September in Portland is an exciting time for creators, makers, and audience members across the city. With Fall around the corner, our minds turn to spending more time with the arts and settling in for a fruitful season of dance, visual art, film, design, and more.

This year, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art provides just that yet again with TBA:24, the two-and-a-half week time-based art festival bringing performances, exhibitions, collaborations, learning opportunities, after-parties, and interviews to Portland. PICA will host renowned international, national, and regional artists in various galleries, theaters, and public spaces open to audience members — all starting this week.

PICA’s celebration of contemporary art kicks off its 21st year with the free TBA:24 Opening Day on Thursday, September 5 at 5 p.m. with Videotones’ jam session and Outside Inside World at Pacific Northwest College of Art’s 511 Gallery. The festival continues with a wide selection of electrifying works from bold artists determined to amplify urgency, collaboration, community, and current events.

The festival continues with Sam Hamilton’s Te Moana Meridian, an interdisciplinary collaborative experimental opera and “creative Trojan Horse for delivering a proposal to the United Nations … to formally relocate the international Prime Meridian from Greenwich, England to its antipodean coordinates in Te Moananui-ā-Kiwa — the South Pacific Ocean”, at Portland Art Museum on September 6 and beyond; Morgan Bassichis’s Can I Be Frank, a performance chronicling the life and experiences of queer comedian, musician, and performance artist Frank Maya, at the PICA Annex on September 6 and 7; Timothy Yanick Hunter’s Noise / Grain, a kaleidoscopic stretching and looping process exploring “the idea of the grain and the manipulation of samples”, with opening reception September 15; Jess Pertliz’s Reductions of Mountains, a sculptor’s consideration of boulders and “categorizing the objects around us and interpreting our lives in fragments”, with discussion on the Reed College library lawn on September 15; and many more.

TBA:24 runs through Sunday, September 22, with the official free-of-charge Closing Party featuring DJ Shannon Funchess Saturday, September 21, at PICA.

In addition to the events mentioned above, interdisciplinary dance artist and educator Linda K. Johnson will participate in TBA:24 with PASTfuture: Long-Form Archival Conversations with Portland Dance Artists. Johnson will engage in 75-minute-long individual artist conversations with dancemakers and artists Chisao Hata, Susan Banyas, Robin Lane, and Joan Findlay, followed by all-level somatic embodied practice experiences led by the artists.

The talks will occur on various dates throughout the festival at PICA, FLOCK Dance Center, and Linda Austin’s Performance Works Northwest, beginning with Embodied Archiving: Why and How? at 10 a.m. September 14. In this panel exchange, Johnson, PICA Curatorial Fellow Jason Le, and others will discuss practices and perspectives for preserving and archiving the history of dance. PASTfuture, just one arm of the multi-faceted Mycelium Dreams project container dreamt up by Johnson in 2021, aims to show the dance community its interconnected nature, honor it, and interweave it further.

I met with Johnson for coffee on a recent late August morning to discuss PASTfuture, Mycelium Dreams, the importance of mapped archiving, and how we can turn artifact into catalyst for the cultivation of new dance composition.

“All of this started for me in 2021, the year before I turned 60, as I struggled to understand how I had spent my adult professional life,” Johnson told me, “What had I been doing for 40 years — basically since graduating from college and immediately having the opportunity to have a job in dance?” 

Originally from Portland, Johnson returned home to teach at Jefferson High School and quickly became engrossed with the community of dancemakers and teachers — later becoming a pillar of its dance world herself. 

“I was reading Suzanne Simard‘s work a few years ago, Finding the Mother Tree, and it dawned on me that I have been a certain mother tree here … having opened many studios and teaching probably up to 6,000 students continually for 40 years,” Johnson continued. “So I made myself my map, and it was such a gratitude project to realize that we, as dancers, are the ‘richest’ people in the world, because our currency, our field, is about relationships … All the pieces matter. Dance is a relational form, and you cannot do it without all those pieces.”

