Here in Mni Sota Makoce as we continue to move towards the darkest time of year we are deepening our commitment to creativity as a path for healing and looking towards the promise of light as the wheel of life turns and turns forever. Over the last two years Pangea’s Placekeeping/Placemaking program Lake Street Arts! held over 20 Story Circles in Minneapolis and the surrounding communities. We edited a full length book with story circles, poems, photographs and visual art.
If you haven’t checked it out yet please visit it here.
We put up 21 poems in the windows of local businesses along Lake Street (some are still up from Bill’s Imported Foods to Milkweed Cafe). We created an ensemble devised performance ritual inspired by the Story Circles and the Uprising in Minneapolis. Life Born of Fire featured poetry, movement and live music. And ending the year we had our first public indoor event, Love is Time Travel at Moon Palace Books with a gorgeous evening of poetry and stories about death and ancestors.
Love is Time Travel artists at Moon Palace Books, 2022
Moving into 2023, Lake Street Arts! is launching a series of new workshops and projects funded by The National Endowment for the Arts–Our Town grant. Pangea will be offering monthly workshops from January to May including writing your own hidden histories, dancing your archive, creating ancestor vessels with clay and a theater workshop to create a five minute movie of your life! We are working with amazing artists on these workshops including Venus DeMars, Anthony Ceballos, Sayge Carroll, Diver Van Avery, Miré Regulus and many others. In the summer of 2023, look for a Timeline/Map of Lake Street charting ancient/now/future visions for our beloved corridor from Bde Maka Ska to the River and a second version of Life Born of Fire is in the works for late summer 2023. Pangea World Theater’s Lake Street Arts! Program will continue to create space for us to come together in grief, healing and celebration. We look forward to seeing you in 2023 online and in person.