Skene Year One: From Ghostlight to Global Stage.
Josafath Reynoso
Celebrate Skene’s Year One: 1.47M views across 95+ countries. From ghost light to global hub, we’re documenting the labor behind the magic.
Celebrate Skene’s Year One: 1.47M views across 95+ countries. From ghost light to global hub, we’re documenting the labor behind the magic.
A practical guide to beginner ballet gear, from shoes and attire to training tools that support safe, confident technique.
Edella Oroz Westerfield brings imagination, cultural reflection, and vibrant detail to her work as an emerging actress and singer in contemporary theatre.
Argentinian hair aerialist Martina Bakst shares her path through new circus, emotional storytelling, and the discipline of her airborne craft
How the Super Bowl halftime show became a political stage where power identity and performance collide in front of millions.
Dance-movement– for Alyssa Johnson, is more than performance—it’s language, ritual, rebellion, and revelation. As the founder and artistic director of Paracosm Dance, she’s built a kaleidoscopic world where movement is the first and final word, and where story, sound, and spectacle collide in gloriously messy, emotionally raw, and defiantly queer expressions of the human condition. A dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, Johnson doesn’t just choreograph bodies—she orchestrates experiences, often in collaboration with a powerhouse team of composers, designers, and visual artists.
In this intimate interview, she opens up about the magnetic pull of dance as a language beyond words, the aching beauty of creative control surrendered, and how grief, contradiction, and radical collaboration shaped her retelling of A Christmas Carol. From prosthetic-laced costuming to steel-forged sets to drag performances defying oppressive politics, her work is both deeply personal and powerfully political.
In this edition of PROFILES Alyssa Johnson will leave you inspired to leap—unapologetically—into the unknown.
It was always intuitive. Movement came without question, without judgment. At the beginning, watching others dance ignited imagination – viscerally, cathartically – narratives named wordlessly. I felt ancient questions of humanity could be, if only for a moment, understood in totality as limbs intertwined and shot through space, raw corporeal tension-and-release illustrating with tangibility the spectrum of human emotion and experience.
Where words could muddle, misinterpret, or meet language barriers, movement could transcend. Even before I had the vocabulary to articulate this truth, I knew dance would be my vehicle to most profoundly communicate and affect through artistry.
Dance has since become the lens through which I see the world. It’s how I process each day on this Earth, from mundanity to marvel. It’s how I connect most genuinely; it’s the language I choose to speak.
Yearning to be not only a recipient of, or vessel for, the rippling effect of dance, I now choreograph and produce multimedia works for both stage and film. Through decades of relentless curiosity and a refusal to go silent, I’ve channeled that desperate, inextinguishable need to tell stories and honed my craft as a creator. I’ve found others who through their own vein of artistry exist with similar hunger, and from these collaborations, the multimedia collective was formed: Paracosm Dance.
My first evening length piece: Paracosm’s A Christmas Carol.
This show is our deeply twisted, stunningly dark, defiantly queer contribution to the winter tradition of proscenium performances. Our retelling of a classic tale highlights the underbelly of emotions coursing through the “performatively positive” holiday season, dissecting unresolved grief’s grip on those living with guilt and ghosts.
I felt this was the first time I had achieved the multimedia, multilayered storytelling I’d grown up envisioning. It was imperfect; it was magnificent. There were so many mediums in harmony, from live music to drag, roller skates to prosthetics. All these voices, none more important than the other, offered varied avenues for people to access the piece’s themes. It was the skeleton of a work that could be fleshed out with each iteration, always inviting expansion (including revolutionary set design intimately coupled with narrative costuming). It grows even now, new theaters demanding new depth.
It was also the first time I really felt my choreographic signature find its footing. My movement stems from the violent contradictions in humanity, manifested as contorted, glitched dynamism that in real time processes the glorious ugliness coursing through our veins. It’s unfiltered. It’s honest. With ferocity and precision foiled by bouts of recklessness, it tells an obvious truth – we are, as humans, deeply messy and beautifully flawed.
Dance is the avenue I’ve chosen, but I thrive in the creative process when my language is spoken alongside another’s. Most often it’s the music of Behnam Arzaghi, the cinematography of Eric Hunter, and the costume design of Dustyn Shehane. New to the fold and expanding our multimedia artistry is the integrated design of USITT’s “Master Crafter” Zach Young.
The commitment to curiosity yields, in loose form, a consistent routine of creation, but it still stems from spontaneous inspiration.
What’s beautiful is that the inspiration strikes at different times for each member of the collective, meaning the spark originates in different mediums. Sometimes I have an abstract narrative in mind, or even just a choreographic motif. Sometimes, inspiration is born of Behnam’s musical compositions. Last month, it started with Dustyn’s prosthetic, structural experiments. No matter the origination, the desire to expand on a seed leads us to our team, where we then layer in our voices, always evolving, adapting, and redirecting. Elevating.
