Tumí Johnson, submitted artwork
Tumí Johnson
Video, Performance
The Canary Islands
Tumí Johnson is a Nigerian-American dance performance artist, poet, and physician. She quit stable jobs as both a hospitalist and company dancer for two reasons: art and healing. In 2006, Tumí went to work as a field physician for Doctors Without Borders in the Sahel desert. When she returned to her usual work in NYC, she realized she couldn’t unsee what she had seen: art as medicine. Tumí had found that sharing her dance in Africa was powerful medicine. She returned to the States to begin creating a newer and truer way to be of service to others. That service is her Healing Poemdances. These dances are crafted from her poetry, her experience as a physician, and performed to powerfully ignite and propel delicious healing in the viewer. She has now performed several of her Poemdances around the world, and creates films of her Poemdance performances for video installations in art spaces.
Works
Tumí Johnson, submitted artwork
I begin with my feet naked on the earth. That earth might be a sea-kissed beach in Tanzania, a limestone rock in Croatia, a wooden floorboard of a small apartment in New York City. My feet are bare to better listen. It is the way of my ancestors: I begin with a pain within that mirrors a dis-ease I have witnessed in the world. A woman with congestive heart failure whose heart has been broken not just physically but emotionally from childhood abuse. A community that is ravaged by a depression they don’t have words for. A world in which cruelty is normalized. That pain within might first fall out of me into a poem, then be shaped into dance. That pain might begin with my body curving into shapes and sequences which then give me the words to craft the poem. My process sometimes crystallizes into the dance first, sometimes first the poetry, sometimes a simultaneous interplay of both, creating what I call my Healing Poemdances. But it always starts with the still small voice saying “pay. attention. inside. now.” Pain. Pain that echoes a need for healing in the world. As a dance performance and video artist, poet, and physician, my work blends dance performance, poetry, and my health knowledge to powerfully awaken the healing process of the viewer. My Healing Poemdances are art that can be experienced as live performance or as video installation. It is an honor to transmit art as medicine.
