When Brigid Baker heard that she was selected to compete for $20,000, she was excited and oddly shocked.

The seasoned dancer, choreographer and fierce community activist isn’t exactly fond of grants. Since the Little Havana 6^th Street Dance Studio opened 10 years ago, she’s intentionally operated without grants or even business cards. She opted to sustain the studio on a barter system to develop artists without the constraint of outside funds or “funny money,” as she calls it. “Where I come from, no matter what, if you are good and it is needed you will do well,” she says.

But not even Baker could pass up the Knight Foundation’s current challenge.

She joins three other Miami-Dade finalists and another Palm Beach contender for the foundation’s first ever Knight Arts Challenge People’s Choice Awards.

The foundation will bestow $20,000 in unrestricted funds to one of the five contenders, which in addition to Baker’s non-profit studio, includes FUNDarte, Urgent, Inc., LAB Miami and Arts Garage of Palm Beach. The twist to this contest is that the general public will decide the winner by texting in their group of choice. Voting ends Oct. 22.

“One of the pillars of our work is engaging the public,” says Matt Haggman, the foundation’s Miami Program Director. “We thought this would be a new, interesting and compelling way to engage the public.” The response, he says, has been great. “The number of texts we received was beyond our expectation.”

The groups up for the People’s Choice Award were plucked from the finalist pool of the Knight Foundation’s annual Challenge Grant, which traditionally matches funds for innovative art projects in Miami. Haggman says adding another dimension to the challenge grant further “helps rev up the creative juices in our city.” And that it did.

Two of the groups, Urgent, Inc. and LAB Miami are non-arts based, yet have devised art projects as a way to reach the people they serve. In their online profile videos for the People Choice Awards, LAB Miami states that it would use the funds to “bring together creative professionals and techies for a three-day art hackathon.” The plan is to develop apps and Websites that will enhance the “delivery of local art to users.” For Urgent, Inc, the money would help the Overtown community group paint a mural reflecting the Negro League’s legacy at Dorsey Park.

“Using the arts as a way to engage is certainly one way to be involved in the challenge,” says Haggman. In the five years since The Knight Foundation started the Challenge Grant, it has doled out approximately $17 million in grants.

Approximately 1,200 project proposals were submitted for the challenge grant, says Haggman. As part of the selection panel, he says the foundation looks for ideas that are “new and innovative and that we think will deliver a meaningful impact and is achievable.”

The three arts groups in the $20,000 competition, share goals of development and expansion.

FUNDarte will present Aldo Lopez-Gavilan & Harold Lopez-Nussa on Nov. 24.

“My goals are to secure funds to help local artists to develop and process [works] from scratch,” says Ever Chavez, founder and executive director of FUNDarte. Many local performance artists in the Latin genre don’t have the knowledge or “infrastructure” to fully develop performance pieces. Language barriers and lack of funds are often the problem, says Chavez, whose organization showcases performance art.

Most of FUNDarte’s projects reflect local Latin culture and issues, which Chavez says helps create intercultural understanding even among various Hispanic communities. Chavez, a long time theater producer in Cuba came to Miami in 2000 and started FUNDarte just two years later.

“I realized how hungry people were for another flavor of contemporary Latin performances,” he says. “We deserve more.” Chavez organizes four well-attended art programs each year: No Borders, Global Cuba Fest, Out in the Tropics and Miami on Stage.

The extra funds would allow him to give local artists one year to work on production and another year to present their performances. “I’m very happy, it is an awesome opportunity,” he says.

Arts Garage, based in downtown Delray Beach, is an arts hub seeking to expand in areas of music, film and visual art.

Baker, of 6^th Street Dance Studio, also anticipates using the funds to expand existing dance programs and develop local artists — many of whom are the children who come to her studio each Friday evening to craft their break-dancing skills.

The cipher is nothing to take lightly, Baker smoothly explains. Break-dancing is one of the “healing protocols” for communities with little resources. The TruSchool project, housed at the dance studio, is based on the five elements of Hip Hop founded by the legendary DJ, Africa Bambaataa, and the Universal Zulu Nation.

While the Zulu Nation was formed on the streets of New York City, Baker says there happened to be a sizeable following in Miami, including TruSchool dance mentors. Kids come with their families each Friday night. “It’s creating an enormous bonding of family,” she says. Baker’s describes her dance studio as a holistic, open environment that fosters relationships and diversity.

If awarded the extra funds, Baker plans to implement other elements of hip hop, including popping and locking, graffiti art, emceeing and deejaying.  The kids’ ballet program would receive a boost and Baker plans to introduce Lindy Hopping, which has a long tradition in Miami. “I think the kids would really love it,” she says.

