Tofte Lake Center was established in 2008 by Liz Engelman and Michael Bigelow Dixon. TLC is often lovingly referred to as Norm's Fish Camp (or just Norm’s!), in honor of the resort’s previous owner, Norm Saari, who built and operated a fishing resort on Tofte Lake for over four decades.
2023 was another exciting blend of new faces and old favorites! We kicked the year off with our first winter residency collaboration with Camp du Nord and launched the summer with our Adopt a Highway work weekend before jumping into hosting artists! Our programming included our National Emerging Artists, Family Artists, Individual Artist, and MN BIPOC Artist Residencies. We also hosted organizational retreats for the McKnight Dancer and Choreographer Fellows, Macalester College Theatre and Dance Students, the Playwrights’ Center, Octopus Theatricals, and wrapped up the season with a performance by the April Sellers Dance Collective. It was a season to remember.
In 2022, we welcomed back familiar faces while also meeting many new ones! In addition to our our Individual Residencies, we were thrilled to host our first parent-artist retreat, partnering with Tru Ruts curate their first Black Artist Family Retreat, made possible with support from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Some familiar faces that we’re always happy to see at the lake were: April Sellers Dance Collective, Macalester College, Pangaea World Theatre, The Playwrights’ Center, and our Shinrin Yoku Forest Bathers. New faces to the lake included Lightning Rod Theater and National New Play Network.
We were so excited to return to a full season of programming. We launched two new Residency Programs: our National Emerging Artists Program for emerging artists from around the country, and our MSAB Residency Program for BIPOC artists from around the state of Minnesota thanks to the generous support from the Minnesota State Arts Board.
We’re so grateful to have been able to program half of our season, given the restrictions on activity demanded by Covid-19. This gave us the opportunity to respond to artists’ needs. We offered fully-funded residencies for BIPOC artists from Minneapolis and St. Paul, whose livelihoods were affected by the murder of George Floyd. Our Group Residencies focused on Black artists and activists who integrated their creative work with their racial justice work.
TLC partnered with the Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET) in an artistic exchange of performance practice, and with the University of Texas-Austin in hosting their graduate playwrights and designers for pre-production collaborations.
In 2018 we celebrated our 10th Anniversary Season. We were excited to launch two new programming weeks: our Ambassadors Week, which brought local and national artistic leaders together to strategize how TLC can broaden our reach to artists and communities of color, and our Shinrin Yoku (Forest Bathing) Retreat, which introduced this growing nature therapy mindfulness practice to our TLC community.
We celebrated the opening of our new Visual Artists Studio - “The Doodle” - with several Guided Retreats focused on visual art and creativity.
We inaugurated weekly Yoga Classes in the Aerie, open to both the Ely community and TLC's resident artists, led by Ely's yoginis Kris Hallberg and Sarah Hansen.
Our Gaia Memorial Fellowship was inaugurated in honor of TLC’s longtime artist, supporter, and dear friend, Gaia Fenna.
We extended our dance repertoire with two additional Minneapolis dance companies, Ananya Dance Theater and Shapiro & Smith Dance, who became another returning dance company to TLC.
We inaugurated two new Master Classes, our Visualizing Nature Workshop, and the Art and Nature Workshop, with support from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council. We also built The Aerie, our new dance-friendly rehearsal and performance space.
We hosted organizational retreats for The Playwrights' Center and the McKnight Dancer and Choreographer Fellows, initiating what has become longstanding partnerships.
We initiated our community engagement efforts with SPDT’s creation and performance of a community-developed piece called Cast from the Water’s Edge: The Boundary Waters Project, performed by a combination of members from the Ely community and the SPDT dancers at Vermilion Community College.
In 2010, we launched our Emerging Artists Program for arts from MN and New York, sponsored by the Jerome Foundation, the first of ten years of their programmatic support. Additionally, we initiated our Master Classes and Workshops and initiated our first organizational retreat.
