Saturday festival to bring dance into the April sunshine

As an Associate Professor in the University of South Florida’s Department of Dance, Andee Scott creates and develops movement within the confines of the Tampa campus.

And through a USF Pinellas Partnership Grant, Scott has collaborated with thestudio@620 for a unique program on the plaza between the Mahaffey Theater and the Dali Museum.

Eight choreographers, Scott among them, have created works for Move St. Pete!, taking place Saturday (April 8) from 11:30 a.m. until 2:30 in the afternoon. Admission is free for what’s intended as the first of many such events, subtitled the St. Petersburg Dance Festival.

Andee Scott

Bringing dance into the “real” world, into a natural environment, as opposed to asking somebody to buy a ticket for a seat in a theater, is an important concept for Andee Scott. Move St. Pete! is not her first tango with the idea; she likes to think of dance as public art.

“First of all, on a really romantic level, I think that dance can save the world,” she says. “I think it has this ability to create connections between people in a visceral way that’s really important to our human-ness.

“If I believe that it can change the world, then the next step is, how can I facilitate it being as accessible as possible? So that it can be available, reachable, not behind a paywall, not behind an actual wall … that it’s out in the public. It’s in the air.”

Collaborators include Alexander Jones (the studio@620’s resident choreographer, and the founder of Project Alchemy), Paula Nuñez (Tampa City Ballet director), Elsa Valbuena, Katurah Robinson, Mary Williford-Shade, Mary L. Durant, Sadie Lehmker (Scott’s co-director for Move St. Pete!) and Bliss Kohlmyer.

Dancers will perform at various locations around the plaza, including the Mahaffey’s pillared colonnade and the garden grove of crepe myrtle trees on the western border.

Scott is only too aware that April in Florida, outdoors, can be a little … well, hot. “Even if the dance is in full sunlight, the audience can still find shade,” she explains. “There actually is a lot of shaded area that you can watch from. Always. We’re being really strategic about that.”

Plans include free hydration stations – and the distribution of hand-held fans.

In between performances will be “interactive movement experiences,” with discussions of, and audience participation in, country line dancing and African dance.

In 2020, Year One of the pandemic, Scott was one of the first bay area choreographers to re-introduce the art into a socially distanced world. Dance in the Time of Coronavirus placed dancers on the sidewalks of 1^st Avenue South, between 27th and 23rd Streets, with the audience watching from the sidewalk on the opposite side of the avenue. And from bicycles. And from passing cars.

Another concept was a series of videotaped dances, running on loops and shown on TV screens in the front windows at thestudio@620. Each dancer had been recorded in a different American time zone, performing a different section of a single piece.

Scott told the Catalyst at the time: “It honors where each of us live – we’re not all trying to be the same, we’re taking a step along this journey when it’s our time. Then it becomes this really beautiful idea: Somehow the dance is moving across the country. Somehow, the dance itself is traveling through space, if you will.”

Those baby-step innovations, she says now, were necessary to get where she is today. “With this kind of work, there’s a permission I need to grant myself on a certain level. I grew up in classical dance, dance looks like this, it belongs here, this is where you see it … no, actually we can democratize it. We can create a space where everybody accesses it.

“All of the things that I’ve done have been more permission-affirming. That really, you can look at any particular space and say ‘OK, I can see dance here.’”

The story arc is this: By bringing dance out of the concert hall, it becomes another necessary part of human life.

“A lot of people will say ‘Oh, I don’t really get dance. I don’t really understand it.’ And I think that’s a really fair thing to say,” Scott explains.

“A lot of the people that are making dance and watching dance, we have so much expertise in it – and it can start to feel like experts talking to each other. That doesn’t make it available either.

“The more than I can create opportunities for people to encounter it in their daily life, it’s not rarified and held up on a particular pedestal, then they’ll have an opportunity to engage with dance and maybe it will touch them a little bit more.

“It’s pretty intangible, but I do think it’s important.”

Move St. Pete! event website