Photo courtesy of vagabondance.
vagabondance is a newly-established dance company taking up residence in Baton Rouge at the Cary Saurage Community Arts Center as the first participants in its new Arts Incubation Program.
The newly-established contemporary dance company vagabondance has leapt onto the scene in Baton Rouge as the first residents of the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge’s new Arts Incubation Program. The company is helmed by Artistic Director Scarlett Wynne and Executive Director Erik Sampson, who previously operated a dance company in Santa Fe, New Mexico for three years. During the course of their residency at the Cary Saurage Community Arts Center, vagabondance hopes to engage the Baton Rouge community through performances, classes, and open rehearsals.
“vagabondance sort of came to be as this idea that we’re always growing and changing and evolving. And I believe that dance should do the same thing,” said Wynne. “But not just dance, but also the structure and approach of a dance company has a lot to do with adaptability, seeing the needs of the community and the people around us and sort of creating art in response to that. We want to be highly accessible to the community.”
Providing artists like Wynne and Sampson with a launch point from which they can connect with the Baton Rouge community and realize their missions is why the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge established the Arts Incubation Program. “Creating a meaningful space that draws artists to the Capital Region and expands the growth of local access to high quality art-making are major goals of the Cary Saurage Community Arts Center,” said Renée Chatelain, President and CEO of the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge. “We are thrilled to see artists of the caliber of vagabondance moving into our city because of this access.”
Wynne and Sampson are hoping to incorporate vagabondance events into the Ebb & Flow Festival, to introduce the burgeoning company to the Baton Rouge community and jumpstart its residency at the Saurage Center. Sampson, who spent formative years in Baton Rouge for a nonprofit job shortly out of high school, thinks that Baton Rouge and the Saurage Center will be a perfect home for vagabondance to live out its mission.
“We’ve been trying to pioneer some new ideas about how a company can be structured in a way that makes it more accessible to the broader community,” Sampson said. “Really the next step for us as a company is to expand that model. And because of the relationships we have in Baton Rouge, and the connections that we’ve built there, we feel that Baton Rouge is the perfect place to start a new entity with a focus on exploring further what that would look like. Just highly accessible, and represents a redefined version of what dance can mean for the community as far as performative art form.”
