Artist Lab: Audience Engagement For Performing Artists

What are the ethics of working in community? What are the pleasures as well as challenges when working in community? Join 2023 Creative Capital Awardee Yanira Castro, Co-Artistic Director of FuseBox, Ron Berry, and Artistic and Managing Director of Honey Pot Performance, Meida McNeal for a Creative Capital Artist Lab on Wednesday, November 20 at 12PM CT/1PM ET via Zoom to discuss the ins and outs of audience engagement.
In this 1 hour and 15 minute live, online session, Castro, Berry, and McNeal will discuss how to reach an expanded audience through activist and political discourse as well as decentralized curatorial systems as models for engaging audiences. They will also share best tips and best practices for audience engagement outside of traditional performing arts venues and answer questions from the audience.
The Artist Lab is part of the new free Creative Capital Curriculum. Live captioning (CART services) and ASL interpretation will be provided. The session will also be recorded and made available in the Curriculum.
This Artist Lab was made possible thanks to support from the Walder Foundation.
Yanira Castro
Yanira Castro’s work is rooted in communal construction as a rehearsal for radical democracy. She is an interdisciplinary artist born in Borikén (Puerto Rico), living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn), and working at the intersection of communal practices, performance, installation, and interactive technology. Yanira forms iterative, multimodal projects that center land, and the complexity of citizenship and governance in works activated and performed by the public. Since 2009, she’s created and performed with a team of collaborators as a canary torsi. Her recent work includes a performance manual for reckoning, Last Audience, a performance manual; a participatory podcast to rehearse for a collective future, Last Audience: a performance podcast; and a tea ritual created with four teens from NYC Girl Scouts Troop 6000 to enact the ingestion of home/land, TIERRA. Currently, Castro is developing her ongoing interdisciplinary work, I came here to weep, a collective exorcism for territorial possession.
Castro has been commissioned and presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater, New York Live Arts, MCA Chicago, The Invisible Dog Art Center, SPACE Gallery, PICA, LMCC, The Bates Dance Festival and ICA/Boston. Her work has recently been supported by Creative Capital, The MAP Fund, The Alpert Award for Dance, 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Art, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, LMCC, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Marble House Project. She has received two New York Dance & Performance (aka Bessie) Awards for Outstanding Production.
Ron Berry
Ron Berry is the founder and Co-Artistic Director of Fusebox, a non-profit arts organization working in Austin, TX. Ron has helped guide the organization through twenty years of critically acclaimed programming across a multitude of art forms. His particular focus has been on stewarding the annual Fusebox Festival in Austin, which features local, national, and international artists at sites across the city for five days each April. Today, Fusebox collaborates with organizations all over the world ranging from small grassroots organizations to major art centers and festivals in service to artists and their work.
Fusebox hosts two festivals (The Fusebox Festival & Live in America) along with year-round programming and events, residencies, and workshops. Fusebox also uses its festivals as an opportunity to work hand-in-hand with community members to creatively address issues facing the city. These efforts have resulted in new initiatives related to community health, affordable housing, and transportation.
Meida McNeal
Meida McNeal is Artistic and Managing Director of Honey Pot Performance. She received her PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and her MFA in Choreography & Dance History from Ohio State University. Over the past two decades, she has produced numerous creative projects as both a solo artist and with Honey Pot Performance, with works performed in Illinois, Rhode Island, Ohio, California, and Trinidad. Positioning her work as an Independent Artist and Scholar at the intersection of performance studies, dance and critical ethnography, she has taught courses in dance, critical performance ethnography, and black diasporic cultural production at Northwestern University, Brown University, Governors State, Columbia College Chicago, and University of Chicago.
Meida also works with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events as the Deputy Commissioner of the Cultural Grants & Resources Division. Previously, Meida served as Senior Manager of Art and Community Impact Investments spearheading the design and implementation of grant programs focused on pandemic recovery for the arts sector. Prior to this role, Meida worked with the Chicago Park District as Arts & Culture Manager supporting community arts partnerships, youth arts, cultural stewardship, and civic engagement initiatives.