Lake Street Arts: Pangea Theater wins national grant to fund art experiences on Lake St.

Article and photos by MARGIE O’LOUGHLIN

Pangea World Theater has won a $120,500 grant from ArtPlace America, a national grant-making program that upholds arts and culture as critical pieces of community life. The funds are being used to partner with the Lake Street Council, a cohort of artists, and local businesses to create multi-media installations and build community in a program called Lake Street Arts.

The Lake Street corridor has been steadily improving, thanks in no small part by the success of Latino, East African and other immigrant-owned businesses. While these businesses exist in proximity to one another, they are often quite separate. The goal of Lake Street Arts is to use artist-led experiences as a bridge across ethnic lines.

“Poetry in the Windows” is one of the grant-funded initiatives that will soon start appearing along E. Lake St. For this project, business owners will make window space available to display poems written by local youth ages 16-23 on the subject of home. Pangea’s Alejandra Tobar-Alatriz, project coordinator for Lake Street Arts, said, “The intention is to provide a platform for these voices to be heard.”

Photo left: Alejandra Tobar-Alatriz, the project coordinator for Lake Street Arts, is a dancer, actor, director and community organizer. She explained that Pangea World Theater was one of 55 organizations across the country to receive a grant from ArtPlace America. 

The youth, who identify themselves as indigenous, immigrant and/or people of color, are responding to a call for artists put out by social media, fliers, youth groups, community organizations and mentors in the spoken-word and writing scenes. The poems tell stories of transformation, injustice, loneliness, and family. They’ll be printed on plastic clings at least 2’ by 3’ in size, and will remain up in the windows of host businesses through November.

The question of what is home is very relevant to Lake St. Long considered the main corridor for start-up immigrant businesses, it has seen several waves of immigration since its humble beginnings. In 1885, Lake St. was just a country road—a dividing line between farm sections. Not one business existed on its six-mile stretch across town. The only corner that held even the slightest promise for development was the intersection of Lake and Nicollet.

By the turn of the last century, Minneapolis had drawn a significant Scandinavian immigrant population. German and Latvian immigrants followed and, most recently, large numbers of Latinos and East Africans have put down business and family roots here.

Photo right: Meena Natarajan, executive/literary director of Pangea World Theater, said that “being an immigrant is about constantly stepping into multiple worlds.” The Poetry in the Windows project invites young writers to express how it feels to live in their world, and then to share it in a host business which may be owned by someone of a different ethnicity.

Meena Natarajan is the executive/literary director of the Pangea World Theater. She grew up in Mumbai, the most populous city in India. Natarajan speaks three languages fluently. “In India, I was constantly listening to different languages,” she said, “seeing different types of clothing, tasting different foods. I started to ask myself very early on, what does it really mean to live and work together across differences?“

Natarajan continued, “At Pangea, we believe that no one needs to be invisible. Our theater has been based on Lake St. for years, and we are excited to continue building more focused and intentional relationships in the community through Lake Street Arts.”

Pangea World Theater is located at 711 W. Lake St. Natarajan and her husband, Dipankar Mukherjee, has been making plays there for 20 years about race, gender, ethnicity, human rights, politics and social justice. The scope of what goes on at Pangea is huge: the work illuminates the human condition, celebrates cultural differences and promotes human rights by presenting international, multi-disciplinary theater.

The good news for residents of the E. Lake neighborhood is that Pangea World Theater is in the early stages of relocating to E. Lake St., if a suitable space is found.

Poetry in the Windows will be on view in several business windows along East Lake Street including Elsa’s House of Sleep, the Himalaya, Gandhi Mahal, la Alborada Market, Heart of the Beast Puppet Theatre, East Lake Library, Longfellow Market, Lake Coffee House, J-Klips Barber & Beauty Shop, Taco Taxi, Ingebretson’s, Mercado Central, Patrick’s Cabaret and the Midtown Global Market.