Both Chavez and Baker have relied on social media, email and word of mouth to garner votes for the People’s Choice Award. Winners for the award and the challenge grant will be announced on Dec. 3, at the New World Center.

To vote in the People’s Choice Awards, send your texts to 305-767-3200. Text 1  for the 6^th Street Dance Studio; text 2 for Arts Garage; text 3 for FUNDarte; text 4 for LAB Miami; and text 5 for Urgent, Inc.

Top Image: 6th Street Dance Studio “Wonderlawn”

Fundarte is presenting an avant-garde production of Albert Camus’s take on Caligula, from the controversial Havana troupe, Teatro El Publico.

In its third year of Out in the Tropics — a performing art series that highlights contemporary GLBTQ artists and their work in dance, theater and film — FUNDarte opened this year’s series with Sean Dorsey Dance and The Secret History of Love. The performance on Saturday, May 12, at The Colony Theater, was equal parts dance concert and theatrical performance that both educated and inspired as much as it entertained by laying bare the landscape of gay love through the ages in the pre Stonewall eras of the 20th century.

Through movement and dialogue, both live and recorded, the company brings to light the personal tales of the community’s elder GLBT generation and how they found or fought for their intimate, intense, and passionate love despite discrimination and warranted fear of persecution and prosecution. At the heart of this dance production was Dorsey’s “soundscore” that included recorded live interviews with gay elders and their personal true accounts of first loves; of heartbreaks and police brutality; and of the inception of the cornerstone of gay life before such ideas as gay community or gay movement came to being — the underground bars and watering holes from the speakeasies of the 1920s, to the wartime joints of the 1940s, and the clandestine clubs of the 1950s.

The interviews painted a picture of life in Chicago’s Boystown; to New York City’s Harlem and Greenwich Village; to New Orleans’ French Quarter; and to Boston’s South End. The first recorded interview reveals that  “secrets are our greatest industry.” In these charming, chilling, and heart rendering testimonies a unique, fragile, yet precious love abounds. There were moments recounted of excitement, passion, fear, and genuine humor in these personal accounts of both life-long loves, or loves of long ago and the elegant to fanciful trappings of the roaring ‘20s to the dapper dress of the ‘50s.

A running thread in both the live and recorded dialogue is Dorsey’s character’s search for love in a time where same sex “fraternizing” was punishable by fines, prison time, and in some cases death. The overhanging question of love was, “Where and how do I find it?” in a world of supreme secrecy.

The other three dancer/performers advise, cajole, push, and point the way to booze, dancing, and the special fraternity of the secret night spots. At times Dorsey would speak to a recorded voice of an assumed psychoanalyst who was leading her patient to his ultimate goal. At other times both parts of the dialogue were recorded while Dorsey danced a physical soliloquy as counterpoint. At others he lip-synched to his own-recorded voice.

These various levels of imitated, recorded, and live voice that made the soundscore so intriguing would change the surface of the audience experience from an instant visceral moment to one that was subtler.

The company consisted of a quartet, with Dorsey and three other male dancers who moved tirelessly through lyrical-looking minuets of sinewy phrases of constantly changing partners, and which incorporated lifts like punctuation after a long important sentence. The dancers moved through the historical landscape with subtle yet marked change in costume while the tenor of their movement changed in tone from energetic bursts to the intimate couplings at the dénouement of the piece.

As a whole this piece that Dorsey self-described as dance theater, endeavors to gain appreciation for an inconceivable time in the social fabric of GLBTQ persons — before the modern age we live in now of Kurt Hummel’s on Glee and U.S. presidents affirming the right to gay marriage. The precious secret of the love that once “dare not speak its name” is as enduring as the political and cultural movements that came after to ensure its right to be heard.

Photo: Lydia Danglier

This article also appears in the Miami Sun Post

Sean Dorsey Dance will performa The Secret History of Love by, part of Out in the Tropics Contemporary Performing Arts Series. 

It’s easy to forget that love exists. But Sean Dorsey Dance’s new production, The Secret History of Love, unearths stories from LGBT history that never made it into the history books. Based on archival research and stories collected through Dorsey’s national LGBT Elders Oral History Project, The Secret History of Love sets out to prove that love is real, and that it survives under even the harshest of circumstances. This weekend, on Saturday May 12, FundArte’s Out in the Tropics Festival opens with The Secret History of Love. We spoke with Dorsey recently about the project, and his immersive encounter with LGBT history.

