City of Boulder, CO Creative Neighborhoods Projects, 23 Jun 2021

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From YouTube: Artist Interview: Alex Milewski

Description

In addition to his own career as a movement artist, Alex is an experienced educator. With kids unable to participate in dance, sports, and other extra-curricular activities, he is currently developing a series of online creative movement lessons. “Breakdance Fundamentals” will provide no-cost opportunities for neighbors to exercise in alternative ways during COVID-19 restrictions. Creative Neighborhoods: COVID-19 Work Projects was launched by the Office of Arts + Culture and Create Boulder: https://boulderarts.org/public-art/creative-neighborhoods/covid-19-work-projects/

A

um So, first off I'm just going to have you introduce yourself in your creative career.

B

um All right, my name is alex moleski. I am a dancer based in boulder.

B

I am the director at block 1750 and have been doing classes and direction here for the past about six years, and um I move a lot. I teach a lot I dance on my head and on my feet and in all the ways.

A

Amazing, I love it um and how has coveted 19 affected your life and livelihood.

B

Wow, that's the question of the hour. How has covhood affected my life and livelihood? Basically in every way imaginable, we were shut down as a studio for almost two months and we have come back. We've like crawled back slowly, so now we're running like limited capacity classes, um physical distancing protocols and um pretty much all of my like gig gig work went away, evaporated overnight, there's not a lot of performances going on these days, there's not a lot of off-site teaching going on these days.

B

So it's made me.

B

It's forced me to become very creative with how I'm making a living and how we're keeping the studio open- um and it's definitely revealed some like really awesome opportunities, and it's also been probably the hardest struggle that we've been through as an organization and probably like in my life as a full-time artist, probably been like the the busiest and most struggleful time for me.

A

Yeah I hear ya, um it's really inspiring to hear how people have you know gotten really creative um to keep their work moving, but um I'm sorry to hear about cancellations, but I'm glad to hear you all are coming back.

B

We are coming, we are back actually.

A

We're back um amazing, so you've obviously been awarded a covid19 work project stipend, um and would you mind just briefly telling me about your project and how it can promote connectivity in your neighborhood.

B

Yeah, so my project is a online breaking fundamentals course that teaches it's kind of focused on kids ages, 7 to whatever, but teaches whoever the basics of break dancing and so in like a fun and engaging way.

B

And my hope for that project is that I can kind of connect people in different surrounding neighborhoods to dance culture and the dance scene, and maybe they can either come together within their neighborhoods or within their pods and experience that or they can actually like, come to the studio and meet new people in that way, because I think right now, like socializing, has become really hard um and physical activity has become a little bit more of a challenge so being able to offer people in surrounding areas like opportunities to connect with their bodies and also with a new culture, and a new group of people is super important.

A

Beautiful, I wonder if I'm a kid age, seven to whatever.

B

Probably I actually, I taught a library zoom class a couple weeks ago and I think, like half of the people were like grown adults.

A

It was supposed.

B

To be a kids class, but they were like all sorts of adults. It was awesome.

A

That's amazing um cool. uh Well, finally, is there anything else you'd like to share.

B

um I guess I'm just very grateful for the opportunity and the support, um and just being you know, an artist in these times being an artist is always like its own.

B

You know day-to-day hustle, but definitely like it's inspiring to see like organizations and groups coming together and like supporting arts and supporting movement and supporting like connectivity during this time of like social disconnect, which is like really sad for me as a as a community um activist and a mover, it's just sad to see like especially young people, being more disconnected from each other and from their bodies, because I think there's already like way too much of that and that's kind of like what the block promotes is like movement in your own body and also like community movement and like doing things together.

B

um So it's just nice that there's like a little bit of support there and that we can um put in the extra time and energy and um resources to like making sure that this isn't as big of a hit as it could be, um because I think, like there's potential for catastrophic failure and the only way we're not gonna have that happen is if we like, put extra work into making sure that we have um continued effort.

B

A