Continue reading the full transcribed interview with Linda K. Johnson below. Answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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What can TBA:14 attendees and viewers expect to see from you via The Institute series at TBA this year?

In general, The Institute is the educational component of TBA, where artists have a chance to talk about their work. They’re interviewed, or they present workshops. This is the first time The Institute has been back post-pandemic. As part of the institute, you can come to expect people in dialogue, talking about ideas, practices, ways of knowing, methods that they use to think about and create their work, and in this case, to think about what it is to have an archive of someone’s work.

In my particular programming, people who come to listen will have a chance to see some images, a little bit of video, short excerpts of visual language, and lively conversation between myself and each of the incredible artists. The artist is also going to have a chance to do an embodied downloading of a practice; a way of knowing, a somatic exercise, or a composition methodology they use. It’s very much an opportunity to be in relationship to the artist, as well as really hearing their story and ways of working.

Can you talk about the intersection of long-form conversation and performance, and whether interview can or should be considered performance?

Well, in my mind, I’m not framing the opportunity to listen to an artist talk about their practice necessarily as a performance … but certainly being in the room with them, you’re going to get a translation of an embodied experience. This can include the way they use themselves, the way they use language, the examples that they give. I won’t be surprised if each one of these individuals, at different times, gets up out of their chair to demonstrate something.

My hope is that these exchanges deeply illuminate the work of each of these individuals. We could certainly frame them as performances, in that it’s happening in real time and we are dealing with people who are animated in their bodies as a practice, but they would be highly aleatory and highly improvisational. So rather, I’m making a big container and inviting the artists and myself to show up with the audience and go along for a ride. After all, inside the TBA container — time-based art — these exchanges are finite.

How do you prepare to talk with creators, and in particular, different artists from varying genres, backgrounds, and experiences?

I love that question. The first thing that informs my conversations is profound respect as a young artist, having returned home here in 1985 to teach at Jefferson. I walked into a dance ecosystem that these artists had shaped, and I got to be this young teaching artist that hadn’t made any work yet. At that time, Echo Theater was one of the important places that allowed a space to make work. And I saw many different styles and many different series present there. I took a workshop with Susan Banyas and got to be in a piece with Joan Findlay, and others.

For me, this was a start with a totally lived, embodied experience of witnessing their sheer genius and audacity — how they made their way in the world as dance makers, performers, and educators. It’s my lived experience, my memory of them, that I’m bringing first and foremost to my conversations, because I have a timestamp with each of these people. Over the last 30 years as a maker myself, my experience of their work has shifted by the making of my own work. So then I come to them as their peer, in addition to their colleague. I’ve also been reading up on them. Even from their bios alone, I could understand something about the way their minds work.

Can you expand on the concept of peers, colleagues, and the social web of the art community? How much does it have to do with the Mycelium Dreams project?

You can be a solo artist in dance, but you’re still dependent on everybody else who supports you — your lighting designer, dancers, friends, family, so on. When you look at your story on paper, you realize, wow, if we measured wealth in relationships, dancers and dance makers are so wealthy. I then had this idea to send my map to everyone on it so they might also benefit from making their own map. And then I thought, oh, I’ll just invite all those people to a party for my birthday.

Hence, the project manifested very organically. Everyone’s story on my map is so important, and each individual’s story has shaped a generation of someone who danced with them or studied with them, written about them or reviewed their work. These are people in our ecosystem, and they’re important. I decided to start a podcast and thought I should start with a list of my elders first. So the map is somewhat arbitrary, as it has 37 names on it with a plus sign at the end, which means that this is a flexible and fluid list—a starting point. It is by no means comprehensive.

In terms of ‘colleagues’, that refers to anyone in our dance ecosystem, no matter their age. If they’re dancing or making or teaching or writing or being a grant writer, they’re my colleagues in the field. It is a word that doesn’t imply any hierarchy at all. The same goes for the word ‘peer’. It isn’t necessarily hierarchical, but suggests we have more shared experience. There’s more time shared in the dance ecosystem. I’d like to really avoid hierarchy, therefore calling this the PASTfuture interview component of the Mycelium Dreams project. It’s just another layer, ideally helping to avoid the notion that only some people’s work gets to be remembered and kept.

