Arts Activities Support

100% of artists participating in this project indicated that they experienced artistic growth and diversified their vocabulary of highly physical movement. More than 25% of audience members saw Contempo Physical Dance for the first time. Marciano Silva dos Santos and Carl Flink, the choreographers, grew artistically, challenged their thinking and expanded their repertoire of highly physical movement. At the beginning of the creative process they began with one choreographer creating a movement idea and then the other choreographer taking that idea and modifying it. Marciano said that he came up with new ideas because he was able to come from a different starting piece, shifting Carl’s vocabulary and fusing it with Afro-Brazilian subtleties. Carl challenged Marciano to use more partnering work and movement that went upside down. Marciano, on the other hand, challenged Carl to use more polyrhythmic movements. Both choreographers used highly physical movements and it was interesting to watch the dancers increase their range of movement with Contempo dancers finding the partnering sections more difficult and Black Label Movement dancers finding movements like shoulder and hip isolations challenging while moving so physically. By the end of the process both Marciano and Carl were able to anticipate some of the creative choices of the other and it was less obvious who was making which choice. In the end, the work was a seamless collaboration and even the choreographers couldn’t tell you who came up with which idea because they worked together so much. The collaborative project resulted in a duet for Marciano and Carl and an ensemble piece performed by both companies. There were four public performances at the Cowles Center in Minneapolis. We had several audience engagement activities leading up to the performance and two post-performance talkbacks. We had both regular Contempo and regular Black Label Movement audience members who were being exposed to the other company for the first time and learning about the creative process. A comment we heard several times from different people in the audience was that a collaboration such as this could go very wrong because of such different aesthetics and approaches, but we were successful. Before the premiere of this collaborative work, both companies showed a piece from their respective repertoires. Audience members stated they could clearly see both companies in the premiere and that the voices worked well together. Both choreographers and companies worked really well together. The only major challenge was for the choreographers to agree on costume design because they had drastically different opinions, but through conversation they were able to resolve their differences. There isn’t much we would change about this project if we had the opportunity to repeat it. And we hope we do have the opportunity for future collaborations. The only thing the choreographers discovered was that they weren’t getting anywhere at the beginning during their initial planning meetings, which were verbal in nature. But they found that the collaboration flowed when they were working kinesthetically together, so I think they would go straight to the studio in the future. We successfully reached our intended community both in terms of our artists and audience. We had a cast of racially diverse dancers with artists of color representing more than half of the ensemble. We also did significant outreach activities including an episode on TPT television highlighting the creative process, spotlights in local newspapers and magazines, e-blasts, social media promotion, and Contempo’s audience advocates program among other activities. This resulted in a racially diverse audience, including adults, seniors, students and children. We performed at the Cowles Center, which is an ADA compliant venue, we had discounted tickets for students, seniors and children and student rush tickets were available. We also had an ASL interpreter for one of our shows. He interpreted during the show and for our post-performance talkback. All of our pre and post community outreach activities were free of charge and open to the public and we offered a series of open classes, open rehearsals and discussions with Marciano and Carl. These experiences deepened the understanding of the work and the collaborative nature of this project and we could see from the questions asked at our talkback that the audience was intrigued and engaged. Our actual population benefiting was different that our estimated in terms of age groups. We had a good turn-out of students, seniors and adults, but we had less children than anticipated because we did not do a student matinee performance. We had hoped to do a matinee, but at the time of our proposal it was only a possibility, and we made it clear in our application that our conversations about it was only preliminary and it was not confirmed. We, in collaboration with the Cowles Center, reached out to numerous groups to share the opportunity. We could not find enough interested student groups to attend due to the time period of our performances. It was late enough that all schools were out, but early enough that all summer school programs were just beginning or hadn’t started at all. In the future, we will avoid this time frame because we found it difficult to engage a K-12 audience.