Seven Days at Basin Arts

Inside the multi-faceted Lafayette arts incubator

by

Visual & Performing Arts

On the outskirts of downtown Lafayette, the Halo Building harbors a thrumming world of Acadiana creativity. On any given day, through Basin Arts’ doors pass a dozen dancers, artists bearing canvases, designers brimming with ideas, and children filled with wonder. 

Founded and helmed by dancer/teacher/choreographer/arts administrator Clare Cook, the nonprofit has operated as an arts incubator in Lafayette for eight years—providing creative space and opportunity for the community’s small-but-mighty world of professional and amateur dancers, as well as artists operating in various other mediums, through an ever-evolving rotation of classes, residencies, performances, and exchanges. 

The concept came to Cook as the manifestation of a sensation she’d pursued across New York City’s professional dance scene for a decade—“this magical feeling of collaborative energy, of all these systems coming together and the thing we’re making becoming more than any one of us.” When she decided to move home to Lafayette, she knew the creative world she’d be re-entering would be smaller, less institutionalized, less established. She’d have to find a way to facilitate that feeling for herself. 

She spent the first year back in Louisiana querying, dipping her toes in. “Like, what’s happening in Lafayette? What are the needs? How can I contribute?”  After some time, she started to make connections, a web forming in her mind of Acadiana’s most uniquely talented creatives. She just needed a way to bring them all together, to foster the collaborative energy she’d always sought out. “There needed to be a vehicle, a container for it,” she said. A basin. 

Since 2016, Basin Arts has grown into a genre-agnostic arts hub in Lafayette, a beacon that brings artists together in the name of art-making as much as art-made; and inspires participants to explore new ways to inject art and artists into the larger community. 

[Read this story about Basin Arts, published shortly after it first opened, in our April 2018 issue.] 

To get a sense of what this looks like in the day-to-day, I asked Cook if I could haunt Basin Arts over the course of a few weeks—to spend time observing the world she’s created, and the sorts of ideas and individuals that pass through it . . . 

Day 1: Animal Dance 

The endeavor started with a performance, the culmination of one of Basin’s newest initiatives, the Dance Lab Residency. The program provides an opportunity for dance artists across Louisiana to use the dance space and resources at Basin Arts to develop new work while engaging with the Lafayette community. Ann Glaviano, a New Orleans artist and choreographer, was the program’s first Resident Artist this past July. During her time at Basin she hosted a master class and a brown bag lunch conversation, while preparing for a showcase of her work-in-progress, Animal Dance. 

The work itself is highly abstract, performed without music—the sounds of Glaviano wandering the stage with a single high heel keeping disconcerted time. She dances, but disorientedly, holding a balloon or carrying a suitcase. She climbs a chair, reaching for the sky, and calls out phrases like: “I have something to communicate.” “I am on fire, keep clear of me.”  

Some moments of the dance were humorous, others moving—all of it wrapped in the tension of audience participation. There were around fifteen or twenty of us, many of whom were handed written instructions upon arrival. Before our chairs were mechanical switches, which controlled the lights and other production effects. There was anxiety in unexpectedly finding oneself part of the show, but not quite knowing how until the moment arrived. Mine came at the very end, as Glaviano walked from the stage out the front door of Basin while we, the audience, sang (in harmony!) “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”. My job was to shut off the lights. 

When the lights came back up, with the applause, Basin Arts transformed from a theater space with dropcloths as curtains and professional lighting apparatuses, into its world of artistic ideating and conversation. Glaviano sat in a chair before the audience while Cook facilitated a Q&A.  Audience members, sipping complimentary wine, were a mix of Glaviano’s friends, dancers from across the state, and local Lafayette creatives/Basin regulars. We faced the black dance floor, and behind us was the gallery space, where over fifty works of visual art by Lafayette artists were displayed as part of the annual BARE Walls Group Exhibition. 

In discussion, Glaviano shared that though she had been working and performing Animal Dance for six years now, this had been her largest audience yet. The intimate piece thrived in close quarters, but had struggled against institutional barriers and a premier that was canceled in the wake of the pandemic. “So I’m just DIY producing it at this point,” she said. “Truly, my biggest support structures are my colleagues, like Clare. Like the work gets done through things like this residency, at places like Basin.” Cook, nodding, responded, “We all have the tools we need.” 

