By Our Hands, Georgia Incarceration Performance Project (2020), photo by Clay Chastain
[ID: Students from Spelman College, Morehouse College, and the University of Georgia in the performance of By Our Hands, the culminating production of the Georgia Incarceration Performance Project, on a dark stage, wearing vibrant colored costumes, interacting with an archive box.]
I think there are many ways to be a Visionary, but I often associate it with foresight… the kind of foresight that enables seeing and thinking about the world many years from now. I think about a Visionary as someone who is able to spend time in the murky, unknown void that is our “future,” to see possibility and build a world there. They leap over the time between now and then and generate potential strategies and technologies, perhaps well before we have the means to make it so.
When I spend time in the unknown, I am more often dreaming about the past. Who came before me? What did they create? Who did they love? What wisdom did they generate? How did they dance? What stories remain untold, and why? I believe that the answers to these questions might help me understand how we arrived at this moment now, where we go from here, and what strategies we need to build the future worlds that the Visionaries are dreaming up. In this sense, I understand myself as a Memory Worker. I leap over the time between then and now to find connection, clarity, and understanding.
I don’t mean to suggest that one can’t work both in the past and the future. In fact, I think many people do. I am simply reflecting on hindsight as an intentional mode of visioning. I have come to deeply appreciate mindful facilitation to explore memory, perhaps because I have so many gaps in my own past (likely trauma-related dissociation that created chasms of lost time in the archive of my experience). Sense perception – sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, and movement, to name a few – serve as “happy helpers” to reintroduce myself to past experiences by focusing my attention on the past through my body.
Remember a time when you experienced or witnessed joy. What sights do you see when you recall this memory? What colors, what faces, what shapes? Are there pools of light or shadows? In this memory, what sounds do you hear? Are there voices, is there music? Sounds of nature or industry? What scents do you notice in this memory? What textures do you feel against your skin, under your feet, or in your palms? How do you move in this memory? Where do you feel this memory in your body?
An Embodied Memory Framework
It was 2015 when I first thought about making this sort of memory work an intentional part of my creative practice. A year prior, I attended Urban Bush Women’s Summer Leadership Institute in New Orleans and witnessed each member of the company present what they referred to as an “embodied history,” an intimate sharing of their dance journey through gesture, movement, and voice. It seemed to open a portal to the past so that we the audience could see/hear/feel the events unfold that resulted in them becoming a UBW company member and performing for us, in that place, at that time. After the Institute, when I returned to Philadelphia where I was pursuing a PhD in Dance Studies at Temple University, I thought about how significant embodied memory was to my own journey through doctoral studies. I was researching meanings and experiences of ‘community’ in Philadelphia-area West African dance classes. Research participants (an intergenerational group of Black women and men who either danced or played percussion in the classes) expressed inherent connections between their sense of communal belonging and African dance classes as sites of personal and cultural memory. My field notes were full of embodied reflections of experiences on the dance floor that elicit kinesthetic responses every time I reread them.
