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.

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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.”

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.”

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

• Sunday, January 26: lighting designer Jeff Forbes at Performance Works Northwest
• Sunday, February 16: Choreographer, performer, movement educator Vincent Martinez-Grieco, at PWNW
• Sunday, March 9: dance and visual artist Bobby Fouther, at Dekum Street Theater
• Sunday, April 13: Reed College professor and dance educator Pat Wong, at Performance Works Northwest
• Sunday, May 4: dance artist and community activist Chisao Hata, at Performance Works Northwest
• Sunday, June 15: dance and arts writer, publisher and editor [and Oregon ArtsWatch founder] Barry Johnson, at Performance Works Northwest

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.