Composer
“Orion is one of the most exquisite artists I know, whose musical work and personal spiritual commitment to collective liberation are profoundly intertwined. We’ve created multiple works together, from the minuscule to the epic, and from the overtly political to covert, narrative work. Their musical compositions are wildly sophisticated, and yet rooted in the inclusive beauty of ALL HUMAN VOICES, and a commitment to featuring a multitude of sounds with the voice as the window to each unique human soul.”
I understand myself, first and foremost, as someone dedicated to the question: “who and how might we be together most bravely in light of our collective liberation?” Thus, I am most drawn to work that sits at the intersections of theater and civil disobedience, theater and political organizing, theater as ritual and sanctuary, theater as space for collective action and collective healing.
I wrote my first musical at age 5, and I’ve been working as a composer, conductor, and director for over 20 years now. From ages 4-5, my babysitter placed paintings on the piano and invited me to play what I saw (she happened to be a composer!), encouraging me that there were no wrong notes, no wrong choices. This empowered me to call myself a composer before I could read or write or understand music theory, and this shaped me into an artist who has always colored outside the lines.
Recent Composition Highlights Include:
*Light Shining In Buckinghamshire at New York Theater Workshop, directed by Rachel Chavkin
*Hold, in Prelude NYC, created by Mei Ann Teo
*Forgive Us, You’re Dying: A Mortality Play, an NYU Tisch Mainstage, directed by Joshua William Gelb
*Primer For a Failed Superpower*, created by the TEAM, directed by Rachel Chavkin, music directed by Nehemiah Luckett (*I was music supervisor and one of many contributing composers)
*I’ll Never Love Again, at the Bushwick Starr, by Clare Barron, directed by Michael Liebenluft
Upcoming: Risk Hallelujah: an unapologetically Queer musical about Jesus, developed w/ Nehemiah Luckett
You can find my full C.V. here.
When Occupy Wall Street happened, I dropped everything to show up there full time, believing I would not be working as an artist anymore. Much to my surprise and delight, I came full circle! Connecting to making music in the context of civil disobedience and direct action, and in learning about anti-oppression facilitation, I found a way back into theater making that held my whole heart more than ever before and I grew into understanding, in a deeper way, the relationship between artmaking and justice and liberation.
My deepest musical love is the human voice, and specifically, many voices singing together. I have been writing music for theater since I was a child, but I really found my voice as a composer through singing in the streets and singing in the context of prayer and ritual. I believe when we sing together, what unfolds is more than the sum of its parts, and I find it extra transformative when everyone is invited to sing along! I celebrate choral singing not only as a thing of beauty but as a profound way of being together. For more on my philosophies of singing together, please see Voice Coaching
I am drawn toward the epically simple and the simply epic. My Autistic brain feels like an ocean of algorithms, and I am at my most at Home when writing and conducting expansive, layered, scores. And I love the multi-tiered universes that music in theater makes possible. At the same time, I revel in melody and accessibility and hummability. So I am at my best when I am allowing vastness and complexity in form and structure and ecosystem, while letting that grow from simple powerful melodic core content/seeds.
My core influences include sea shanties, hymns and praise songs, Appalachian and Slavic folk music, any song that is sung around a campfire and/or in the streets, rock music played with orchestras, Nina Simone, Caroline Shaw, Stephen Sondheim, and the Polyphonic Spree.
I am Transgender, and I carry a ferocious and fabulous commitment to Queering: to unruliness, to non-conformity, and to unsettling the dominant scripts that are built on power over others rather than power with others. I believe that my life, and our lives, literally depend on this. And I am rooted in this sacred unsettling not only in form and content, but also in process.
How we make is as important as what we make. Care for everyone’s well-being and relationships with each other is paramount! In every collaboration, I strive for fractal integrity with this mandate, so that every tiny piece is a reflection of the whole, and each element of a process is connected to the more just and liberated world that I know in my blood and my bones.
Every breath is a prayer, every word is a spell, and theater making is a sacred collective act. It is important to me to co-create rituals with the team to ground us in our connection to the earth, to our ancestors, and to who and to what our work is dedicated, and it is important to me to allow those rituals to be a core part of shaping the work that unfolds.
From the time I was a child, I have known that collaborative storytelling and singing together are some of the most powerful (and most ancient) technologies of transformation. Disrupting and transcending systems of dominance requires resilience with discomfort - resilience with bearing witness to pain and violence and also, equally as powerfully, resilience with tolerating joy and possibility. As a theatermaker, I am devoted to creating sacred containers to support our resilience with the discomfort of transformation, in all these ways and beyond.
For more on what shaped me, please see Roots and Linages.
Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to hear some demos of my work. Everything is meant to be heard in context and in person, but I am happy to share recordings within the frame of a conversation between us.
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In the Words of some wonderful collaborators:
“Orion Johnstone is a fearless, powerhouse composer. But that’s insufficient; because they are so much more than that. More than a commanding, artful lyricist and seasoned theater-maker. More than a deft experimenter in form and style. Orion uses music not merely to tell stories (they can do that too... and incredibly), but to envision a more harmonious way of existing. In any process they are the fulcrum of communication, the very essence of collaboration, enriching not only the room but endowing somehow the act of music-making with the spirit of solidarity, honesty, and ecstatic empathy.”
“My life has fundamentally changed for the better since meeting and working with Orion. As a collaborator they are generous, heart-led, and deeply invested in dismantling oppressive systems through music and theater-making; these concepts are also made real through the music they compose and arrange. Orion’s arrangement of Exuma’s “22nd Century” for Primer For a Failed Superpower’s multi-generational, multi-ethnic and beautifully diverse cast was the closing piece of the performance and a magic spell that continues to reverberate in my life.”
“Orion continually inspires me as a collaborator/composer/director, in the way they hold space and people as sacred and whole beings. The care, rigor, and thoughtful communication evident in all layers of their interactions speak to the way that SPIRIT and JUSTICE are moving at their core.”