Anohni
Anohni Hegarty, styled as ANOHNI, is a British singer, songwriter, and visual artist based in New York City and Ireland.
She has presented solo work and as the lead singer of the band Anohni and the Johnsons, formerly known as Antony and the Johnsons.
She started her musical career performing with an ensemble of New York musicians as Antony and the Johnsons. Their self-titled first album was released in 2000 on David Tibet's label Durtro. Their second album, I Am a Bird Now, was a commercial and critical success, earning her the Mercury Music Prize.
In 2016, Anohni became the first openly transgender performer nominated for an Academy Award; she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, along with J. Ralph, for the song "Manta Ray" in the film Racing Extinction. Her debut solo album, Hopelessness, was released in May 2016 to wide critical acclaim, including another nomination for the Mercury Music Prize and a Brit Award. In 2023, as Anohni and the Johnsons, the artist released her sixth album, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross.
Early life
Anohni identified as transgender from an early age. In 1977, her family moved to Amsterdam for a year, and then, in 1981, they moved to the San Francisco Bay Area of California, settling in San Jose, where Anohni attended Lincoln High School and studied music and was an avid record collector. Her mother Barbara is a photographer and her father Brendan was an IBM engineer and in his later life a COO of Seagate Technology. She told The Telegraph in 2005, "I was listening to OMD, Kate Bush, Culture Club, Alison Moyet and especially Marc and the Mambas, which was this incredibly dark and emotional side project for Marc Almond." Anohni also recalled how she "saw reflection" in Culture Club singer Boy George.In 1990, Anohni moved to Manhattan to attend Experimental Theater Wing at New York University. In 1992 she founded the performance collective Blacklips, later known as Blacklips Performance Cult, with creative partner Johanna Constantine, and she spent the next several years singing in after-hours bars and clubs using pre-recorded cassettes as self-accompaniment as well as writing and directing late-night theatre productions.
Musical career
Antony and the Johnsons
After being awarded a grant from New York Foundation for the Arts for the 1996 production of The Birth of Anne Frank/The Ascension of Marsha P. Johnson at Performance Space 122, Anohni solicited accompanying musicians to record a number of songs she wrote in the early 1990s. The ensemble performed for the first time as "Antony and the Johnsons" at The Kitchen as part of William Basinski's installation "Life on Mars" in 1997. In 1999, the group began to perform more frequently at venues such as Joe's Pub and The Knitting Factory in New York City. British experimental musician David Tibet of Current 93 heard the recording and offered to release it through his Durtro record label; the debut album, Antony and the Johnsons, was released in 2000. In 2001, Anohni released a follow-up EP through Durtro, I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy, which, in addition to the title track, included a cover of a David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti song "Mysteries of Love", and a Current 93 song, "Soft Black Stars".Antony and the Johnsons' 2005 album I Am a Bird Now featured guest performances by Lou Reed, Boy George, Rufus Wainwright and Devendra Banhart. The album was released in North America by Secretly Canadian Records and in Europe by Rough Trade. It won the UK's Mercury Prize and was named Album of the Year by Mojo magazine. The band toured North America, Europe, Australia and parts of South America for a year and a half in support of I am a Bird Now. The song "Bird Gerhl" was featured in the soundtrack for the movie V for Vendetta.
Antony and the Johnsons collaborated with experimental filmmaker Charles Atlas and presented Turning in November 2006 in Rome, London, Paris, Madrid, and Braga, Portugal. The concert featured live video portraits of a group of women from the New York City underground. The Guardian called the piece "fragile, life affirming, and truly wonderful " Le Monde in Paris hailed Turning as "Concert-manifeste transsexuel."
In 2007, Anohni created an original soundtrack for a video by Nick Knight featuring the designs of Hussein Chalayan. She collaborated in 2008 with Prada to create a song called "The Great White Ocean" for their promotional campaign.
Antony and the Johnsons' 5-song Another World EP was released on 7 October 2008. Antony and the Johnsons' third album, The Crying Light, was released on 19 January 2009. The album peaked at number 1 on the European Billboard charts. Anohni has described the album as being "about landscape and the future." The album was mixed by Bryce Goggin and includes arrangements by Nico Muhly. Ann Powers wrote of The Crying Light for the LA Times online, "it's the most personal environmentalist statement possible, making an unforeseen connection between queer culture's identity politics and the green movement. As music, it's simply exquisite – more controlled and considered than anything Antony and the Johnsons have done and sure to linger in the minds of listeners."