I question who has the right to decide who’s important and valuable. I’d like to suggest in this project that every story has made the ecosystem that we’re continuing to make. They’re all valuable in remembering what this community is, has been, and will be. That’s also why I’d like to have anyone who’s interested in the field be an interviewer. And anyone can write to me and add to this list. Once this generation of around 66 and up is interviewed, I’d like to move on to the next, and so on.

This makes me want to create my mycelium map.

Yes! And you can on my website. If you go to my website, you can write to me and tell me, please send me materials to make my map. Any dance person can do that. It’s very moving to me, that this is our well. This has really been my life, and many of our lives … being shaped by and shaping this ecosystem for 40 years.

How many iterations or sections of the Mycelium Dreams project will there be?

There are potentially three categories: maps, interviews, physical embodiments. PASTfuture is only one element in a larger container.

Can you talk more about the physical embodiments?

I was researching other examples of embodied archives for the project. Bebe Miller, for example, is someone I’ve been in the room with a lot, who I adore and hold great esteem for. In 2012 when she was around 60, she dove back into her history, looking at old rehearsal tapes, thinking about her process, embodied knowledge, dancers, and her particular way of working. As she engaged with those resources, she harvested them from her past processes and projects to create a new work called A History.

On her website, she says it was the research and the processes that gave the information the potential to move from archived artifact to artwork. What if this notion of artifact isn’t some work that once was, but an engaging way to go back to the archive to make new work that reflects their former — you could say — embodied choreography? And in this type of recorded setting, you’re downloading pedagogy. You’re downloading embodied knowledge — a message from this artist. It goes forth generationally in this very active way, potentially leading toward introducing and cross-pollinating audiences. There are many layers to think about, which I love.

Your bio on the TBA PICA website mentions geography and waterways. Does this project relate to those topics?

Often when I’m teaching somatically, I can talk about the geography of the body. And, of course, the amazing Bonnie Brambridge Cohen, decades ago, gave us particular images to talk about the systems in our bodies — our arteries and our veins as our rivers and waterways, and the lymphatic system as our estuaries. When thinking about the body as landscape, the body expresses these very various ecosystems.

In 1995 I did my first solo performance here at the generosity of the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, and was dealing with the four elements: water, fire, air, and earth. I was really dealing with the body as landscape in this giant 300-pound mound of sand and have been thinking about systems and the body as landscape and ecosystem since the early ’90s.

What may surprise someone who comes to any of your TBA events?

I’m going to guess that an artist might be listening to someone talk about their process or path and realize, as an audience member, how connected they are to that artist. I hope people are pleasantly surprised about how closely they are connected to someone they thought they had no connection to. This realization could give someone a little bit of inner freedom to ask more questions or to push in, and start making a connection in their own conversations about how they’re connected to this community. I also hope this will be as generative for the person I’m interviewing… that the ties become more clear. 

Why should non-dancers care about this? 

Every dancer is an audience member, but every non-dancer is a potential audience member. Any time you can learn more about how dance is made — the systems, the imaginings, the concepts, the risks, the processes — the more you can arrive at a physical performance with an understanding of what might be happening in front of your eyes. That’s why I would tell every potential audience member, wow, you’re going to learn so much about how people make things and how their cool, awesome, unique brains work.

Is there anything else readers should know about this chapter of your work?

I want people to know I’m not being the authority. I’ve only brought my lived experience of being here for 40 years, and I welcome people to add names to the list of this phase. Particularly of people I’ve missed — dance elders 66 and up who have committed their life’s work to the field of dance. This project is intent on honoring those people and shining a light on them. These are lifers, and what that means may change over time, but they have stayed with it … usually to no economy, to very little or no fame. But wow, what it is to commit your life to an ephemeral practice, I just think that’s unbelievably brave and unbelievably courageous.