THEME SECTION SPONSORED BY HAIR AND NAILS
Regarding Space
Thoughts from some of our favorite artists, makers and space-owners on the current state of SPACES in the Twin Cities dedicated to making/performing.
Anna Marie Shogren: Dance Artist
The work of artists will continue and likely thrive in an unharnessed openness. A lot of us exit in a space of self-production and artist made opportunity. Perhaps the artists with the best business skills will fall behind, but I’m ok with that. I am grateful for Steve and Miriam and may the Bowl never be swallowed by condominiums, but I am eager for the new growth.
Aeysha Kinnunen: Clothing Designer; Chair, Third Space
A robin flew in through the window of my studio this morning, as if it had come to visit.
It stood tall in the middle of the floorboards, as if it had come to witness.
We are in the midst of a raucous spring. New growth is as inevitable as the coming of the summer.
And yet, the space from here to blooming asks us for a thirsting reach; to press up out the ground.
I guess, it’s time to practice what we preach; to find a few more dares to double down.
Ryan Fontaine: Artist, Co-Owner Hair+Nails Contemporary Art
I disagree that this is cyclical. There will be new performance/exhibition spaces to the extent that real, individual humans with vision and follow-thru decide to take on the often thankless task of finding and running new spaces. Also, current real estate dynamics make it much more difficult to discover and fund suitable venues: there just aren’t as many raw/undiscovered warehouse/commercial buildings out there.
It could be fertile, in that the loss of foundational venues creates a need for new organizations and operational models that can potentially shake up everything, but whether or not this actually happens is TBD. How many out there have the commitment to run a space for 35 years?! (Thank you Steve + Miriam!!!)
Arwen Wilder: Choreographer, HIJACK
Since reading the most recent dance closure announcement (Zenon) and watching Chris Schlicting’s show on a concrete floor in a little room, I keep imagining the TC dance community like Princess Leia in the trash compactor scene, making dances for smaller and smaller, harder floored, harder to get to, smellier, less equipped venues. Americans drive big cars, drink big coffees, have big refrigerators, great plains, giant redwoods, and are cultural descendants of a manifest destiny logic. This gives us our relationship to space, which is evident in modern and jazz dance. The American sense of space necessarily will change as the oceans rise and resources become scarcer and swathes of the United States become uninhabitable. But we will keep making dances. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago where, in the 80s, a couple of cardboard boxes on a street corner was a dance floor. I like making dances for the awkward spaces, the condemned basements, abandoned offices and concrete staircases. I like sharing with things other than dance. But I also appreciate being in conversation with my history. At Colorado College, I loved going across the floor of the enormous gym where Modern Dance history films showed Hanya Holm teaching in 1945. When we dance in a place that other people have danced, their DNA get on us. We breathe in their sweaty exhales. Their ideas may mingle with ours. Where we make our work does change what kind of work it is, kitchen dances, outside on the grass dances, quiet smooth maple floor studio dances, we take our instructions from the space, from its architecture, and contents, its size and the softness of the floor, the politics and ghosts and memories of the space.
Miriam Must: Co-Founder, Red Eye Theater
Don’t drink the Kool-Aid. I say, “bullshit” to the idea that the loss of spaces for creating and presenting performance is part of some natural cycle. Access to performance spaces is essential to a vibrant arts community. That includes rehearsal rooms, as well as technically equipped theaters where work can be developed and staged for audiences. As the focus in arts funding shifts from organizational to individual support, I wonder where the hell the work is going to be produced and/or presented or why the funding community feels every artist should have producing skills in addition to their creative talents? We need spaces committed to alternative work, spaces where artists hear “yes” to their ideas far more often than at larger, institutional spaces. Hello to hot pink stage floors, to sets made of dry ice, to mountains of sand, piles of leaves and exploding soda bottles, to moving the audience on stage, to unexpected performances in the nooks and crannies. These kinds of essential spaces emanate a tangible sense of possibility, offering artists the opportunity to make a creative home where their explorations can develop and evolve, and audiences the chance to encounter work that surprises in ways they never imagined.
