We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Miriam Kraatz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Miriam below.

Miriam, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s talk legacy – what sort of legacy do you hope to build?

Construct is made to be a place where people of any age and background can be free to express themselves and discover abilities and ideas within themselves. Life in a modern tech society is fast and we are still quite bound to the ideals of producing and efficiency of the industrial era. Construct is meant to provide a bit of a vacation from that and give the opportunity to slow down every now and then and seek happiness outside of material things and technological progress. …This kind of makes it sound like Construct is a think tank or spiritual center, and to me it is.
My biggest hope is that Construct will continue to grow as a place where people explore their spirituality, create, and question the status quo even once my years have passed. Even if our current main medium is dance, particularly street style dances, other arts and ways of expressing oneself are just as welcome. The most important part is that Construct is like a community living room that gives freedom from daily pressures.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

My Latin teacher in high school once gave all of us nicknames or titles, and mine was “Qua philosopha est” (the philosopher).
I feel that what I do every day, my ‘business’ or ‘work’ has been with me all my life. By that I mean providing a space to explore ideas. It may sound surprising, but during my career as a data scientist, I felt that I was also doing this: I created space for ideas and exploration by asking questions and pointing out overlooked possibilities. I just changed the realm from numbers and logic to movement, colors, and sounds.
Both of these realms have been a part of my life as long as I remember: In 2nd grade I was excited to do the math homework for the 4th graders, and when I was 9, I taught myself how to play piano (which would eventually lead to a brief career as a jazz saxophonist). I struggled with the decision which one to commit myself to ever since, and in the end I ended up doing both.
I came into direct contact with Breaking in 2006 when a friend started throwing down at a party of mine and I joined local practice sessions the next week. After finishing my PhD at Vanderbilt in 2011, I was able to get more serious about dance and increase my involvement with the scene in Nashville. I began assisting Q (Quincy Ellison) – who had opened “615 House of Dance” in 2012 to teach kids’ breakdance – with his event, a Breaking jam called “Bashville Stampede”.
In January 2016 we took the leap and founded “Construct”, our studio and event space. It took us, with the help of the community, 3 years to complete renovations (the first year we held community practices in the summer without A/C, so we often hit 95 to 100 degrees inside!). Our pride and joy is our sprung maple floor made with a traditional batten system like the old dance halls of the 1930s, which I designed and we built all ourselves.
The obvious commercial services we provide are dance classes for kids and adults, summer camps, Breakdance performances, and the studio as rental space. Aside from that, and more importantly, Construct also offers 7 hours of community practices a week free of charge. All across the US, street style practices and events are often held in whatever space is available, at barber shops, bars with sticky floors, or outside on concrete, while older, more established forms of dance such as ballet learn in nice studios with specially made floors. At Construct, we are giving street style culture – which has traveled around the globe but received surprisingly little support in its origin country (the US) – a space that we believe is worthy of it. At the same time, we uphold original values: free community practices where “each one teach one”, the idea of spreading knowledge for the betterment of the community, is practiced, valuing individuality and autonomy, as well as the community helping the community (e.g., help with housing in emergency situations). Construct has become a second living room to the Nashville breakdance scene with lots of opportunities to find or create your purpose.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Q (Quincy Ellison) and I met at breakdance practice at Rocketown in August 2006. At first our worlds were quite different: He was 22 and one of the main guys at practice, traveling the South and East battling (and winning a good number of times), and I was a beginner, busy with my PhD program, and pretty European. We got to know each other very gradually over the course of the next 10 years, and eventually founded Construct in 2016.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

The biggest expense for a dance studio or event space is probably the space itself, the building, and that is where Construct started: Q and I knew that we wanted to do something and we also knew that a place that hosts the things we love and want to foster did not exist in Nashville in this form. We chose a route that is probably backwards compared to most other organizations and businesses: we started with the biggest expense. When a small warehouse for sale close to downtown and where we lived popped up in December 2015, I took out all my savings and a giant loan and bought it. I was able to do this because I was working as a PhD data scientist in the corporate world with a 6 figure income at that time, but I never bought “nice” things like a new car, expensive clothes, luxurious vacations, lived by myself, or spent money on going out to eat. I don’t have a 401k. I just invested all my money in the thing I wanted to create.
I think this is the main message I want to send: Q and I built what is there now by going (almost) all in. He invested his time in teaching an endless number of hours for free, being the first in the city to teach Breaking to kids at all and building the kids breakdance program, figuring out what works, and laying the foundation for Breaking culture in Nashville to transition from bad boy/outcast past time to where it is now. He has dedicated his life to building and maintaining the community. I denied myself the pleasures other people my age and “status” were enjoying (yet it really didn’t feel that way) and bought a warehouse without having a specific plan for how it was supposed to pay for itself. We’re still not really making money – but by owning the building and continuously investing in the community, Construct is evolving into a resilient collective of artistic exploration embracing individuality and community alike. And that is what matters.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://constructnashville.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/constructnashville/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ConstructNashville
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7gh8mWRvgZRlvdzg0qGzhw

Image Credits

Imagine credits for portrait picture (DSC03525): Tommy Phothisane: https://www.instagram.com/photojonin/