"Thank-You Bar" a mystery tour

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Posted: October 8, 2009 - 9:39 pm

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By Mike Dunham
Emily Johnson: Kenai Peninsula-born choreographer lost the fish for the live performance of "The Thank-You Bar." The eyepiece was spoken through during one of the stories.
“Someone needs to explain to me the difference between the avant-garde and the ridiculous. I’m mystified,” went a letter to the editor in Thursday’s Daily News. The writer referred specifically to Emily Johnson’s performance art piece “The Thank-You Bar,” which debuted at Out North, also on Thursday.

Johnson’s odd little mystery play/dance/narrative may not be explicable (it does have moments of humor), but we can try to describe pieces of it as experienced on opening night.

The audience of no more than 30 milled around a visual art display in Out North’s gallery featuring work by Native American artists with the collective title, “This is Displacement.” Of particular interest is perhaps the first Alaska screening of a movie titled “The Snaring Madman” by award-winning Barrow Filmmaker Andrew Okpeaha MacClean. Johnson herself has work in the show, a series of frames with colored sand and paper stained with what may be her own blood.
Pas des trois: Joel Pickard (l) and James Everest (r, Johnson's husband) dance with her as well as supplying the music. They'll also present post-performance concerts in Anchorage and Homer.
At showtime, we were led into the theater. Those who went first got chairs. The rest sat on cushions. Musician Joel Pickard came out, created a sound on his pedal steel committed it to a computer loop and departed. James Everest then came out, did the same thing on his guitar, and departed. They alternated thusly for about 10 minutes until a cloud of layered strings, percussive and vocal elements filled the space.

Now entered Johnson from the back of the theater. Those seated on the cushions really couldn’t see what she was doing. It sounded very gymnastic. We stood, but by then she was on the floor and still invisible.
The Que-Ana Bar: Clam Gulch establishment owned by Johnson's Yup'ik grandmother was an inspiration for the new performance piece.
A video followed of her entering the same room, using a recorder strapped to her chest to tell the story of what was here before it was a library or theater, which she illustrated using just her eyes with comic effect.

She alternated storytelling with dancing, a choreography that I can’t say I’ve seen before. It’s simultaneously graceful and violent, snapping arms, quick bends that keep the legs straight while slapping the floor with the palms of her hands, moves that may be mime, but seem utterly abstract as they buzz by.

She performed a solo waltz while the musicians (who play as a band, Blackfish) played “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” and sang “I Fall to Pieces” with them before they all spun off in a balletic pas des trois.

She brought out a container of lit paper boxes in a rough “igloo” shape and handed out the boxes to the crowd, sort of making us the “igloo.” She had us all move from one end of the theater to the other, where she sat in a plastic kiddie pool filled with leaves and recounted her cousin’s frustrated attempt to study blackfish.

And that’s where it ended. The whole thing lasted one hour, but in recalling it 50 minutes later, it seems impossible that so many vivid, original and engrossing images (I’ve mentioned less than half of what transpired) could have fit into that time frame.

If there’s a message — and that’s hypothetical — it may be that art, experience, survival and life in general are as impossible to analyze as the blackfish. In the final analysis, we’re all mystified.

PERFORMANCE INFORMATION:

THE THANK-YOU BAR will be presented at 7 and 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Oct. 9 and 10, and 4 p.m. Sunday at Out North, 3800 DeBarr Road. Tickets are $20 and can be reserved at outnorth.org. It will also be presented at the Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer at 8 p.m. Oct. 16 and 17. Tickets are a suggested donation of $15 and can be reserved by calling 1-907-235-2622.

BLACKFISH will perform a free concert at 7 p.m. Oct. 11 at Out North, and in Homer following the performances of “The Thank-You Bar” and at 8 p.m. Oct. 18.

THIS IS DISPLACEMENT: NATIVE ARTISTS CONSIDER THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LAND AND IDENTITY will remain on display through Oct. 25 at the Out North Gallery. The gallery is open prior to performances.

Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.

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