My knees are bent. My torso is pitched forward with my chest almost parallel to the floor. A rhythmic pulse is riding up my spine like a wave. I shift my weight side to side with a slight shuffle step from right foot to left. I dip my head and, as each foot returns from its shuffle, I thrust my hips back. My arms push out over each step, as if shooing away some invisible nuisance. Right and left, right and left, a constant rhythmic bob. The air is thick but I cannot smell it; I feel immersed in the musty dampness collectively created by the moving bodies in the room. The heat of effort opens my pores, I can feel the sweat beading on the surface of my skin. The thirty minute warmup at the beginning of class prepared me for this moment, raising my heart rate and pumping the blood through my body… I am swimming in a sensation of ‘aliveness.’ In my periphery, I see a few of my classmates dipping their heads and pushing their arms, riding the same wave. The dim floodlights hanging from the ceiling and the pencil-colored wooden floor work together to cast a golden hue around this old dance space. Splashes of bright colors and patterns enter my view as I turn my head and see all the lapas, the wrap skirts we usually wear to this West African dance class, tied around the waists of the women bobbing along with me. Syncopated movement of colors – greens, golds, and pinks, deep indigos and corals – offer visual layers of rhythm driving our dance.[1]
This experience helped deepen my understanding of the role that the body’s sense perception can play in memory work. From there, I developed a framework for embodied memory mapping that draws on a long lineage of memory workers – artists, scholars, culture keepers – who uphold the idea that our personal and cultural histories are stored in our bodies.[2] This work is based on four premises:
- Our memories live and move in our bodies;
- Through dancing, observing, writing, and discussing, we can draw on sense perception (what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and how we move) to locate and access embodied memory;
- By mapping, moving, and sharing our stories, we can more deeply understand ourselves, each other, and the ways in which we operate in the world;
- This understanding creates empathic connections that can effect personal and social change – starting at the level of the body (juliebjohnson.com)[3]
In 2015, I established a creative practice, Moving Our Stories, that would become the mechanism for exploring this framework. Moving Our Stories uses participatory dance and embodied memory mapping to amplify the histories, lived experiences, and bodily knowledge of Black women as a strategy towards collective liberation and restoration for all. I am grateful that the ten years since its inception have been full of generative collaborations with individuals, grassroots organizations, and cultural institutions. Together, we honor dancing bodies as a vital mode of research, community connection, and social change. I learn so much from each encounter, and strive to carry this knowledge into every new experience. Whether facilitating workshops, community dinners, video chat wellness check-ins, abolition study groups[4], dance films, or site responsive performances, MOS projects invite inquiry about the relationship between our dancing bodies, the land on which we dance, the social and cultural structures that inform our dancing, and the experiences of those who came before us.
Encountering Material Archives
My earliest encounter with an archival collection that I can recall was in the basement of our family home in White Plains, NY. We had moved from Baltimore in 1986 when I was 7 years old, and my older sister and I helped the family settle into our new home by removing all the stickers that the moving company had placed on every single piece of furniture. The lowest level of the house became the storage space for all the things that were never unpacked. Down the basement stairs felt like another world. I could barely fit my little body between the mountains of cardboard moving boxes marked “memorabilia.” My sister and I carved narrow pathways, nooks and crannies as we explored these mystery boxes full of old family photographs, dad’s high school sports trophies, documents, school papers, toys, yearbooks, tattered books, and more. Before this, I didn’t know what “memorabilia” meant, but this experience, looking through this treasure trove of memories, the word became magical to me.
Some years later (in the early 90s), my dad embarked on a journey to discover our family’s ancestral roots. He took several road trips down south to search through libraries, county and state archives, and to conduct oral history interviews with family elders. I remember how excited he was to come back with printouts of U.S. census records, wills, marriage licenses, and death certificates that collectively told the story of our family from generations before. This was before the era of Ancestry.com, so he had learned a lot about how to put the pieces together himself. He shared conversations with archivists and family members that would reveal a clue that would lead to the next clue and on and on. “Look, this record shows that your great great grandmother lived at this address!” He talked about genealogical research like an Indiana Jones story – but replaced the boulders, spiders, and Nazis with his embodied memories of what it was like to drive through the south as a Black man, imagining the ghosts of ancestors lurking in the swampy forests as he traveled towards what he hoped would be answers to the questions about his past. He captured embodied reflections in his book, Who Came Before Me? A Story of the Search for my Tomes and Lightfoot Roots and What I Found,
“I was scared to death. The murky waters of the Great Dismal Swamp came right up to the shoulders of the narrow winding road as I drove past Suffolk, Virginia… The ghosts of the past were all around, and they seemed to be summoning me… I had palpitations; my heart was in my throat. I could not catch my breath. And, it was getting dark.”[5]
My father transitioned in 2009. Those who didn’t know him well likely perceived him as reserved and stoic… maybe even distant or unfeeling. He was pragmatic, methodical, and chose his moments to emote very carefully, so I understand this perception of him. But the rest of us, his family and close friends, knew that he had great capacity to feel things very deeply. He was sensitive and kind, thoughtful and contemplative, generous with his love, and he could be ridiculously silly. But his reflections on the Great Dismal Swamp caught me off guard. It let me know he could be vulnerable and afraid, and despite that, willing to face his fears to uncover the past – it was that important to him. I imagine he felt it was the least he could do to honor his ancestors who had sacrificed so much. It let me know what was at stake.
