From left, Jeffrey Wells, Pramila Vasudevan and Lela Pierce last year perform in Aniccha Arts' “Plantulary” at Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis. Vasudevan, who is also a choreographer, says high costs are making it increasing difficult for dancers to thrive these days. We are trying to keep what is possible from what we have and where we are," she says. (Ayrton Breckenridge/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

The Twin Cities dance scene, long a bastion of risk-taking choreographers, is facing an existential threat with a loss of some key infrastructure.

Last March, the Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts in Minneapolis went dark. In May, the city’s Minnesota Dance Theatre’s performance company was stilled. In November, James Sewell Ballet in Minneapolis announced its final season.

Arts administrators describe organizations socked by pandemic closures, rattled by disappearing corporate funding and strained by rising costs.

It is “a hard time for dance” in the Twin Cities and across the country, said Abdo Sayegh Rodriguez, executive director of St. Paul-based TU Dance and board chair of Dance/USA, the national, membership-based service organization for dance.

But he and others point to signs of hope, with the city of Minneapolis stepping in with new funding, and needed change. Some shifts in philanthropy have benefited TU Dance, a Black-led nonprofit celebrating its 20th year in 2025.

“We’ve gotten every grant we’ve applied for this year, for example,” Sayegh Rodriguez said, a sign funders are finally working to acknowledge systemic racism within their field.

Audiences have also showed a strong appetite for dance.

They packed the balcony at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for two sold-out performances of Choreographer’s Evening in November. They filled the Southern Theater in the city for up-and-coming dance company Body Watani’s incisive work. In St. Paul, they sustained monthlong runs of Collide Theatrical Dance Company’s jazz dance-style shows.

In the new year, as Minneapolis searches for a different operator for the Cowles space, performers and administrators hope it might hold a new beginning that addresses longstanding disparities and fissures simmering beneath the surface of the dance scene.

From left: Koa Mirai, Jeffrey Wells, Mankwe Ndosi, Lela Pierce, and Pramila Vasudevan perform during “Plantulary” presented by Aniccha Arts at Red Eye Theater. Vasudevan says most dancers have day jobs just to make ends meet. (Ayrton Breckenridge/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Calling the dance ecosystem “super fragile,” Ben Johnson, director of arts and cultural affairs for Minneapolis, said “stabilizing the Cowles is one thing, stabilizing some funding is another, and then organizing the dance community is another.”

The Twin Cities is in an important transitionary phase, said Carl Flink, director of the dance program at the University of Minnesota.

“Sometimes it’s important to realize that organizations have life cycles,” said Flink, also the artistic director of Black Label Movement. “There’s been this beautiful period of time that these large dance companies came into existence. They had really vibrant moments. And then sometimes those things end.”

His company has steadily expanded, receiving a commission from the American Dance Festival in 2024. He noted groups like Ananya Dance Theatre, which tours nationally and has a permanent space on University Avenue in St. Paul, and the Ragamala Dance Company, which started a 18-month residency in New York City last year partnering with Lincoln Center and New York Public Library’s dance division.

“One of the things I think people are wrestling with is that the face of the active dance organizations in this community has changed, and people aren’t used to that,” Flink said.

In the Twin Cities, unlike other major metropolitan areas, a single, multimillion-dollar dance company isn’t “sucking up all the funds and all the people,” said Eve Schulte, executive director of the James Sewell Ballet, which will be shuttered in March, after 35 seasons. But it also means there is no mega-company marketing dance to a broad audience, as the Guthrie Theater does for theater.

Schulte said she hopes that Cowles’ next operator will be “brilliant and bold,” finding ways to fill the 500-seat house and turn the center “back into a center.”

Even before the Cowles announced its closure, contemporary dance company Arena Dances had been holding regular roundtable discussions about the struggles dancers face, said founder and artistic director Mathew Janczewski. He then became an organizer for the Minnesota Dance Task Force, which obtained a grant from the McKnight Foundation to hire a facilitator to come with the next steps.

“We want everyone’s voices heard throughout the state, honestly,” Janczewski said.

