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Dancing in the Streets strives to illuminate the urban experience with groundbreaking public performances and site-specific installations that explore the kinetic life and history of natural and architectural public spaces. Its productions, which range from intimate to large-scale, investigate the relationship between art and the public realm, strengthen community life, build a more diversified art audience, and serve as catalysts for private and communal celebration of the rich complexity of urban daily life. Founded in 1983, Dancing in the Streets has achieved an artistic standard that has garnered regional, national, and international recognition for its body of work by over 300 of today’s most respected contemporary artists. Dancing in the Streets’ free public performances and productions break the barrier between art and the general public and serve as catalysts for private reflection and communal celebration and as antidotes to urban isolation. Dancing in the Streets maximizes its potential to reach a broad a diverse public by producing performances outside the constraints of traditional theatres, literally taking performances “to the streets.” Many of these performances reflect and reveal the artifacts, memories, and poetry of natural and architectural spaces. Throughout the years, Dancing in the Streets’ productions have investigated and celebrated the stories and myths of sites such as parks, rivers, train stations, swimming pools, grand staircases and grain terminals. Dancing was founded by Elise Bernhardt and has been under the leadership of Aviva Davidson since 1998. Throughout its 22-year history, Dancing in the Streets has nurtured the development of site-specific work and promoted it as a public art form by leading national conferences and panel discussions about site-specific work, by offering production and technical support to established and emerging site artists, by documenting the process of creating site-specific work, and by launching several national initiatives that have fostered the creation of site-specific performances and developed audiences for site work around the country. Through its Dances for Wave Hill series (1991-2001), Dancing in the Streets commissioned 90 works for the spectacular 28-acre public gardens in the Bronx. In 1988, it established Dancing in the Schools, a year-round arts education program for inner city youth. In 1993, it launched its ongoing Red Hook Initiative, which integrates arts education, festivals, and site-specific productions into the life of this predominantly, African-American and Latino Brooklyn community. AWARDS In 2005, Dancing in the Streets was selected to participate in Time Warner Cares: ArtsAdvantage/NYC, a multi-year capacity building seminar for small arts organizations on the verge of major growth. In 1997, Dancing in the Streets was selected as one of ten recipients in the country for a three year, $200,000 program grant from the Lila Wallace Readers’ Digest Fund’s Program for Leading Dance Centers to enhance the audience development component of its Red Hook Initiative. In 2001, the Association for Performing Arts Presenters awarded Dancing in the Streets a $100,000 Arts Partners Award for its “Picture Red Hook” project, a continuation of the Red Hook Initiative. Other recognition has included an Encore Award from the Arts and Business Council, a Certificate of Merit from the Municipal Art Society, and The Doris C. Freedman Award from the City of New York for “greatly enriching the public environment.”
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