Matryoshka

PRESENTED WITH Red Eye Collective

Designs By Søren: Lighting Designer, Festival Coordinator

Presented as part of the Red Eye New Works Four Weeks Festival.

In this live visual album, a woman enters a nonlinear dimension where she may experience herself as a microcosm of the universe. Anna Johnson brings together electric folk band Bella Yaga and guests from Mila Vocal Ensemble to tell a story of ancestral contact, necessary death and self-love in energy’s spiral flow through space-time. Drawing from a Slavic folk tale and the Wizard of Oz, the work collages original and traditional music, video projection, object theatre and dance to create ancient and psychedelic textures. A set of nesting dolls, or matryoshka as they are called in Russia, offers a visual metaphor for the layers of self, memory and universe that open throughout this ritual of transformation.

Anna Johnson is an interdisciplinary performance artist with a focus on music, moving image, and installation. She creates time-based art to process and transform energy and to heal on individual and collective scales. Anna leads the band Bella Yaga and sings with Mila Vocal Ensemble, a women’s group grounded in the vocal traditions of Eastern Europe and Russia.

Photos by Maxwell Collyard, and Carlisle Evans-Peck.