What is a Virtual Residency?

For Dan Froot & Co, a performance is one node on a continuum of community engagement. Before the current pandemic, Dan Froot would conduct one or more advance visits to performance sites in order to build interest in the company’s work, and to develop reciprocal community partnerships with organizations whose missions overlap those of our projects.

...We are interested in meeting your community members where they are.

Whether a residency’s goal is to pave the way for a performance of existing work, or to seed a new community-engaged project, we are interested in meeting your community members where they are. For instance, if we were planning to perform Pang! in your community in October, Dan might visit the prior April for a week. He might volunteer a few times at soup kitchens, attend a meeting of a student group that runs the local college food closet, participate in a community potluck, or attend a city council meeting at which the school lunch program is being discussed -- all the while connecting with leaders and stakeholders whose missions would benefit from increased cross-class dialogue about local hunger and food insecurity.

...Our “virtual residencies” offer a safe, low-cost option for rich face-to-face engagement with your community members, from the comfort of their own homes.

During the age of COVID-19, our “virtual residencies” offer a safe, low-cost option for rich face-to-face engagement with your community members, from the comfort of their own homes. We envision a virtual residency functioning similarly to one of Dan’s advance visits, except that the whole company would be in residence, and we would attend events and meetings remotely, via Zoom, Google Hangouts, or other video conferencing platforms. Having the entire company in residence expands the breadth of our offerings, such as:

• Virtual childcare activities: Asynchronous workshop offering
• Movement workshop
• Storytelling
• Community organizing
• Self-care: creative writing, meditation, breath
• Movement
• Oral History Methods

All company members would be “on-call” for the residency days - in whatever your time zone is - to join events or meet-ups that arise naturally throughout this process.

Sample Virtual Residency Schedule: