Past
Grantees

INTERMEDIA ARTS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for THE BODYCARTOGRAPHY PROJECT, received $10,000 in support of the creation, development and production of new works by choreographers Otto Ramstad and Olive Bieringa. Intermedia is a multidisciplinary arts center that selectively serves as fiscal sponsor for independent artists and their companies. The BodyCartography Project investigates the body's relationship to the physical, architectural, climatic, technological and social landscapes that people inhabit in urban/wilderness and private/public contexts. Grant dollars will support the redevelopment of Holiday House for production and touring, the research and development of Pacific Rim Project, and the redevelopment of Condition.

DANCE THEATER WORKSHOP, New York City, acting as fiscal sponsor for BIGMANARTS, received a grant of $8,000 in support of the production of works by Lawrence Goldhuber in May 2007. Goldhuber's work is usually related to his large physical size and society's misconceptions of and prejudices toward obese people. The show will include the New York premiere of The Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony, a new work titled Hoody, and two additional works.

NICOLE BRENDING received support for Rebel, a narrative short about a developmentally disabled man who has his first sexual encounter while out with his meth-addicted brother. The story for Rebel developed out of a mixture of experiences Brending had growing up as a delinquent in Minnesota and working as a stripper in both Minnesotan and North Dakotan clubs-the isolation of being a young person in the middle of nowhere mixed with the energy and urgency of a time bomb. Part gritty realism and part magic, Rebel represents a Midwest that is often ignored-not the Midwest of comfortable suburbs and happy upper-middle class liberals, but a Midwest in decline, suffering from the sweeping rash of meth and economic devastation in rural communities.

THE FIELD, New York City, as fiscal sponsor for the BRIAN BROOKS MOVING COMPANY, received $8,000 in support of the creation and production of a new work, The Seven Wonders of the World, in its 2007-08 Season. This series of dances, performed by seven dancers, will be presented as one cohesive performance. With the human body and its potential at the core of his inspiration, Brooks lists his seven wonders as the Mind, the Heart, the Eye, the Hand, the Skeleton, the Muscle and the Breath. Each dance will place a seemingly small part of the body under a microscope, magnifying its function and design.

CHAMECKILERNER, New York City, received $8,000 in support of the production of a new work, tentatively titled Exit. Founded in 1993 by Andrea Lerner and Rosane Chamecki, this contemporary dance company creates environments that flirt with a physical and fantastic reality, sometimes seeming almost real yet slightly absurd, sometimes seeming fantastic yet disturbingly real. Exit will reflect both the challenges inherent in the field of dance and the process of aging as creators, serving as an allusion to the artist's capacity for navigating the unknown.

DANZAISA, New York City, received $10,000 in support of the creation and production of a new work.The organization operates under the direction of choreographer Gabri Christa. It received support for the development and production of Memoria, to be produced in early 2008. Memoria is a multimedia performance project, inspired by the work of the writer Hanif Kureishi. Christa's themes are lost dreams, the isolation of living and probably dying in a country or a place where one wasn't born, the distance from relatives and family and the creation of a new community that becomes a family. With Memoria, Christa will continue to address the immigrant experience, an ongoing theme for her.

OPEN CHANNELS/DIXON PLACE, New York City, acting as fiscal sponsor for D UNDERBELLY, received $10,000 in support of the creation and production of two new works. Dixon Place provides space and services for performing and literary artists to develop new work for engaged audiences. D UNDERBELLY is a network of independent artists of color invested in interdisciplinary experimentation through the creation of new work and communal exchange. With Jerome Foundation support, choreographer Baraka de Soleil will create and produce two new works. The first is the kinesthetically driven EGRESS, abstracted from Sartre's play No Exit and an earlier work by de Soleil. It explores the subconscious of contemporary culture and relationships, refracting an expansive notion of blackness. The second work, Childr'n of O, examines the voice and image of an iconic Black woman figure. It is envisioned as a project for seven characters, unfolding through a web of poetic text, deconstructed television and Internet cultural symbolism, gestural language and multimedia projections.

A grant was awarded to JUAN ANTONIO DEL ROSARIO for The System, a feature-length narrative film whose premise is based on the simple metaphor that the human body is the ultimate bureaucracy. In this film, the human body, and all its operations, is a typical modern city with a typical economic model. In this city, the Brain is a highly sophisticated corporation, charged with collecting and using data to administer virtually every operation that takes place in the system. On the other side of town, the Heart is a vast industrial complex whose sole mission is to produce and deliver oxygen to every cell/person in the System. This film explores what happens when an organism turns on itself. How does the Brain deal with self-destructive behavior? How does the tired Heart send signals indicating that it may be reaching its breaking point? The System is an allegorical story that projects the micro into the macro. Politics, social systems, cities, climate and the best and worst of human nature collide as a single organism confronts its mortality, and looks for a reason to continue existing.

MITCH DEOUDES was awarded support for The Death of Doctor Island, an experimental 35mm narrative that tells the story of a mentally ill boy trapped on what appears to be a deserted island, told as a cycle of seven installments. According to Deoudes, the film is an experiment in immersion and persistence in cinema, which touches on themes of morality, socialization, and sacrifice.

JRG FOCKELE received a grant for #1 Train, a short narrative that follows two brothers, seven year-old Marc and four year-old Daniel, as they cope with the disintegration of their family. Their mother is addicted to alcohol and their father is absent from the family. In a drunken rage, the boys' mother abandons them one evening, prompting Marc and Daniel to set out to find her.

A grant was awarded to SARAH FRIEDLAND for Thing With No Name, a feature-length documentary that tracks the rebirth of a rural South African community plagued by AIDS. The film also focuses on an HIV-positive individual's recovery through treatment. The title of the film addresses the fierce taboo and stigma attached to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa. This fear of rejection is so paralyzing that the name of the virus is rarely spoken aloud, especially among those who are directly impacted by HIV/AIDS.

