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One evening this spring, Carl Flink  (B.A. ’90) watched intently as two of his dancers, University student Eddie Oroyan and Miriam Castro (B.A. ’06), performed his “Duet from Wreck” at Old Arizona arts center in Minneapolis. As the dancers perched at either end of a bench, in unwavering yet precarious-looking shoulder stands, the audience gasped. They flung, clung to, lifted, and carried each other with an intense physicality cast in tenderness, and the audience was rapt.

As the tension and uncertainty in the dancers’ relationship ebbed and flowed, the audience’s emotional identification with the portrayal was palpable. The duet ended with the dancers simply, yet profoundly, holding hands. The audience was silent, as if collectively regaining its breath. One or two people softly said, “Wow.”

Then the theater erupted with vigorous clapping and loud whoops. Several audience members dabbed at their eyes. Flink nodded to his dancers with approval, as his wife, Emilie, and 3-year-old daughter, Willa, joined in the applause. The performance had offered a glimpse at the Twin Cities’ newest dance company, Black Label Movement, which debuts in August. As excitement coursed through the audience, the company’s founder realized, he said later, that “I’d hit it; I’d struck a universal chord.”

He explains: “I talk a lot with my dancers and students about how you touch someone communicates everything. The emotion is inherent in the physicality. If I’ve achieved my goal, the audience can’t help but be there with the dancers when they’re experiencing the emotional or mental vulnerability that comes with physical risk. When people can see human vulnerability in a piece, that’s their entrance point,” Flink says.

Last year, Flink began assembling Black Label Movement—whose name was inspired by the spare, unadorned generic food labels that began appearing in the 1970s—to facilitate such choreographic explorations. The company features an outstanding cast of dancers, many of whom, like Castro, are recent graduates of the University of Minnesota’s dance department. Flink began teaching dance at the University in 2001. In 2004 he joined the University as an associate professor. In 2005, he was appointed director of dance for the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance.

Black Label Movement is the means by which Flink merges his theories and research in dance with real-world practice. “It’s a holistic model that has the specific benefit of breaking down institutional walls between the university and the larger Twin Cities community,” Flink explains. “And it gives people who aren’t necessarily going to respond to an article, a book, a lecture, or a panel a whole new way of accessing those ideas.”

According to Steve Rosenstone, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Black Label Movement demonstrates that faculty contributions to the broader community are “not just about technology transfer, not just about jobs, not just about serving as consultants to cities when they’re designing highways and buildings,” he says. Rather, artistic ventures like Black Label Movement contribute to “the cultural fabric of our community.”

The company also brings a powerful and unique choreographic voice to the local dance community. “A lot of people in academia and beyond think of the arts as simply descriptive of knowledge,” Flink says. “Someone does a piece about apartheid so the audience will think and learn something deeper about it.” Instead of making his dances “about” something, Flink says, in his work “artistic expression comes out of the body through movement.” This “embodied art,” as he calls his work, conveys “a way of knowing, not a description. It’s a way of communicating in and of itself. I don’t need to layer it with a paragraph of description.”

Flink also sees this approach to dance, in which the physical manifests the emotional and intellectual, as an “act of rebellion” in contemporary American society. He cites decreasing physical activity and increasing obesity, distorted views of the “perfect” body, and the tendency to watch activities, such as sports on television or games on computers, rather than to participate in them.

In short, he says, people increasingly disconnect their minds from their bodies. “But anytime you move, or experience the power of someone else’s movement, you become aware that the mind is connected to the body.” Because of his “embodied” approach to choreography, Flink continues, “my pieces are distinctly human. I truly believe art and dance are pivotal forces for change in our society. And I believe the ultimate political statement is helping people find deeper centeredness in their own humanity.”

This merging of art and politics in Flink’s work, with its strong infusions of athleticism and humanism, comes naturally. He was raised in Kenwood during the 1960s, when the Minneapolis neighborhood was “a liberal bastion of progressive thought,” he recalls. His father, who worked for 30 years in Medtronic’s department of international corporate medical standards, “was always extremely rigorous in his thinking and very critical of our society.” Flink’s mother was a schoolteacher who worked with juvenile delinquents and adults earning their high-school GEDs.

His younger sister, who was adopted at three months and was of African American and French Canadian origin, died in 2005 “as the result of a 20-year addiction to heroin,” Flink says. “The experience of witnessing her life, and the lens it provided on social programs in this country and how they privilege certain groups over others, was radicalizing. My sister’s life took my liberal progressive upbringing away from theory and made it real. For me, there was no more talking about equality, tolerance, and acceptance. I realized that I needed to act if people like my sister were going to get a fair share of society.”