[Read this: A Guide to Art Galleries in Acadiana] 

Day 2: Pilates 

The following Tuesday I was back at Basin for a Pilates mat class taught by Cook—one of many adult classes on the roster during summer. I arrived and set my mat on the Harlequin dance floor where Glaviano had performed a few days prior, the room now bright with natural light and morning energy. One class member, Ana Leger—a Basin regular and bodywork practitioner—got me signed in and helped me find a roller and weights

When Basin first opened, its main focus was to offer adult dance classes. “There was no professional dance community in Lafayette,” said Cook. “There was no one producing professional work, and there were no opportunities for regular people (adults, specifically) to take dance classes.” She started offering a range of classes designed for beginners, nonprofessional dancers, and professional dancers—ten to twelve a week.

Today, in part because of the nurturing role Basin Arts has played for the local dance community, Lafayette boasts a much more robust collective of resources for area dancers beyond Basin—with more people choreographing work for the stage, collaborating, applying for funding. There are more places offering adult dance classes, too. “What we’re always trying to do is look ahead, and model something which we hope will then get the legs to flow out and do something more,” said Cook. 

In the interest of refocusing its role in supporting local artists, Basin Arts has reduced its dance class offerings, offering one to two daily classes on Tuesdays–Thursdays, usually open-level (meaning anyone can take them). In addition to ballet and contemporary dance classes taught by Cook and other teaching artists, Cook offers a regular, usually twice-weekly Pilates class—a program that supports dancers’ health while also appealing to a broader segment of the public, who (like myself) might feel more comfortable in a work-out setting than a dance setting. It’s another way to pull more of the community into the space. 

Having taken Pilates via Youtube for years, and more recently in classes at a local gym, I found Cook’s class to be steadying and approachable, and still challenging enough to be wholly effective. Throughout the hour, she’d demonstrate poses and moves while constantly emphasizing a focus on the core. The class was small, about seven people, and the space—open and airy, festooned with artwork—added a meditative quality. 

Day 3: Ballet Class  

Later that week I came back to Basin to observe the open-level ballet class taught by Gina Aswell. Sitting at a meeting room table, I watched four students—all women, some in traditional ballet flats, some in socks, one barefoot—set up at the bar, stretching muscles to an instrumental version of “Cinderella” by Remi Wolf. All appeared to have been before, understanding without conversation that each phrase demonstrated by Aswell was open to interpretation. Together they reached and pointed and kicked—beautiful coordination in the art’s most basic moves. 

"It's such a fluid, creative space, a blank canvas. . . the most beautiful thing about what we do, I think, is holding space for the community to come in and see the creative process in real time." 

—Taylor Elliott

A phrase set to the quicker tempo of Britney Spears’s “Toxic” was a challenge: tendu, turn in, turn out, flex, point, plié, reverse. When the moves got muddied or the group appeared to struggle with something, Aswell would pause the music and go over it again. There were opportunities for modifications—when one dancer appeared to be in pain, Aswell encouraged her to get a foam roller. Reminding them all to breathe, she said “Every breath you take is life, don’t forget. And life is where the drama is. I want to see more drama.” 

After class, as the group gathered their things, conversations turned to children: having them and surviving postpartum. By the time they were walking out the door, playdates had been scheduled. 

Over the course of the class, a steady stream of people had flowed in and out of Basin, including Dirk Guidry—a painter-in-residence who keeps his studio in the corner of the dance space. Guidry is also the director of Basin’s BARE Walls program, a subscription service available to Lafayette businesses in which they can convert their public-facing walls into gallery space featuring a rotation of local art. The innovative program simultaneously infuses art into community spaces while generating income for local artists. 

As the dance class wrapped up, I introduced myself to Taylor Elliott, the Operations Director at Basin, who was storing and organizing artwork from the program’s roster. She told me that the BARE Walls program is now serving around twenty businesses in Lafayette, and over fifty artists. “And it’s so simple,” she said. “It’s accessible for businesses; we handle everything.” 

Elliott joined the Basin Arts team in 2021 as Cook’s number two. “Basin and its programs were expanding so quickly,” she said. “They were looking for someone to help Clare build up systems to manage it all.” In that capacity, Elliott has played a big part in keeping Basin’s many arms manageable and sustainable, and implemented fundraising strategies to keep it all going. “Every day is something different,” she said. “It’s such a fluid, creative space, a blank canvas. It’s a gallery space, and has held everything from a musical performance to poetry readings to dance performances. But the most beautiful thing about what we do, I think, is holding space for the community to come in and see the creative process in real time. That’s part of our model.” 

[Read our November 2020 story on Basin's BARE Walls program here.]

