In mid May, I sat down with choreographer Emily Johnson and scholar Kai Recollet to discuss their ongoing “kinstillatory fires” project—gatherings that bridge dance, decolonial practices, Indigenous kinship, care, and their own friendship. Speaking from their respective homes in Lenapehoking and Toronto, Emily and Kai spoke to me about origin of their relationship, the political and spiritual dimensions of fire, and how movement becomes a site for connection across space, time, and generations. What unfolded was a conversation about art as a living practice, rooted in intimacy, reciprocity, resistance, justice, and protection.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Eve Bromberg: I just wanted to start by asking, Emily, have you always been based in Canada, or is this a more recent move?
Emily Johnson: I’m not based in Canada. Kai is based in Canada. I’m based in New York.
EB: Okay, that makes so much more sense. Because I was looking up your work, and I was like, it’s so New York-focused. I wonder why Canada…I get it. And Kai, you’re in Canada because you have a teaching post there?
Kai Recollet: Yeah, I’ve always actually lived here. But I’m working at the University of Toronto.
EB: Very cool. Are you in the gender studies department?
KR: Yes, I’m in Women and Gender Studies.
EB What is your area of focus, for the most part?
KR: I’m looking mostly at urban, diasporic, indigenous moves. So I look at movements and choreographies in relation to more-than-human kinship.
EB: Wonderful. I wanted to start contextually. Emily, you have Catalyst. Do you identify Catalyst as a dance company primarily? How would you explain its function? And could you tell me a bit about how it came to be? And then I’m curious about how you two came to work together and the origin of the fires.
EJ: That’s fun. And just before we jump into that, your pronouns and where you’re based?
EB: Sure. She, her. And I am based in Brooklyn. I should ask the same of both of you, thank you for that.
EJ: I’m Emily. I use she, her pronouns, and I am about three and a half hours west of the city.
KR: I’m Kai Recollet. I go by the pronouns she/her, and, yeah, based here in Toronto.
EB: Very cool. And, Emily, just, sorry, because I didn’t 100% hear you. Where did you say you were based?
EJ: Oh, I am based in Lenapehoking, both in the city and also three and a half hours north of the city, which is where I am right now.
EB: Very nice, in the Hudson Valley?
EJ: No, further west. I am in the Catskills west of Hudson Valley.
EB: Lovely. So, now, yeah, take it away about the origin of Catalyst, should you feel so inclined.
EJ: Sure, yeah. I mean, I am a dance maker, but I think about dance very broadly. I think about the performance gatherings I make as opportunities to create time together. When we’re gathered, we can get to know one another in different ways, some of those very intimate ways, some of those political ways, some of those body ways. I also think about dance making as thought, as provocation, and as action in the world. I think of it as writing and creating new forms of knowledge, and I think about it collaboratively – that’s collaborations with humans, but also collaborations with more than human kin. Catalyst is the home for all of my work, and I have been working as an independent choreographer and as the director of Catalyst for 27 years.
EB: Wow, that’s amazing.
EJ: And Kai, I love when you tell the story of when we met. How we got rolling.
KR: Emily and I were both attending a gathering in Riverside, California, a long time ago, and I ended up witnessing and participating in a procession that Emily had curated for us as part of this gathering. We were a group of indigenous dance makers and choreographers, scholars and academics, people who write alongside and think alongside dance practices. It was when my daughter was very young. She was really tiny, I think, actually, she was still breastfeeding. So it was a very, very difficult time for me to be away from her. And during this procession, we ended up thinking about decolonial love. We were prompted by Emily to think about relations and portals. Our bodies were making these circular kinds of movements, and at one point during the procession we ended up resting. Emily was moving her body in a way that was like she was visiting us as we rested. One of the prompts that she had articulated for us was to travel, so we were thinking about how our bodies were in relation with what was underground, thinking about the root systems and how they travel tentacularly through space and time. During that procession, I ended up visiting with my daughter, who was back in Ontario, Canada – which was far from where I was. I remember feeling this intimacy with her, with Gracie, through this processive kind of decolonial movement practice, which had us thinking about scales of space and time differently. And so it was in that context that I was able to experience the work that Emily does, and to create an intimacy, a relationship between us that was like, oh my gosh, this is what it’s about. It’s about decolonial love, it’s about creating these portals for kin making and kin relating processes.
EB: Wow.
KR: Yeah, it was really meaningful for me. And I was just like, oh my gosh, I love this woman. Like, who are you? We’ve been kind of like sisters ever since.
EB: How old is your daughter now?
KR: She’s 14.
EB: Do you yourself have a background in dance, Kai?
KR: I do, a long, long, long, long time ago. I was in dance classes most of my teenage years.
