- Kindling Arts is Nashville's radically unique independent arts incubator.

(groovy music) - We are conveners and facilitators, and we exist to make the ideas of local artists a reality.

We have a wide variety of artists that we work with.

Theater artists, musicians, and dancers, and circus performers, and puppeteers, and comedians.

Any kind of performance you can imagine we are interested in.

- And we've done plays and dance pieces and immersive projects and site specific work.

It's that sense of limitlessness is one of the really exciting hallmarks of Kindling Arts.

The reason that Kindling came to be in a festival format is because it is literally a chance to pull resources together.

- [Jessika] You have musicians collaborating with puppeteers and circus artists collaborating with theater artists to make new kinds of work.

- [Daniel] What we're able to do is say, okay, not everyone has to self-produce their own work individually.

We can produce those works together.

(audience clapping) - I got into a show, and that was really my first introduction to Kindling.

They are giving Nashville kind of the cutting edge of art.

And it's something for everybody.

Just kind of felt like I had a place there, that I belonged there.

It felt good to me and I just love it.

- We've seen the same kind of work for so long.

We've seen the same bodies on our stages.

We've seen the same romances on our stages.

And it's time for something new.

We absolutely must be providing a platform to folks who are black, indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, other people of color, we need to be providing a platform for queer voices in this city especially.

- You have to be able to go to a very vulnerable place for any kind of art than to have a company like this that was wanting to put the idea forward and to see how it would grow.

You have someone that trusts in what you're doing, or what it could be, and knows that the artist is going to come back with something weird and awesome and interesting.

And somehow you meet in the middle.

(inspiring music) - [Daniel] Authentically having a community that is diverse and supporting the existing community that is already here in this vibrant city that we live in.

It's amazing how young the organization is and yet how much work has come out of it already.

I'm just so pleased that the organization is at a place where it feels full all the time.

- I hope that when people come and leave the Kindling Arts event that they are filled with wonderment, that they leave wanting more of something new.

- July 28th through 31st, we have the 2022 Kindling Arts Festival.

For more information, if you're interested in attending the festival or any of the other programming, please visit kindlingarts.com.

- [Narrator] This NPT Arts Break is made possible by the generous support of the Martha Rivers Ingram Advised Fund of The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee.