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Image by Elizabeth Maske. Black Label Movement dancers Shannon Hartle Dolan and Cheng Xiong perform Carl Flink's Duet for Wreck in Hillside Theater.
I’ll Live, As I’ll Work, As I Am!
This is Frank Lloyd Wright’s declaration at the beginning of his 1896 poem Work Song that greeted the apprentices when they came through the south entrance to the Hillside Drafting Studio. It still adorns that entrance in 2026. I first encountered this poem 15 years ago during a Taliesin tour when I also experienced the yet to be renovated Hillside Theater designed by Wright for the first time. At that time, I vowed to bring my dance company Black Label Movement (BLaM) to perform in that beautiful and unusual jewel box theater, if it was ever renovated. A renovation was completed two years ago in 2024.
Image by Elizabeth Maske. Black Label Movement dancers perform site specific activations in the Hillside Drafting Studio.
Fast forward to July 25, 2026, when that vow became a reality and BLaM stepped onto the now renovated Hillside Theater stage for a unique performance that included site specific pre-show activations of the Drafting Studio, the Assembly Hall and the Dining Hall of the Hillside Home School. The enthusiastic and engaged audience in attendance that evening encountered the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in an entirely new way, through the lens of choreography and dance. One audience member declared during the post-performance talkback, “This should be a part of the tours offered here. I experienced this beautiful place in ways I never imagined.”
Image by Elizabeth Maske. Event attendees promenade from the Hillside Dining Room to the Theater.
This event, of course, didn’t occur by happenstance. It was only made possible through a close collaboration between BLaM and the Taliesin programming team led by Caroline Hamblen. In Fall 2025, we envisioned a 5 day BLaM artist residency that would allow the company to stay for two nights and create a performance on the Taliesin grounds with rare access and use of the buildings to conceive and build the performance. One of our goals was to evoke the historic Taliesin Fellowships of the 1950s through the mid-1980s that were set up by Wright’s third wife Olgivanna and Wright to support apprentice architects, but also composers and dance artists to be in residency at Taliesin.
Image by Bill Cameron. Black Label Movement dancers Javan MnGrezzo (right), Shannon Hartle Dolan (center) and Lily Conforti (left) rehearsing in the Hillside Drafting Studio.
This was not simply a concert dance performance. I also invited University of Minnesota Architecture Professor Tom Fisher to join us for the residency. Together, he, the Black Label movers and I created a “TED Talk-Like” presentation entitled: Architecture as Slow Choreography | Choreography as Fast Architecture.
During the residency, Tom shared:
I have always been struck by the movement intrinsic to Wright’s architecture. Experiencing a Wright building, whether the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, his sprawling Taliesin home or the Hillside Theater, is not a passive event. Like a choreographer moving dancers across a stage or space, he moves visitors through his designs intentionally so they experience his buildings the way he wanted them to. While you can wander in a Wright design, you always feel how he, as the architect, wants you to be in the space, what he wants you to see.
Image by Elizabeth Maske. Professor Tom Fisher is lifted by Black Label Movement during the embodied presentation Architecture as Slow Choreography | Choreography as Fast Architecture conceived, choreographed and directed by Carl Flink ins collaboration with Fisher.
This presentation challenged the audience to think of how two seemingly disparate fields like architecture and dance could actually be closely related, even entwined, like Wright’s intimate relationship with Olglivanna Lloyd Wright, who was herself a dance artist.
BLaM company member Javan McGrezzo observed:
Taliesin is a place that invites an intentional slowing down and accentuates the importance of being present. Taking in the countryside, gazing upon architectural marvels, and moving through spaces make one yearn for the comfort of community; finding yourself compressed so that you might move into the release of full breath and limitless imagination.
Change - Image by Bill Cameron. Black Label Movement dancer Lily Conforti “flying” in the Assembly Hall as audience members watch from below.
I will close where I began with Frank Lloyd Wright’s anthemic Work Song. Ever since I first read it 15 years ago, it has stayed with me as an unvarnished, even awkward, declaration, by a young, striving Wright bursting with vision and ideas about how he would face, take on and transform the field of Architecture and even the world. The Work Song moved me so much that for this performance I choreographed and premiered a new duet called Work Song: A Duet for Olgivanna and Frank set to an original composition by Minnesota music artist Eric Mayson. Eric set and performed the entire poem during the duet’s premiere with Black Label Movers Lily Conforti and Javan MnGrezzo. The Work Song inspires me, but perhaps more importantly, it reminds me that making and creating is beautiful, and often hard, labor that is worth digging into.
To stay at Taliesin and commune with Frank Lloyd Wright through his buildings, his Work Song manifesto and the land that shaped him through rehearsals and performance was an unparalleled and rare opportunity. One that revealed how alive the Taliesin estate is and will continue to be as a place to work, create and imagine, whether through architectural design or to inspire new art through music, dance, photography and beyond.
I’ll Live, As I’ll Work, As I Am!
When Dance Returned to Taliesin
