Archiving Dance
Embodied Strategies in Linda K. Johnson’s Mycelium Dreams Project

If I were to share a foundational concern that gathers the many edges of my work as a visual arts writer, curator, and educator, it would be the task of figuring out where my training and career as a former dancer ends and where my current practice as a writer begins. While I have not danced professionally in many years, I know for certain that decades of repetitive bodily movements, mandates from beloved teachers, and hours spent memorizing repertoire have never fully left me, and that some of that repetition and memory work haunts every tap and drag I make on paper or laptop. Dance has not evaporated from my body but has rather moved into the synaptic spaces that link my mind to my every gesture. When slivers of somatic memory rise from their latent sleep, I am reminded of how much the body unconsciously holds, and how the body we live in is the very field upon which making, writing, and thinking occur.

Perhaps this is why I have found my greatest inspiration and stimulation inside of archives and in community with artists who use them? Archives have an embodied character, filled as they are with the material remnants of people and communities who used and activated them, and the present bodies who seek to re-activate and contextualize those archival materials anew. And yet dance as a genre fits crookedly inside archival institutions. Unlike a text, painting, or personal object, a dance cannot be laid neatly into an acid-free folder or tucked gently into a cardboard banker’s box — a dance lives in time and can only be executed or registered by people in space. While photographs and video recordings have brought choreographed dance and performances into the archive, dancing and how a dance(r) lives on its own terms remains a complicated, sticky question. If we embrace archives as dynamic and responsive sites, how do we engage in a conception of archival collection that supports dance holistically? How can we complete the circle of sustaining memory not just of the dance, but the dancer, and dancing itself? How can we emphasize an embodied process within an archival collective that emphasizes “history as moving…[and as] movement”?¹

No other artist seems to understand and invite these methodological questions into their practice more than the Portland-based dancer, choreographer, and educator Linda K. Johnson, whose Mycelium Dreams Project stands as a rigorous, hopeful enactment of archiving dance and the dancer in its fullest expression. Begun at the height of the COVID lockdown in 2021 (which happened to coincide with Johnson’s sixtieth birthday), Mycelium Dreams Project is a durational documentary dedicated to mapping the visible and invisible relational economies surrounding dance artists and their work using peer-to-peer interviews, memory mapmaking, and group forums as alternative methods to current object- and performance-based dance archival practices. Johnson’s work to support dancers in constructing their life, career, training, and community visually and linguistically through mapmaking and conversation instantiates the voice and experience of the dancer at the center of archival praxis, which Johnson describes as a form of “embodied archiving.” Johnson states:

Dance is an embodied practice — meaning of the body, through the body, in the body, and including the totality of the experience(s) of being in a body. It would only make sense that the methods of archiving the work of dance artists — of making, of performing, of teaching, of thinking, of relating, of collaborating — should reflect the nature of the form itself. Embodied archiving suggests a devotion to including not only the signature works and overt details of an artist’s life, but also their ‘ways of knowing,’ their somatic practices, their systems of creating and working, their philosophies, their authentic pedagogies, et cetera…²

Given the project’s emphasis on dissolving the primacy of individual authorship in the creation of dances for a more multiple, rhizomatic model of making, Mycelium Dreams Project is also a community history of dance in the Oregon region told through Johnson’s own position as an individual dance worker and active participant in an ever-expanding collective. By underscoring the tricky work of narrating and archiving dance, Johnson’s project points to the need for medium-specific techniques beyond the limits of current nineteenth-century processes to support an enlivened historicization and archival processing of the form that includes dancers in its telling.

The work and capabilities of the natural world are the foundations of Johnson’s methodological framework in Mycelium Dreams Project, which takes up the root-like branching structure of fungi, known as mycelium, as a primary metaphor within the multi-part work.³ Mycelium’s primary role in an ecosystem is as catalyst for decomposition, a process essential to the conversion of biomass into compost material that nurtures surrounding soil and draws missing nutrients to resourceless areas. In addition, many studies have noted the memory capacities of mycelial networks to attach to plant roots and spread outward like a three-dimensional net, thus expanding the strength and capabilities of a plant’s root systems by magnitudes.⁴ The building and sustaining of mycorrhizal associations, or the forming of mutually beneficial relationships between fungi and other plants, and the construction of hyphal networks create what is known as “mycelium memory,” or the capacity for fungal networks to respond and act by harnessing past electrical states.⁵ Johnson’s seizure of mushroom logic for this project forms a framework for intergenerational narrative-building relationality within the work, uplifting archival practices already at work in nature to emphasize the connective bonds and carework linking dancers and their environs.

