Views from the Porch Reflections on Dance as a Practice of Being BY AUDREY JOHNSON
EDITOR’S NOTE: Audrey Johnson is a Spring 2023 CA$H grantee. This article highlights her funded activities and vision. A s I sit on a porch overlooking a small meadow, the sky in a sensual humid holdout with the rain, crick- ets holding their breath as the trees tease coming winds, I am breathing within my now near daily practice of attunement. The meadow, the porch and I are on Cherokee land in the Blue Ridge mountains of northern Georgia, on the final days of an artist resi- dency at the Hambidge Center. Here to dig into my per- formance project land|body|memory , much of my time has been spent attuning, breathing, feeling and just being. On this porch, I am a few hours’ drive north of Macon, GA, the hometown my grandparents left for Detroit, MI, which is Anishinaabe land, along with so many of our folks during the Great Migration. Eventually they ended up in a house on Whitney Street, where in the ‘90s and early 2000s I would spend frequent days of
my childhood sitting on my grandmother’s porch, eating Oreos, making mudpies in the dirt with my cousins, play- ing in the small urban meadows across from and to the left of their home (in other contexts also called vacant lots, abandoned, or blight). Though the home is no longer in our family and my memories are colored in the skewed blurriness of a child’s eyes, the home and street is a present place in my body-memory. The feeling shows up as a sense of slow wonder, and a reoccuring attraction to open grassy spaces, such as those speckling the neighborhoods of ungentrified Detroit. These mini meadows, and the meadow I am looking out at now, are necessary spaces in which I have experi- enced my own Black queer feminist imagination, breath- ing, delicious boredom and zoning out dreaming time. Here in Georgia on the porch, and in all the life that will happen beyond it, I locate myself as a part of this land, through my lineage as well as my present experience and participation with it. In my reattunement to the experience of “just being,” I give a dear nod to bell hooks, who in
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
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