Last fall, Raissa Simpson received a video from Robert Henry Johnson, who had been Simpson’s close friend and mentor for more than a decade. In the video, Johnson, a widely beloved San Francisco dancer, choreographer, poet and playwright, was pouring his heart out singing the song “Young, Gifted and Black.”

“He was playing a piano, an upright piano that probably needed a lot of tuning,” Simpson, director of Push Dance Company, remembered. “But the beauty of the song was how Robert can do that — take something broken and fix it so that it becomes melodic and singing.

“And at the end of the song, he said something about wanting to live a long time.”

Looking back, Simpson wonders if that video, which Johnson sent to several other close friends, was his goodbye. As Johnson’s birthday approached and passed in January, friends and family became concerned about his silence, especially on Facebook, where he frequently posted poems to a large and admiring audience.

在3月,约翰逊的表妹,Shante Saulsberry,费尔ed a missing persons report and soon learned that Johnson had died at age 54 on Dec. 16, 2022, his body held as a John Doe by the San Francisco coroner.

The exact circumstances of Johnson’s death may never be known, but the outpouring of love from the Bay Area artistic community was immediate.

“It’s helped me get through the grief,” Saulsberry said of the many testimonies to Johnson’s talent, including an online memorial led by radio host Wanda Sabir, and a gathering at the Bayview headquarters of Zaccho Dance Theatre, whose acclaimed works Johnson had often performed.

“Growing up with him, I knew he was a professional in the dance world and good at his craft,” Saulsberry continued. “But I didn’t realize until hearing everyone’s reflections that he was just, wow, this brilliant.”

On Saturday, May 27, Johnson’s family will finally hold their official remembrance at San Francisco’s African American Arts and Culture Complex.

Johnson lived his entire life in the Western Addition, the only child of guitarist Robert Gonzales and jazz singer Lady Mem’fis. He accompanied his mother to rehearsals and performances and showed an early gift for dance, becoming one of the first students to graduate from the San Francisco School of the Arts.

Johnson then received a full scholarship to the San Francisco Ballet School, and while studying there was noticed by William Forsythe, one of the world’s most influential choreographers. Forsythe helped arrange for Johnson to choreograph for the Bavarian State Opera Ballet, according to a 1998Los Angeles Times profileof Johnson and his troupe, the Robert Henry Johnson Dance Company. Johnson also choreographed for the Oakland Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre and Ballet British Columbia.

Small of frame and astonishingly fluid, he seemed to effortlessly assimilate any dance style and transformed every movement phrase he approached, according to choreographers who worked with him.

“The back of the theater opened up to the buttes and the sky, and I remember Robert leaping off a piece of the set and people just being stunned by the ease that he lived in his body,” said Robert Moses, artistic director of Robert Moses’ Kin, performing alongside Johnson with the Santa Fe Opera in the early 1990s.

An intense spirituality coursed through not only Johnson’s dancing, but also his writing. In 1993, his first play, “Poison Ground,” was performed in the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, later to be produced by the Hartford Stage Company. Other works, including “The Othello Papers,” were commissioned by San Francisco’s African-American Shakespeare Company and the Buriel Clay Play Reading Series.

Laura Elaine Ellis, co-founder of the Bay Area’s Black Choreographers Festival, felt honored when Johnson asked to dance her solo “When Strength Is My Weakness” in 2003. “He took it to a place my body would not have gone,” Ellis said, remembering the “hyperkinetic” state of fretting he brought to a section of improvisation. The performance won Johnson a nomination for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award.

“He had a way with his body that was flowing and otherworldly,” recalled Halifu Osumare, founder of Oakland’s CitiCentre Dance Theatre and professor emerita of African American and African studies at UC Davis, who worked with Johnson as a company apprentice when he was a teenager. “Had he been in a dance market larger than the Bay Area, he would have gone even higher in terms of recognition as a choreographer, dancer and theater artist.”

Johnson’s two greatest loves, Saulsberry said, were his mother and Jesus, with Johnson a devout member of the San Francisco Christian Center. He disbanded the Robert Henry Johnson Dance Company in the late 1990s to focus on solo work, but also to care for his mother. When Lady Mem’fis died last year, “he was facing emotional battles and knew to lean into his faith,” Saulsberry said.

In one of his last communications, Johnson texted a friend that he wanted to make a dance with that friend and Saulsberry. After learning of his death, Saulsberry, a gospel music composer, began choreographing a work for Saturday’s memorial.

“We’ll be dancing with him,” she said, “just as he asked for.”

Rachel Howard is a freelance writer.