped organize these connections with SHORE in Yelamu. Johnson comes over. “Did he tell you about last night?” She says, “That was the performance. That was SHORE. The rest is just—” She waves her hands to say, the ripples.

The night before, twenty or so of those who had been at the Rob Hill campground came to ODC Theater (a major site for contemporary dance in San Francisco) to see Johnson there and learn some about what she is doing. They ate pizza together and had a mini tour of the space, and then, kind of impromptu, they had a song exchange: Johnson and the SHORE cast shared the whale song from the piece, then David Smith’s Pomo dance group got ready to share a song. But they hadn’t brought a hand drum with them so said they can’t do that part. But wait, SHORE director Ain Gordon said, here, we have a timpani, would this do? And so the Pomo dance group offered a Pomo song, on a timpani, in the ODC Theater, in an exchange that was able to happen because of how they had been sharing fireside at Rob Hill, at the “STORY” event: because they’d gotten to know each other some and had begun to build relation. Then Smith’s group asked Johnson to see part of her performance, and Johnson and the dancers shared an excerpt—the basketball section, with the voice-over. MacLean said the kids got it right away. “Which player were you?” they asked Johnson. On the way back to the campground, Razzle Dazzle—who had been dancing for twenty plus years—said he understood the whale story and could connect with Johnson’s piece through that plea for the whale, and that he’d never seen modern dance before or ever been in a theater like that.64

On SHORE, “PERFORMANCE” day, I arrive at ODC early and sit next to MacLean and right behind Bernadette Smith, AJ, her son, and Flavio, her nephew, for the last part of tech. Bernadette is stepping in to perform. She is in regalia, with a long black dress and a head piece with beads that cover her face. Dave Smith asks Johnson, “Do you have a hairdryer?” and I chuckle—his hair looks great—before he adds, “I need to heat the drum, it’s not sounding right.” Johnson points to the stage lights on a pole—those lights get really hot, you could try putting it there? Bernadette’s voice is powerful and moving and fills the space. Then it’s time to go to the alley, where the piece will begin. On the way, we come up to a homeless woman sleeping on a red couch. As we get near, Bernadette, carrying her clapper, says, “We should sing for her, Dad!” But Dave has walked too far ahead to hear, so we keep walking by, and Bernadette claps the clapper over the woman, who continues to sleep.

The alley is covered in bright graffiti murals, gorgeous art with powerful messages, shimmering with energy. People—not connected with the show, just passersby—walk through, as more and more SHORE attendees (we are wearing our SHORE name tags) start to gather. I take lots of pictures—of the space, the huddled SHORE dancers, Dave resting against the mural wall holding his drum, talking to Neil, to Bernadette. AJ and Flavio are interested in all the sneakers flung over the wires above. Then the intonation starts; the singers at one end of the alley, with the high aaaaaaaahhhhh, start slowly to walk in, first from one side and then from the other. The space quiets; we stop our chatter; people (even those walking through, unconnected) realize it’s a “thing” that’s happening (except one woman, getting pulled by her two dogs, yelling “No! Sinister! Come on!”—if I didn’t know better, I would think that part was scripted too). Then Johnson arrives with her sign, “Gather Here,” and holds it high overhead. More and more people stream in. The high, eerie aaaahs echo clearly in the alley space; it has good acoustics for this. Bernadette, in her headdress (she is wearing a different one for this part of the piece, in the alley), and her dad, hugging his drum, are just part of the group. The SHORE Choir members are walking through the space, three steps forward, two back, advaning slowly. Johnson arrives with her pedestal and climbs up. She has positioned herself under a giant bougainvillea. Its pink petals are gorgeous, and she looks stunning among them but is kind of entangled. “I picked a kind of difficult spot to put myself!” she laughs. She said she has a story she wants to tell—she’s told it before—she points to me; do you remember that story I told you about the tree? She talks about Candlestick Point, about yarrow and islay cherry. She talks about, before the Mission was called the Mission, before Mission Creek was covered up, the ground there. At the end, she tells us the route we are going to walk—out the alley, left of Sycamore, past the grate where, if it were really raining (it has been sprinkling some), Mission Creek would bubble up, toward the ocean where the whales are gathering, past the burger joint, where she hears the mango shake is really great (but don’t get one now because there isn’t really time, come back tomorrow), toward the mountain. She again asks us to walk together, in silence.

