A new performance, Niicugni, created/performed by recent Bessie Award winner Emily Johnson and influenced by her Alaskan Yup'ik heritage. Niicugni includes Aretha Aoki, composer James Everest, violinist Rachel Golub and lighting designer Heidi Eckwall. The Yup'ik word Niicugni is a directive to pay attention, to listen. Housed within a light/sound installation of handmade fish-skin lanterns, Emily Johnson's Niicugni quietly compels attentiveness, layering multiple dances, live music, stories, and histories into a space occupied by past, present, and future.

Read the New York Times article preceding Niicugni's run at
New York City's Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Emily Johnson is a director/choreographer/curator, originally from Alaska and currently based in Minneapolis. Since 1998 she has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances often function as installations, engaging audiences within and through a space and environment – sights, sounds, smells – interacting with a place's architecture, history, and role in community. She works to blur distinctions between performance and daily life and to create work that reveals and respects multiple perspectives. Allowing for the possibility of multiple meanings, her work stimulates reflection and emotional empathy between performer and audience, and between audience members. Emily is a 2011 Native Arts and Cultures Fellow, a 2010 and 2009 MAP Fund Grant recipient, a 2009 McKnight Fellow and a 2009 and 2011 MANCC Choreographer Fellow. The Thank-you Bar is touring through 2011 to The TBA Festival, The Dance Center at Columbia College, Northrop Auditorium, DiverseWorks, ODC Theater, Vermont Performance Lab, and Dance Theater Workshop with support from National Dance Project.

Emily grew up in her native Alaska playing basketball and running long distance. At 18 she left rural living, moved to Minneapolis, and quite by accident, learned to be a choreographer and performer. For the past 16 years city living has swirled around her, dragging her away from the physical space of Alaska and the summer and fall family rituals of hunting and fishing, then smoking, drying, canning and freezing food. She is pulled back when midwesterners and others ask her if she lived in an igloo (myth), if she has an Eskimo name (no), and if it is OK to say the word "Eskimo" (rarely). She is of Yup'ik descent, though she does not speak the language – yet. Emotionally, she is tied to the landscape of South Central Alaska where she was born and to the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta where her father's family is from.

Her work includes commissions by the Walker Art Center, PS122, Out North, Franconia Sculpture Park, and Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts. She has been presented by theaters across the USA including the Walker Art Center, TBA Festival, ODC Theater, PS122, Franconia Sculpture Park, Links Hall, Dance Umbrella, Velocity, and OutNorth. She has toured with Scuba and NPN and self-presented in numerous venues including Dance Theater Workshop, Rogue Buddha Art Gallery in Minneapolis, and The Que'Ana Bar in Clam Gulch, Alaska. She has embarked on performance projects in Montreal and St. Petersburg, Russia and toured her work to 14 American states. Her dance films have screened at the Walker, DTW, Chicago Cultural Center and university film festivals. She was a 2009 Loft Native InRoads Fellow and recipient of a Seventh Generation Fund Grant. Her past work has been supported by a Forecast Public ArtWorks Grant (2008), Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Visual and Expressive Arts Grant with Rhianna Yazzie and Carolyn Anderson (2008), MAP grant with Lisa D'Amour and Katie Pearl (2008), Blacklock Nature Sanctuary Residency (2007), Puffin Foundation Grant (2005), Bush Artist Fellowship (2004), Jerome Artist Fellowship (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004), and Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship (2001).

Read more about Emily Johnson at catalystdance.com

Season partners and supporters for Tigertail's 33nd season include: Aquarius Press; Books & Books; Bresaro Suites; The Children's Trust; City of Coral Gables Cultural Arts Program; City of Miami Beach Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council; Clarke Foundation; Consulate General of Brazil; Consulate General of the Netherlands; Consulate General of Japan; E.S. Moore Family Foundation; Florida Dance Association; Funding Arts Network; The Galler Group; Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau; Japan Foundation; John S. & James L. Knight Foundation; JPMorgan Chase; MiamiArtZine; Miami Beach Botanical Garden; Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; Miami-Dade County Public Library; Miami-Dade County Public Schools; Miami River Inn; National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts; National Performance Network with major funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), Altria, MetLife Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation; Pridelines; Publix Super Markets Charities; Joseph H. & Florence A. Roblee Foundation; Safe Schools South Florida; The Law Office of Linda M. Smith; South Arts; State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; The Miami Foundation; VSA Florida; Vortex Communications; WDNA & WLRN FM; Wells Fargo and our many private supporters.