When Theatre Three offered discounted performance space, Avery-Jai Andrews jumped at the chance to take another step in the development of Agora Artists, the grassroots dance company and incubator she launched in 2020 with Lauren Kravitz.
In just a couple of months, Andrews and her Agora associates have put together the first Dallas Indie Dance Fest, which will bring 20 choreographers and 65 dancers to the main stage of the Uptown theater for three programs over two weekends.
The dance-makers come from a wide range of experience levels. Some have been on the scene for years. Others are in the early stages of their careers.
The festival builds on Agora’s earlier initiatives, the one-day Mini-Movement Festival and Seeds, a 12-week crash course in self-producing that culminates in two performances at Arts Mission Oak Cliff, the group’s home base, where Andrews has been executive director since 2022.
“It truly is, just do the work and see what happens,” she says. “I don't know if I was to make the master plan that this would be the next step, but it's making a lot of sense right now. I think people finally are seeing Agora as this hub or like some kind of dance community. We have enough of an independent scene. But where do you perform? Where do you present work?”
Dallas lacks a dance center or even an annual gathering of dance professionals since the demise of the Dallas DanceFest. It’s something Andrews recognized when she returned to her hometown in 2017 after graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and working abroad for a few years.
“I already run a building, but a dance center is what's missing,” Andrews says in an interview over Zoom. “That's where our classes would be. That's where our process showings would be. All the stuff that's not necessarily audience forward but is about cultivating dance artists. Austin has the Austin Dance Festival, Houston has Barnstorm, Waco has 254. There's no reason that Dallas shouldn't have a festival, one that prioritizes local makers. But we don't really have a home, so it’s hard for the dance community to grow.”
Operating on a tiny annual budget of $50,000 that includes small grants from the city of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture, TACA and the Moody Fund for the Arts, Andrews’ 5-year-old organization is trying to be a catalyst for that growth.
“We're committed to Dallas and being on the ground,” she explains. “We've got a great network of friends and colleagues from college in New York who have moved to other cities and are doing similar work. What happens when you can connect those independent, local scenes to each other? I'm wondering if that's maybe more the direction that’s sustainable in the U.S. -- cultivating local scenes and exchanging work in that way. I’m thinking long term that’s where we're going, but it requires us to have a really strong local scene.”
Details
Aug. 8-10 and 15-17 at Theatre Three, 2688 Laclede St. Free-$40 per show. $75 for festival pass. agoraartists.com/didf.
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