It is twilight, and the sky, which was pink and gold in the alley, has become that blue luminous color. It is so much lighter than at this time in New York, of course, because that was winter and here it is summer, and dusk, and we are on clock time: 8:00 P.M. is when the theater starts. It gives you a sense of distance, this walking in silence through the streets, with people around going about their lives, along the path of the creek that isn’t bubbling up now but is there beneath us. We float by people around us, smiling at how they seem so wrapped up in their concerns. A woman walks past us, elbow lifted, cell phone to ear. “When will you get here? When?” she screams into the phone. We laugh. It feels scripted too. Choir members, carrying the furry music boxes, travel with us so the sound score comes along too, reverberating in my chest, creating the space between us as one of connection. Inside a Laundromat, I glimpse people lifting their arms toward the walls, twisting, bending, crossing space, like dancers. Johnson comes to walk with me and, as we walk under a sign for the Star Hotel, points up and whispers, “We’re going under the stars! Tomorrow that’s going to go in my show.” I see the ODC director, Victor Gotesman, give a panhandler money. Bernadette, walking ahead up a ways, shakes her clapper, that sound score drawing us along together.

When we make it back inside the theater, Johnson is onstage, in her yellow suit, wearing a leg brace (she is having a knee issue). There is no smoke: Aoki has pulled her hamstring, and the smoke would make the stage too slippery, Johnson told me earlier. It is smaller than the stage in New York, or Minneapolis, and I am closer in, in many ways. Aoki, in the back, between the timpani drums, breathes heavily, then comes out to do her high leg lift, except she lifts it only partway, and holds: “I am going to stay,” she says. “Keep staying.” She holds in that bent forward position. “It’s different!” she laughs. “Different.” Then she falls forward. I wonder how the rest of the audience is reading it and if I would be willing to trust that there is meaning in it, however inscrutable, if I didn’t know about her hamstring. She still does the running handstand, and we hear the sounds of her hands squeaking on the Marley floor and how she says “I’m glad you’re here” to the tall woman from the Large Cast who holds up her legs. The Que’ana fish strips drop, then the red cloth, and the Large Cast dancers stand and sway before them, and the singer raises her hand. Next is the bird–claw–hand section, Langberg’s hands again like claws, back arching. Bernadette Smith emerges onto the stage, and her voice rises and blends into the Large Cast voices. Dave Smith hits the drum, singing her on. Langberg supports her from behind, Aoki holds her hands, and Johnson holds Aoki’s. Bernadette is a gifted performer, holding one arm out, with the clapper, compelling our attention, directing the energy. In the basketball section, there is a soundtrack of feet stomping, in addition to the sounds made by the basketball dancers’ feet. The Large Cast on the sides stomps too. As three dancers bring plants across the stage and then walk slowly, eerily, back across it, the basketball dancers gallop around them. It’s as if they don’t really see each other. Dave’s grandkids, in front of me, are restless in their seats, squirming. Bernadette keeps giving them the stink eye to behave. In the snow section, when Johnson and Aoki take off their suits and change, Flavio covers his eyes. Johnson keeps her back to us. She throws a cloth over Aoki’s head, and they dance that way. Downstage, Johnson slaps her own chest, and it sounds like she’s crying.

I am struck, watching, by how little this performance piece matters. It is intriguing, and impressive, and a little funny, but, as Johnson has said, just a ripple of what SHORE in Yelamu is getting at.

Afterward, in the lobby, a colleague I’ve run into meets Johnson and talks about how good it is to be reminded about this land, and what is on it, and the waters underneath.

In response to all this energy and connection, Johnson and the SHORE crew ask ODC to move the last planned performance of SHORE, “PERFORMANCE” to the beach where we had volunteered, to overlap with SHORE, “FEAST.” Eventually ODC agrees. Many from the Bay Area Indigenous and Indigenous arts communities come out: Point Arena Pomo, Central Valley Miwok, Pajara Valley Ohlone, the Pomo-led world beat music group Audiopharmacy, San Francisco–based dancers from Dancing Earth. “Patrick [Orozco] set the blessing, setting the center spirit pole, surrounded it with bear, coyote, raccoon, and deer skins. He led his group in six songs each introduced by stories about his life and the history of his people,” MacLean writes me about the event.65 “Mary Jean [Robinson] welcomed and introduced all the participants as they entered the arena: SHORE, Miwok, Pomo, Ohlone, followed by Anthony Khalil and Noxium (aka Brother Nature) from Literacy for Environmental Justice. . . . They gifted rattles to dancers who had shown keen focus. They described the campground they are going to build beneath the mound we had filled with new native ancestral plants.” Then Johnson’s Choir sung the whale song from SHORE, and Johnson performed a solo dance in relation to her Choir.

