amilton de azevedo writes about Being Future Being: Inside/Outwards, by Emily Jonhson/Catalyst (Lenapehoking/New York), presented in the 2024 Festival TransAmériques (FTA – Tiohtià:ké/Montreal). this text is part of a special coverage; the critic traveled to Canada at the invitation of the FTA.

“Whilst society is made from the equals, community is built by diversity. We are the diverses, the cosmological, the natural, the organics. We are not humanists, humanists are the people that turn nature into money, into a brand new car. We are all cosmos, except humans. I am not human, I am quilombola. I am a farmer, a fisher, a cosmic being. Humans are the monotheistic eurochristians. They are afraid of the cosmos. Cosmophoby is the big disease of humanity.“ [Antônio ‘Nêgo’ Bispo dos Santos, A terra dá, a terra quer (The land gives, the land wants), in a free translation]

To reflect upon Being Future Being: Inside/Outwards (2022, United States) means to acknowledge way more than what could be seen on the stage of Espace Libre during its presentations on FTA 2024 (Tiohtià:ké/Montreal). During the programme of the festival, Emily Johnson (Lenapehoking/New York) presented the Decolonization Rider, a letter stating that institutions and organizations inviting Catalyst to present their works will commit to a serious of direct actions; Catalyst’s tenet is Land Back and they ensure that their ways of being are guaranteeing some sort of step taken towards reparation.

Within the document I had my first contact with the A Copy Editor’s Education in Indigenous Style | The Tyee and the Indigenous Peoples Terminology: Guidelines for Usage. After fourteen days of festival (and eight years writing) I was able to correct the terminology used in texts I’ve written throughout the years. In that sense, it was a good example of the Speculative Architecture of the Overflow proposed by Catalyst’s Branch of Action: they state that their “goal is to build an overflow from the performance moment, forward“. Evidently the overflow intended is towards Interkinnecting networks for supporting communitarian needs; nevertheless, I would say that the overflow also regards confluence, as proposed by brazilian quilombola leader, philosopher, writer, poet and political activist Nêgo Bispo (1959-2023):

“I don’t have any doubt that confluence is the energy moving us towards sharing, acknowledgement, respect. A river does not stop being a river because they confluence with another river, it is the opposite, they become themselves and other rivers, they become stronger. When we confluence, we do not stop being us, we come to be us and others – we renders. The confluence is a force that renders, that raises, that amplifies. This is the measure.” [Nêgo Bispo in A terra dá, a terra quer (The land gives, the land wants), in a free translation]

What Johnson refers to more-than-humxn seems to relate towards Bispo’s image of cosmos, as cited in the epigraphy of this text. To confluence means to produce kinship beyond the produced idea of humanity, which includes from marginalized populations and communities turned into less-than-human throughout history to the wholeness of nature. For Being Future Being, Johnson ignites the piece through a manifesto performed in the street – if not a call to action, a call to listen and imagine; an invitation to experience, even just for a few moments, how bodies could pulsate inside and outwards towards justice.

This beginning feels like an introduction for what will be seen on stage – which, as already mentioned, is just a small part of Johnson’s research, attitudes and work. How to perceive the difference between space and territory? How to respect and evoke the ancestry of a land through movement and through the living experiences of other lands? Being Future Being structures itself as a tool of confluence, as the manifesto is turned into somewhat a ritual and then into something else, into a lot, into mountains and waters and forests and claims made by vibrating bodies.

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Regarding the mise-en-scène, choreographic scores are everywhere within the Espace Libre, from stage to audience to staircases to outside. Some quite abstract and complex to read, some that look quite literal; they perform portals and within the set design (by Johnson) there are also portals designed by IV Castellanos. And portals, by their nature, are not always understood by everyone. Being Future Being builds confluence as performers are movements of the land, movementing the land, being moved by the land, being land, coming to be through land. 

All the composition seen in Being Future Being seems to operate towards this confluence – which in any way means an organization as normally could. Confluence can also be the cosmos’ beautiful chaos, as the staging is maybe operating in this non-hierarchical degree regarding the focus of which scene, leaving the spectator’s attention free to wander around the so-much that is happening at the same time in some moments of the performance.

There is a mountain – soil, moss. There are entangled lines above them, signaled portals on the ground. There is anarchy, there is community. There is the repetition of movement until something becomes other things. There is exhaustion and joy. There is an explosion of life in the end. Being Future Being is a continuous attempt and ritual of organizing oneself towards the confluence overflow of a possible existence beyond the boundaries of the limited ideas of humankind.