Past
Grantees

MARA V. PELECIS received a grant in support of Souvenirs, a feature documentary exploring the suicide of the filmmaker's father, and the lives of other veterans. The work seeks to understand the emotional and spiritual impact of wars on those who fight them.

DANIEL RAGUSSIS received a grant in support of a 30-minute narrative short, titled Haber, which tells the story of one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, and the terrible moral dilemma he faced. Fritz Haber was a brilliant German chemist with one of the most extraordinary dual legacies in history. On the one hand, his revolutionary process for creating synthetic fertilizers averted the greatest overpopulation crisis the world has ever known, won him the Nobel Prize in 1918, and now feeds over 2 billion people. On the other hand, he is the father of modern chemical warfare, a dubious accomplishment that resulted in his wife committing suicide.

The Directors approved a grant of $9,000 for RAGAMALA MUSIC AND DANCE THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as fiscal agent for APARNA RAMASWAMY, in support of the creation and production of new works. Ragamala Music and Dance Theater presents classical and contemporary/collaborative work based in Bharatanatyam, the ancient classical dance of southern India. Aparna Ramaswamy, choreographer and dancer with the company, will create two new works, Aathma and Flying Horses. Aathma is an exploration of the works of 13th century Persian poet Jelaluddin Rumi. This evening-length work will interweave Bharatanatyam and abstract and narrative dance. Flying Horses will be created to a musical work by Mu Daiko Artistic Director Rick Shiomi, contrasting and juxtaposing two culturally-based art forms, Japanese Taiko and Bharatanatyam.

YORUBA RICHEN received a grant for Promised Land, a feature-length documentary that examines post-apartheid South Africa's efforts to bring about racial reconciliation through land redistribution. The film follows one black community in South Africa as it attempts to reclaim land from which it was forcibly evicted 40 years ago. By following the efforts of one indigenous black tribe to reclaim its land, Promised Land shows how one country is attempting to redress its violent colonial past in order to sustain its current fragile peace.

The SOUTHERN THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as fiscal agent for SAVAGE AURAL HOTBED, received $8,000 in support of the creation and production of the new work The Rate of Mass Displacement is Momentum at the Southern Theater. The Southern presents alternative performances by artists responding to contemporary issues and life situations from the perspectives of the varied cultural communities in the Twin Cities. Savage Aural Hotbed is an ensemble of four composer-musicians who create highly percussive music and sound experiences using found objects, industrial machines, and musical instruments. The composer-performers are Mark Black, William Melton, Stuart DeVaan and Dean Hawthorne. The changing urban landscape, which includes building and destruction, is the basis for this new work. Savage Aural Hotbed envisions a symphony of steel, the rhythmic cadence of pile drivers accompanied by pulsing, droning engines and whining motors, with beeping back-up signals providing counterpoint.

THE SOUTHERN THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for choreographer KAREN SHERMAN, received a grant of $9,000 in support of the creation and production of new work. The Southern presents alternative performances by artists working at the grassroots of the Twin Cities varied cultural, political, and economic communities. Choreographer Karen Sherman will create an evening-length dance/performance work that addresses the intersection of environment, terrain, the body, and memory through the specific lens of Midwestern weather, landscape, and culture. The working title is Tiny Town. This grant will support the creation and public showings of sections as work-in-progress. The final version of the piece will be produced in late 2006 or early 2007.

With THE FIELD, New York City, as fiscal sponsor, the Jerome Foundation Directors approved a grant of $9,000 to support ROSEANNE SPRADLIN DANCE. Spradlin's choreographic mission is to awaken audiences to a fuller experience of the body in motion, and to bring audience members into a closer intimacy with themselves. Pay Color, a dance to be premiered this December, constitutes a section of an evening-length work to be completed in 2006. The impetus for Pay Color is to explore the heightening of sensory intake-smell, touch, sound, site and motion-to the point that the experience begins to resemble an altered state of reality. Subjects are made more critically aware of the intense beauty of the world and the inborn rights of human beings while also being exposed to the damage and pain caused by human nature.

JASON WADE was awarded a grant in support of STABBER, an experimental film about an institutionalized man who has been sheltered from society his whole life. He is accidentally left behind when the institution closes and goes on an incredibly violent and surreal journey that takes him from the country to the city, into the forest and ends at the precipice of a large cliff where he hurls himself into the abyss.

THE FIELD, New York City, acting as fiscal sponsor for ELLIS WOOD DANCE received $10,000 in support of the creation of a new work titled Hurricane Flora: Inferno. Ellis Wood Dance was founded in 1996 with the mission of presenting performance work and developing community projects that focus on bringing the power of dance to a diverse audience. Hurricane Flora: Inferno will explore aspects of female identity as they relate to the four elements of air, fire, earth, and water. The two new sections in progress, Fire and Water, will be combined with the previously completed Air and Earth to create a complete piece that will tour in this country and abroad. The purpose of the work is to lead the audience through an experimental journey of female choice.

