Performances

Educationally inspiring and creatively engaging programs that bring poetry to life. Through interactive stories, poems and dance, Johanna Walker sparks interest in the arts and engages students’ imaginations. Students leave the show smiling, inspired to write poems and make dances that tell the stories they live!

Dancing Words: Poetry with a Twist
In this solo show, Johanna performs classic poems by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman, contemporary poems by Billy Collins, Sonia Sanchez and Jane Cortez, poems by other schoolchildren and poems by herself to show the many ways poetry can be used to say all the things we want to say to each other and the different ways people find to say it. She uses dance to say the things that words can’t quite say alone. The show includes interactive segments that allow the students to provide material for improvisational poems-and-dances-on-the-spot. Johanna invites students and teachers to come to the stage and participate in an improvisational structure themselves, and the whole audience will build a dance-in-their-chairs that we’ll all perform together in unison.

Poetry Out Loud
A high-energy performance for high school students, Johanna performs poems by herself and a wide range of contemporary and traditional poets, using movement, rhythm and voice to bring the poems to life. Copies of the 20-25 poems are sent in advance of the visit so students are familiar with the poems before they see the show. Portions of the show are interactive, inviting audience members to help build improvisational, on-the-spot poems

This is Making Me a Wise Old Woman
In this program for college-age students or adults, Johanna performs poems by and about women to tell the story of a Woman living in the world. Poems by Sharon Old, Patricia Smith, Sonia Sanchez, Marge Piercy, Mary Oliver and Johanna herself make this a rich and inspiring program bound to resonate with men and women alike. Great for Women’s History Month.