Past
Grantees

The artist will travel to Austin and San Antonio, Texas and Mexico City to research the lives of survivors of the battle of the Alamo for a play with music about diverse people who survived inside the shifting borders of fledgling democracies.

The artist will travel to New York City to attend the Funny School of Good Acting for a four-week intensive advanced clown workshop as a continuation of work undertaken in 2015 with instructor Christopher Bayes.

The artist will travel to Xiamen, Beijing, and Shanghai, China to meet relatives and study Chinese culture in order to expand knowledge of Chinese culture and tell more authentic, resonant mixed-race stories.

Taous Khazem and Aaron Gabriel will travel to Paris, France and Algiers, Tizi Ouzou, and Oran, Algeria to research Kayle (Berber) folk songs originally sung by women.

Jonathan David Martin, Zoey Martinson, and Lianne Arnold will travel to Berlin, Germany as part of the Smoke and Mirrors Collaborative to conduct research and develop relationships with potential collaborators for a new multimedia work of performance.

Laura Marie Thompson and Wazina Zondon will travel to Khartoum, Sudan to study womyn's spiritual and physical resilience in a Muslim context.

ARMENTO, KEVIN / BRADLEY, JAKI, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to New Orleans and Jackson, Louisiana, to further their investigative research into the myths and realities of Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans trumpeter credited with inventing jazz, and to meet with those playing in his wake today. Research resulting from this trip will inform the development of Armento and Bradley’s new theatrical production, Playing Hot, an immersive musical about the birth of jazz and the tragic life of one of its earliest stars.

ARTLEY, SCOTT, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Links Hall in Chicago, Illinois, and Dixon Place in New York, New York to investigate the role of the artistic director in contemporary community-driven performing arts organizations by visiting two organizations outside of Minnesota that have clear alignment with Artley's work as the lead artistic leadership of Patrick’s Cabaret. As an emerging creative leader, Artley wants to investigate and experience how other peer organizations, and their creative leadership, are evolving to meet the needs of contemporary artists.

BURKLUND, JON / STUELPNER, ILANA, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Berlin, Germany, to further their research into improvised, cross-disciplinary performance. Stuelpner and Burklund plan to use this trip to advance their ongoing research and engage in cross-cultural artistic exchange with international artists working in their specific area of experimental performing arts. This, in turn, will allow them to make technical and creative progress in their distinctive performance style.

COVINGTON, SARITA, New York, New York, will travel to Denmark to engage in an exploration of forgiveness as it pertains to culture, race, and legacy through poetic theater. Covington intends to incorporate what she gleans from this rich learning experience into a full-length performance piece, called Forgiveness, which she is developing in collaboration with B3W Performance Group.

DE LA RIVA, YADIRA, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Madrid and Melilla, Spain, to investigate the local dynamics of the Spanish and Moroccon border, looking at the differences and similarities to that of the U.S. and Mexico. De La Riva’s work focuses specifically on the role that women play in strengthening the hand of the labor movement against transnational corporations. De La Riva plans to write and produce a trilogy of theater pieces that use local stories to educate and humanize the experiences of immigrants and border women.

EVANS, AYANA, New York, New York, will travel to Toronto and Montreal, Canada, and Kingston, Jamaica, to gain a greater understanding of the African diaspora in Jamaica and Canada and find parallels between her heritage and the history of others with similar past experiences of colonization and slavery. Evans plans to use the interviews, images, and other information she gathers to stretch past the scope of herself and use historically anchored themes analyzing the role of gender, class and race in the proposed locations.

GORMAN-CARTER, MALIYA, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Estampés, France, to study the art of clown with master teacher Philippe Gaulier in Estampés, France. Through this workshop, Gorman-Carter hopes to learn how to let go of technique in favor of focusing on presence. She is eager to discover and strengthen what is unique to her as a performance artist and will prepare her for eventually joining or creating a performance troupe that uses movement and clown to tell stories, express magic and connect with the hearts of audiences.

