Northrop PAC Selected for Innovation Lab for the Performing Arts, Round 8

EmcArts is currently conducting research on how best to support innovation and adaptive change among service organizations and other arts development agencies. We expect to develop a first Lab cohort designed especially for service organizations in spring 2013.

Round 8 Grantees - Project Descriptions:

Northrop Performing Arts Center at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN) : A New Center for Interdisciplinary Creativity and Innovation
Northrop's adaptive challenge is to transform its revitalized facility into a hub of interdisciplinary creativity and innovation at the University of Minnesota-a Big Ten, major research university in the United States-that dynamically engages students, faculty, researchers, artists, and the greater community. Northrop aims to create a new collaborative model, framework, and set of practices that will realize and meaningfully sustain this transformation. Northrop's overarching goal is to transform its curatorial practice from "presenting artistic content" to "facilitating social orchestration" that provides meaningful personal experiences and aggregates creative energy to deliver greater value to its multiple constituents and create lasting impact in the community.

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR) : Changing Spaces: Rethinking PICA's Itinerant Presenting Model
The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) champions experimental, inter-disciplinary artists locally and globally through presenting, residencies, commissioning, and educational programming. Since its founding, PICA has pursued a flexible and entrepreneurial model of temporary, pop-up spaces and alternative venues in underutilized buildings within residential and transitioning neighborhoods. This practice of presenting work in abandoned warehouses, cinemas, storefronts, and in partner galleries and theatres has fulfilled PICA's mission of putting artists first, allowing PICA to site work in spaces appropriate to the artists needs. PICA is questioning its ability to find the sort of spaces that it was able to obtain before, and is challenging its assumptions of the value of this model in its current state to PICA, to artists and to its community. PICA wants to preserve its practice's core values while reshaping an itinerant model.

Redmoon Theater (Chicago, IL): Academy of Spectacle
For 23 years Redmoon has cultivated innovative thinking in creating community and activating public space. As the artistic and civic practice of creative placemaking and the power of art in public space are gaining national and international traction, Redmoon is identified as a leader in the field. Redmoon faces the need to invest in individuals in the long-term, scaffolding training from intern to apprentice, apprentice to collaborator, and from collaborator to peer artist. In re-imagining this process to create a Spectacle Academy, Redmoon has the opportunity to benefit from cultivating a well-trained community of collaborators. The institution faces the following adaptive challenge: how can Redmoon realize the full potential of its social mission and 23 years of history as artists in public space in the creation of a training model that builds their artistic community and diversifies who and how Redmoon trains the next generation of Spectacle artists?

The Theater Offensive (Boston, MA) & partner organizations involved in the Pride Youth Theater Alliance : Can a Continent Be Our Neighborhood?
The Theater Offensive (TTO) has co-founded the newly formed Pride Youth Theater Alliance (PYTA), a strategic alliance, to bring a international organizing model to support and encourage Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) youth theater in North America. TTO's strategic alliance with the PYTA will support similar art work by partner organizations in 18 cities with almost 10% of North America's population. More than just a contracted service, this alliance has an equally shared leadership structure that oversees the administration, as well as a mutual recognition of the overlapping missions and institutional goals. This is a completely new model for TTO; and raises several questions: 1) Can TTO's model of Queer-arts-as-local-community-organizing have impact across North America by effectively leading the Pride Youth Theater Alliance? 2) Can TTO execute this change in scale as it continues growing and deepening its own work locally?