No one who comes to this event, with its exchanges of California Native songs and dances, its setting, its context, could miss the Indigenous context of what SHORE in Yelamu is doing, even if they didn’t know this when they bought tickets to see a contemporary dance work they thought would be in the theater at ODC.

SHORE in Narrm

I miss SHORE in Seattle (Dᶻidᶻelaľic̆/Dkhw’Duw’Absh) and in Johnson’s home community in Homer, Alaska (SHORE in Tuggeght). But a year and a half later, in May 2017, I make it to SHORE in Narrm (Melbourne), where I have been invited as an “International Delegate” to the National Indigenous Dance Forum, which dovetails with the twelve-day Yirramboi First Nations Arts Festival that includes SHORE. Here in Narrm, which I’ve learned is the Wurundjeri word (Wurundjeri are the Indigenous people of the land on which the Arts House theater where SHORE, “PERFORMANCE” will happen is situated in relation to the river) for that part of Melbourne, Australia, which is very far away from any place I’ve called home.

The first day of SHORE, “COMMUNITY ACTION” is at a park helping an organization called WeCycle fix bikes, recycling them for distribution to members of refugee communities and others in need and reducing landfill.66 It starts with a welcome and a discussion about the name of the park where it is being held, Batman (which references a colonizer, not the masked avenger), and how they are in the process of naming it an Indigenous name. I attach lock holders to bicycles that are going to St. Joseph’s Flexible Learning Centre, which is a specialist secondary school for young people who have disengaged from mainstream education and which is located just up the road from Arts House. Johnson has been working at St. Joseph’s regularly on her trips to Melbourne over the past two years. Day 2 of SHORE, “COMMUNITY ACTION” will be developing a school garden there. That evening, SHORE, “STORY,” held at Arts House, on a platform with potted plants, in the context of all the vibrant abundance of Indigenous art spilling out everywhere at the Yirramboi Festival, feels a bit contained. I listen politely. Some of the readings are beautiful.

It is late autumn here in June, so the next night at SHORE, “PERFORMANCE” in Narrm, we start in the dark. We are given flashlights (which double as our tickets) and head up into Royal Park, where there is a majestic and giant tree that has been half illuminated for the show, stunning and luminous against the night sky. As we gather together (near a “Gather Here” sign framed in lightbulbs), the SHORE Choir stands around its giant trunk wearing light bladders around their necks (they are plastic, rectangular pockets bulging with light; I think of them as light bladders). Johnson stands on her pedestal and tells her tree–hawk–eagle dream story and points to a tree, down a ways, and about the sense she had that she was that tree and was herself at the same moment. Her stories, the dark, the moonlit sky, this shimmering half-lit setting, again tune our attentions to layers of connection and distance: to our rustlings here on earth, to the tree and bird beings around us, to other worlds—the stars, the multiple scales, high and low, big and small. Alert to these layers and sensing the shifting spaces between them, we walk a long way to the theater, together, through the streets, in silence, the sounds of our feet crunching. “What’s it for? What’s it for?” a group of people shouts to us as we walk. No one answers. On another corner, a woman laughs to her friend as we pass by. “I told you it was art!” Johnson invites them along. They decline but offer her a beer.

The theater we arrive at is a large one, though not as large as the one in Minneapolis. The cast is different too, and not just the Large Cast, which is always different, and always in relation to the place in which SHORE is taking place, but the core cast. Aretha Aoki and Krista Langberg aren’t available to perform this time, though they’re not fully gone: I see flashings of them in the two new dancers, like when Langberg’s clawlike hands appear on one of the new dancers, the young woman with a ponytail, just for an instant. And Aoki’s stick-on mustache is gone from the stage, too, though I wonder if the way it signaled the playful way things aren’t always what they first appear, and its nonbinary gender suggestion, might have been transposed to the other new dancer, who is tall, short-haired, and gender abundant. Johnson’s fuller dancing presence is also different. I think she is doing much of Aoki’s role as well as her own: the handstands, the virtuosic leg kicks, the quirky seeming-random-not-random basketball movement. The playful part with the cloth on the head is gone. There is a more present anger: Johnson’s legs slam down with force; the steps are sharp, tight; we hear her breath, her guttural outcries, the sounds and effort and rage of a fuller embodiedness, a tight wrath underneath what looks muffled, this need to tell the stories, tell the stories, in the midst of all this drowning out.