HAM, CHRISTINA, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Dublin and Galway, Ireland, to research the connections between the Irish Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance in drama. This trip will benefit Ham’s work by informing the creation of a new play called Niagara that she plans on writing based on the information that she uncovers in Ireland. It will also help her in terms of establishing a new collaborative alliance with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

HENLY, ANNE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Prague, The Czech Republic, to experience the largest worldwide theatre design festival, the Prague Quadrennial, and attend a traditional Czech marionette carving workshop to expand her knowledge and skills in order to explore her own scenic design and puppetry work in Minnesota. Henly strongly feels that attending the Prague Quadrennial and the Puppets in Prague marionette carving workshop will undeniably inspire her future personal and collaborative work as a theatre maker and an artist.

BLAISDELL, LYDIA, New York, will travel to Vienna, Austria and Berlin, Germany, to do research for a play based on the Austrian Expressionist painter, Oskar Kokoschka's life, specifically his documented affair with an inanimate doll created to mimic his former lover, Alma Mahler. When Kokoschka returned from World War 1 to find that Mahler had married another man, he commissioned a life-sized doll,complete with of Mahler’s spring wardrobe from Paris. He escorted the doll to various Wagner operas and his catalogues show over twenty portraits of the doll in various poses. For nearly a year, his maid and his butler were required to wait on the doll until finally, after a night of drunken revelry, Kokoschka beheaded the doll and tossed it out a window.  Blaisdell’s travel will allow her to fully explore Kokoschka’s life and his paintings in the cities where he is remembered and celebrated. This project is her first full-length play set in a historical time period, drawing on existing figures.

CHOMET, SUN MEE, Minnesota, will travel to North Korea where generations of her birth family resided before the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Chomet is specifically interested in going to Pyongyang to visit factories, the Women's League offices, the National Reunification Institute, universities, and museums; Baekdu Mountain, the highest mountain on the Korean peninsula, considered sacred as the place of ancestral beginnings; and Cheolsan in Pyeongan-do, the city where her birth family resided before the Korean War broke out. The trip is offered through the New York-based organization Nodutdol for Korean Community Development (NDD), which promotes research by North American Korean artists, activists, and educators to increase their knowledge about reunification efforts and exposure to North Korea from the North Korean perspective. Her goal as a playwright is to create authentic work and address what is not said in the silences that have fracture families.

HERWIG, PAUL, Minnesota, will travel to Toronto, ON, Portland, OR, and New York, NY to enrich and develop his individual practice as a performing artist by experiencing performances, attending lectures, and participating in workshops at three festivals of contemporary performance: Summerworks Festival, Time Based Arts Festival, and Performa 13. Witnessing many of the best-known artists in the field of performance through these festivals will further Herwig’s work with his performance company Off-Leash Area.  In the past couple of years, he has been moving towards performance that combines visual art and theatre in a way that strives to exist squarely between those two art forms. Broad exposure to others investigating this intersection will help Herwig integrate his interests and experience with visual art and physical performance.

KADER, JACOB, New York, will travel to Salt Lake City and Ogden, Utah to do further research for the development of a new play titled Watermaster, a play about water development in Utah and a man's spiritual journey. Kader was born in Provo, Utah to parents who were both born and raised in Utah. He is curious about the correlation between water and religious faith and belief. Kader’s elders were “Jack-Mormons”, a term for somebody baptized Mormon, but who smoked, drank alcohol and coffee, and didn’t always attend church. He abandoned the Mormon Church after high school, feeling disconnected because of his Arab-American ethnicity/identity, and educational pursuits. Kader will research the history of social and religious issues, and the development of the irrigation and dam system of Ogden, Utah, digging deep into the underpinnings of the society – land and water appropriation, issues of power, family, and belief.

LEE-YANG, MAY, Minnesota, will travel to Los Angeles, California to attend the Cornerstone Theater's Summer Institute to learn their process of community-engaged theater through first-hand experience. Cornerstone produces new plays through the collaboration of people of many ages, cultures and levels of theatrical experience, building bridges between and within diverse communities. Their work is based on the conviction that aesthetic practice is social justice, artistic expression is civic engagement, and that access to a creative form is an essential part of the wellness and health of every individual and community. Lee-Yang sees this as a perfect study opportunity for furthering her work as a writer and performance artist. She sees the engagement work as an important skill because theater is such a relatively new form within the Hmong community.