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Jenny Olivia Johnson, Associate Professor of Music
Jenny Olivia Johnson
Associate Professor of Music
DIVE (Lucy’s Last Dance), 2020, Dive bar installation with interactive lighting, video, and audio from Jenny Olivia Johnson’s opera The After Time (2019), Courtesy of the Artist, Installation view of DIVE (Lucy’s Last Dance) by Jenny Olivia Johnson, Q20: Wellesley Faculty Artists, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA.
Artist’s Statement
DIVE (Lucy’s Last Dance) is the installation version of The After Time, a 90-minute opera for three voices, electronics, and chamber ensemble that I composed over a 19-year period (2000-2019). The After Time tells the story of what happens following the mysterious death of Lucy, an undergraduate female dancer at an urban women’s college. In the wake of Lucy’s tragic passing, two women are unexpectedly brought together: Erica, Lucy’s shy, admiring classmate, and Maureen, Lucy’s therapist, who is desperate for answers. As the story unfolds in fever-dream flashbacks, Erica reveals that she was with Lucy the night that she fell from the roof of their skyscraper dorm, but cannot remember exactly what happened because she was too drunk. The last place anyone else saw Lucy alive was with Erica, at a nearby dive bar. Nothing else is certain.
DIVE is an immersive reconstruction of the dive bar, one of the most important sets in the opera. Eighteen mysterious and cartoonish illuminated-manuscript paintings represent each of the scenes, and myriad trinkets, memorabilia, and photographs add richness to the story. The centerpiece of the room is an illuminated jukebox, which allows visitors to listen to any scene in the opera. Each track correlates to a painting of a corresponding scene, and triggers an atmospheric shift in lighting. Thus, the dive bar has many possible states, and visitors are invited to return as many times as they wish to experience the story very much as the protagonists themselves did: as fragmented memories, and as intense, sometimes overwhelming feelings of grief, confusion, eroticism, joy, and transcendence.
2009 PhD, New York University
2002 MM, Manhattan School of Music
2000 BA, Barnard College
http://www.jennyoliviajohnson.com/
Listen to selections from The After Time here.
Installation view of DIVE (Lucy’s Last Dance) by Jenny Olivia Johnson, Q20: Wellesley Faculty Artists, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA.
Installation view of DIVE (Lucy’s Last Dance) by Jenny Olivia Johnson, Q20: Wellesley Faculty Artists, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA.
Installation view of DIVE (Lucy’s Last Dance) by Jenny Olivia Johnson, Q20: Wellesley Faculty Artists, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA.
Acknowledgements
DIVE was conceived and built with significant conceptual and artistic contributions from Daniela Rivera and Lamia Balafrej. The music for DIVE comes from The After Time, an electroacoustic opera composed by Jenny Olivia Johnson between 2000 and 2019. The musicians included on this recording of the opera include P. Lucy McVeigh ‘11 (vocals), Alex Vissia (vocals), Mike Jones (vocals and trumpet), Yong Su Clark (flutes), Miriam Kapner (oboe), Gleb Kanasevich (clarinets), Cameron West (horn), Wil Dannenberg (horn), Isabelle O’Connell (piano), Morgan Doctor (drums), Lisa Liu (electric guitar), Brent Price (violin), Peter Gregson (cello), Eleonore Oppenheim (electric and contrabass), and Jenny Olivia Johnson (synthesizers, digital audio, and percussion). Many thanks are due to Christine Elise Chen ’14 for her contributions to the backup vocal arrangements in Scenes 2, 4, and 7, and to Thomas Ray Willis, whose beautiful sculptural work “In the Name of Love” (2018) is featured in this bar. I also thank David Boyer for finding me a bar, Andrew Kemp for help with building the jukebox, and Mark Beeman for helping build the bar support. The vocal parts for The After Time were tracked at the Banff Center for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, in January 2018 (with Henry Ng as head engineer), and at Oktaven Audio in Mount Vernon, NY, in April 2018 and July 2019 with Ryan Streber as engineer. The instrumental parts were tracked between August 2019 and January 2020 at Oktaven Audio, also with Ryan Streber as engineer. The After Time was supported by a generous grant from New Music USA in 2017, and by two Faculty Awards from Wellesley College in 2018 and 2019. Portions of the opera in progress were featured in workshop performances by Opera From Scratch in Halifax, Nova Scotia (2013), directed by Janice Jackson and featuring vocal performances by Nicole London and Alondra Vega-Zaldivar; and by The Industry in Los Angeles, CA (2015), directed by Yuval Sharon and featuring performances by vocalists Justine Aronson and Lauren Davis with the Wild-Up Ensemble, conducted by Marc Lowenstein. Scenes 1, 12, and 17 from The After Time also appear on Jenny Olivia Johnson’s first album, Dont Look Back (Innova Recordings 2015), with performances by Megan Schubert (soprano), Jessica Schmitz (flutes), Eileen Mack (clarinets), Isabelle O’Connell (piano), Todd Reynolds (violin), Peter Gregson (cello), and Nathaniel Berman (conductor). Many thanks are also due to Vanessa Anspaugh and Ryan MacDonald for a very early and enduring contribution to DIVE: a short VHS video of “Lucy” dancing in a Red Hook dive bar in 2003.