Building Community Through Performance: Krannert Center Engagement

Krannert Center’s performances offer audiences the chance to experience and be transformed by world-class music, theatre and dance from around the globe. While thousands of attendees experience the transformative power of our presented works, an increasing number are also engaging through research collaborations, international residencies, school-based arts integration, and sustained creative partnerships. These efforts contribute to the broader university vision and support the elevation of the arts as essential to a sense of civic belonging, healing, and public education. Led by a team of five professionals with diverse educational and professional backgrounds, Krannert Center’s Engagement team focuses their efforts on making a deeper impact on our communities than can be achieved by performance alone.

 “Engagement work has evolved considerably since the 1980s,” said Julieanne Ehre, Krannert Center’s Assistant Director of Programming and Engagement. “At that time, arts organizations often had an Education department that was focused on youth programming for schools, while their Marketing department focused on getting more people interested in attending performances and helping explain what attendees were going to see. In the early 2000s, presenters began planning classes, workshops or community events while the artists were visiting. Over the past decade, Engagement has moved out of the Marketing and Communications departments and tied in with Programming, so Programming and Engagement are more closely tied together to align the missions between the two.”

Every season, the Engagement team strives to connect with many communities that make up Champaign-Urbana and east-central Illinois. “A large part of our focus is dedicated towards youth and young adults through programming that creates opportunities for schools to visit Krannert Center and for artists to visit schools for performances and workshops,” said Emily Laugesen, Krannert Center’s Director of Community Engagement. “We are also committed to building partnerships with community organizations that foster greater understanding to help address pressing social concerns through arts-based approaches.” Recent examples include performances and workshops with our Global Arts Performance Initiatives program featuring the music of east-meets-west fusion artist Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East, and Shona musicians from Zimbabwe “Samaita’ Vitalis Wilbert Botsa and Erica Azim. Engagement also facilitated a study/social event for Reading Day, led by the Krannert Center Student Association.

This season, Krannert Center launched a new Artists Talk series that features artists who perform on our stages, bringing audiences and artists in conversation with one another. The first conversation in this series took place in October with the University of Illinois Department of Dance alumni and Marquee artists Leslie Cuyjet and Angie Pittman. Upcoming Artists Talks will present internationally celebrated choreographer Hope Boykin February 20; jazz legends Terence Blanchard and Ravi Coltrane March 6, and Grammy-nominated composer and bassist Stephan Crump with noted science journalist and National Geographic Explorer Erica Gies April 21.

Another major project is the Krannert Center Hip Hop Convene February 25-28, partnered with the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures, the University of Illinois School of Music, Grainger College of Engineering, and the Department of Dance. The Convene is a celebration of hip hop’s legacy and future as a force for cultural innovation, social change, and community empowerment.

Krannert Center’s Engagement work provides broad opportunities for participation across multiple entry points to artistic experience in service to all our communities. At Krannert Center, we believe in the power of gathering and shared aesthetic experience as a means to confront rising societal divisiveness and the loneliness epidemic, and to nurture individual and collective healing, strength, joy, and fulfillment. We invite everyone to connect with us through our community-building efforts.