Jeffrey Wells & Sam Johnson: Choreographers, SUPERGROUP
The small, independent, experimental, contemporary, dance, dance/theater, interdisciplinary performance communities that we are a part of are in a real tough moment right now in terms of space and infrastructure. Our work is different from other art work; it’s incredibly labor intensive, it relies so much on collaboration and community support, it’s often made in big time and big space but ultimately exists for a very limited time, it is expensive, and it is not mass-marketable (that’s often the point). There has been a big push to reallocate money directly to artists – a commendable idea in and of itself – and a no brainer, especially when the question is “should artists be given more money directly to do their work?” Of course we should, but what is the context? Sure, as artists we would love more money handed directly to us, but as performance makers, we’re trying to consider what that means for our spaces, our programs, our administrative colleagues and supporters. If we have money, but nowhere to produce, no infrastructure to rely on or plug into, no physical gathering spaces to share our work and champion our importance as a field, then we start to lose something. Maybe it makes us more divided. Artists are left on their own, there’s perhaps an erosion of a sense of belonging or being part of something greater, there’s an ever-accelerating hustle just to find a place (most of the time too small, too expensive, too not-made-at-all-for-performance) to do it. Maybe the conversations get more diffuse. Maybe the work gets more “useful.” This isn’t all good or all bad. Cycles will happen. There still won’t be enough money for anyone (let alone everyone) to make a living wage, or at least not for more than a couple of years. Hopefully new places, new spaces, new gatherings will emerge, but maybe they won’t. We tried to boil this response down to an anecdote or a couple of sentences but it didn’t work. We’re left with this overlong spilling and some big questions: How do we (can we) become less reliant on arguably broken and definitely fickle sources of support? How in a financially under-resourced field, do we find ways to stop identifying with scarcity? What are the new and emergent models (resource sharing, cooperative structures…) (that we are most likely already using in our art making) that can be applied to creating new supportive and adaptive spaces and places to share our work?
Paula Mann: Choreographer, Time Track Productions
I’ve had an awareness of space since childhood, but it really came into focus when I began dancing at age 14. My training included several movement styles and improvisation. The experience of improvisation allowed me to embody space as an essential partner in the dance. Whether it was my own internal space, the space between bodies, how energy interacted with space, the distance between people and events or the simply the space that surrounds us, what I learned about space through improvisation has stayed with me for all these years.
Thinking back to great spaces I have known…….
From the late 1970’s through the 1980’s I lived in New York’s East Village. I would venture across Broadway, through Washington Square Park, heading to the dark, empty streets of Soho, with its pre-war abandoned factories looming over cobblestone streets. Artists lived and performed in these roomy lofts, with enough space to dance and seat an audience. It was an intoxicating time; experimental performances, gallery openings, weird parties and greasy corner cafes out of the 1950’s. A tangible excitement permeated these events. I coveted the loft spaces, hoping that after I graduated I might set up a studio in one. But by the late 1980’s, big money came in, renovating the old spaces and rents went up, driving artists out. Soho, the way I remember it anyway, was no more.
What the community needs right now….
Over the last two years particularly, we have seen several beloved performance spaces fall to gentrified interests. There are only a small handful of affordable rental options left in Minneapolis and St Paul. As our community continues to expand, independent choreographers and small companies will be unable to produce performances, rehearsals or support emerging artists programs.
As moving performing artists, we need space. And not every space is right for every artist, of course. Our needs for space are as varied as the community. The space must be accessible to a broad spectrum of performing artists. Great art doesn’t flourish in a culture when only the most commercially successful survives or thrives.
We need an alternative community space designed for movement oriented performance. And one that is affordable for all. A multi-purpose, flexible performance space for presenting work, classes and workshops. A center for all, not just one company. One that promotes diversity in work, form and viewpoint, welcoming all forms of dance to a wide range of audiences. A space where emerging and established artists intermingle. A space with access to public transportation, preferably outside of the downtowns. A place to experiment and grow as an artist.
While I miss the spaces we’ve lost over the years, there is always the promise of better times. Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Jerome, McKnight Foundations and MN State Arts Board, the community needs your help! Step up!