A grant in support of Manhattan, Kansas was awarded to TARA WRAY. Manhattan, Kansas is an intensely personal documentary about the filmmaker's relationship with her troubled mother who lives in Hunter, Kansas, a small town with no mental health facilities capable of treating her mother's multiple mental illnesses. The film delves into the complex nature of home, as well as the often complicated ways people, and families, care for one another.

Support was awarded to JAKE YUZNA for OPEN, an unconventional love story about a gay man and transgendered man (born as a woman, but through surgery and hormone treatment transitions into a man) who sleep with each other and discover they are each other's first time with a member of the opposite sex. Yuzna's goal is to build understanding of contemporary fringe culture by creating emotionally compelling and complex characters.

DON BERNIER received a grant for In A Nutshell (working title),a one-hour documentary about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Yassa Tashjian, a.k.a. The Nut Lady. Ms. Tashijan, who founded the Nut Museum of Old Lyme, Connecticut, is viewed by some as a fascinating eccentric and by others as a nut case. Bernier probes the life of this artist, philosopher, entertainer and curator.

INTERMEDIA ARTS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for THE BODYCARTOGRAPHY PROJECT, received $6,000 in support of the development and production of new work by choreographers Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad. Bieringa and Ramstad will use the lens of film creation as a structure for live performance, balancing the weights of dance and video in real time in front of an audience, creating an opening for an evolution of live work that charges audiences and challenges their attention. In their new work, Bieringa and Ramstad are interested in highlighting and contrasting different seasons, urban and wilderness locations, and wildlife spaces re-emerging in urban environments. The work will be presented in theaters and in public spaces, in a minimum of ten towns throughout Minnesota. All events will be documented and presented as part of an exhibition accompanying performances in Minneapolis.

The AMERICAN COMPOSERS FORUM, St. Paul, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for the B MAGIC ORCHESTRA, received $10,000 in support of the commissioning of two emerging composers to make new works for the B Magic Orchestra and the presentation of those works in the Community Jazz Concert Series at The Dakota Bar & Grill, a leading jazz club in the Twin Cities. The Orchestra provides a versatile voice for modern day jazz composers. The call for submissions will be undertaken in collaboration with the American Composers Forum. A jury will select two emerging Minnesota jazz composers, who will be commissioned to write new work for this jazz ensemble, founded in 1998 and led by composer/conductor William Banfield.

NICOLE CATTELL received a grant in support of Revolucin: Visions of Cuba Since the Revolution, a feature documentary that explores how photographers from four different generations tell the story of Cubas utopian dream and its unfolding since the 1959 revolution.

NORMAN COWIE received a grant in support of The Dimension In Which It Reigns Supreme, an hour-long experimental video essay on the US Governments enactment of global military supremacy and its effects on everyday life in the country. The tape will study the Pentagons concept of "full spectrum dominance" to reveal the human cost and social distortions of this policy.

RANDY CROCE, St. Paul, received support for If Stone Could Speak (Se la pietra potessero parlare), a documentary that examines the migration of stonecutters from northern Italy to Barre, Vermont. It emphasizes their struggles to both preserve their traditions and adapt to America, and to cope with working conditions that killed most of them by age 40. The stonecutters (scalpellini) invigorated the arts and culture in their new homeland.

JOSEPH CULTRERA received a grant for Hand of God, a firsthand account of a man abused by a Catholic priest in a Massachusetts town in 1964 as retold by his brother (the filmmaker). The film is also about the Cultreras, a family of Catholics recovering from broken trust, abuse and outright theft. Its a story about fathers given, lost, acquired and assumed.

BRIAN L. DEHLER, St. Paul, was awarded a grant for Elements of Habitat, a collection of twelve 2-5 minute vignettes that explore the sights and sounds of various habitats in the form of an audio/visual collage that is both structurally rhythmic and socially insightful. It will attempt to challenge perceptions of the locations by examining and re-exposing the defining details of the habitat.

A grant was awarded to ANGIE ENG in support of Memobile, a new media performance installation that explores the transition of ones perception from a static life to a nomadic one. Using interactive video and sound, Eng will recreate the poetics of movement and ones relation to space through symbols. The title Memobile combines the concept of memory and mobiles. Marcel Duchamp coined the name mobile in French, a pun that suggests both motion and motive for Alexandre Calders kinetic sculpture. Together, memory, motion and motive are concepts the Eng addresses in order to explain how one wanders from place to place to make sense of the world.