After four decades of creating, performing, teaching, mentoring, and advocating for dance in the Portland community, Johnson sought a way to witness how the first forty years of her professional creative life had unfolded across the region. Inspired by biologist Suzanne Simard's research on forest ecosystems and the interconnectedness of life through mycorrhizal networks, she spent three months mapping her lived experience of dance history.

The resulting 24" x 36" drawing revealed an interconnected web of people, projects, relationships, and collaborations. What began as a personal history project quickly revealed itself to be a gratitude project. If wealth were measured in relationships, collaborative unions, or embodied twining, dance artists would be among the wealthiest people on the planet.

Recognizing that others might value a similar opportunity for reflection, Johnson invited every living individual represented on her map to create one of their own. During a February 2022 residency at Building Five in Portland, fifty-five artists gathered to share their maps and collectively reflect on the relationships that shaped their creative lives. Their public exhibition revealed a powerful form of artist-driven archiving, one in which artists maintained authority over how their own stories, relationships, collaborations, and histories were represented. From this experience, the larger framework of the Mycelium Dreams Project emerged.

Linda K. Johnson in conversation with Dance Elder Bobby Fouther, March 2025 at Dekum Street Theatre

Archival in intention, Mycelium Dreams is committed to foregrounding the voices of dance artists and professionals in remembering, telling, revealing, and mapping their own histories. Since what is remembered lives, the project defers to artists and those who worked closely with them as primary authorities over their own stories.

EMBODIED ARCHIVING

Mycelium Dreams is grounded in an exploration of embodied archiving and the unique challenges of preserving histories within a field where knowledge is often held in the body. Dance archives have traditionally focused on choreographic works and artist biographies, both of which are vital. Yet artists and dance professionals also carry pedagogies, creative methodologies, somatic practices, philosophies, and ways of knowing that are transmitted through lived experience.

The project asks how these forms of embodied knowledge can be remembered, valued, and shared across generations. Through community mapping, long-form conversations, and other forms of exchange, Mycelium Dreams seeks to create forums for the transmission of knowledge from artists to peers, emerging practitioners, audiences, and scholars. By foregrounding artists as the authors of their own histories, the project expands archival practice beyond artifacts and documentation to include memory, experience, and embodied knowledge itself.

PASTfuture CONVERSATIONS

PASTfuture is the conversational component of the Mycelium Dreams Project. Debuting in September 2024 as part of the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival, the series began with public conversations featuring Portland dance artists Susan Banyas, Robin Lane, and Joan Findlay.

The PASTfuture long-form conversations seek to create an inclusive, nonhierarchical oral record of the artists and professionals who have dedicated their lives to the field of dance. Beginning with Portland's dance elders and continuing across generations, the project proposes a community-based approach to remembering and preserving dance history.

Long-form in nature, these conversations provide artists with the time and space to discuss their work, methods, influences, and experiences in depth. Conversations may take place privately, remotely, or in public settings, depending on the preferences of the participant. Whenever possible, the artists are also invited to share a movement study, somatic practice, choreographic strategy, or other experiential offering that transmits embodied knowledge directly to those present.

All recordings and community-generated maps will be preserved within the Portland State University Dance Archive, where they will be available for listening, research, and public viewing. Together, these materials form a living record of the individuals, ideas, and practices that have shaped Portland’s dance community.

Co-created community alter for deceased dance elders as part of the opening of The Mycellium Dreams residency exhibit at Building 5.

Mycelium Dreams is an ongoing, durational dance cartography, long-form conversation, and embodied archiving project initiated by Transdisciplinary Dance Artist Linda K. Johnson in 2021 on the occasion of her 60th birthday.

EMBODIED ARCHIVING

PASTfuture CONVERSATIONS