Today we’d like to introduce you to Holly Johnston.
Holly, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I am of and belonging to a family of changemakers. I was once an orphan born in S.Korea with my sister until we became the children of a single queer social worker and teacher, granddaughter of a labor union leader and ceramic artist and sibling to our brother who was adopted 10 years after my sister and I were adopted. I am a parent of a mixed race child partnering with self-taught musican and master carpenter. I am a dance artist, choreographer, creative, critical thinker, writer, community builder, somatic specialist who is rebellious by nature and joyful by practice. I grew up on the lands of the Chumash Peoples and live on the lands of the Tognva Peoples.
My work centralizes around RESPONSIVE BODY, a social movement and body liberation practice. Together with an extraordinary group of courageous humans we have collectively developed support programs and services for the embodiment of radical joy and the hard work of resiliency building. I mentor somatic practitioners who also aim to decolonize dance and movement therapies. Our work directly confronts white supremacy, toxic capitalism, ableism, and homophobia through experiences with somatic phenomenology expressed through choreography, performances, community workshops, master classes, residencies, therapeutic sessions, writings, and podcasts.
As a choreographer I create dances through interactive physical dialogues and ongoing verbal discourse with communities of co-creators. I have been well seasoned through the tumbles and triumphs of being a dance artist, former artistic director/choreographer LEDGES AND BONES, dance educator in higher education, mentor and consultant to artists and students, and somatic therapist. My range of capacities and skills can weave together a vast matrix, like our connective tissue, that can hold the body of an artist’s work with shaping without bearing weight against their mobility. I have a cellular connection to the performing arts.
I have grown in an untamed forest of artistic redwoods entangling my roots with legacy makers as well as emergent artists sharing in common an unearthing of ourselves through resistance against the pressure of invisibility. I investigate the process of embodiment through the cultivation of conscious movement and affirmation of our bodily wisdoms. When one knows oneself it becomes possible to understand how one relates to others, and how this pattern of connectivity tethers us to one another and the world in which we live. It enables us to question the phenomena that make up the visible and invisible, allowing us to witness the relationship between what is “sensed” and what is “seen.”
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
A well paved and guided path towards a successful career in the movement arts is not something I have known or experienced. Not sure that the wildness of being a creative artist can be contained to a ‘smoothed road’ or prelaid path. At least not for me. I have been rejected, marginalized, invisible, tokenized, and diminished as a person of color, female, neurodivergent, fat dancer who was direct and who deliberately directed anger at false authorities. This did not open many doors, I climbed in through the service entrance volunteering my excellence and skills to organzations and artists I admired. Through this engagement what began as volunteering evolved into paid job opprotunities. But rarely was I invited and welcomed through the front doors. I snuck my fat, brown ass through the cracks in the fencing that were designed to keep bodies like mine from entering elistist, white dominated spaces.
I am the survivor of early childhood trauma. I am neurodivergent with ADHD and dyslexia. I live with post-traumatic stress disregulation. My body is hyper-sensory sensitive and works hard to regulate dopamine, serratonin, and adrenaline. I have experienced sexism, ableism, racism, fat phobia, xenophobia, and been fetishized as a fantasy of the male gaze. My body has evolved and as my dancing became more rigorous my physicality expressed and continues to express this rigor. My shaping changes. The fat phobia that exists in our culture has not. This needs changing now. I have moved through the academic systems earning degrees, BA and MFA and have worked as a professor in higher education. These felt like obstacles as I did not have many allies or faculty members who authentically believed in my body. I am deeply grateful for the allies, mentors, and faculty who were few, but mighty in their advocacy of my creative capacities. I am grateful for Judy Scalin, Stephanie Gilliland, Rob Bailis, my mom Sherry Johnston, and the founding members of LEDGES AND BONES and the ecofamily of RESPONSIVE BODY. These humans have made challenges feel more like a playground of creative options than an obstacle course for show ponies set up to entertain the elite.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am the envisioning director of RESPONSIVE BODY. I am a movement artist and somatic phenomenologist working with individuals and communities in our exploration of embodiment. I was the artistic director and choreographer of LEDGES AND BONES. I am a somatic ecologist with CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater. One of my specialities is the skill of loving. I like to imagine that I’m a love ninja just elegantly moving obstacles and preventing harm or injury to your body. I like to say that in RESPONSIVE BODY loving is not a feeling, it is an active and dynamic force, similar to gravity. Love is a dynamical force, not an emotional feeling. It holds you, you can resist it, ignore it, defy it, fall into it…whatever you animate, gravity is there to hold you. This is the loving of our responsive bodies. Love like gravity.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
The role of luck in my life and business..huh…let me think for a beat on this. I know I have taken the risk to gamble on myself and to believe that from nothing other than passionate purpose I could build a career. I know i was lucky to be adopted by my mom and to be a descendent of adoption. I know i’m lucky to have met my partner, Peter. And feel like we won the lottery with our son, Sky. I feel lucky to be neurodivergent. I feel lucky that my body can laugh out loud without apology. I am lucky to have a body that cannot be silenced. I feel lucky to have a body that is terrible at lying and does not let me stay in conditions that compromise my sense of integrity. I feel lucky to know all the beautiful, perfect, delightful mutants that are my friends who are among the rejects of their families and/or failed to meet the demands of the institutions of heteronormativity.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.responsivebody.com
- Instagram: @responsivebody
- Facebook: @responsivebody
Image Credits
CREDIT: RESPONSIVE BODY, Emily Lobba