Day 4: Set Design Meeting 

Back at Basin a few afternoons later, I met Cook as she started to build out the landscape for an upcoming performance of her latest work, “Rounding the Edge”—which will be performed as part of a double bill with fellow Lafayette choreographer Leigha Porter at the Acadiana Center for the Arts on September 13 in a show titled Dance/Splits. 

Cook explained that her vision for the dance emerged from a personal curiosity around systems. “Family systems, government systems, human systems,” she said, noting the influence of the Fibonacci Sequence—a mathematical sequence in which each number is the sum of the two that precede it. “You’re put into these systems, and there’s routine, there are needs. How do you manage those responsibilities?” Her thesis, through the work, is to explore how to get right up to the edge of those systems and then, instead of punching through, to round over them—approach them with a strength found in softness. “So, looking at routines, patterns, structure, and honoring the fact that we have these things for survival and they are natural, if rigid. But how can we accept transitions and accept each other’s systems with softness?” 

This afternoon she was working with architect and ULL professor Ashlie Boelkins—a longtime collaborator and friend. “We’ve known each other since kindergarten,” Boelkins said. Since Cook’s return to Lafayette, the two have created several dance/installation projects together. “We start day-one with sketchbooks,” said Boelkins. “And then it just evolves together, a true exchange throughout an ever-changing process.” 

For “Rounding the Edge,” the women envisioned a stage draped in gauzy, floating fabrics. Cook brought bolts of it in various pastel colors. Immediately, it was decided that the light pink, almost flesh-toned, was the winner. As Boelkins and Cook laid it across the ground, then stood over it contemplating, their four young daughters (two for each) ran loose across the dance floor. When the women stood on chairs to hang the fabric from the ceiling beams, to see what it looked like hanging, the girls ran through it, giggling and shouting. A fan was brought out to blow the fabric out across the floor like a ghost, eliciting shouts of “It’s flying! It’s flying!”

The fan was loud, a problem Cook was trying to work out with Boelkins. They wanted the fabric to balloon into “pods” and rooms across the stage; so they needed the fan. But would the sound disrupt the music? “What if we used it?” Cook asked. “As white noise?” The music, she explained, would be performed live by composer Hillary Bonhomme. “Maybe she could vocalize into the fan.” In response, one of the girls went and stood behind it, singing—her voice ululating through the room. 

Day 5: Board Meeting 

The following week, I hopped on a lunchtime Zoom call with the Basin Board of Directors, who were gathering for their bi-monthly meeting. 

It’s evident that part of what makes Basin Arts an especially effective arts organization is its carefully established structure of logistics and administration. When I asked Cook what it’s been like to lead those aspects of Basin atop her work as a creative, she explained that she has always, since college, approached her own pursuit of the arts with a sense of strategy. “I think some of the skillset has been due to my environment,” she said. Attending LSU on a TOPS scholarship, her only access to a dance career came in the form of a dance minor. “So I had to choose a major that I could somehow mobilize into a career in the arts.” She finished in public relations, with a double minor in arts administration and dance—an education she packaged to secure jobs in admin for choreographers across New York City as she supported furthering her dance education at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. “There wasn’t a sort of plug-and-play model, so I had to make it happen, and learned a lot on the fly, seeing how my skills could build and collaborate and intersect.” 

With the support of her board, made up of creatives and arts administrators from across Lafayette (including frequent Country Roads contributor Paul Kieu, who serves as president of the board and whose photographs accompany this article), Cook and Basin Arts have been able to coordinate a series of major and minor fundraising efforts, secure sponsorships for the organization’s programs, organize regular engagements and performances, and pursue opportunities for large-scale community art projects like the 2023 mural by Jamar Pierre at the Historic Four Corners. 

A point of discussion was an August fundraiser, a new event that would be replicated annually called “Lineage”. The evening, which was to take place at the Acadian Superette (owned by Cook’s husband Robert Autin), would include a meal, drinks, live music, and a dance performance—all to celebrate recipients of the Lineage Award. The award, in its inaugural year, was created to honor artists who have contributed a lifetime’s worth of inspiration to the Acadiana community, laying the foundation for future generations of artists. This year’s honorees are Mary Francis “Cissy” Whipp, who co-founded Louisiana’s first modern dance company and has been teaching and producing dance in the region for over forty years; and Robert Dafford, whose murals across the United States span fifty years and have earned him a place as one of America’s best recognized muralists.  

