With the holiday season in full gear, the Iowa Dance Festival Second Holiday Edition will electrify Iowa City audiences once again. After 19 years of production, the dancers are prepared to put on another event meant to bring cheer into town.
This year, however, the holiday edition is changing its usual programming due to a lack of funding.
“We call it holiday season because we want to use the celebration to create a celebratory atmosphere of joy, art, and education for the community — an excuse to get together, open to families of all ages,” Eloy Barragan, one of the co-directors of the festival, said.
Barragan and Emily Trapnell, the other co-director, have spent a considerable amount of time getting everything ready, as Dec. 20, the date of the event at Space Place Theater, quickly approaches.
The festival began as a means to support the dance community, not just within Iowa, but throughout the nation. Though a majority of the performers come from Midwest-bound areas, there have been prior years where the event brought in companies from New York City. The event also provides an opportunity for students and professors of all kinds from across the country the ability to partake in it.
The group is made of University of Iowa dancers, local studio dancers, and professionals.
“The main mission is to create community and educate the youth, inspire them so they are present and have the joy of movement, music, and theater,” Barragan said.
Despite being more limited than usual in terms of funding and their typical staff, the pair have worked hard to get the venue, prepare the performers, and keep everything on track.
There were no grants that could be permitted to the company for this year’s festival.
Barragan and Trapnell have adapted to the situation by switching the events from the past two years into an hour-long dance performance, removing their usual program that once included workshops and dance classes for attendees.
With the founder of the Iowa Dance Festival, Nora Garda, having taken a step back in planning the upcoming event, Barragan asked Trapnell to be co-director for an extra helping hand.
“We support each other, [without] Emily, I would not be able to do it by myself, and vice versa. Also, we have Claudia Jacobsen, who is our director of marketing and publicity,” Barragan said. “We have three people, the main key people, who make all of this happen.”
The event will be an hour long, consisting of about 10 performances across different styles of dance. There will be dances consisting of classical ballet, contemporary ballet, tap dancing, and Indian classical dance. Many of these pieces will consist of original choreography that comes from the various performers and their companies.
“I think one thing the Iowa Dance Festival is good at, also is that there’s a huge array of dance languages, and I think that it brings in something that any kind of viewer can be excited about,” Trapnell said.
By holding the festival so close to the holidays, both Barragan and Trapnell said they hoped the event would be a kickoff to the season. Each piece selected follows themes of celebration, joy, and togetherness.
But the hope for the event to help facilitate holiday cheer is not the only thing that the festival stands out for. It is also a long-running festivity that promotes the dance community.
“Especially for Iowa City, which sometimes doesn’t have festivals like this for dance that are bringing in people from all over. I think the Iowa Dance Festival does a good job with that,” Trapnell said.