By Britt Robson

After 42 years in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, Mixed Blood Theatre took a small but significant detour into the movies.

On a beautiful night this summer, the theater invited neighbors to an outdoor screening of “A Stray,” a 2016 movie shot entirely in Minneapolis that chronicles a young Somali refugee and the stray dog he encounters. Nearly 200 people flocked to the theater’s adjoining parking lot. Approximately two-thirds were Somali-Americans from the surrounding neighborhood. They brought blankets, carpet squares and upturned plastic buckets for seating.

In a memo to staffers the following week, Mixed Blood founder and Artistic Director Jack Reuler said that “The feeling in the air echoed the mission of the organization” that night.

Beginning in the 1990s, the neighborhood known as the West Bank has been the locus for a huge influx of East African immigrants. It is said to contain the world’s densest concentration of ethnic Somalis outside of Mogadishu.

Cedar-Riverside is also home to several organizations committed to diversity and multicultural engagement. That includes Mixed Blood as well as the Cedar Cultural Center, Augsburg University and KFAI Radio. More than two decades into the neighborhood’s massive demographic shift, these organizations are learning to adapt and engage the community in exciting ways.

By its very name, Mixed Blood stands for the integration of cultures and people. But as Reuler tells it, acting on that credo in its own backyard has been a long learning curve.

“If we were going to keep from being an island in a community where we’d been an anchor, we needed to change,” he said. “Every year we’ve been a little less dumb about it.”

The biggest leap occurred a couple of years ago. “We finally realized we needed to use what we had — art in general and theater more specifically — as a tool rather than a product,” Reuler said.

So Mixed Blood rolled out a detailed plan to engage its Somali-American neighbors. Some strategies are delineated by age: “Baby raves” hosted by DJs with shiny objects; a regular story time for preschoolers; talent shows and discussion groups for teens.

Many activities are handled by 21-year-old hip-hop artist Sisco Omar, hired this year as Mixed Blood’s community organizer. He stages pop-up concerts around the neighborhood and runs a quarterly Cedar’s Got Talent event. “We want the community to think of the theater as their room,” Omar said.

In recent months, that’s exactly what has happened. Be it an election night celebration for a victorious Somali-American politician, a carwash fundraiser in the parking lot for a basketball team, a concert where families can grab free back-to-school supplies or story circles to promote better health care, the community has engaged with the Mixed Blood space.

There’s also a fledgling program — still without funding — that brings the origins of Mixed Blood full circle. “In the belief that theater is an instrument of change and a voice for the unheard,” Reuler said, he has met with Augsburg University administrators to develop scholarships for neighborhood residents who want to study theater.

‘Colonial mind-set’

Founded in 1989, the Cedar Cultural Center spent much of its early existence fighting off creditors and operating hand-to-mouth in terms of budgeting. That was frustrating for then-director of development Adrienne Dorn, hired in 2006.

“Our mission as an organization is intercultural appreciation, and here it is located in the middle of the largest Somali diaspora community in North America since the mid-’90s and what are we doing?” Dorn remembered thinking. “It was always a glaring gap, and huge inconsistency.”

Beginning in 2010, however, the Cedar began receiving grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, a direct result of Minnesota’s Legacy Amendment. “That was a game changer,” said then-executive director Rob Simonds.

Still there were growing pains. Like Mixed Blood, the Cedar initially pursued “outreach” rather than genuine engagement with Somali-American neighbors. “Outreach is sort of a colonial mind-set: ‘We have to help them figure us out,’ ” Simonds said. “Where genuine engagement is more, ‘We have to figure out how we can do things that are of value to them.’ ”

Read more: Cedar-Riverside arts groups dispense with ‘colonial mind-set’ to engage Somali-Americans

Source: Startribune