My father’s curiosity and commitment to unearthing our ancestors’ stories stand out in stark contrast to my memories of teenage drama and angst. His excitement for archival research eventually became my own. The deeper I delved into archival collections, the more I realized that ancestral voices aren’t always documented in written records. Many collections were initiated and stewarded by white men in power who either had no knowledge of/interest in/access to experiences other than their own, or they were actively committed to excluding/erasing/revising those histories. So, when conducting my doctoral research from 2014-2016, it felt vital to include as many of those experiences as I could. I culled through the archives at the Philadelphia Folklore Project (PFP) searching for voices of elders and leaders within the city’s West African dance and drum community. I found oral history interviews, transcripts, and program notes that offered insights into how this community emerged, took shape, and thrived for decades. Paired with the embodied research on the dance floor, and the interviews with other West African dance class participants in the community, my dissertation experience helped me figure out how to integrate the research of archival materials with the research of embodied memory. I continue this practice here in Atlanta every chance I get.
Making a Way Back to Go Forward
In 2019, I had the honor of serving as a co-director and choreographer for The Georgia Incarceration Performance Project (GAIPP) alongside some amazing faculty members from Spelman College (Kathleen Wessel and Keith Bolden) and The University of Georgia (Dr. Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin and Dr. Emily Sahakian). This cross-institutional collaboration centered archival research and interdisciplinary creative devising. Together with students, faculty, librarians, and archivists from both institutions, along with Atlanta-based artists and designers and justice-impacted students enrolled in college courses at Georgia-area prisons, we explored Georgia’s history of convict leasing.[6] As UGA archivists pulled out box after box full of memories, it brought me back to the basement of my childhood home. The feel of tattered, old paper; the smell of weathered, crumbly leather book bindings; the yellowish hue of stained black and white photographs all felt familiar to me. The nostalgia, however, quickly turned heavy as we studied city records, police reports, whipping logs, photographs, and letters from elected officials in other states seeking guidance from Georgia’s leaders about how to grow their own convict leasing system. Dr. Amma arranged for the archivists to bring the materials into our creative space. Collaboratively, we reviewed the materials, reflected, and moved our bodies – not always in that order. The year-long process culminated in a full-length production called By Our Hands which brought the archives to life through dance, theater, music, spoken word and visual media technology to shed light on the development of Georgia’s carceral system from the turn of the twentieth century to today. This transformational experience taught me more about the lingering impact of slavery through the country’s prison industrial complex than I could have ever hoped to learn by just reading about it or listening to a lecture. For example, it is one thing to read about the burgeoning railroad system in the mid 1800s and its role in proliferating convict leasing which disproportionately impacted Black men, women, and children, but it is quite another thing to hold a pair of 100 year old prison shackles in your hand, see photos of chain gangs driving the railroad spikes into the Georgia red clay, and then deepen the inquiry through the body using collaborative choreographic devices. One of my favorite scenes was a dance created by Spelman students that drew on archival evidence of Black women’s resistance in the labor camps by sabotaging equipment, burning prison uniforms, and protesting corporeal punishment (whippings). Working on GAIPP changed me at a cellular level, I will never see this country the same way again.
In conjunction with my participation in GAIPP, I initiated Idle Crimes & Heavy Work through my creative practice, Moving Our Stories and worked with key Atlanta-based community partners such as Giwayen Mata (an “all-sistah, dance, percussion, and vocal ensemble”) and The Chattachoochee Brick Company Descendants Coalition (a grassroots organization working to honor and preserve sites built by convict labor), to name a few.[7] Idle Crimes & Heavy Work (ICHW) is a collaborative dance research endeavor that explores Georgia’s history of incarcerated labor through the lens of Black women’s experiences. Driven by archival research (material and embodied) and site-responsive performance, and grounded in the principles of community-based participatory dance research, ICHW collaborators connect the stories of women past and present to sites in Atlanta embedded with their carceral labor. Like GAIPP, our collective is made up of dance artists, archivists, activists, educators, architects, historians, and justice-impacted citizens who endeavor together to understand our own relationship to the U.S. carceral system – how it has impacted us and our communities as citizens of this country built on forced labor and entangled in the prison industrial complex. We use embodied memory mapping, archival research, interactive performance, workshops, dance films, and community gatherings to build empathic bridges of connection between past and present. We dedicate our own creative labor to restoring erased histories and emblazoning the experiences of incarcerated Black women on the cityscapes of our community as an act of resistance through communal dances of love, liberation, and joy.[8] We look backwards to reckon with the past, and along the way, we discover ancestors’ strategies of survival that may be the key to our future liberation.
