Confluence (2024)

The Minnesota International Dance Festival (MNIDF) is an annual celebration of dance, cultural exchange, and community, bringing together emerging Twin Cities artists, dance instructors, choreographers, and audiences for a week of workshops, performances, and artistic exchange. Launched in 2023 by Dance Projects by ME, the festival was created to foster connection through dance and to provide opportunities for artists and communities to encounter diverse movement traditions and creative perspectives. Each year, MNIDF welcomes a different guest country, highlighting the artists, traditions, and contemporary voices that shape its dance community.

For its second annual festival in 2024, MNIDF welcomed Cambodia as its Guest Country, bringing together Cambodian and Cambodian American artists from Minnesota and beyond. The festival celebrated the many ways Cambodian dance continues to evolve across generations and communities, from Cambodian Classical Dance to contemporary Khmer movement and new works shaped by the Cambodian diaspora. Through performances, workshops, and community exchange, artists and participants explored the connections between tradition, identity, heritage, and contemporary artistic expression.

The festival’s featured programming included Confluence, a vibrant gathering of artists representing diverse perspectives and approaches to Cambodian dance. The program brought together local and national artists connected to Cambodia through birth, ancestry, family, community, and cultural heritage, creating space for traditional and contemporary practices to exist alongside one another. Featured artists included Wattanak Dance Troupe, Roza Lay, Peter Veth and Chummeng Soun of Khmae Urban Ballet, and Crash Dance.

MNIDF 2024 was made possible through collaboration among Dance Projects by ME, Wattanak Dance Troupe, Hot House, EMartin Dance, Khmae Urban Ballet, Roza Lay, and Crash Dance, under the direction of Carmen Lucia Lincoln and Erika Martin. Together, the artists and organizations contributed to a festival centered on accessibility, artistic exchange, and the belief that dance can create meaningful connections across cultures and communities.

This engagement was supported by the Arts Midwest GIG Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional contributions from the Minnesota State Arts Board.