Sometime around 2014 or 15, I was looking for a new way to present dance at the Palladium that reflected the theater’s mission to support and promote the best local talent.
Fortunately, two dancer/choreographers who grew up in St. Petersburg were thinking the same thing.
It only took one meeting with Helen French and Lauren Slone to know I’d found the perfect partners. We agreed on a show date and these two talented women went out to make it happen.
The result was BEACON, an annual dance event in Hough Hall. I am so proud of the work Lauren and Helen have done to bring the best choreographers and dancers to our stage.
Beacon returns on March 6 for the biggest dance concert in the event’s history. For tickets and information, please follow this link.
I asked Lauren to write a brief history of BEACON. That follows here:
BEACON at 11: How Two Dancers Built Something To Last
By Lauren Slone
In 2015, Helen French and Lauren Slone were both serving as judges for a student dance competition at USF, and a late-night parking lot conversation afterward kept circling back to the same thing: they’d both grown up training in St. Petersburg’s dance studios, and spent years traveling the world making, supporting, and watching dance, and both kept getting pulled back home. That conversation turned into BEACON. Eleven years later, it’s still one of the most exciting nights on St. Pete’s arts calendar.
Helen and Lauren weren’t looking to start an institution. They were filling a gap they couldn’t stop noticing: St. Pete’s arts scene was receiving more national recognition for its energy, murals, and galleries but professional dance was still more of a well-kept secret. Their thinking was straightforward: if more infrastructure and visibility for dance wasn’t here yet, we’ll help create it. So they did.
From the beginning, BEACON was rooted in place. The Palladium became home base, and the focus was on artists who shared their commitments to world-class training, professional careers, and a genuine investment in what was growing here. Intentionally, BEACON includes artists at every career stage, and since that first show has supported over 75 artists and presented 45 premieres
What’s made BEACON feel different is that it’s always featured dance in collaboration with other artistic disciplines. Any given evening might put a choreographer in conversation with a live musician, a spoken word artist, a filmmaker, or a visual designer. It’s a collision, in the best sense,and audiences feel that.
The vision for BEACON’s next chapter goes well beyond an annual performance: subsidized studio space for local artists, producing support, professional development, residencies that bring outside artists into the St. Pete conversation, and eventually a festival model that spills out of the theater and into the city itself, outdoor installations, film screenings, partnerships with local businesses, and more.
BEACON started as a question about what “home” means for a working artist. The answer, it turns out, is something you have to build together.
If you’ve never been, this is the year to come. And if you want to make sure this performance series keeps growing, you can support BEACON through the St. Petersburg College Foundation. Eleven years in, and there’s still so much to come.
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