Forklift Danceworks
Activating civic engagement about the future of Austin's pools through dance
Image Source: Forklift Danceworks (1-7)
Project Overview
Forklift Danceworks activates communities through a collaborative creative process. Founded in 2001 by Artistic Director Allison Orr, award-winning Austin-based Forklift Danceworks presents innovative performance projects featuring participants from diverse communities, including sanitation workers, warehouse employees, and retired Negro League baseball players. Forklift’s dances showcase the skilled movements and often-unheard stories of the people whose work sustains our daily lives. Each performance is created through long-term artistic and ethnographic research within a community, enabling Forklift’s creative leaders to understand the community’s history, challenges, and assets while building trusting relationships and observing movement material. The directors then create choreography together with the participating community members, transforming the ordinary movements of work and everyday life into a performance accompanied by live, original music and stories told in the workers’ or neighbors’ voices. Through these performances, Forklift creates opportunities for more informed civic dialogue, deeper understanding of the jobs essential to urban life, and greater connection between citizens and across communities.
Civic Arts is teamed up with Forklift on their ongoing My Park, My Pool, My City project, a three-year artistic residency led by Forklift in partnership with the City of Austin Parks & Recreation Department’s Aquatics Division and several East Austin neighborhoods. Using collaborative and arts-based evaluation strategies, Civic Arts assisted the Forklift team with planning and evaluation for the project and helped them identify the specific impacts of their efforts on individuals, organizations, and the different communities in which they worked.
About the Team
Project Location
Services Provided
Program Evaluation • Survey Design and Facilitation