MN Dance & the Ecstasies of Influences

MN Dance & the Ecstasies of Influences was launched in fall of 2014 in downtown Minneapolis and completed 12 separate events over its three-year run at The Cowles Center. The series continued in Saint Paul at the Ordway (2017-2018), the Minnesota Museum of American Art (2019), and the East Side Freedom Library (2020), always in partnership with The Cowles Center and the Performing Arts Archives. A people’s history of sorts, the final three events focused solely on dance practitioners from refugee communities based in Minnesota.

 

The series was developed in consultation with Kristin Van Loon, choreographer and curator; Judith Brin Ingber, choreographer and writer; Cecily Marcus, curator, and Kathryn Hujda, assistant curator of the Performing Arts Archives at the University of Minnesota Libraries; Nancy Mason Hauser, videographer, and Linda Shapiro, choreographer and writer, founders of the Minnesota Dance Pioneers Oral History Project.

 

The complete archives were placed as a collection at the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Performing Arts Archives. The multifaceted oral history project/lecture series, through its many goals, has established an extensive video archive of over 100 local dance makers’ stories, while visually mapping the relationships between individuals and assets embedded in the dance ecology in the Twin Cities.

​

Video clips by Flywheel Productions