Stage & Studio: The Mycelium Dreams threads of Linda K. Johnson

In her new podcast, Dmae Lo Roberts talks with the veteran dancer, teacher, and activist about her project to "map" the voices and experiences of important figures in Portland's dance and performance scene.
Visionary Portland dancer Linda K. Johnson.
Visionary Portland dancer Linda K. Johnson.

Linda K. Johnson is a visionary dancer who has created conceptual and site-relevant performances and projects for the last 40 years. She has been both an educator and curator, bringing artists of varied disciplines to create together.

One of Linda’s memorable projects came in 2005, for the Regional Arts and Culture Council’s “in-situ” program, when she enlisted dancers to work as gardeners on a tiny strip of land at road intersection in near downtown Portland.

Several years ago, Linda brought me into a residency project in South Waterfront, when the now-towering buildings were still being built and rented out. That project was a year-long effort to create arts opportunities for residents there and a way to bring people to the new neighborhood.

As an innovator in dance and multiple disciplines, she’s now embarking on her Mycelium Dreams Project, which aims to document the conversations connecting us to veteran dancers in Portland, as well as to dance-adjacent artists and writers to their histories and stories.

As Linda writes, the Mycelium Dreams Project is archival in intention, committed to foregrounding the voice of the dance artist or professional in remembering, telling, revealing, and mapping their own history. Since what is remembered lives, it makes sense to defer to the artist or those who worked intimately with them to have definitive authority over their story.  Starting January 26, Linda is holding public conversations for the Mycelium Dreams Project.

Subscribe and listen to Stage & Studio on: AppleGoogleSpotify, Android and Stitcher and hear past shows on the official Stage & Studio website. Theme music: Clark Salisbury.

In this podcast, Linda K. Johnson …

Talks about the end of her teaching at Portland State University: “Dance has again died at PSU and I’m very sad that over the last eight years since I’ve been there (again) that there was never the leadership inside the department of fine arts to make sure that dance existed. I do think there’s a certain irony at this point when PSU is proposing as a fine arts department to build this new building downtown.  As [Portland dance critic and ArtsWatch contributor] Martha Ullman West would say, you can’t just have fine and some of the performing arts. Dance is an essential part of performing arts.”

Sponsor

Portland Center Stage at the Armory Portland Oregon

Remembers her conceptual project gardening in downtown Portland: “I had 65 volunteers. Some of them were dancers. Some of them were just people who were really interested in the idea. Every city has always had unhoused populations, certainly with nothing like it is now. But during that time, I have to say, no one ever degraded the garden. No one ever stole food from the garden. No one ever defecated in the garden. No one ever slept in the garden. But I got to know our unhoused population that kind of frequented that area. And they were protectors of that garden.”

Mapping the Mycelium Dreams Project and her connections to people: “Historians, critics or curators drive who gets attention. But every story matters. So I just began making lists. I asked other people who they thought people would send me names. And so 39 people ended up on that list and it is not genre-based. But it goes through ballet, different ethnic dance forms, through people focused in jazz and jazz dance, and contemporary practice. And it includes not just the choreographer, who … always gets a lot of attention, but it includes the lighting designers, the writers and the critics, and people who have mostly been full educators here.”

Linda K. Johnson in performance.
Linda K. Johnson in performance.

Upcoming public interviews Winter/Spring 2025, Sundays, 11 am-1 pm:

Linda K. Johnson’s “PASTfuture.” Photo: Yalcin Erhan.
Linda K. Johnson’s “PASTfuture.” Photo:  Alicia J. Rose.

More info at https://www.lindakjohnson.net.

Linda K. Johnson is a mother, plant devotee, queer sexagenarian, and proud Oregon native. For four decades, she has been committed to, and influential in, the maturation of dance and site-relevant performance in the region, contributing as a maker, performer, academic, somatic educator, mentor, curator, and administrator.

Her trans-disciplinary choreographies have been presented by PICA, On the Boards, The Art Gym/ Marylhurst University, and ORLO, among many others. Nationally, she is honored to be both a custodian of Yvonne Rainer’s seminal postmodern work, Trio A, and one of 12 artists in the 2015 feminist monograph by Kristin Timkin, The New Explorers, which includes a forward by Lucy R. Lippard.

Co-founder of the shuttered dance center Conduit, she has participated in residencies at Rauschenberg/Captiva, Yaddo, Caldera, and The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Currently, she is engaged in the Mycelium Dreams Project, a long-term dance community archive project which foregrounds the artist as the active participant in telling, mapping, and documenting their story.

Sponsor

Portland Opera The Shining Newmark Theatre Portland Oregon

Dmae Lo Roberts

Dmae Roberts is a two-time Peabody winning radio producer, writer and theatre artist. Her work is often autobiographical and cross-cultural and informed by her biracial identity. Her Peabody award-winning documentary Mei Mei, a Daughter’s Song is a harrowing account of her mother’s childhood in Taiwan during WWII. She adapted this radio documentary into a film. She won a second Peabody-award for her eight-hour Crossing East documentary, the first Asian American history series on public radio. She received the Dr. Suzanne Ahn Civil Rights and Social Justice award from the Asian American Journalists Association and was selected as a United States Artists (USA) Fellow. Her stage plays and essays have been published in numerous publications. She published her memoir The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family in 2016. As a theatre artist, she has won two Drammys, one for her acting and one for her play Picasso In The Back Seat which also won the Oregon Book Award. Her plays have been produced in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, NYC and Florida. Roberts is the executive producer of MediaRites, a nonprofit multicultural production organization and co-founder of Theatre Diaspora, an Asian American/Pacific Islander non-profit theatre that started as a project of MediaRites. She created the Crossing East Archive of more than 200 hours of broadcast-quality, pan-AAPI interviews and oral histories. For 23 years, Roberts volunteered to host and produce Stage & Studio live on KBOO radio. In 2009, she started the podcast on StagenStudio.com, which continues at ArtsWatch.

Conversation 2 comments

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  1. Michael G. Sievers

    As a long-time LKJ fan (and friend), her work is fascinating & remarkable. Oregon & the PNW are fortunate to follow her artful arc & career. “Every story matters.”

    1. Dmae Lo Roberts
      replying to Michael G. Sievers

      I concur Michael! Thanks for listening!

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