Here we are experiencing the work ensconced within Yirramboi First Nations Arts Festival. It is one small part of a twelve-day festival of Indigenous dance and other arts and is presented and marketed in explicit relation to Indigenous artistic and political histories in Australia. At a satellite forum the day SHORE, “PERFORMANCE” opens, Merindah Donnelly, executive producer for BlakDance (the central organization for Indigenous dance in Australia), speaks about how only 2 percent of arts presenting in Australia is Indigenous and “how that’s not good enough.”67 Yet Donnelly also notes that there are more than one hundred Indigenous choreographers, more than two hundred Indigenous community dance groups, and one hundred thousand Indigenous cultural dance groups in Australia. From a U.S. perspective, being part of twelve days of the Yirramboi Festival, where every speaker and performance begins by stating a wish to acknowledge “the traditional land upon which we are located,” where on one night, five Indigenous dance pieces were happening, feels also like resilience, abundance, reexistence.

This time, watching SHORE within this so-much-more-strongly-stated Indigenous context than it was in Lenapehoking (where participants I talked with didn’t know of Johnson’s Yup’ik identity or of any Indigenous aspect to the work) or in Yelamu (where the piece shifted to strengthen its connection to local Indigenous peoples and land, though this connection was not at the forefront of the framing and publicity around it), I continue to sense SHORE, “PERFORMANCE” articulating a flickering slipstream presence between worlds in which an Indigenous connection is there, but isn’t always seen or heard clearly.68 I still read in SHORE, “PERFORMANCE” a yearning for Indigenous knowledge and connection (to whales, to trees, to other-than-human/once-were-human relations) that is there, and that Johnson is trying hard to access, but that keeps getting drowned out by so many other voices. Here in Narrm, in the midst of Yirammboi, I also feel SHORE, “PERFORMANCE” as specifically coming from the territory that is for now called the United States, and its political history, and the “insignificance, statistically speaking,” of Indigenous peoples in the States, to return to Audra Simpson’s discussion (see the introduction). Here SHORE feels to me not (only) Indigenous in a broad sense that connects peoples around the globe similarly affected by British/European colonization but also Indigenous in a specifically U.S. way, where Indigenous presence is so deeply counted out. I feel this in its instantiation of an Indigenous presence sheathed in obscurity even as it is clearly there. And in its anger. Here I find myself thinking about the “broken song lines” I’ve heard talk of in various Yirramboi discussions. I think about SHORE: Narrm not as a song line, which is specific to Country here, but in a related way: as an embodied voicing of Indigenous stories that cross, and also don’t cross, from territory to territory, shore to shore, with attention to the trauma, and import, of those emergings, groundings, voyages, stoppings, and carryings-on. I think about the way SHORE carries the residues and energies of major U.S. metropolises—Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco, Seattle—as well as of Johnson’s home in Alaska, and their contemporary dance scenes, and their Indigenous presences and erasures.

I think about Narrm turning toward these stories from this visiting Yu’pik relative from across the waters. In Narrm, I read SHORE as a vision of Indigeneity vibrating with ongoing Indigenous presence while tuned also to experiences of pervasive Indigenous invisibilization, and with the multiple layers of what living this invisibilized presence is like for U.S.-based Yup’ik dance artist Emily Johnson living in spaces of what today is called the United States. Here, to me, watching this time, it seems so very U.S. This includes the ways Johnson’s Yup’ik self is at its very core central, constitutive, but also muffled, so that you might leave scratching your head, wondering if you saw it. The context of this surrounding situation (this Yirramboi Festival) registers and amplifies its flickerings—and also brings out the parts of the story that are rooted elsewhere and don’t quite cross over.

A number of times throughout the Yirramboi Festival in for-now-called Australia, I hear Indigenous people say, we have been here thousands of years—sixty thousand years, at a minimum.69 We survived the Ice Age. We have deadly tools for survival. Two hundred years of colonization? That’s nothing compared to the skills we have. I think about SHORE as Johnson’s offering, from the Indigenous lands of for-now-called the United States, put forward as cultural exchange on the traditional land of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin nation, with its millennia of Indigenous resilience and practices of ongoing sustainability (practices that, several speakers note, include recognizing the power in art, song, dance, performance). This is Johnson’s story, her song, her danced contribution to this global gathering and its conversations: it is the story she brings and offers. SHORE registers here within this festival’s context of scarcity, precarity, tremendous loss—many of the voices I hear and performance pieces I see throughout the week speak of loss, violence, trauma, in the context of ongoing British settler colonization of these territories (only 2 percent of programming is Indigenous, as Donnelly notes; it is still, statistically, small). And SHORE registers as part of this festival’s simultaneous performance of sufficiency and abundance, including all these inspiring Elders and youngsters, and the abundant possibility that Indigenous resilience, intelligence, and creativity yields (a hundred Indigenous Australian choreographers!) and the resilience of connection to one another it offers.