Mycelium memory is put to work literally in the project’s dedication to the making and sharing of hand-drawn “memory maps” — constellatory works on paper to excavate and organize the people, places, and events that define a dancer’s individual history and connection to/engagement with a broader community of dancers, institutions, and cultural workers. Radiating outward like a family tree with language size, demarcating bubbles, and connecting lines working to trace hierarchies of historical information across and around discrete concepts, these maps site the dancer at the center of multiple temporal unfoldings, and render personal memory crucial to the telling of dance history.

To visualize the landscape of personal and collective dance memory, for Johnson, was an opportunity to bridge and instantiate their inextricable entanglement with one another. Originating in the data models configured in computer science, memory maps sketch internal pathways in computer operating systems to encode details and connections across programs, but their most evocative life can be traced to their use in anthropological and psychoanalytic discourses to test individual remembrance against official (and often state-sponsored) accounts. Using the spatial capacities of diagrams and maps to connect or estrange events, concepts, and sites that might otherwise be understood as isolated or different, memory maps dissolve the objective ideological promise inherent within cartographic frameworks to combine knowledge shaped as deeply by Freudian dreamwork as by methods of imperialism and colonization. In this model, associations arise from proximity between words, phrases, names, and geographies to form an archival document both specific and loose.

I know and knew that the memory map would be the most substantial part of this archival praxis, that what is encoded in the body as a dancer can never be fully expressed through linear linguistic articulation and communication. Something of space and time was needed to materialize the body and its knowledge.⁶

First completed by Johnson herself to summon her memory and acknowledge her path to dance after an extended break from the artform, the map’s significance as a learning tool and historical catalyst was immediately clear, particularly in the midst of a global pandemic that stressed Portland’s cultural landscape. (Fig. 3) Names of artists and organizations press up against one another on Johnson’s map — PICA, Jefferson High School Dance Dept., Bonnie Jo Merrill — calling them into connection and remembrance across a time-space continuum, snapping them into a present. All of these boxes are a reminder of the funny way memory prefers short-term recollection as opposed to long-term reflection.

Excited by the generative nature of the activity, Johnson soon shared materials and guidelines to other dancers, pedagogues, choreographers, and arts workers in her circle as a way of building and extending the practice as well as enriching and revising the historical information gained from each map’s particular pathways. The result was total diversity and heterogeneity across each participant’s map, with some participants choosing to incorporate images into the landscape of the paper, such as Susan Banyas, whose photocollage strategies and use of blue painter’s tape tell a more mysterious, subtle story of a career shaped by energy, dreamwork, and time. (Fig. 4) For Johnson, the ongoing collection of these map-works has positioned her into a sort of “citizen archivist” — someone invested in generative, communal making, offering tools and support to others excited to engage and share in this work alongside her.

The complementary component of the Mycelium Dreams Project is the organizing and documenting of interviews, led by Johnson, each one shaped in full recognition of the complex mode of knowledge transfer crucial to the practice and performance of dance and the rich pedagogical amassments and narratives ever-cycling in a dancer’s body and brain. For dance is taught and learned in classrooms from teachers who pass down information orally as much as physically. Language thus becomes the prime vehicle for defining and expanding the dancer’s habits and skills, accumulating in the body and in memory as technique, mastery, repertoire, and artistic ethics.

Johnson’s first interviews sought to bring together a diverse cohort of dance artists and elders who shaped her own dance history in Portland, including the interdisciplinary performer and writer Susan Grace Banyas, the Japanese American performing artist and activist Chisao Hata, queer choreographer and artistic director Robin Lane, and the neurodiverse visual artist and choreographer Joan Findlay, all of which took place under the umbrella of the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s TBA: 2024 Festival. Johnson shares:

I was thinking about where the ‘silences’ might be in the history of our dance community here in Portland — not just the gaps or erasures in the very small [academically-held] archives that currently exist, but more importantly for me in the way my community understands and holds its history as a living, recirculating entity. Of course, I was also thinking about representation across gender, queerness, disability, neurodiversity, individuals of color, and forms of practice. It was very important to me to acknowledge in the conversations the many ways one can live a life in the field of dance. Choreographers so often get the primary gaze, but all the stories share equal significance…The wealth of practice and history in these bodies is so profound to me.⁷

The format for Johnson’s interviews is both structured and dancer-specific, each one beginning with a sequence of more generic questions (“When did they come into awareness?”) with a push toward the participant’s particular dance history, training, profession, and current practice. Long-form and wide-reaching, each conversation grants the artist the space and time to unpack their work and influences and settle into a space of trust. Some of these interviews take place in private, either in-person or over the phone, with Johnson as the primary locutor, while others take place in group settings as an acknowledgement of the collective process of remembering, making, and witnessing in dance. In addition to the conversation, an accompanying movement exercise or somatic opportunity is offered to Johnson and the audience — if public, as a way of continuing the line of transmission so crucial to the history and longevity of dance. As of fall 2025, twenty-two interviews have been conducted, many of them incorporated into the Portland Dance Archives held at Portland State University.⁸