Cook emphasized the importance of centering Whipp and Dafford in the event’s messaging. “I really want them to feel valued and seen as part of the event,” she said. Board member Molly Rowe agreed: “I think we take it for granted, this amazing cultural structure we have in Acadiana­; there was a generation of artists that built that and invested in it. And they’re still here. Cissy and Robert were part of that foundation.” 

“Right,” said Cook. “I keep dreaming about what I’m going to say about them at this event, like stress dreams.” Lineage, and the passing of time, has been on her mind. “You know, the unannounced subtitle of this event is that I’m turning forty that night,” she laughed. “So all of that—a new decade. All of this is just swirling in my mind right now, beautifully, emotionally. And I think about Cissy and Robert, truly understanding the depth of their contribution and what they accomplished for us, just forty-five years ago. And they are just here, living it every day, just doing the work as they’ve been doing it for a lifetime.”

I listened on, absorbing the breadth and depth of Basin Art’s impact in the here-and-now—honoring this past as it pushes into the future. With exciting developments just around the corner, Johanna Divine—General Manager of the Lafayette news organization The Current, expressed her anticipation for all that is on the horizon: “This all just bodes really well for the next ten years at Basin, like you are really finding your feet in the community,” she said. 

Cook only emphasized, “I think the name of the game is making sure we maintain our ‘Basin-ness’. We can’t lose the heart, the relationship-based intentional connections, the collaborative environment. We hold fast to that, each step of the way.” 

Day 6: Projectspace 

One of the most fascinating and generative programs at Basin Arts is its Projectspace Residency—a three-month opportunity for artists across mediums to bring an in-progress work into the space and develop it, inviting the community into the process. As with all else at Basin, multi-disciplinary collaboration and experimentation are paramount. Some featured projects have included Armed Rhymery’s interactive and sensory “Living Altar” installation, which featured spoken word and music performances around the themes of ancestry and growth; an exhibition of Kristie Cornell and Marla Kristicevich’s photographic and sculptural exploration of the Bayou Teche, called Meander Mindset; and more recently, Kelly Clayton’s exploration of joy as a practice, through the creation of historic dress and textiles in preparation for a culminating “dance party” celebration with the community.  

The concept of Basin arts came to Clare Cook as the manifestation of a sensation she'd pursued across New York City's professional dance scene for a decade: "this magical feeling of collaborative energy, of all these systems coming together and the thing we're making becoming more than any one of us." 

Cook invited the applicants to brainstorm, to hash out their ideas. Ana Leger, who I had met earlier at the Pilates class, shared her vision for a project that explores art from the perspective of a “non-artist”. “I’m a member of the community who is inspired by artists,” she said. “I want to see the community see their role in art creation. I want to take people who say that they are not an artist, or not a dancer, and give them a vehicle to see their ideas magnified.” 

“That’s interesting,” said Cook. “I also think it would be interesting to turn that around and see who you are in the space, not only ‘I’m not this,’ but how do you visually and experientially represent your community? Thinking about it as a conversation.” 

One of the other applicants interjected: “And what is an artist, anyway? Who decides?” 

[Read this: "Sacred Spaces? : A collaboration between the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, and Performing Arts Serving Acadiana recalls the 2019 Opelousas church arsons ] 

Day 7: Rehearsal 

I arrived on a Sunday afternoon about a month out from Cook’s “Rounding the Edge” performance. She and her cast—five dancers selected through an audition process—had spent the weekend working through the piece-in-progress. When I arrived they were all in a circle. The dancefloor was draped in four times as much fabric as had been there during the early design process with Boelkins. Cook was flipping through a notebook, and in a corner the costume designer Paula Calderon was ironing and sewing away. 

I’d met Calderon a few days before; she’d taken part in the Pilates class as well as the ballet. A recent transplant to Lafayette and first-time collaborator at Basin Arts, she is a professional ballet dancer with twenty years of experience, which translated into a career in stage and costume design in her hometown of Medellin, Colombia. In conversation with Cook about illustrating softness through an earth-toned palette for this piece, she had created an ensemble of muted yellows, greens, browns, and blues in a variety of textures: silk, tulle, linen, and cotton. The centerpiece dress, an elegant green silk, came from Dirt Cheap, Cook confided with a smile. 

A selection of local dance professionals had been invited to watch this early run-through of the work, among them Cissy Whipp, Gina Hanchey—whose Ballet Académie shares the Halo Building with Basin, dancer/choreographer Paige Krause, Boelkins, dancer and ULL professor Michael Crotty and painter Hagit Barkai, who is also a professor at ULL. “I invited you all here today because I wanted to get new eyes on it, your eyes on it,” said Cook. “What are people seeing? What’s landing? What’s confusing?” 