SHORE in Narrm asks us to step back, take a breath, consider where we’ve come from, where we’re standing now, prepare. “Gather, we have gathered, and for now we’re here,” the performance closes. This time, on the pedestal under the tree, before she asks us to help her down and to walk together in silence to the theater, Johnson says, “I’ve been trying to think of the most joyous moment in my life. I’m not sure what it is. But I’m ready.” SHORE in Narrm is an experience of being attentive, alert, watchful, balancing with an open heart on that teetering space between confused and curious, with deep awareness of where you came from, the territory you’ve traversed since then, the Country on whom you’re standing now, and all you do and don’t perceive about the spaces and beings and entities around you, and the joy, and anger, this attentive experience can (and will, it is coming) bring. It’s about listening, watching, acknowledging Indigenous land and presence, and how it is—or perhaps isn’t—acknowledging you. And being ready. Change is coming, and it’s risky, but there are possibilities for an otherwise world already here.

In Johnson’s trilogy, the “what of us is left there?” of The Thank-You Bar and the “How do we listen to each other? To the land?” of Niicugni move from that Yup’ik term for listening and attending to a broadly open call, in SHORE, to inhabit the world, in all its realms, in this attentive and aware relational way that functions beyond the structures that muffle and discount Indigenous abundance, conceptual formations, ways of feeding and tending to and weeding and caring for each other, in all their formations of existence. Its pieces move, repeat, layer, one part echoing into another, continuing durationally across time and from place to place, through breaks and ruptures. It’s not about a linear timeline but about connecting with different parts that recur and resonate, and knowing that they are still there, even when muffled, reexisting as we turn our attentions toward them. In this, it engages the layered multitemporality that is part of what Martin terms “abun-dance.” Martin writes, “Rather than appearing merely fleeting and ephemeral in performance, dance is the concatenation of varying durations, of reaches near and far that nestle among the moving bodies.”70 He, like Johnson’s work, links this multitemporal abun-dance to “a momentary realization of the future in the present.”71 His “abun-dance” registers how dance—which in Johnson’s performance work is activated expansively to include stage choreography with its distilled clarity of concept, as well as all our embodied movements through space, including piling oysters and fixing bicycles and planting herbs, and physical connections with one another, sharing food, and stories, and time together—provides deadly tools for “moving through disequilibrium and divining ways through spaces made for infinite possibility”—not (only) to negotiate the disequilibrium and precarity of these spaces but to enact beyond them.

SHORE offers the possibility, if even just for an instance—an afternoon, a flash of a sense, a new person you’re meeting, a joyful-energy-charged conversation—of an otherwise way of being in which our entangled, attentive interconnectivity with each other as human and more-than-human entities—humans, trees, hawks, whales, stars, streams, ancestors—enacts each of our existences, which can fade back or sparkle forward in time and space, become enlivened or shift into another state, depending, in part, on where we are walking and what we are paying attention to, and what is paying attention to us: on where we are connecting.72 It provokes our attention to the ongoing presence of entities we see and don’t see—including streams beneath the concrete, family members who have passed on, our not-yet-borns—and to ways of being and knowing, seemingly absent but there still, if transformed, in the stories and streets around us. In its plantings and potlucks and story sharings, SHORE gives us a nudge to practice turning toward and caring for each other as a way of keeping in existence in our current form and in our relations to other forms of being (whales, trees, streams, waterways, oysters, native plants), which our tending to also helps keep in existence—presuming, and hoping, that those forms decide to attend to us too. But we can practice so that, perhaps, they do. SHORE faces us toward experiences of sufficiency-as-abundance: enough time to be together, enough food to share, enough space, enough connection to others, enough caring and giving. It also acknowledges the realities of rupture, confusion, refusals, shifts, drawings back, muffled awareness, and incomplete understandings, where things change in relation to where we are facing and what we are paying attention to and how whatever we are facing is facing us and paying (or not paying) attention to us.

These practices and presences are here, in SHORE’s multilayered, multitemporal movements of relational abun-dance, even if we squint to see, and strain to hear, or can’t find easy understanding. SHORE’s plantings and feastings and walkings and dancings layer in wisps of loss and grief and yearning and anger wrought in part by a colonization-fueled neoliberalism, yes. But this is not a new precarity, or even a precarity at all: it is a different way of being, rich in relational capacities and expansive connections and coalitions of interdependence that are vibrant, durational, and enduring. SHORE opens up possibilities for us to catch glimpses of these sensings and enactings of relationality-as-abundance, these ways of existing-in-relation outside of an imposed scarcity or precarity, perhaps, if only in momentary instances, to instantiate them anew.