Off-Leash Area: Contemporary Performance Works creates original performance work and was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1999. To date we have created over a dozen original productions, toured twice to Canada, and have been chosen among numerous Ten Best Lists and have twice been honored by the Ivey Awards, recognizing outstanding artistic work in theater in the Twin Cities.

"Our new show, Ivan the Drunk and His Terrible Tale of Woe, is on his feet and getting RAVE reviews from all the critics in the Star Tribune, City Pages, Minn Post, and the Daily Planet. Click on the links to read, and come to the show!"

Daily Planet link | Minn Post link | Star Tribune link | City Pages link

For the 4th year in a row, City Pages chooses Paul Herwig's set
among the Best Set Designs of 2008 for Border Crossing

Jennifer Ilse is awarded a 2009 Artist Initiative grant
in the Dance catagory from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Paul Herwig was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative
grant in the Theatre catagory in 2007.

Paul Herwig's set named among City Pages Best Sets of 2007
for A Gift for Planet BX63!

Jennifer Ilse named among Star Tribune's
Celebratory Moments in Dance for 2007

Paul Herwig's set named among City Pages' Best Sets of 2006
for Crimes & Whispers

Off-Leash Area is recognized with a 2nd Ivey Award!
Gerry Girouard, Artistic Collaborator,
Wins an Ivey Award for Outstanding Choreography in Crimes & Whispers!

Off-Leash Area is recognized at the inaugural Ivey Awards with an
Outstanding Production Award for their
2005 Mainstage production Psst!

Off-Leash Area is recognized by City Pages, the Minneapolis
news and arts weekly, as their 2005 Artists of the Year!

Paul Herwig's set chosen among City Pages Best Sets of 2005
for A Cupboard Full of Hate

Off-Leash Area's Zap Kunst or Presto It's Art and The Sunrise Cafe are chosen
among City Pages Best Theatre of the year 2000 and 2002!

Listen to a feature story on Off-Leash Area at the Minnesota Public Radio website.

A great interview with rehearsal and performance footage by Off-Leash Area on the Access to Art program at Minneapolis cable station MTN Channel 17. Click here to watch to featured video

Our Mission

With a playful disregard for artistic boundaries, Off-Leash Area Contemporary Performance Works recombines vocabularies and styles to create deeply transforming experiences for its audiences. The work results in a union of the vocabularies of physical theatre, dance, music, and visual art. Our creation process is extensive and involves visual storyboarding and a collaborative rehearsal process with our performers and designers. Our goal is to link all of the artistic elements not only as an artistic aesthetic, but as an interdependent and emotionally linked whole. In all our work, we strive to create a project that is both artistically challenging for us and a thought-provoking yet fiercely emotional experience for the audience. While ideas are valuable and social and political agendas are worthy, the heart is the primary field of action in our work.

Off-Leash Area Board of Directors		Off-Leash Area Advisory Council
Stefanie Galey Paul Herwig Jennifer Ilse JeNell Jacobson Liz Morque Laura Owen Dave Sheppard Chaim Teitelbaum		Sears Eldredge David O'Fallon Gerry Girouard Pam Heimdal Bill Pederson

Interested in Joining the Off-Leash Area Board of Directors?
Contact Off-Leash Area at 612-724-7372, or offleash@offleasharea.org

"The multiple Ivey Award winning troupe renders dynamic character portrayals while using simple yet stunningly effective staging and props (with) movement that's profoundly expressive while free of histrionics"
- Camile Lefevre in METRO July 2007"

"Any production by Off Leash Area is an event: this group consistently pulls together extraordinary talents from all over town to produce performance that is dance, installation, theater, and concert in one."
- Ann Klefstad, Editor of News & Features mnartists.org

"Off-Leash Area (Paul Herwig and Jennifer Ilse) – I've come to recognize this after seeing several of their productions—always brings you to a moment when, without knowing you were going to, you suddenly feel weepy. It's Yeats's "Innisfree" effect: you're reading along quietly, and then you're choked up, and you can't point to what word did it, but now you can barely finish reading the poem - "in the deep heart's core". I once heard someone else give a name for it, which I can't remember—the plunge or lunge or lurk or lunker; I call it the clutch.

How does Off-Leash Area manage to always create this effect which is so rare in the world? To begin with, they work with big themes: love and death, madness, art and life, imagination and reality. Politics and cultural theory, though applicable, are not the subject. Although the mind is engaged by Off-Leash Area's invention, the heart is the primary field of action. Second, Off-Leash Area goes bravely and continually too far, always (like Tchaikovsky) giving the crank another turn. They do not touch on things; they dive.

I'm not saying that the clutch is an essential element of art. Intellectually engaging and politically motivating artworks abound. There's even something kitschy about the clutch, something Reader's Digest. The clutch can be confused with the feeling you get when you pick up an old stuffed animal, but the true art clutch is something different, unhinged, chaotic, a sudden pane of glass giving onto the heart's desperate building. Personally, I love the clutch, which is why I will be reading Yeats, listening to Tchaikovsky, and going to Off-Leash Area productions for as long as I can."
- Lightsey Darst, poet and Minneapolis Dance Critic

"(Psst!, Maggie's Brain, and A Cupboard Full of Hate) managed a moving, almost uncanny tone that smartly depicted the bittersweet longing that tinges experience when we wake up on certain mornings, with a forgotten name on our tongue and a sensation that there is something to be done, if we could only remember what it was."
- Quinton Skinner, theatre critic for Minneapolis City Pages