Artists at Work

A special collaboration with Danté Brown and Roots Rising

Inspired by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA), Artists at Work is a new program created in 2020 supporting artists and fostering healthy community during the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Artists at Work (AAW) pairs artists with organizations, supporting artists in creating new work while addressing community needs.

Choreographer Danté Brown is collaborating with Pittsfield, MA-based non-profit Roots Rising, whose mission is to empower youth and build community through food and farming. Brown, Artistic Director of Warehouse Dance, is committed to social justice and cultivating community as central to his practice, with a belief that “dance is the closest thing we have to magic.”

Brown is creating a multifaceted project centered on the importance of sustainability within community, creating an online documentary exploring where perseverance resides in food justice, racial injustice, and self worth during this pandemic. Through monthly community movement workshops, he is investigating varied approaches on how to self persevere through art making. Read more in this recent article in the Berkshire Eagle, and follow this project’s evolution on Instagram.

Fall Workshops

Planting Seeds for Healing – A Virtual Creative Movement Workshop with Danté Brown

Join choreographer and dance artist Danté Brown in this monthly virtual community movement workshop series, Planting Seeds for Healing, and use the power of movement to engage with your creativity and body. Explore how movement, writing, or visual imagery can be a grounding and nourishing force for our bodies in order to find relief, while simultaneously building comfort in our own personal movement exploration. We’ll conclude this workshop with a conversation centered on strategies for perseverance. For this workshop, please have paper and a writing utensil available.

Thursday, November 19 at 7-8pm EST REGISTER HERE

Sunday, November 22 at 11am-12pm EST REGISTER HERE

Free; all levels welcome, no previous experience needed. In collaboration with Roots Rising. Please read the Participant Waiver and Release of Liability before registering for a workshop.

About Danté Brown

Danté Brown began his dance training at Wesleyan University, which led him to The Ohio State University to receive his MFA in Choreography. As a performer, Danté has worked with artists such as Esther Baker-Tarpaga, Christal Brown, David Dorfman, Nicole Stanton, Noa Zuk and at the Dance Exchange.

Since its founding in 2010, Danté Brown | Warehouse Dance has shown work at Bates Dance Festival (ME), Boston Contemporary Dance Festival and Dance Complex (MA), Columbus Dance Theater and Wexner Center for the Arts (OH), Dance Complex (Boston), Dance Gallery Festival (NY & TX), Dixon Place, GAP Green Building, LaMaMa Moves Festival, Movement Research at Judson Church, Triskelion Arts, and The Wild Project (all NYC), Sam Houston State University (TX), and YourMove Dance Festival (NJ).

Danté has had the opportunity to teach a range of classes at Broadway Dance Center, Dancewave, East Village Dance Project, and Gibney Dance Center (all in NYC), and The Ohio State University. He has held collegiate positions as an Adjunct Professor at CUNY Westchester Community College, Visiting Artist at Middlebury College, Lecturer in Dance at Bates College, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Amherst College and Wesleyan University. He was awarded the Schwartz Center for Performing Artists Fellowship at Emory University. Find Danté on Instagram @dbwarehousedance.

About Roots Rising

Roots Rising is an award-winning, women-led organization based in Pittsfield, MA whose mission is to empower youth and build community through food and farming. Its vision is to lift up teens as community changemakers and strengthen the local food system through the transformational power of meaningful work.

Roots Rising has two main initiatives: a Youth Crew program and the Pittsfield Farmers Market. In Roots Rising’s Youth Crews, Pittsfield teens are hired to work on farms, in food pantries, and at their own market. It’s an opportunity for teens to engage in meaningful work- work that needs to be done and that contributes to a larger social good. The Pittsfield Farmers Market is a thriving producer-only market, with all vendors selling products that they grow, raise, or produce themselves. It is the first teen-run market in the region and offers various food justice programs to make fresh and healthy food available to all.

About Artists at Work

Artists at Work, a program launched in summer 2020 by THE OFFICE performing arts + film, is inspired by President Roosevelt’s Depression-era Works Progress Administration and its Federal Project Number One. Artists at Work seeks to provide artists across the U.S. a living wage and foster healthy communities in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conceived in collaboration with the FreshGrass Foundation as a public/private partnership that combines government, corporate, and foundation support, AAW is a WPA for the arts reimagined into a modern context that is sensitive to the 21st century landscape (now drastically changed) of every artistic discipline’s place in the culture. Learn more here.

AAW is funding the work of six artists chosen by cultural institutions in the Berkshires and Hilltowns: Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, Hancock Shaker Village in Hancock and Pittsfield, Images Cinema in Williamstown, The Mount in Lenox, MASS MoCA in North Adams, and the Institute for the Musical Arts in Goshen. Read more in this August 4 feature in the Boston Globe.