Tell us about this production.

The Secret History of Love is a full-body dance theater show that explores the ways that LGBT people managed to find and love each other in decades past. And it’s really exploring history and themes that every person on the planet can relate to. Every person on the planet wants to be loved, to love, and to find love.

You did archival research — what sources did you find?

This show is the culmination of a two-year research and creation process and during that time, I conducted a national LGBT Elders Oral History Project where I interviewed and recorded oral histories with LGBT elders and asked them about their lives, their growing up, and their experiences of finding community. But especially of finding love. Falling in love, passionate love affairs, steamy liasons, lifelong partnerships, timid first love.

Where there any surprises in the stories?

When I did all my archival research and conducted these interviews with elders, I was really joyfully surprised at the passion and joy of managing to find love and happiness even among the very intense and often violent discrimination. Stories emerged about these wonderful secret underground clubs, lifelong partnerships that decades ago people couldn’t be out about, lifelong love affairs, just the kind of humor and sauciness and strength and joy that our elders did manage to boldly carve out and find and claim for themselves.

How far back in history do you go?

I immersed myself in as much as I could. Journal articles, actual archival materials. I got my hands on actual love letters and all kinds of source material. And then I found other peoples’ research on, for example, queer love letters that went back to the 1600s. So I did a lot of groundwork for this show.

When we go back in history in this show, we go back to the 1920s. And historically in this show, we only go up as far as before Stonewall. Often the Stonewall riots are heralded as the birth of the LGBT rights movement and awareness and community building. But also part of what I was passionate about sharing in this show is some window into all of the amazing gathering and organizing and loving that was happening long before Stonewall.

You describe your work as dance theater. Can you tell us about your artistic approach?

For myself, I think of my work as dance work. But because I use a lot of elements of storytelling and narrative and text in the sound score, and theater in the work, I use the term dance theater as a shorthand way to relate to people that it’s not abstract dance. So there are moments when we are dancing only to music. Or when we are using abstract ideas or even abstract text. Or when the whole company on stage is actually physically embodying just one character.

Text seems to be key.

Absolutely. I spend anywhere from six months to a year doing research on a piece and then doing writing. I’ll write the text for the score and record that. I work with a team of composers and they create music, and in this case, a lot of the score is compiled from hours and hours of interviews. But I do all of that first in the recording studio before I even set foot in a dance studio.

So you have a script basically.

Exactly. We have a very long script and that drives everything. You know when we go into a theater, the script drives all of our technical cues. Whether it’s as literal as a story or a storytelling section, or slightly more abstract text. It helps define the flavor of the movement vocabulary. And I think that’s part of why I get a lot of feedback from my audiences that the movement is also very powerful and resonates with them, that they understand not only the words that they’re hearing but they can understand the dance on stage.

I want to return to this idea of the archival sources. Can you give us a little more information about what kind of archival sources you’re working from?

A huge range. There’s a non-profit in San Francisco called the GLBT Historical Society. And they are an amazing and very important non-profit that also houses a physical archive of documents, clothing items, all kinds of items that document people and episodes in history out of the LGBT community. And so I would go into the archive and talk to Rebekah Kim, the archivist, about the things I was looking for. She found a collection of love letters between two queer women, one of them transgender, over the course of several years of their relationship. They had bequeathed these letters to the Historical Society. So one day I spent a couple of hours reading these letters. Some love letters, some regular letters back and forth to each other, and even love notes left on the kitchen table in the morning from one lover to another lover.

I also did a lot of research about the framework and the context within which people were trying to find each other to meet, to have community, to start political organizing. It was really in the bar that people were first able to find other people like themselves and see themselves reflected physically, emotionally- — their gender and sexual orientation — so nobody drinks alone. You know, decades ago, there was nothing in newspapers and books or magazines. Certainly you weren’t taught anything in school. If you were taught anything, elders talked about being shown films in school about the evils of homosexuality. And people underwent electric shock treatments. So the role of the underground bars and house parties or, in the ‘20s, speakeasies, was really vital to the birth of LGBT community.

Every single elder I interviewed had firsthand experience of police raids in bars. And some of them also police violence. A lot of transgender and lesbian or gay people have experienced police abuse and police violence. Some of them had been sexually assaulted or physically harmed by police. A lot of them had undergone arrest and been thrown in jail for either having been in a gay or trans bar, or just having been pulled over in their car. So that’s also part of the struggle to find each other and find love is this threat of violence and fear of police.

