At the Reopened Cowles Center, Anat Shinar Makes the Lobby A Stage

Choreographer Anat Shinar’s new piece welcomes audiences to the Cowles Center once again. Photo: Pedro Juan Fonseca

On Friday, June 12, 2026, audiences will return to the Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts, but they will not be gathering inside the Goodale Theater. Instead, choreographer Anat Shinar will ask them to stay with her in the lobby and think differently about spaces in transition.

Her new work, An Ode to Being Right Until Someone Else Arrives, is a site-specific ensemble performance staged between the glittering bar and towering columns that patrons are usually meant to pass through on the way to coat check. “We don’t take time to stop and look at this space the way we look at performances in the theater,” she says. “I am hoping that by setting this piece in the lobby, we create a new relationship with it.”

Dancers rehearse Shinar’s “Ode” in the lobby of the Cowles Center. Photo: Pedro Juan Fonseca

The lobby is the newest part of the building at 528 Hennepin Avenue. The Cowles Center opened in 2011 after a reconstruction that joined the 1888 Masonic Temple, now the Hennepin Center for the Arts, with the 1910 Shubert Theatre, now the Goodale Theater. Above the lobby sits a studio used for education and rehearsals. Shinar’s show places its attention on the seam that joins these spaces. Her dancers will perform beneath a glass-and-metal sculpture suspended above the bar, a rendering of Labanotation, Rudolf Laban’s system for recording movement. The notation refers to choreography from The Rite of Spring, the 1913 ballet whose Nijinsky choreography pushed the art form toward modernism. The Cowles lobby, then, will hold choreography twice: once as notation overhead, once as bodies moving below.

Until now, Shinar’s works have often been solos, duets, or trios, so this new ensemble piece marks a shift in her practice. The performers include Brian Evans, Gabriel Rodreick, Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies, Laurie Van Wieren, Miriana Shinar-Baker, Taja Will, Waswa Kalema, and Shinar herself, with lighting by Alice Endo. The group brings together disability culture, somatic practice, improvisation, concert dance, and decades of Twin Cities performance history. Under Shinar’s direction, they “occupy the space between social encounter and public display, moving through fleeting alignments and soft spectacles.”

The performance is the first to bring audiences back to the Cowles Center. Photo: Pedro Juan Fonseca

Shinar has worked with education programs at the Cowles Center and performed on the Goodale stage. She is now artistic director of Young Dance, a Saint Paul organization built around inclusive, concept-based movement for youth and adults of all abilities. Her artistic leadership is shaped by the same philosophy that has always been behind the Cowles Center mission: “Dance belongs everywhere because that is important to creating a healthy ecosystem."