The Several Jill Johnston

Everyone is more or less familiar with the American journalist, art critic, performer, and feminist writer Jill Johnston (born Jill Crowe, May 17, 1929–September 18, 2010). The question is which Jill, or “JJ” we are talking about. Is it Johnston the critic, Johnston the dancer or Johnston the lesbian feminist? In dance and performance scholar, Clare Croft’s recent monograph Jill Johnston in Motion: Dance, Writing, and Lesbian Life and the accompanying anthology on Johnston’s writing, The Essential Jill Johnston Reader that she has edited, Johnston is also introduced according to categories such as “audience” and “writer”. The book is structured across these categories, as per which Johnston’s activities are historicized from her engagement as dancer and critic within the circuits of Judson church, to her alteration of spectatorship to performance. Discussing Johnston’s lesbian activities throughout, Clare Croft introduces the notion of ‘lesbian adjacencies’, in compliance with which entanglements across lesbian experiences, subjects and contexts are articulated.1 Reading the monography, it stands out as clear that Croft herself has approached the subject of Johnston in this way. Namely, rather than as an object of study, Jill Johnston is approached as a fellow lesbian. Croft’s resulting way to handle Johnston’s archive, which she is the only one who have accessed to date, stands out in the same manner. Rather than underscoring historical facts, gaps and contradictions in the subjective assembly of traces from Johnston’s eclectic life –that her partner at the time, Ingrid Nyboe, still handles– Croft reflects on every event that is archived, every text that is drafted, as if it was still in action. The title of the monography –Jill Johnston in Motion– is suitable for the purpose. Johnston is indeed in motion, but behind all that activity, it is hard to decipher who she really was. This causes, on the contrary, a problem for Croft’s intimate approach to this figurehead. Is it Johnston that Croft approaches intimately, or is it one of the many images that Johnston created, or let be created by others, of herself

Dance · Feminism · Lesbian · Performance art · Cultural History and Identity Formation · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Theatre and Performance Studies