For Johnson, the question of whether these interviews are executed in public is vital to the development of Mycelium Dreams Project and begs the question of how a public-facing memory exercise is translated or altered in front of an audience. For, like all public-facing occurrences, what and how information is communicated is undeniably altered by who is (or is not) in the room during the conversation. So much of a dancer’s life is challenging — the career is short, opportunities are few, “success” is relative and often accompanied by pushing through or attending to physical pain, life challenges, and collegial struggles. Just saying “yes” to these tasks was, at times, too daunting or emotional for some invitees. Some said no. Others found it difficult to start. Johnson’s desire to overcome as many of the initial burdens to participants in this work — offering material and technical support, ensuring privacy and transparency to everyone engaged — points to her sensitivity to the process of building archive in collaboration with other people. Not everyone’s relationship to telling “their story” is identical or neutral. How these questions will grow or diminish as this project carries forward and shifts toward curatorial presentation is an open but invigorating question.⁹

The significance of this work for Johnson as a dancer and community member is crucial to its sustainability and articulation. Dance as an artform (an umbrella under which I also include performance art) continues to be one of the most underfunded genres in the American cultural landscape, with communities outside New York and other major cities struggling to sustain and historicize their activities.¹⁰ Thus, the Mycelium Dreams Project is as much a product of an artist’s praxis as it is a reparative act to record and document dance in a community lacking necessary institutional support and steady financial capital:

After four decades of creating, performing, and teaching, I wanted to manifest a way to witness how I had spent the first [forty] years of my professional creative life in the region. I needed a way to sense where I had been in order to feel where I could go…for each year we are losing so much infrastructure.¹¹

The mission to keep Portland’s dance history ongoing, alive, and available cannot be separated from Johnson’s project to solve dance’s archival lack. Therein lies Johnson’s mission — her conviction — that archivists do more than build new collections for entry into history, but keep the methods and questions of how, when, why, and for whom at the center of archival strategies.

1. See Carrie Noland’s book Agency & Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture, Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009; and Kathy Michelle Carbone, “Artists and Records: Moving History and Memory” in Archives and Records Vol. 38, No. 1, 2017, pp. 100–118: https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2016.1260446.
2. This quote was culled from an interview between me and Linda K. Johnson, which was conducted in three parts via Zoom and email in early November 2025. I remain incredibly grateful to Linda for her openness and care across our conversations, which expanded across multiple themes and queries.
3. Plants and fungi have held an important place in Johnson’s work for many decades, beginning in 1991 with the creation of her first site-specific work Finding the Forest and continuing with projects shaped by the nurturing and production of food and herbal medicine such as TaxLot#1S1E4ODD - A temporary Edible Urban Garden Project from 2000–01.
4. See Aiduang, Worawoot, Athip Chanthaluck, Jaturong Kumla, Kritsana Jatuwong, Sirasit Srinuanpan, Tanut Waroonkun, Rawiwan Oranratmanee, Saisamorn Lumyong, and Nakarin Suwannarach. "Amazing Fungi for Eco-Friendly Composite Materials: A Comprehensive Review" Journal of Fungi Vol. 8, No. 8, 2022, p. 842: https://doi.org/10.3390/jof8080842.
5. See Tatyana Woodall’s article “Mushrooms show promise as memory chips for future computers” on Phys.Org, October 25, 2025, Link: https://phys.org/news/2025-10-mushrooms-memory-chips-future.html
6. Quote culled from an interview with Johnson in November 2025, via Zoom.
7. This special quote was shared with me in a generous email exchange with Johnson on November 9, 2025.
8. For access to the Portland Dance Archives, visit the following link: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/pda/
9. Aspects of Johnson’s Mycelium Dreams Project will take shape in the upcoming 2026 citywide curatorial presentation of Portland, Oregon’s CONVERGE 45, curated by Lumi Tan. See more here: https://www.converge45.org/2026-citywide-art-exhibition
10. See the 2024 Dance/USA report titled “Dance/USA Ecosystem Survey 2024 Findings” shaped by Sarah Morrison (Director of Research), which outlines cited financial support and federal advocacy as two of the top four most concerning and needed priorities for dance and dance organizations in the United States. Link: /https://danceusa.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/04120321/Findings-from-the-DanceUSA-Ecosystem-Survey-2024-Public-Report.pdf
11. This excerpt was taken from Linda K. Johnson’s written project description titled “ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF THE MYCELIUM DREAMS PROJECT & PASTFUTURE” on her personal webpage, www.lindakjohnson.net. Link: https://www.lindakjohnson.net/currentupcoming