EB: Emily, what is your background in dance that led you to Catalyst and The Fires? What was the sort of moment in which politics and dance merged? I also studied dance growing up, and I would say that your approach is not necessarily the most common method of pedagogy.
EJ: Yeah, I think that’s probably safe to say. My first moment of understanding was in the woods where I grew up. I had my arms wrapped around a tree, it must have been pre-K, and I was quite young, but I was holding onto this tree and I felt the tree sway and I could sense the roots. I was looking up at the branches and I remember this realization that I was dancing with this tree. And so to me, because that was my first understanding of dance as a form – my play in the woods – I think maybe that’s where the sense of what dance could be first began.
EB: Where are you from, Emily, originally?
EJ: I grew up in Alaska.
EB: Oh, cool. Very cool.
EJ: I’m from the Yup’ik Nation and grew up on Dena’ina land in Alaska.
EB: What was the origin of the fire pieces?
EJ: Yeah, the fires, we can talk about what they have come to be, but they came out of this project that I was doing called Then a Cunning Voice and a Night You Spend Gazing at Stars, which was this all-night project. It started at sundown and went until sunrise, and took place outdoors in New York City, on Randall’s Island. And Kai was part of that, she came from Toronto to activate some provocations and some lands and star-based thoughts. Probably it was like 2 to 3 in the morning, was your time slot?
KR: Yeah, that was my call time.
EJ: We had three separate fires going. In the middle of the night, there were different conversations happening at each of these three fires. And the piece was hosted on 84 quilts that we’d stitched together with communities in geographies of what’s called the United States and Canada and Australia and beyond. And the day after this performance, after we had spent all night together and had a shared meal together in the morning, the quilts moved from holding our bodies through the night on Randall’s Island over to Abrons Art Center, where they were being shared in an exhibit. And it just felt right that when that exhibit opened, which was later that week, that we also hold a fire at Abrons Art Center. I consider that the start of these kinstillatory fires. I went home from Abrons and I woke up in the morning, and I could smell the fire in my hair. I just remember reaching out to the folks at Abrons Art Center and saying, we gotta keep this going. And Kai and I have been thinking and learning alongside those fires ever since.
EB: Kai, will share your perspective of why you felt like this was something to continue?
KR: Yeah. Emily and I have been thinking with fire, with more than human, with stars, and writing about these relationships. We have these ongoing moments, through the pandemic, for example, when we just needed to write together. The fire had always been a collaborator, this co-thinker, co-writer, this being that kept us connected. It also kept us connected to what was going on in the world, kept us connected to the inequities that we saw particularly with COVID: who was deemed worthy of getting care and who wasn’t, which bodies were deemed worthy of life and which weren’t. The fire has been both a witness to and catalyst for these conversations. The kinstillatory fires have taken so many different forms, and have been hosted in different spaces. The fires in New York have been important in shaping the gatherings in relationship with the Indigenous stewards of the lands. It’s like honouring the histories of folks that put their bodies on the line, who really care about social justice and livingness of Two-Spirit, queer, BIPOC folks. And the fires have been a continuation of this process that began generations ago. The fact that both Emily and I are Indigenous, with matriarchs in our communities that have held fires in many, different ways really inspires the work. The fire can take place in urban spaces and can still be an Indigenous relational fire. It’s tending to those relations that are in the cities, those folks that have been dislocated from their home territories because of war, because of injustice, because of violence.
EB: I, unfortunately, have not had the ability to attend one of these events, Emily, could you maybe speak to how you’re able to incorporate movement into this?
EJ: Kai and I talk a lot about how we lightly curate the fire. To us, there are multiple invitations. First, I think, it’s the fire inviting transformation. And how the fire is inviting transformation at different times is different in relation to what’s happening in the world. And so we listen. And so then our invitation to other artists and activists and organizers is in relation to that. There are different people who are invited to share each time a fire is hosted. And those sharings have been activism, they have been music. Those sharings have been poetry or spoken word or food or shared skills- all different ways to invite listening, understanding, and relationship making. Then Kai and I try to craft an invitation outward to the community and to audience members to come together with us at the fire.
EB: Can you speak to your partnerships with Abrons? Where do you see their mission overlapping with yours?
EJ: I can speak to how our relationship has grown. It’s pretty incredible to work with an institution over eight years and to do it on a fairly regular and consistent basis. And because the fires are so important to be held regularly and are so, what is the word? Flexible?
EB: Adaptable?