JENNIFER GRAUSMAN received funding for Pressure Cooker, a feature-length documentary that chronicles the senior year of several inner city public high school students as they are transformed by a teacher and her kitchen. Their unorthodox teacher is Wilma Stephenson, a 37-year veteran of Frankford High School. With high expectations, a borderline-ecclesiastical devotion to her students and a boot-camp styled approach, she pushes her students to grow, mature and aspire-both inside and outside the kitchen. Her distinctive personal approach pays off-last year her seniors won over $500,000 in scholarships. And this year she is hoping they earn even more. Pressure Cooker is a coming-of-age story about the slow, sometimes painful, process of learning and becoming. The film speaks to the essence of education.

A grant was awarded to LOVISA INSERRA for BUSTER, a super-8 feature-length experimental narrative about a man named Buster who spends all his time provoking strangers into fights, then refuses to defend himself as they pummel him until they grow bored. BUSTER is a grifter, sucking his brother dry, and a cancer, sabotaging his brother's relationship with his girlfriend. Think of him as the patron saint of passive aggression, the don of all losers, or maybe just a regular guy who lost his mind trying to avoid growing up. This is also the story of the people who don't run away from Buster.

MARYAM KESHAVARZ received support for a feature-length documentary called Persian Fashionistas: A New Generation of Revolutionaries. The film looks into the lives of a select group of Tehrani youth struggling to attain freedom under the conservative watch of the Iranian government. These youth represent a generation that has grown tired of restriction and is using fashion as a form of political resistance.

ANDREW J. KOEHLER was awarded a grant for List of Schindler?s Part 1, an experimental series of six short live action/animated films that revel in a world of guided mistranslation. Using a very specific process of translation and retranslation, Koehler has taken the script from Schindler's List and twisted it beyond recognition. From there, form is given to the mangled words that are now devoid of identifiable characters, events and even sentence structure. This film series is about the delicate balance of language and intent, and what happens when both are thrown forcefully out of whack. Koehler hijacks the language of the original script and transforms it, building an entirely different creature that abides by none of the rules of the physical world, as we know it. List of Schindler?s serves as an irreconcilable contrast to Schindler's List, which Koehler expects will produce a more profound effect on an audience that has some stake in its relationship to the source material.

THE FIELD, New York City, as fiscal sponsor for Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, received $10,000 to develop Church, which will be presented in April 2007. Drawing from personal experiences, Young Jean Lee plans to make the most moving, breathtakingly beautiful church service she's capable of making, an original ceremony that borrows from a wide range of religious and cultural traditions. Her intent is to create a complicated and evocative experience for the audience. This grant recognizes the promise of experimental playwright and director Young Jean Lee.

THE SOUTHERN THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for LIVE ACTION SET, received $10,000 in support of the creation and production of Desire for the Undesirable. Four emerging artists form the collaborative Live Action Set: Vanessa Voskuil, Galen Treuer, Megan Odell and Noah Bremer. Their shared aesthetic produces performances that dissolve artistic boundaries and address relevant issues. Desire for the Undesirable, to be produced in June 2007, is inspired by recent events in Colorado and Pennsylvania in which middle-aged men entered schools and eventually killed some of the intended victims and themselves. The company is interested in exploring the inner conflict of a fantasy or desire that is not wanted; and in investigating those desires found to be morally or intellectually repulsive.

THE FIELD, New York City, as fiscal sponsor for LUIS LARA MALVACIAS/FULL FAT DANCE, received a two-year grant of $18,000 in support of the creation, development, and presentation of two new works. The Field's purpose is to encourage and cultivate appreciation of the performing arts. It supports and sponsors the development, creation and presentation of musical, dance, theatrical, film and video works, serving more than 2,000 artists per year. Malvacias is a choreographer and multidisciplinary artist who is intensely interested in exploring the interaction among a variety of artistic disciplines. His first new work, Reason without Meaning, will deal with ideas of perception. He is interested in the organization of perceptions that exist in their own right but that are not necessarily attached to a particular meaning. He will place ideas in the context of an installation/scenery, a soundscore/landscape and a form of psycho-visual-physical vocabulary. The second work, Contemplating Impotence: present day reality is a lot more like this that I wish it were, plays with reversals of meaning and subversion of predictability. Sensations look like disturbing realities and feelings are perceived as banal experiences. The piece will contain images and characters that Malvacias has been observing over the years from the window of his studio in the rapidly changing Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, overlapped with images and inspirations from selected paintings by the German artist Neo Rauch.

SUSAN MARKS received support for Our Wildest Dreams: A True Crime Documentary of Dolls and Murder, an intimate look at dolls that are used to solve crimes, the woman who created them, our collective fascination with forensics, and the stories we like to tell ourselves about death. This film will be very unpredictable, even quirky, humorous and shocking as it challenges viewers through its revealing examinations of our odd relationship with death, our own mortality, our need for mythical death storytelling (i.e. crime television) and the reality that murderers usually know their victims.

MITCH MCCABE received a grant for Youth Knows No Pain, a feature-length documentary about the fear of aging and one filmmaker's comical journey through America's anti-aging industry, all set against the backdrop of her father's plastic surgery practice. Traveling across America and visiting everyone from doctors to celebrities, scientists, Star Magazine editors and a cross-section of real life characters who have gone to crazy lengths to beat the clock, Youth Knows No Pain creates a tableau of the aging hysteria. As the film sheds light on both the absurdity and the biological foundation of this obsession, it entertains as it dispels myths, exposes dark truths, and confirms that one thing is for sure-the aging obsession has become a national obsession.