April Sellers: Choreographer, April Sellers Dance Collective
show up show up show up
remain leave leaf love
you can persevere and still lose
shift and still lose
love and still lose
that’s not the story line
be the remnant years later you see what losing won
excerpt from Line Out of Line written by Minneapolis Dancer and Poet Su Smallen Love
Morgan Thorson, Choroegrapher
Valerie Oliviero, Performance Maker, Designer
Co-Owners of MOVO
MORGAN: I have a strong tie to several of the spaces that are no longer, Intermedia Arts for example. I feel a lot of sadness about losing that space particularly because there was so much important work happening there, for years. I was lucky to be involved in the very first public exhibition there, before the space was even renovated. It was a dynamic space in that it presented a lot of different kinds of work and was a home for artists and communities of all kinds, already existing on the margins. For example, Vulva Riot happened there for years. It coalesced art, community and social engagement.
VAL: I have a lot of frustration around the loss of arts spaces in the Twin-Cities. I’ve only lived here a little over 6 years but I have witnessed the closing of so many legendary spaces. Before I moved here, I was told of Intermedia Arts (I shot a dress rehearsal for Laurie Carlos in the late 2000s in Illinois), other friends told me about Patricks, Red Eye and Bedlam.
I think of it as a kind of displacement, maybe even an eviction. A kind (continuing) removal of a community’s way to get together without the availability of a clear alternative space… and although I have absolutely no doubt that we are a resilient community and that we will find a way, the recent battering so to speak has been alarming and unnerving. It’s also the kinds of spaces – spaces for People of Color, Queer, Trans, Spaces for experiments, failure …The Red Eye Theater had barely a few months notice before it was lost so there is also a sense of instability that has surfaced – The spaces that you lean on and love may be lost at any given moment.
MORGAN: At this point in this dialogue, I feel like I want to respond to the notion of change; how to embrace change. I certainly struggle with the ramifications of gentrification and people making money off of spaces and artists and communities losing spaces to capitalistic aspirations but at the same time I think about how to imagine optimistically while acknowledging disappointment and grief. I feel I am at a place with MOVO where I’m trying to think beyond the parameters of my experience with space, at the same time, embracing what has happened so far in the twin cities. That has helped me through these changes in our community. I also look to my peers, who are so purposefully and intentionally manifesting art space: Marcus Young, Kristin Van Loon, Ephraim Eusebio and many more. I am grateful for and inspired by their ingenuity and generosity, and want to model it, somehow.
VAL: the loss of spaces multi-layered is not just a performance space that is a space for gathering, for Community, for events, for meetings, for people who not only come for performance but also come for work, for maintenance, for friends, for help. If you walk by that space you might feel it’s vibration.
Morgan mentioned MOVO and for those who are unaware, Morgan and I have had a space that we call MOVO. We mostly rent it to the community to rehearse/prepare their work. We have had it for about a year and having run spaces before because it’s such a weird time in the cities there’s been some feeling of being pulled in many directions because there is a desire to hold or throw out a net to catch on to some of the things the communities have lost as a result from the loss of our spaces and we’re slowly coming to some sort of a movement but it’s been also hard because other communities not just the performance community are also feeling the space crunch. MOVO is in a multi-use building so we have to work in concert with other artists who are not necessarily used to the ways of making performance.
MORGAN: I think about where I’ve rehearsed here in Minneapolis and I’ve literally danced everywhere; inside, outside, in hallways, and in people’s homes. I rehearsed with Baraka de Soleil in the driveway at Intermedia in the 90’s. I remember half the ensemble refused because we were rolling around on gravel. Like I said, I feel sad but I’m thinking this community is so resilient. There will certainly be an outcropping of a lot of places and spaces for art and community gatherings. I think of Third Space and Hijacks’ Future Interstates at Cedar Cultural Center. Yay.
VAL: There is something about the consistency with which we continue to desire to make space for each other that really lifts me. very necessary.. I know a 92 year old woman who talks about embracing change to me every time we meet. I think it’s because she thinks i need to hear it. I think that it is a very artsy post-modern thing to say – well spaces are everywhere, everything is space. While there is truth is that, it is much more complicated. I think the key here is some rethinking of the way we take our spaces for granted – we don’t advocate enough for the spaces we love or visit often. Do we need to lose the May Day Parade before we advocate for Heart of the Beast? It takes a lot of resources to run a space and to keep it afloat. The stakes are higher for artists and it is important for artists to advocate for the spaces they care about. I hope to be much more in community with this issue and support spaces in ways that are needed. There is a lot of mourning and a lot of loss and I think that so much will come from this but we have to hold really close to our bodies these recent losses first.
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