Most recently, a show began with the set: Zach Young’s self-contained stage, born of curved steel and pixel-mapped lighting. His feat deserves an article of its own!
I speak with great reverence for the collaborative process, but it took me a while to get here. Decentering my choreography and relinquishing creative control remains a great challenge.
But it is essential.
As PD grows, the lingering remnants of these tendencies are more and more a hindrance. Artistry is intimate. Creating, performing – it all requires a vulnerability that pulls from the rawest sense of self. Held too tightly, you protect yourself, but you also suffocate any room for input. You block yourself off from change, and in doing so, limit both the experiential depth of creation and the expansiveness of the work. Collaboration is key, and with true collaboration comes a release of predetermined expectation. This is a good thing. (It is also terrifying.)
I think this ties into a greater fear of being witnessed on a larger scale.
It’s nerve-wracking to release work in this climate. It’s nerve-wracking to be an artist in this climate. It’s often unforgiving, lacking nuance, and uncritical in its consumption. When the stakes feel this high, it’s daunting to publicly share anything, let alone something where elements fall out of your creative control. But it’s necessary.
Refusing to succumb to these fears has forced me further into the collaborative process, into my community, and into radical self-love. It’s allowed me to access new wells of creativity and to share my work with abandon.
I’ve realized that radically, I exist, and that my existence is radical art.
Humanity. The grittiness, the darkness, the contradictions. The unfiltered honesty of self on display through wordless movement, uncensored.
Witnessing others’ humanity, acknowledging my own….it all comes up both in the performances themselves and within the creative processes.
I’m endlessly intrigued at how rawness can come forward shamelessly when words finally fall away and all that remains is movement. It helps us – the creators and performers – access healing and understanding, and more so, it allows audiences to witness the practice. Viscerally, they can see vulnerability and be guided to their own depths. We demonstrate this in art and hope it ripples out beyond the stage, from the personal to the political, ever intertwined.
Alongside that, the opportunity to help bring my collaborators’ visions to life is an endless source of inspiration. It’s the greatest honor as an artist and leader, and my own curiosity at the genius of my peers pushes me to break the boundaries of my own art.
Beyond dance theatre, artists in every field are louder than ever. It’s thrilling, it’s invigorating, it’s urgent in need.
We are showing up with radical visibility and unwavering support of our most vulnerable communities. As our government attempts to legislate away rights and cultivate a culture of conservative aesthetics and fascist norms, we commit to creativity – to our fellow artists – and resist this diabolical shift. (Gratitude to Kate Freer, Wingspace, and Design Action, to name a few inspirators.)
Inspiring protest, inspiring change, inspiring hope, it is truly our creativity that propels, sustains, and later memorializes progressive resistance. I’m horrified at what’s unfolding here in the US, but staving off nihilistic defeat, I’m emboldened by the artists around me standing taller than ever and uplifting those whose voices are most threatened.
Today, I’m actively fighting the drag bans. The first Queen to ever grace our stage was Tara Cotta, and with halts in funding spurred by hateful legislation targeting gender non-conforming and trans communities, we are fighting back and raising funds to get her show back on the road.
You’ll never feel ready, but I promise, you are. Tell your story now. No perfect conditions for creativity exist. Create, recreate, share, collaborate TODAY. Share your work often; care little for the criticisms of strangers. Learn quickly whose critiques you value and release the rest. Any attempt to placate everyone will shrink your work – this can paralyze you.
Also, you won’t ever succeed in pleasing everyone. That’s okay. In fact, it’s great! Be unapologetic in authenticity and be always in awe of what your artistry awakens.
Create like your life depends on it, because it does.
Paracosm Dance is named for its mission: creating temporary realities through fierce movement.
Paracosms are the expansive, imaginary worlds we create in our minds that allow us to process the happenings of the physical world. These temporal realities invite us to play. To explore. To safely investigate and discover. They serve as canvases for imaginative work to then be applied outside the mind.
We bring this to fruition every time we share art. As performers, we create spaces unconstrained by the limits of the everyday, suspending disbelief with the magic of theater and film. This, with the power of partial abstraction in performance, opens the door for audiences and creators alike to probe at what needs individual and communal healing.
I want people to be moved. I really do.
I hope to draw audiences in with surreal, multilayered environments where physicality and imagination merge. I hope to keep them hooked with narrative progression, wordless but clear…I’ll never zoom in on the details, though. My work demands with its ambiguity audience projection; its abstracted design speaks uniquely to an individual’s deepest need. Accessing this, I hope they can leave the theater with newfound, vital insight.
The wisdom is their own – we simply aim to lead them down their stairwell, inviting them to open their door and grab it.
AKA, we’ll never answer the question, “So what did that actually mean?” Only you can fill in the blanks, dear friend; the Paracosm is yours.
Support artists—share this
Get our free Survival Guide for Actors, Directors, and Designers.
Get our free Survival Guide for Actors, Directors, and Designers.
