The Denver dance scene has been having a bit of a renaissance lately with events like Red Bull Dance Your Style at Summit on Blake Street and The Somebody’s Friend Movement and Music Festival, held around the Denver Central Market. The latter event was the creative passion product between Kimberly Chmielewski, owner of Denver-based dance company jk-co, and Cecelia Jones, a Denver native and dancer since she was three years old. The festival had been in the works for over a year, with discussions starting in April 2022, and was meant to give a larger platform to dancers in the community.
“We got this huge influx of dancers during the pandemic, and we began to lose them to the coasts because we didn’t have work or they weren’t getting the visibility that we wanted for them,” Jones said in an interview before the festival. “So we thought, how do we make a platform to just have the artist’s organization see artists?’ “
Jones went on to also mention the wealth of depth and arts in the Denver area from many small modern dance companies that focus on styles like vogueing, twerking and circus, just to name a few and was adamant about not losing them from lack of opportunities in Denver. Chmielewski also wanted to call attention to making dance be seen as an integral part of entertainment and socializing as much as live music or going to a brewery.
One of the other major events was their Magic and Mayhem Ball on Saturday, May 20th, focusing on Ballroom culture and the vogue style of dancing, an event also meant to elevate voices in the LGBTQ+ community. Davry Ratcliffe, also known as Father Glamm Lauren, and Colorado’s LGBTQ ballroom pioneer, produced the event to help educate people about what those spaces are meant for.
“I was one person in this entire city that vogued, that was in Ballroom. There was nobody in all the clubs I went to, all the functions that I went to, that knew what it was,” Ratcliffe said to the bar tour crowd. “To go from being the only person, to seven years later having seven Ballroom houses, having thrown my 3rd ball in the past six months… is remarkable.”
Lisa Engelken, the Creative Director of the dance company Breaking Barriers and a contestant in the Red Bull Dance Your Style competition from earlier this year, expressed her excitement about being one of the 41 dance companies involved. She also noted that the Denver dance community needed an event like this in town to drive home the growth of dance culture in the city.
“It’s a common cycle in Denver, because that’s the nature of the city – it’s small and spread out, people come in and out,” Engelken mentioned. “It’s difficult to stay in Denver because there’s not a lot of opportunity, so to have something like this shows that we really needed it because everybody came out.”
The festival was not without unexpected obstacles, however. While the first day went well during the bar tour, the next day was canceled with performances moved to Saturday due to rain – only to once again have to reschedule due to the air quality warning coming from the fires in Canada. Nevertheless, all involved parties persevered and still managed to adapt and manage to create a space for everyone to express themselves in spite of the circumstances.
After a somewhat tumultuous experience, Jones and Chmielewski thanked everyone involved in making the festival an overall success and took to Instagram on the official Somebody’s Friend page to announce that they look forward to seeing everyone next year.