Amid other budget cuts, new partnership keeps Minneapolis kids dancing at school

Minneapolis celebrated its first “High School Dance Day” last week at Hennepin Center for the Arts, and between the tap and hip-hop and Haitian folk fare, there was something for everyone.

The audience? Dancers only, sharing with one another this year’s work, and in turn, offering a glimpse of new moves to come to Minneapolis Public Schools.

Amid the budget cuts that have run rampant across the state’s school districts, Minneapolis schools will see an expansion in artist residencies in 2025-26 thanks to a $350,000 investment from the city.

Dance programs will be available at each of the city’s 47 recreation centers, too, city and school leaders announced recently at FAIR School for Arts downtown.

“Arts are foundational to who we are,” said Mayor Jacob Frey, adding the city was pleased to help fill a need for a district grappling with deep and chronic shortfalls.

Three years ago, Minneapolis Public Schools slashed arts programming across the city, and dance now is on the chopping block at Roosevelt High. But Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams said: “We cannot imagine a world without dance.”

A year ago, the Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts in Minneapolis was shuttered, and its educational outreach efforts came to a close.

The district since has entered into a new partnership with the St. Paul-based nonprofit Young Dance. The group supplied the teaching artists who’ve worked alongside dance instructors and other teachers this year, and now is contracting with the city to expand the programming this fall.

But with the school system grappling with a $75 million deficit, Lori Ledoux, the district’s K-12 arts content lead, and Anat Shinar, artistic director with Young Dance, were asked: Why the emphasis on dance?

“Movement can benefit so many learning styles,” Ledoux said.

Shinar said the skills translate to all parts of people’s lives, helping them to be creative and confident, and build community.

“I also think dance education is really unique because all you have to do is show up,” she said. “You don’t have to provide materials.”

Ava Vice, a FAIR School student who performed with her dance class at the recent city-and-district news conference, said that if it were not for the performing arts, “I would be a lot less happy of a person.”

In 2023, Ledoux reached out to the Cowles Center for Dance to discuss the potential for a K-12 dance residency program that would introduce dance to all physical-education classrooms and provide more intensive residencies to existing dance programs.

But the Cowles Center went dark in March 2024, and the partnership shifted to Young Dance, with the result this year being 52 five-day residencies at 18 school sites, Ledoux said.

Moves on display at Hennepin Center for the Arts last Friday involved dance routines in the traditional sense and included students from four Minneapolis high schools that now have dance specialists. At one point, Roosevelt dancers shared the floor with those from FAIR School.

But the teaching artists also use movement to bring curriculum to life.

For example, Shinar said, she’s helped co-teach science classes about the states of matter by having students mimic solids by barely moving and gas molecules by romping about quickly.

“You’re giving the students permission to move really fast and a little chaotically in the classroom, which is really fun,” she said.

Next year, the teaching artists will conduct at least one three-day residency in a phy-ed classroom in every district elementary school, Ledoux said.

The exposure to dance is limited, as such, but Shinar said it is hoped that kids then will be inspired to sign up for rec center classes in such styles as Afro Latin, ballet and breakdancing, hip-hop, jazz, improv and krump — a style of street dancing.

At Hennepin Center for the Arts, the students breezed through their routines, and the kids were boisterous as they watched and people shouted:

“Get into it!”

“Go, girl!”

“Hey! Hey! Let’s go!”

North High students closed the show with hip-hop and krump, eliciting a roar from their peers when the lights went out, then all of the students from all of the schools gathered on the floor. A teaching artist shouted “1-2-3” and they all yelled: “DANCE!”

And when the dancers dispersed, the kids from Roosevelt stood silently in the center of the floor, soaking it all in for just a few extra moments.