Explore Choreo North
supports  3 early career choreographers in non-mainstream dance forms who wish to deepen their practice, learn from peers and/or merge into the concert lane.
This opportunity is designed for dance artists with a connection to North Minneapolis. 
kenna cottman is the facilitator of this jerome foundation funded program.

North Minneapolis has a lot to offer in terms of dancers and choreographers as well as venues and artistic home.  Let's put on for dance just like we do for sports and community.

Folks deserve a shot at the concert stage if that’s what they want. Respect is shown through providing opportunities for training, education, and cultural context. Our artistic community begins to thrive when a diversity of forms are represented.  

I’m looking for more ways to build the community I want to live in and support the folks that BEEN here doing our thing.  As we gentrify we have to insert ourselves into the change.  See us, hear us, feel us, create with us. I am a key leader over North that is doing the work to create connection and opportunity.
​
Support provided:
  • Access to studio space: to be scheduled according to availability, to be used for practice, to hold classes or other sessions that the artists need space for
  • Peer learning circles around work in progress: periodic gatherings to include a sharing of work and discourse 
  • Workshops with exemplars in the field: periodic guest artists from either Minne or NYC
  • Observances: annual showcase where participants select what they present
  • Artists Choice ($1000 per artist): Music Production support (an original work or working with a producer), Design & tech support: costume, lighting design+creation, Professional work sample creation (working with a videographer)
  • Financial support: $3000 x 3 artists for two years

Forms I'm Pubbin:
​all expansive forms of Black and diasporic dance including majorette, drill team, industrial, heels, twerk, sultry, hip hop, krump, footwork, other regional forms, Ketzal , lyrical, liturgical, shouting, ballroom, vogue, burlesque,  intuitive, vernacular, all-styles, battle dancers, line dancers, backup dancers

For the artists who participate, on the front end of professional careers as well as practitioners steeped in cultures that exist outside the mainstream dance world, this program can be an on ramp to new access points of visibility and resources to realize the new visions. Artists will have the opportunity to share their work with one another, their communities and beyond. This program offers space for choreographers/dance-makers to come together with other choreographers to share work and practice, to experiment, to develop new projects, to build skills and connections with the broader dance community

For our community, in North Minneapolis and beyond, this program builds up the creative and generative forces that we use to maintain authenticity in a rapidly gentrifying city.  Explore Choreo North ultimately reinforces the idea that we residents and citizens of the urban inner city desire and partake of amenities like good visual art, theater, dance and other performance, only enriched through our own cultural lenses, and elevated in ways that we hold meaningful.

applications are CLOSED!!!

Flow:
  1. Artist Identification/Selection
  2. Presentation of CoHort to the community
  3. Public facing events & Professional development/craft driven events (for the Cohort)
*A 2-year cycle of support for the same artists 
  • Explore Choreo North will use a harvesting method of “selecting” artists. 
  • Open call, nominations, presentation of candidates to the community, and consultation with other vested members of the community to ensure that these resources are allocated with a mindset on liberation, abolition, and community care. 
  • Some artists will discover the opportunity on social media or other traditional open call means of announcement. 
  • Artists will be invited to consider the opportunity based on seeds sown through my years of work as an artist and educator in this community. 
  • Even more artists may be recommended to me through channels of communication and connection that extend into sectors of the creative community that are less familiar to me. 
  • I’ll request feedback on the process and artists from an advisory group that I pull together, that will include younger and older mentors, and other folks that work intersecting art and social justice.
  • Resources for this group include Voice of Culture, BodyPrayers and Minneapolis Cultural Arts Ambassadors

explore choreo north 
is not currently accepting inquires
from dancers who fit the profile

Send a cover letter and evidence of your connection to North Minneapolis to Kenna at [email protected]