A star soccer player, Flink transferred from Carleton College to the University in 1985 to major in political science and women’s studies—and to play club soccer with an eye toward a professional career in Europe. Then he took a modern-dance class, to satisfy a yearning he’d felt since ninth grade, when he saw a television program in which football icon Herschel Walker of the Dallas Cowboys danced with the Fort Worth Ballet.

After that first class, Flink says, “dance was like a virus. It infused my whole body.” Within six months, he was taking up to eight ballet classes a week, as well as dance classes at the University and throughout the Twin Cities. “In three years, I crunched in 10 years of dance training. It was crazy.”

Flink was still playing soccer and planning on graduate school in political science when, in 1990, he produced his women’s studies honors thesis, a dance performance titled Silence, Whispers, Screams. “My task was to produce a dance concert using feminist organizational theory—essentially a more democratic, collective approach to organizing a concert versus a hierarchical approach,” Flink explains. The dance works included a woman dancing with her mother, pieces questioning gender roles, and an examination of prison culture. “The attempt was to have dances under a larger umbrella of social criticism,” he recalls. “It was a huge success.”

Graduate school, however, would wait. Susan McGuire, a visiting dancer via the Cowles Land Grant Guest Artist Chair, had taught a work by iconic New York choreographer Paul Taylor to the University students. Flink loved Taylor’s work. “It completely made sense to my athlete’s body,” he says. McGuire suggested Flink move to New York and pursue a career in dance. He earned a full scholarship at the Paul Taylor School and by 1992 was performing with the internationally renowned José Limón Dance Company, where he met and married another company dancer, Emilie Plauché.

In 1996, during a Limón performance at the White House, Flink had an epiphany. “The fact that I was there as the ‘entertainment’ was shocking to me,” Flink recalls. “If you had asked me, when I was 20, what would be my first time in the White House, I would have said as a congressional page or White House intern. I realized I hadn’t left political science and women’s studies and social justice because I was bored with it. . . . So I asked myself, ‘Is dance what I want to be doing for the rest of my life? Or is there unfinished business?’”

He contacted his mentors at the University, including Raymond Duvall in political science and Robert Brown from cultural studies and comparative literature, who suggested law. In 2001, Flink graduated from Stanford Law School (having served as a guest instructor, lecturer, and choreographer in Stanford’s dance program at the same time). He moved back to St. Paul, taking a job with Farmers’ Legal Action Group, Inc., as a staff attorney. But he also began teaching dance at the University as an affiliate faculty member.

With the birth of daughter Willa in 2002, he says, “the seams started showing. I basically was doing a full-time law practice and a full-time arts practice, and when she came along that lifestyle was unsustainable.” By accepting the position as director of the dance program, Flink could finally “bring all of my disparate skills under one roof.”

Rosenstone predicts Flink will continue to strengthen a dance department that’s already “one of the best undergraduate programs in the country. There’s a sense of energy around the program that comes from new leadership,” he says. “Carl is a magnetic personality who engages in broad discussions about the arts and creative processes in the college. And he’s a remarkable choreographer who enjoys tremendous relationships with the college and the larger dance community.”

Flink’s appointment has also benefited the development of the Interdisciplinary Program in Collaborative Arts, part of the U’s Initiative on Arts and Humanities. The premise of the program, Rosenstone explains, is simple: “Much of the creativity in the arts occurs at the intersections, or boundaries, of the distinct disciplines of dance, theater, music, and studio arts. Many of our students come to the University already playing at those boundaries and intersections.” Through the collaborative-arts program, he says, the University will be better prepared to support and nurture the work of such students.

Flink says he brings to the College of Liberal Arts and the dance program “an instinctive, manifested, interdisciplinary experience. . . . It’s not an intellectual exercise. I am living it.” The primacy of Flink’s diverse background in his daily life as an administrator and educator, dancer and choreographer, is also the foundation for the most public of his activities: Black Label Movement.

Jamie Ryan (B.A. ’04) is a Black Label Movement dancer, who—along with Flink—is also a member of the Minneapolis-based Shapiro and Smith Dance. Flink’s choreography requires strong, athletic dancers who aren’t afraid to push at the boundaries of their own physical limitations, which is what Ryan loves about his work. “He’ll show us something and I’ll think, ‘There’s no way I can do that,’ ” Ryan explains, with a laugh. “Then I do it, and the thrill and adrenaline rush excite me.”

That excitement—as well as the emotional shading that accompanies the dancers’ fear, vulnerability, trust, commitment, and mastery as they perform the choreography—easily transfers to the audience. “You can’t be dishonest when you’re at true risk,” Flink says. “It’s the ultimate metaphor for human experience. And audiences can’t help but go along for the ride.”