After touring throughout North America and Europe in support of their new album, Antony and the Johnsons presented a unique staging of "The Crying Light" with the Manchester Camerata at the Manchester Opera House for the 2009 Manchester International Festival. The concert hall was transformed with laser effects created by installation artist Chris Levine. Antony and the Johnsons went on to present concerts with symphonies across Europe in Summer 2009, including the Opera Orchestra of Lyon, the Metropole Orchestra, Roma Sinfonietta and the Montreux Jazz Festival Orchestra. At Salle Pleyel in Paris, Anohni appeared in a costume designed by Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy.
Late 2010 saw the release of Thank You for Your Love EP and in October the full-length album Swanlights on Secretly Canadian and Rough Trade. Abrams Books also published a book edition of Swanlights featuring Anohni's drawings and collages with photography by Don Felix Cervantes. At the end of October, Anohni performed a concert in front of Chiaki Nagano's 1973 film "Mr O’s Book of the Dead" at Lincoln Center in New York City in commemoration of the passing of Kazuo Ohno.
In January 2011, Anohni was a guest on Wintergasten, a program on Dutch Television's VPRO channel, and was interviewed by Leon Verdonschot discussing her political and ecological viewpoints in reference to different film clips.
Anohni performed at the TED conference in Long Beach in 2011 in a session on "Radical Collaboration".
During the 2011 Manchester International Festival, Anohni was musical director for The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, a biography of the 'Godmother' of performance art, re-imagined by director Robert Wilson and co-starring Willem DaFoe, Marina Abramović and Anohni. The piece has subsequently been staged in Madrid, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Basel, Toronto and New York.
In January 2012, Antony and the Johnsons were presented by the Museum of Modern Art at Radio City Music Hall in "Swanlights", a collaboration with laser artist Chris Levine and set designer Carl Robertshaw. The performance was described by The New York Times in a review by Jon Parales entitled "Cries From the heart, Crashing Like Waves." This collaboration was also staged at the Royal Opera House in London in 2013 and at Teatro Real in Madrid in 2014.
Antony and the Johnsons released a live symphonic album in August 2012 entitled Cut the World featuring the Danish Radio Orchestra. The album features a spoken track called "Future Feminism" in which Anohni elaborates on her view of the connection between feminism and ecology. A video for the song "Cut the World" directed by Nabil Elderkin features Willem Dafoe, Carice van Houten and Marina Abramović.
Anohni was the curator of Meltdown 2012 at the Southbank Centre in London.
Anohni was "guest of honor" at the Melbourne Festival in October 2012, presenting a restaging of "Swanlights", as well as screening Charles Atlas' Turning, Lynette Wallworth's Coral: Rekindling Venus, and presenting Paradise, an exhibition of her drawings and collages.
Anohni performed with orchestra for the 2013 Spring Givenchy collection in Paris, singing You Are My Sister and expanding on the theme of "Future Feminism" in literature distributed at the event.
In June 2015, Antony and the Johnsons performed at Dark Mofo in Tasmania as a benefit in support of the Martu people of Parnngurr in Western Australia in their fight to prevent a uranium mine from being developed near their community by Canadian multinational Cameco and Mitsubishi. Anohni appeared with Martu representatives at a press conference at the MCA in Sydney and on ABC Australia's "Q and A" in further service of this cause.
Anohni collaborated with composer J. Ralph on the song "Manta Ray" from the environmental documentary Racing Extinction. The song received a nomination for Best Original Song at the 88th Academy Awards. Anohni released a statement expressing discomfort over the academy's decision to characterize her in the days leading up to the ceremony as having been "cut" from the line-up due to "time constraints", despite never actually having been asked to perform in the first place. She stated that "singing about eco-cide... might not sell advertising space" and that the system is one "of social oppression and diminished opportunities for transpeople that has been employed by capitalism in the U.S. to crush our dreams and our collective spirit". She did not attend the event.