The Cowles Center Comes Alive Again

The Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts, a project of Arts’ Nest and Zenon Dance Company & School.

The Cowles Center is reopening at a moment when Minneapolis needs it the most.

A city changes when its stages go dark. Restaurants lose pre-show tables, sidewalks lose foot traffic, artists lose space for their ambitions to soar, and audiences lose a gathering place to be inspired. A stage is an asset to any neighborhood.

Arts’ Nest and Zenon Dance Company & School hope to connect artists to a missing middle in the Twin Cities performance landscape: a venue larger than the small black box and more intimate than the thousand-seat hall. For audiences, it is a place to discover many kinds of live performance under one roof. And for downtown Minneapolis, a reopened Cowles Center can help turn one night out into a weekly hang, a performance into a gathering, and a historic venue into a place that makes the city feel alive again.