Archive: Performances and Events

A multi-artist collaboration of independent choreographers from around the Twin Cities, giving their voices and visions.

October 19-21
7:30pm
TekBox Theater

Featuring:
Davente Gilreath – Healing, Love
Gerry Girouard – Honest, Energetic
Alarica Hassett – Weird, Liberated
Jim Lieberthal – Mystical, Dynamic
Jennifer Mack – Creatively Resilient
Christine Maginnis – Swashbuckling-Swan
Alys Ayumi Ogura – Appropriately Inappropriate
Rebecca Tanner – Embodied, Collaborative
Julie Warder – Influenced, Supported
Mary Willmeng – Devoted, Magnetic

Get tickets:
$20 for general admission.
$15 for students, seniors, and children under 12.
Fees included in ticket pricing.

Minnesota International Dance Festival is featuring México as their 2023 Guest Country.

Friday and Saturday night MNIDF presents Los Colores de México, a vibrant performance that brings together many voices of Mexican culture. Join us for the closure of the MNIDF workshops with a unique performance by the workshop participants and an artist panel with featured choreographers during the Saturday matinee. Celebrate the vast diversity that Mexico has to offer through all dance styles from pre-Hispanic to contemporary. We invite you to join us and enjoy the talented voices of local and international artists with roots in México.

Performances
October 20 at 7:30pm – Los Colores de México
October 21 at 1:30pm – Informal Showcase and Artist Panel – pay-as-able
October 21 at 7:30pm – Los Colores de México

Tickets
Public Admission: $25
Students: $15

Come out to Threads Dance Nexus for some family-friendly Halloween fun!

Our annual fall fundraiser will take place Saturday, October 21 from 3:00-5:00pm at Threads Dance Nexus. Come dressed in your Halloween best for festive games, a costume contest, treats, and of course, dancing!

Funds raised will go towards scholarships to eliminate barriers to participation for low-income and BIPOC students in the NexGen/Youth Dance Project (YDP) program and for the support of Threads Dance Project to effectively carry out the mission to connect our community through dance.

Saturday, October 21
3:00-5:00pm

Tickets: $10/advance, $15/day-of, free for kids under 5

Celebrating nine different dance artists across three fantastic weekends!
Talents collide onstage as our diverse dance community showcases an assortment of genres across this momentous festival. Each weekend features a new roster and a variety of experiences from percussive footwork to physical feats to modern expressions and more!

Saturdays at 7:30pm
Sundays at 2:00pm

Week One: October 21–22
Concerto Dance‘s Ode to Opus Jazz navigates the challenges of an explosive and turbulent world through resilience, friendship, and young love utilizing vernacular and classic jazz dance with theatrical flair. Kaleena Miller Dance premieres an interplay of minimal maximalism that abstracts inherent footwork patterns in response to the intricate sonic landscape. Afoutayi Haitian Dance, Music, and Arts Company’s Ti Sonson and the Power of the Drums, extracted from the trilingual children’s book of the same name, is a bright spark, highlighting joy and resilience in Haitian culture.

Week Two: October 28–29
Ballet Folklorico Mexico Azteca’s celebration of Día de los Muertos unites the past and present by honoring the departed and the vitality of life with a hint of contemporary dance. Discover STRONGmovement’s unique dance and art philosophy through three original works spanning recent years: You Think You Know, Kwôren,tēn, and a new solo, The Artist. Yuki Tokuda presents a ballet based on Japanese folklore called Yuki-Onna (The Snow Woman) with Piano Sonata in B minor by Franz Liszt, played by Rie Tanaka.

Week Three: November 4–5
Katha Dance Theatre’s PRAKRITIR PRATISODH – Nature’s Revenge depicts the natural forces that are now threatened due to humanity’s choices and the hope to conquer these challenges and move forward with harmony! Shapiro & Smith Dance’s Burning Air tells of the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894. Ominous skies are again in front of our eyes as today’s fires foretell what’s to come in a world of continued inaction on climate change. In We Are Cosmic, Alternative Motion Project connects black holes, dream states, multiverses, and theta waves through stunning visuals, rigorous physicality, and sound by Dameun Strange.

Amidst the fall colors and falling leaves, dancers Sarah Baumert, Suzette Gilreath, Erika Hansen, and Leslie O’Neill perform in the site-specific Fall Sound Garden performance installation along the wooded trails at Wargo Nature Center in Lino Lakes, MN; nestled along the Rice Creek chain of lakes, not far upstream from where the Fall Sound Garden first premiered in 2018 at Manomin Park.