EJ: Yeah, I’m coming back to that, like the fire is leading in a way, right? Like during COVID, for example, when we couldn’t gather as a community, Kai and I were holding the fires in our own respective places and asking folks to gather from where they were. And so Abrons was still part of that, even though we weren’t holding a gathering at Abrons. When it’s raining a lot and we’re not able to hold a fire outdoors, Abrons works with us on ways to still host, to still hold the kinstillatory gathering. Or at other times when there have been different political or activist moments that are really important to tend to, we’ve held processions from the gathering space of the fire to places of action. There have been a lot of growth and learning moments with Abrons. Abrons as an institution that has its own responsibilities to the neighborhood and to audiences and to its programming. Kai and I, as artists and organizers, have our vision. The invitations and the way in which we craft the invitations is very important to us. The programming of the fire is very different, it’s a different way of curating than other programming at Abrons. And so the question is how do we learn together? How do we learn to host fire through fire? How do we learn to host fire through rupture? How do we learn to host fire through the destruction of a local park? How do we learn to host fire through joyous moments, you know? I’m grateful that Abrons has learned a lot alongside us.
KR: In terms of the fire and what form the fire takes, there are these sort of like embers that have been tended to. So the ember begins with the invitation, as Emily said, and the invitation for us is like the most important thing. And part of that is sort of like an ethical radical citation practice too. When you’re working with people in communities and artists and institutions, how do you create something that is ethical in terms of shout outs? It’s important to name artists, it’s important to name context. And oftentimes it doesn’t fit within a particular word count, so ethical citational practice needs to take up its own space. Also, we are movement crafters of language, so we work with language very intentionally. If the English language can’t do what it needs to do, then we create our own words. Like Kinstillations, for example, Kinstillists. And then a lot of our language also comes from Black radical thoughts and traditions, from Indigenous radical thought and traditions, so we’re also bringing together all of these knowledges and all of these histories and narratives in our invitations themselves. And sometimes, yes, I can’t make it across the border or something happens to the embers themselves – but the fire exists in sort of fractal forms, too.
EJ: What Kai was just speaking about, it brings me back to what Kai was sharing about our first meeting and time together. The fires do employ strategies of time and space travel. They have since the beginning. Kai and I are learning about those strategies and technologies through this time with fire.
EB: Has the current administration, Kai, threatened your ability to come across the border as often as you might want?
KR: The hardest thing for me is not being able to visit with Emily right now.
EJ: And that’s why our gatherings are so important. They can never be stopped because we have these technologies with space and time travel. While Kai and I can’t necessarily always be in physical proximity, in some ways we are always visiting. Even if Kai can’t physically be in New York, Kai is always present at those fires. I’m really grateful for that.
KR: The fire is really teaching us alternative ways of relation. And we do lean on the fire a lot for that. We are asking a lot of the fire to hold this relational space with people that can’t physically be together. And we really felt that during COVID as well, when the fire became this portal. That’s one of the main gifts of a fire – a gathering.
EB: Emily, clearly your dance practice has been infused with an ethics of care, with an emphasis on communion – empathy, acknowledgement of the other, a relational ethic, I mean. Dance historically is so much about rigor and technique and constant improvement. How have you been able to infuse what is a pretty rigid paradigm with this philosophical ethic?
EJ: When I decided that I wanted to figure out what dance was, I was a freshman in college. As I had already mentioned, I didn’t study it growing up. I wasn’t a part of any of that training that some folks get to do when they’re younger. But in college, dance presented itself to me as a very powerful form. My roommate had passed away very suddenly.
EB: I’m so sorry.
EJ: I was in a process of grieving and taking one of my dance classes that I just signed up for. It was a modern dance class – beginning modern – and we were studying improvisation. I was still very much in grief. It was through this improvisation with my eyes closed, as I listened to the teacher guide us through these different prompts, that I could see and feel the grief just kind of shift away from my body a little bit. And it almost felt like a jolt, even. It wasn’t necessarily gentle. That loss was something I thought would be really hard for me forever. When you’re in grief, you think it will always be that way. But when I improvised it moved just a little bit. And it was in that moment that I had that realization that this was the dance, it was the dance doing this for me and with my body. I was like, wow, dance must be very powerful. I want to know more about this. I want to know what this is. So my inquiry has always been what’s the power here? When we are vulnerable, when our movement is cellular, when our movement is about grief, about rage or about joy – what is that? How much power comes from within our bodies? That’s where my inquiry has always stemmed from.
KR: One thing that’s always struck me about Emily’s work, especially the durational practice, is the breath, the breathing that happens again and again and again, because what these cellular memories really require is this repetitive, ongoing work. And for me, the durational practice of the fires and of the work itself, of the choreography, is what I think is going to carry us forward.
*Additional transcription work was completed by Lucia Frank, one of our 2025 Editorial interns.
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