Unexpected collaborations take center stage at Keshet's 'Hear Here Festival'

After a two-week deep dive collaborative residency at Keshet Dance Company and Center for the Arts, guests and community members are invited to see the end result of collaborations between several New Mexican creatives for the “Hear Here Festival.”

The cross-disciplinary festival will feature work from musicians, composers, poets, dancers, artists and more, who are randomly paired to create artistic works. Artists do not know who they are collaborating with until the residency begins.

In previous years, there have been unique pairings like aerialists and musicians. Typically, Keshet pairs someone who’s disciplinary art is based in music and another whose focus is with dance or choreography or poetry to blend the two together easier.

“What happens when you get people who have never met each other before and never worked together before?” asked Evening Star Barron, communications manager for Keshet. “It’s really interesting because you never know what’s going to come out of it.”

Keshet provides rehearsal spaces and offers resident artists a $1,000 stipend with a series of free art-related business workshops geared towards learning the business of art, all to promote creatives to continue striving for their passions and giving them access and opportunity to make their passion a career.

Some of those workshops include marketing or branding, which can help artists establish themselves in the community and figure out how to create a brand and name for themselves. Others include workshops like the grant writing and budgeting, which helps artists learn more about finances in the creative world.

“We believe in paying our artists, but it’s also a huge boost to our creative economy,” Barron said. “We have an insanely diverse and beautiful community of artists in Albuquerque across all mediums, and part of Keshet’s mission is to create a welcoming space for art and artists to create.”

At the end of the residency, creatives will have the opportunity to show the community the results of the two-week period. The “Hear Here Festival” — hosted at Keshet Dance and Center for the Arts at 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 8 — is the culmination of the residency. Tickets are priced on a sliding scale, meaning attendees can pay what they are comfortable with.

“Dance can be really prohibitive and really expensive to see, so we really want to make sure everybody that wants to come see this show has the ability to come,” Barron said.

Though rehearsals have been mostly closed door to allow performers to build a sense of anticipation and excitement for their show, Barron said a few have shared some snippets on social media.

“One of our composers, Zachariah Julian, is very active on social media and he posted one snippet last night that had three dancers,” Barron said. “Three Keshet dancers will be working with him and he was sort of filming them doing their rehearsal piece. I’m sitting here with bated breath wondering what we’ll see.”

Unexpected collaborations take center stage at Keshet's 'Hear Here Festival'

You can reach staff writer Nakayla McClelland via email at nmcclelland@abqjournal.com.