Archive: Performances and Events

Toward Utopia is a contemporary dance performance exploring the conflict between my needs and the greater good.

Five performers interrogate the dynamics of individual struggles and attempt to connect across a chasm of miscommunication and animosity with raw emotion and physicality.

The work explores the desire to create a more perfect world, charting the emotional struggles of individualism versus the group dynamic, seeking a common purpose toward an equitable future. What will it take to create systemic change?

Performed by Leila Awadallah, Kendall Kramer, Carmen Lucia Lincoln, Johnathan Surber, and Roxanne Wallace

Choreography by Paula Mann

Projection by Steve Paul

Sound score by Tarek Abdelqader

Costumes by Laura Osterhaus Rosenstone

Lighting design by Mike Grogan

Come celebrate Twin Cities Ballet of Minnesota’s new season and welcome its new professional company members and apprentices! Learn about the exciting performances coming up this season, meet and mingle with its Artistic Directors, board, staff, and dancers, and watch a preview performance by the company.

There will be many opportunities for you to support TCB throughout the night, including a silent auction, handmade items for sale, and information about tickets for upcoming performances.

Families, friends, supporters, and the curious are all welcome!

Saturday, September 24 at 7:30pm
At TCB’s Dance Cube performance space in Lakeville.
Tickets: $10 suggested donation.

Join us Saturday, October 8, 2022 from 4:00-7:00pm at the Ballet Co.Laboratory studios for our first performance of the 2022/23 season: Dirty Dancing – a benefit performance for Ballet Co.Laboratory.

You’ll have the time of your life at Ballet Co.Laboratory’s fifth annual benefit performance and celebration! Take in a Dirty Dancing-inspired performance that will make you want to sway your body and move those hips! Proceeds will directly benefit the company dancers, students, and outreach efforts of Ballet Co.Laboratory.

Enjoy a performance by dancers of Ballet Co.Laboratory, themed sips and bites, as well as mix and mingle with the Company of Ballet Co.Laboratory.

Saturday, October 8, 2022
4:00-7:00pm
Ballet Co.Laboratory Studio Theatre

Learn more or purchase your tickets here: https://bit.ly/BCL5thanniversaryseason

Amidst the fall colors and falling leaves, dancers Sarah Baumert, Suzette Gilreath, Erika Hansen, and Leslie O’Neill perform in a new, site-specific Sound Garden installation at Texa-Tonka Park in St. Louis Park, along the majestic North Cedar Lake Trail, next to Victoria Lake. This premiere performance directed by composer JG Everest will also feature site-specific poetry by Chavonn Shen, Lisa Yankton and many more, along with site-specific photography and natural sculptures created in a community workshop by sculptor Jim Proctor and participants.

The Fall Sound Garden event is a free, family-friendly, self-guided event that features a sound installation of 60+ small, wireless speakers, distributed throughout the park, with live accompaniment by roving musicians and dancers, and live poetry and site-specific visual art. Each small speaker is playing a different part of the whole piece of music, creating a unique, immersive experience that is described as “a concert you can move through.”

The event is free, but registration is required due to limited capacity and possible program changes.

Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth

Visionary choreographer and MacArthur Fellow Kyle Abraham and pioneering producer/electronic music composer Jlin have come together to create a reimagining of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor through abstracted themes of afterlife, reincarnation, mythology, and folklore. In collaboration with costume designer Giles Deacon, and lighting and set designer Dan Scully, ten dancers from Abraham’s company – A.I.M by Kyle Abraham – take the stage to the music of Jlin, who has transformed Mozart’s score into an electronic opus that memorializes ritual and rebirth

If you missed the opportunity to see Minotaur in person, here’s your chance to catch what some audience members are calling “our best work yet.”

Buy a virtual ticket for an online viewing of the performance film, and you will get the link to the video, which you can watch anytime you choose between now and September 30. No matter what date you buy the ticket for, you can watch any time you choose before it closes at the end of September.

With Minotaur, Off-Leash Area Co-Artistic Directors, choreographer Jennifer Ilse and production designer Paul Herwig, lead a gender-diverse, multi-generational, and fiery cast to take audiences on a thoroughly interdisciplinary and utterly imaginative journey exploring the possibilities laid bare by the metaphorical beheading of the patriarchy. With this production, the artists ask: Once we’ve chopped off this monster’s head, can we really avoid its seductive power and finally be free of this labyrinthine system of oppression?

Dancers Nieya Amezquita, Gabby Garcia, Jennifer Ilse, Jesse Schmitz-Boyd, and Joseph Wurm perform Minotaur with contemporary dance and mask performance. Accompanying the performers and immersing the entire audience is live music and sound score by Dameun Strange, and a live animated projection design by OLA Co-Artistic Director Paul Herwig, with costume design by long-time OLA collaborator, Kym Longhi.

All together, Off-Leash Area takes the audience to an otherworldly space where memories of ancient myth, our urgent present, and dreams of an uncertain future collide.

Online now through September 30
Tickets: $10-$30

Get your tickets online at Off-LeashAreaMinotaur.eventbrite.com.

Acknowledgment: This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Off-Kilter is Off-Leash Area’s new cabaret performance program designed to highlight and support artists with disabilities both on stage and in the leadership of the program. Through Off-Kilter, Off-Leash Area makes space for and gives voice to artists with disabilities in the design and leadership of the program.

Curated by the Off-Kilter Leadership Group, the inaugural year is organized around the theme “Organ Recital.” Off-Leash Area was excited to partner with Young Dance, whose mission is transforming lives through movement.

Tickets are $5-30 sliding scale, suggested donation. Get your tickets online at OffKilterCabaret.eventbrite.com.

When you purchase a ticket, you’ll be emailed a link to the filmed performance of Off-Kilter Cabaret, which you can watch anytime between now and September 30 from the comfort of your own home! No matter what date you buy the ticket for, you can watch any time you choose before it closes at the end of September.

Seven artists share their captivating takes on the theme “Organ Recital” in the Off-Kilter Cabaret. Using dance, storytelling, theater, spoken word, puppetry, and performance, artists with disabilities explore the theme in wildly different ways, ranging from hilarious and thought-provoking to heart-breaking and profound.

Featuring the following artists: Braille, Atlas O Phoenix, Daniel Reiva, Amy Salloway, Pat Samples, Scott Sorensen, Young Dance

Acknowledgment: This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

TU Dance Community Gathering and Open House
Tuesday, August 30 from 5:00-7:00pm

Please join us for a TU Dance community celebration and open house to both welcome back our students, families, teaching artists and accompanists as we embark on a new school year and also invite new students and families to experience and learn more about The School at TU Dance Center.

Schedule:
5:00-5:30pm Welcoming activity with Kenna Cottman
5:30-6:00pm Sample Class: Children’s Creative Movement and Drum (ages 4-8)
6:00-6:30pm Orientation and Welcoming (TUDC families and new families!)
6:30-7:00pm Questions about programming/Registration for classes