As I write this, the Trump administration is conducting rapid, wide-sweeping, and devastating policy changes and budget cuts to federal institutions like the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Parks Service, the Department of Education, and the National Archives and Records Administration to name a few. They introduced a long list of words and phrases used to review federally funded programs like the NSF, including “women,” “race,” ”black,” “diversity,” “historically,” “cultural differences,” and many more.[9] These words allow us to name our experience and hold institutions accountable to the way they treat us. By using these words to flag and dismantle programs, the Trump administration has now weaponized these words in the effort to erase the experiences of anyone that is not like them. When systems of oppression attempt to disembody us from our experiences, past and present, it puts our future in jeopardy. Dance keeps us in our bodies. It lets us connect. It is a way to remember who we are. I am grateful for every collaborator, mentor, and ancestor who has helped cultivate embodied memory work practices as modes of visioning. Now, more than ever, I understand what my father knew, we need to look back to move forward.
[1] Julie B. Johnson, Dancing Down the Floor: Experiences & Meanings of ‘Community’ in a West African Dance Class in Philadelphia (Phd. diss., Temple University, 2016), xiii.
[2] In particular, I draw from Kariamu Welsh’s theories on epic memory; Carrie Nolan’s work on memory and gesture in Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment. Harvard University Press, 2009; and Alvin Ailey’s concept of blood memory.
[3] This paragraph on the four premises of embodied memory mapping appears verbatim on the author’s website, www.juliebjohnson.com, and in previous publications.
[4] In 2020, collaborators and I found ourselves situated in national conversations about police and prison abolition since our work focused on exploring carceral histories. We decided to host abolition study groups to learn more and grapple with some complex ideas around art-making and justice. Since then, I have been exploring how my dance practice might align with the praxis of Abolition Feminism, drawing from the work of Mariam Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, and Critical Resistance, to name just a few organizers and collectives in the movement.
[5] Calvin Johnson, Jr. Who Came Before Me? A Story of the Search for my Tomes and Lightfoot Roots and What I Found (Baltimore, MD, Gateway Press Inc., 2009), 1.
[6] Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, explains convict leasing as a system of labor exploitation and state violence that builds on the legacy of slavery through “captivity, abjection, and gendered capitalism,” (2016, p 4). According to Talitha LeFlouria, author of Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South, Georgia’s convict leasing system began in 1868 as a form of punishment in which able-bodied men and women were “legally parceled out to a series of private industries and farms… Georgia’s state penitentiary… was composed of independently operated lease camps, governed by a syndicate of private contractors, ‘whipping bosses,’ and guards at the behest of the state” (2015, p 9-10).
[7] I give thanks to these wonderful thought partners and collaborators; Tambra Omiyale Harris, Artistic Director of Giwayan Mata; Donna Stephens and Genia Billingsley who created the Chattachoochee Brick Company Descendants Coaltion; Victoria Lemos, historian, tour guide, and host of the Archive Atlanta Podcast; Robert Thompson, historian and tour guide with Insight Cultural Tourism; and the team of Community Visioners, including: Lauren Neefe, Holly Smith, Dr. shady Radical, Dr. Vernelle Noel, Hawkins, and Christiana McLeod Horn.
[8] This sentence also appears on the author’s website, www.juliebjohnson.com, www.idlecrimes.com, and in previous publications.
[9] Joel Achenbach, “Here are the Words Putting Science in the Crosshairs of Trump’s Orders.” Washington Post. Feb 4, 2025; Karen Yourish, Annie Daniel, et al. “These Words are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration.” The New York Times. Mar 7, 2025.
This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of In Dance.