[Read this story featuring Clare Cook in our 2020 Performing Arts issue: "The Lost Performances: In an era of isolation, dance companies seek out new avenues for audience".]

She explained that the dancers would be performing to a combination of metronome and recorded music that didn’t accurately portray the vision for the final show—Hillary Bonhomme, who would be performing live, couldn’t be present for the rehearsal. So they were making do. For the beginning, she prepped us: envision the curtains at the ACA opened a sliver, so that you could only see the lead dancer, Rebecca Allen from New Orleans, emerge in a solo from behind the pink gauze, being blown up by a fan in the back. The curtains would then open, revealing the rest of the cast. 

Without giving too much away (the show will premiere at the International Dance Festival in New Orleans on September 12 and at the Acadiana Center for the Arts on September 13), the work centered on Allen, who moved through the space navigating moments of chaos and strife broken by moments, exhales, of solitary reflection, followed by a drive towards connection—the dancers moving together in satisfying and beautiful sequences. The draped fabrics operated as rooms within a world, barriers transformed into shelters. 

After the dancers concluded the unfinished work, they all sat on the floor with Cook and looked to us. “What did you see?” Cook asked. Immediately, Whipp said she saw a family unit—with Allen as the mother figure. 

“It’s so delicate,” said Krause. “I start to follow these stories of letting something go, whatever is coming through.” 

Barkai noted that when Allen came through to the end of the fabric in her beginning solo, her emergence from it came with a gust of wind from the fan in the back. “It was a beautiful moment,” she said. “I don’t know if that can be replicated at the ACA.” 

Cook laughed, “If you sit in the front row!” 

The conversation continued, with more questions about Allen’s role in the group. Is she the authority? Are the other dancers parts of her? Is she the mother? 

Finally, Cook shared that in a sense, all was true. But the concept for the piece, as she’d only admitted to the cast earlier that day, came from her experience of motherhood. “I’ve been making this dance and so resistant to talk about it being that,” she said. “Like, why don't I want to admit that this dance is about being a mother?” 

Part of it, she pondered, is because she doesn’t want to put that interpretation on the dancer or even the audience. “The things I’m understanding about myself are universal things, not only for mothers to understand. It’s about time and space. It’s surreal, since I’ve become a mother—time is extended and accelerated at the same time. You want to just go, like there’s momentum, but sustained energy. And you’re inside of that. But in that space it can be endless.” This is her struggle at the moment, she explains. It’s why the work isn’t complete yet.  “How do you end the dance?” 

Armed now with Cook’s intent, the audience around me offered extensions of her interpretation, and ways to incorporate that into the choreography. Considering mothering as an act, a system of community, an approach to authority, an opportunity for tenderness, an ever vacillating network of tension and responsibility. Boelkins asked Cook, “Is the piece trying to put mothering in one full day, or is it years? Does it end after the morning routine, or at the end of a lifetime?” 

Time is important, agreed Cook, scribbling in her notebook. She envisions the piece as both simultaneously. “I am in this chapter of life where everything feels important—the most tiny things, like a morning routine. But at the same time I’m reflecting on a life. On legacy and lineage.” 

“I’m just curious,” said Boelkins, “does she end up by herself again, like in the start? Does it go full circle? Or is it all of them, together?” 

Cook wasn’t sure, she said, not yet. 

The next day, on a phone call, Cook said that she’d had her “aha” moment when she went home that night. “I see it now,” she said. “What I connected was that my experience of becoming a mother, the act of mothering—and that existence for me has been the portal to have a much different understanding of surrender, and abandoning control, and allowing life to sort of take me on the ride. And trusting it to put me in the right place.” 

It's a revelation that required the community’s feedback, she said, the collaboration of ideas. This has always been the pillar of her process, the heart of her vision for Basin. “You can’t as an artist really get to a deeper understanding of your work without sharing what you’re doing,” she said. “And then from the community/philosophical standpoint, as a society discussing and sharing creative process, you have to learn to be patient. You have to not know the answer, how something is going to work out. You have to connect with other people to get something done. You have to be vulnerable. There are so many things that happen inside a creative process that mirror other systems, that mirror our world.” 

Learn more about Basin Arts and its programming at basinartslafayette.com. "Rounding the Edge" will premiere at the International Dance Festival New Orleans on September 12 and as part of Dance/Splits at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette on September 13. bodyartdance.com/idfnola2024. acadianacenterforthearts.org.