JOHNSON: DANCE IS HER DEPARTMENT

When Karen Johnson heard in mid-April that she’d been chosen the country’s top college dancer, she didn’t know how to react. So she ran to her small dorm room at Cal State Long Beach and “smoked a cigarette for the first time.”

A few days later, the 24-year-old was still feeling slightly stunned by the honor. “I don’t want to get heady about it all,” she said, “so I feel a little detached from it.”

The American College Dance Festival Assn. had named Johnson “Best Performer” in the United States. She was selected from 2,000 dancers representing 150 colleges who competed in eight regional festivals for a $1,000 scholarship from Dance Magazine. Johnson will perform the work that earned her the honor tonight, Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the CSLB University Theatre.

Keeping cool about the award is probably a wise move for Johnson, who maintains a seven-day-a-week schedule full of much more than just dance. She is also a graphic artist who studies printmaking, creates sets and costumes for her choreographies, designs newsletters, flyers and posters and takes on odd jobs.

There’s also part-time work in a bookstore, tennis classes, summer mountain climbing and bicycle touring. But it’s the 40 hours a week she spends training, rehearsing and choreographing that have earned her national acclaim.

Johnson says she has been dancing “every day for the last five years” since her first class--taken while recovering from a knee injury she suffered at 19. Now a junior, she’s been at Long Beach since spring, 1983, after studying dance at Pasadena and Glendale city colleges.

Local choreographers and Cal State Long Beach dance instructors Jeff Slayton and Mary Jane Eisenberg agree that she is a strong performer with a gift for dramatic interpretation.

“Technically, she’s of a high-intermediate level,” Slayton said. “But artistically she’s quite far ahead; she’s quite an intuitive dancer and has a magic quality.”

“Karen moves very largely with a lot of focus on subtlety,” said Eisenberg. “She approaches a work personally, gets involved with what it requires from her and brings a special quality to it.”

Jennifer Donohue, a local dancer and choreographer, nominated Johnson in January for her solo performance in Tryntje Shapli’s “Scrimshaw II, (The Lighthouse),” an evocation of a seaman’s wife awaiting her husband’s return.

“Karen infused the material with a certain kind of passion,” Donohue said. “She had a physical and artistic strength.”

Johnson said her choreographic instincts (she’ll premiere a collaborative work in the Long Beach concerts) are “usually visually motivated and site specific” and credits those instincts with inspiring her interest in the visual arts. “I also like bringing poetry and live music, painters, artists and other non-dancers into my work. That’s the reason I like dance so much, because it’s multi-disciplinary.”

She is sure she’ll be able to continue to integrate her graphic art with a career in dance upon graduation, without having to choose one over the other.

“What I do now is what I’ll do outside of school,” she said. And to prevent a workload from becoming an overload, she’ll probably also do then what she does now: Steal a little relaxation.

“Fortunately, I do have time for nothingness,” said Johnson of her busy schedule, “like when I take a bath. By the end of the day, I have to have a hot bath.”