Confronting a crossroads

Minnesota recently landed among the top five arts-vibrant communities in the country, according to a new report from SMU DataArts, the National Center for Arts Research. Thanks in large part to the Legacy Amendment passed by Minnesota voters in 2008, Minnesota ranks No. 1 in the nation in per capita spending on the arts, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.

However, funding from corporations, foundations and ticket sales have waned. Minnesota’s dance scene is “at an inflection point,” said Kristen Brogdon, director of artistic and community programs at Northrop, a longtime home for acclaimed performances.

COVID-19 changed people’s habits, she said. People are still committed to viewing dance but “just not at the same frequency.” Northrop programmed six events this season, compared with nine the year before..

The performing arts venue has been grappling with the loss of national funding, including from the National Dance Project, which is ending because the Mellon Foundation is discontinuing its support. In December, American Theatre magazine reported the MAP Fund, another fund for the performing arts, would end after Mellon and the Doris Duke Foundation pulled out.

Those grants not only brought national artists to Minnesota, via venues such as Northrop and the Walker, but also helped Minnesota dancers develop their work and tour.

Choreographer Rosy Simas has been in conversations with both national and local funders, including the McKnight and Jerome foundations, for two decades about equity for Native artists and artists of color. Now with MAP and National Dance Project funding ending, Simas said she fears what’s in store for artists.

“With those options gone, we don’t know what is coming to replace them,” Simas said.

In addition, other choreographers like Pramila Vasudevan, Darrius Strong and José A. Luis said the increase in living expenses has made it harder to thrive or even just exist in the arts.

“The arts world functions as a gig economy,” said Vasudevan. “Almost everybody has a day job. That reality makes touring difficult. We are trying to keep what is possible from what we have and where we are.”

Strong, the artistic director of STRONGmovement, said he finds it more difficult to gather a team as people are working 9-to-5 jobs to pay their bills.

“Anytime I am doing solo work, it really is because I don’t have any money [to pay other dancers],” Luis said.

Threads Dance Project's founder and artistic director Karen L. Charles says she is making it a personal mission for "everybody to understand that dance is a job.” (Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

It was a different story for dancers at the Threads Dance Project, which pays its dancers as salaried employees. While they are not full time, the dancers have protections and benefits.

“One of my personal missions in life is for everybody to understand that dance is a job,” said Karen L. Charles, founder and artistic director.

Threads’ dancers also are eligible for workers’ compensation and other benefits, and their pay increases the longer they stay with the company. To recruit dancer Nieya Amezquita, then a senior at the University of Georgia, Charles used the promise of a solid gig.

In the artist industry, dancers are looked at as the last tier of the structure, Amezquita said. “[Charles] was just really set on making sure that wasn’t the case at Threads, which is something I value and something I’m trying to push forward in my own work as outside of Threads.”

Ben Johnson, director of arts and cultural affairs for Minneapolis, right, says the current dance ecosystem in the Twin Cities is "super fragile." (Leila Navidi, Star Tribune/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Dance is a niche art form but a key one, said Neal Cuthbert, retired vice president for the McKnight Foundation. “It’s the canary in the cave,” he said.

A diminished dance scene could point to broader troubles. That concern was echoed by Rachel Koep, managing director of the St. Paul-based Ballet Co. Laboratory, a professional ballet company and school. Koep worries the loss of dance companies will give dancers second thoughts about moving to the Twin Cities area.

“Taking the chance to move to Minnesota now feels like a larger leap for some dancers than it did before,” she said.

Johnson, who became the first director of Minneapolis’ new arts department in 2023, recognizes that issue.

“Even though the Cowles is not there, we still want the companies, their audiences, their artists and their funders to continue to come out and operate downtown,” he said.

When the Minneapolis performing arts venue closed, it fell on the city to request proposals for new venue operators. In the meantime, it’s funding dance: After hosting three town halls with the dance community, the city passed a budget last fall with a new “bridge fund” for dance that includes grants of $10,000 to $20,000 for companies to perform downtown.

The real game changer, Johnson said, is to have a development fund that will allow companies to present their work locally and go on tour.

He pointed out that Cowles Center put Twin Cities dance on the national radar. “When that closed, it was a national outcry,” he said, “not just a local outcry.”