This year’s Fall Sound Garden is part of Wargo’s annual Fall Fest, which also features a cider press, storybook trail, Dakota language scavenger hunt, and fall games.  Directed by composer JG Everest, the Fall Sound Garden will also feature embedded sculpture and poetry throughout the site, with live storytelling by poet/storyteller Lisa Yankton, and live roving musical accompaniment by members of the Free Range Orchestra and Choir.

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. 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.”

Event is free, but registration is requested in order to send weather updates and possible program changes.

Saturday, October 21
12:00-4:00pm

Drag Social
Sunday, October 22
12:30pm
Fall Forward Festival performance at 2:00pm

Make Fall fabulous at this pre-show reception with:

• Drag performances from Pedra Pepa and Jojo Ventus
• Mimosas and brunch bites from Chowgirls
• Included tickets to the Fall Forward Festival
• Glam photo booth from Twin Cities Photobooth

Drag Social is an event within our gotta DANCE! benefit series.

Join us in supporting artist opportunities and sustaining the diverse programs offered by Cowles Center. With your help, we can empower dance and performing artists at every stage of their careers, nurturing their growth and fostering a vibrant artistic community. Together, let’s make a lasting impact on the arts.

Declaration of Independence is a solo performance by Kata Juhasz, Hungarian dancer and choreographer, which is articulated in verbal speech and movements simultaneously in a short personal reckoning with some historical outlook on the possibilities of an authentic artist willing to preserve her independence in a politicized public life on the shifting borderline of the EU.

Kata is a Budapest-based dancer, choreographer, teacher and physician who has been performing throughout Europe since 1996. Her works having been funded by Summa Artium, National Cultural Fund, The Ministries of Human Capacity of Hungary.

Her performance will be accompanied by bassist, composer, producer, educator Alexis Cuadrado of Brooklyn NY. He has released six albums as band leader, composed for many venues, and is on the faculty of New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music.

Declaration will be preceded by Sleeping Giant, a new piano composition by Maura Bosch performed over a video projection of photographs on lumbering and mining on Minnesota Native lands by Vance Gellert. Jim Lenfesty will read his poetry

Saturday and Sunday, October 27-28 at 7:30pm
Suggested donation $25.

Come to the opening reception of Dance Roots: Minnesota’s Movers and Shakers, celebrating Minnesota’s dance community drawn from the University of Minnesota’s Performing Arts Archives.

Friday, October 27 from 5:00-7:30pm

Enjoy refreshments, mingle, and explore the exhibition. Stay for Georgia Finnegan-Saulitis’s talk about her new book Grace & Grit at 6:30pm.

The Exhibition, curated by the PAA’s new director Deborah Ultan, displays a fascinating network of choreographers, companies, dancers, teachers, dance photographers, and dance spaces over the last 100 years. There will be guest speakers at the exhibition through January 31, 2024, including Mary Easter. Mary will read from her autobiography, “The Way She Wants To Get There, Telling on Myself,” on November 8 at 12:00pm – brown-bag lunch.

Dance Roots: Minnesota’s Movers and Shakers will be open during library hours: 9:00am-5:00pm on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, and 9:00am-7:00pm on Wednesday and Thursday.

Frankenstein, zombies, and characters of Edgar Allen Poe come to life in this family-friendly performance steeped in spooky delight and tragic majesty.

Anchoring the performance is a new choral ballet titled Unfashioned Creature, featuring Twin Cities beloved artists Timothy C. Takach (composer), Penelope Freeh (choreographer), and the MPLS (imPulse) choral ensemble. The work is poetically rooted in Shelley’s Frankenstein, and explores key aspects relating to personhood: otherness, abandonment, despair, and hopeful yearning. Music includes cello, percussion, and the stellar singers of MPLS who will perform a fractured libretto comprised of Shelley’s text.

Also on the program, remounts of two Sewell fall favorites: excerpts from “Takes on Poe” (2012); and “Grave Matters” (2011), which combines undead charm and morbid wit in a playful zombie ballet.

Saturday, October 28
2:00pm and 7:30pm

Tickets: $5-34

Submerge yourself in this deeply soulful, powerful new work that fuses Black and Jewish spiritual music with stunning dance. Set to a score by jazz pianist, composer, and MacArthur Fellow Jason Moran—with vocals by Grammy Award-winning vocalist Lisa Fischer—the piece celebrates the 40th anniversary of this artistically innovative ballet company. Master choreographer and visionary Alonzo King reveals Deep River is a reminder “that love is the ocean that we rose from, swim in, and will one day return to”—that love can set us free.

Thursday, November 2 at 7:30pm

Sensory Friendly Lounge
A Sensory Friendly Lounge equipped with sensory supports and staffed by trained volunteers will be available to all guests who are seeking a safe and soothing atmosphere during this and other select performances. Learn more on the Accessibility Services page.