The Most Beautiful Home... Maybe

The Most Beautiful Home... Maybe is a devised performance that brings together artists with local residents, community development corporations, housing advocates, and government officials to undo some of the policies that keep our most vulnerable on the margins.

With local grassroots partner organizations, we will co-create a two-part, parallel structure comprised of community workshops that utilize art-based strategies to surface barriers of current housing policies and imagine solutions for new policies. The information surfaced at the community workshops will be shared with people and groups working on the issues, especially policy makers. Simultaneously these conversations will inform a new, devised performance piece. The primary audiences are those most affected and those with the power to bring about change.

To be clear: we want to change broken policies that are hurting people. That will be the measurement of success.

This is a multi-year project that aims to center art-based solutions for civic-wide problems. The first step in the artmaking is a two-week workshop in Minneapolis, July 2020. During this session, we will enage with the local community to hear first hand stories of those who are experiencing housing insecrity as well as those who are working on policies to address housing challenges. The creative team will create scenes, scenarios, and stories that bring this information to life.

Prior to, during, and afterwards, community organizers will be meeting with housing activists, advocates, policy makers, developers, and government workers to build trust, identify shared priorities, and begin to image solutions.

In March 2021, The Most Beautiful Home... Maybe will premiere in St. Paul, presented by Mixed Blood Theater.

The Most Beautiful Home... Maybe is an experiment. The hypothesis: Can we use the tools and process of artmaking to influence housing policies?

In Minneapolis, the 2019 the homeless count reached a record-high (11,000); a 10% increase since 2015. In December 2019, the Drake Hotel, a downtown resident hotel, caught fire on Christmas Day displacing more than 200 residents, most of whom had no other housing options. Homeless encampments are popping up across the Twin Cities as more and more community members lose thier housing. In the Twin Cities, and across the nation, housing affordability has created a humanitarian disaster.

We believe that humans need housing. Using the tools and imagination we employ as artmakers, we want to be part of a solution.