We have a section about wartime, and these gay couples who had to say goodbye at a train station with a handshake. A lover was going off to war and they may die, and not being able to publicly express affection for your life partner who is going off to fight a war. Or losing a partner and not being able to publicly grieve or get support publicly from the workplace. Or anywhere else. So it’s a lot of really heavy stuff.

I’m sure that it would be impossible to hear those kinds of stories and not be changed.

Absolutely. The project has been completely life-changing for me. And also for the collaborators on the project. I don’t think any of us could have known the remarkable breadth of love and strength and inventiveness and just gorgeous courage and life force that we would have the privilege to learn about.

I think people really leave filled with a lot of emotions. It’s quite a journey and a deep struggle. You know, the highs of first love. But people really leave full of inspiration about the strength of the human spirit. Transgender, gay, lesbian, straight, young, old, the human spirit is very strong. And despite any amount of adversity, we can manage to find human connection and love. There’ s just such powerful proof of that in this show.

The Secret History of Love by Sean Dorsey Dance, part of Out in the Tropics Contemporary Performing Arts Series. Saturday at 8:00 p.m. at the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. Tickets cost $20 and $15 for students/seniors; fundarte.us or ticketmaster.com or call 800-745-3000; info@fundarte.us; 305-316-6165.

Photo: Lydia Daniller

A version of this article also appears in Miami New Times online.

As part of Out in the Tropics, the San Francisco-based Dorsey company will perform “The Secret History of Love,” based on a two-year project interviewing older members of the GLBTQ community on their memories of love, and hurt.

Here comes another round of high-quality GLBTQ (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) performance. The annual Out in the Tropics festival, presented by Fundearte, will showcase bold new work by queer performance by artists from around the country. Some of the provocative words on the program would shock tender ears: Bitch, Crotch, Cracks, to name a few, and in-your face attitude is at the center of this year’s festival.

Out in the Tropics opens with a panel discussion, “Words and Power,” to get people thinking and talking about the ways that GLBTQ artists flip the meanings of offensive words to pack a punch and make a point. Festival artists Keith Hennessy, Bitch, and Andrea Askowitz will join local star Octavio Campos at the Shore Club on June 9 for the panel event, which is followed by a reception sponsored by the Shore Club and Meals that Heal.

The festival will cover a large territory of Queer culture, ranging from live music, theater and dance to film and literature. On Friday June, New-York based musical artist Bitch brings her pop-flavored punk sound to the Colony Theater. Known for both theatrical flair and musicality, Bitch backs her lyrics with wild costumes, not to mention ukulele and electric violin. Also on June 10, Dirty Little Secrets by Jai Rodriguez opens for a limited-engagement run at the Adrienne Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater. Rodriguez will kiss and tell in an adults-only musical autobiography that doesn’t hold back.

"Bitch," photo by Cheryl Mazak; top Keith Hennessy, photo by Yi Chun Wu

Also at the Colony Theater, Bessie award winner Keith Hennessy/Zero Performance offers up his critically acclaimed CROTCH (all the Joseph Beuys references in the world cannot heal the pain, confusion, regret, cruelty, betrayal or trauma…). Hennessy is considered a groundbreaking queer performance artist, and CROTCH is sure to run the gamut of experimental theatrical tactics. He won’t be keeping all of his creative secrets to himself, though. On Saturday June 11, Hennessy will hold a workshop: “Failure and Struggle as Inspiration for Choreography and Performance (post-genre experiments in contemporary dance & performance).” The workshop has been described as “a laboratory of queer performance experiments for all people,” where queer is considered “a perspective rather than an identity.” Make sure to RSVP if you want to get an inside look at Hennessey’s creative process, spaces are limited.

Sunday, June 12 is all about girls. Coral Gables Art Cinema will be showing CRACKS, a juicy romance film set in a 1930s woman’s boarding school (“crack” is the British word for “crush”). Directed by Jordan Scott, daughter of the legendary Ridley Scott, CRACKS is filled with passion, jealousy, eroticism, and emotional tension. Before the screening, Mary D. Events hosts a Women’s Reception. Additional screenings of the film will be held through June 16.

In the tell-all spirit of the festival, Out in the Tropics is rounded out by Lip Service: True Stories Out Loud on June 18. Produced by Andrea Askowitz and Esther Martinez, Lip Service is a well-received series that has aired on radio and television, and now, five true-life stories will be told At the Miracle Theater in Coral Gables. An after party will be held at Books and Books.

For full details on Out in the Tropics, visit www.outinthetropics.com, or call Fundearte at (305) 910-7898.