The Thank-you Bar: What is a Home?

Emily Johnson | Catalyst + BLACKFISH's piece, The Thank-you Bar, is without a doubt the performance I am most excited about coming to Northrop this season. It explores themes of displacement and home. Johnson, originally from Alaska, has lived for sixteen years in Minneapolis, a place Alaskans refer to as part of the "outside." Here in MN, she feels removed from her family and Yup'ik heritage. This piece explores that stark contrast between the place we live and the place we call home. This is a spatial or physical reality as well as a cultural, or even a metaphysical one - in many Indigenous cultures there is a strong spiritual and psychological connection to the land of their origin and heritage. Johnson delves into the effects of her own displacement, and, through her performance, we get a chance to meditate on our displacement and imagine how it might affect us.

The Thanks-you Bar takes this idea one step further in Johnson's exploration of language. Recently she began to learn the Yup'ik language, with help from her grandma. She explains how her realization of a different language reality with Yup'ik has shaped the themes and ideas of The Thank-you Bar. She probes the effects of the presence of English as the dominant language in North America, a place that is also comprised of several Indigenous languages and language realities. When we learn a language, we learn how to think in the structures of that language. There are thoughts which cannot be translated into other languages. What happens when we know two languages? Or more? How does this change the patterns and structures in which we think? How might it change the ideas we're capable of conceiving?

I am so excited to see the way Johnson expresses these themes and creates discussion through her dance, storytelling, curation of the accompanying art exhibit, and the music involved. The idea of displacement is especially important in a country like the United States, the so-called "melting pot," a place where Indigenous peoples have, in many cases, been forced to move from their homeland. So many of us find ourselves hundreds of miles away from our birthplace or heritage. I am curious to see how Johnson explores this idea and, hopefully, along with the rest of the audience, will come to some conclusion of how to reconcile the contrast between the place we live and the place we're from.

-Kevin CurranExternal Relations Assistant