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Date: 9/13/2022
NORTHAMPTON – A collaboration between the Northampton Arts Council, Available Potential Enterprises (A.P.E.), and the School of Contemporary Dance and Thought (SCDT) is allowing six different artists to express their stories through dance.
Titled “Exchange,” the dance event is set to occur at A.P.E.’s Workroom Theater at 33 Hawley St. on Sept. 18 at 7 p.m., with doors opening at 6:30 p.m.
According to Jen Polins, the director of SCDT and co-producer of the event, the six movement-based performance works that will be on display were borne out of months, and even years, of creative network and connectivity.
Polins said she has been working with the Northampton Arts Council to get more dance programming over the last six years. This pursuit became a more active one during the heat of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I do a lot of dance programming with lots of different styles,” Polins told Reminder Publishing. “Mostly, we’re doing a lot of experimental programming, and we have a school that also operates as arts education and creativity education.”
With 33 Hawley quickly becoming a staple of the Northampton arts scene, Polins said A.P.E. and SCDT have been collaborating a lot more on different types of arts programming for the public.
According to Polins, “Exchange” is a combination of artists from a program that began during the coronavirus pandemic. “We were offering choreographers the chance to be in the space by themselves and be inside their process,” said Polins. “We also wanted to start reaching more people and become more diverse.”
This program was called “Distributed Curation,” which meant that A.P.E. reached out to an artist, and then they asked that artist to reach out to another artist that they were connected with. Eventually, this program allowed artists to connect with each other, thus creating a web of creative networking in the process.
“The web of people that were utilizing 33 Hawley St and engaged in a peer support network for their process over the [coronavirus] pandemic grew very quickly,” said Polins. “And a lot of these artists were local and regional.”
“Exchange” became the product of this program, and according to Polins, a lot of the artists participating in the showcase worked with 33 Hawley across COVID-19. “We’re still in this place where the work artists are able to share live with the public feels more poignant and important,” said Polins. “A lot of this work is in direct relationship to an engagement with the changed world that we’re now in.”
The show, which was already canceled a couple of times due to COVID-19, will feature performances from Hartford’s Laura Horn, Northampton’s Tyler Rai, Chesterfield’s Tori Lawrence, Springfield/Los Angeles’ Sakina Ibrahim, Hartford’s Rebecca Pappas, and Chesterfield’s Ellie Goudie-Averil.
“It’s a variety, so [every individual showcase] is a little different,” said Polins, adding that empowerment and the environment are two of the many topics being explored during the showcase. Another includes a video installation.
Tickets are $10, and all profits made will go toward the Arts Council’s spring round of ArtsEZ grants, which help fund a variety of projects throughout Northampton and Florence. To learn more about the showcase, people can visit the Arts Council website: https://www.northamptonartscouncil.org/2022/04/rescheduled-exchange-dances-from-heart.html.