Past
Grantees

DIANE FRAHER received support for The Reawakening, a character-driven dramatic feature film on contemporary Native American tradition and culture, based on the themes of personal redemption and the power of love. The Reawakening is a contemporary story set in the corporate legal world. It is an action story depicting prison life in a very racially corrupt prison bureaucracy. It is also a story of personal redemption. How can an "urban" Indian balance an affluent life style with the traditional ways of his Native background? The Reawakening portrays the struggle for personal redemption through a return to traditional Native American spiritual values, the love of family, childhood friends and the elders of the Nation.

A grant was awarded to LOUIS GALDIERI and KEN ROSS for 1913 Massacre, a lyrical and intimate musical documentary in digital video and 16mm film about an American folk song (Woody Guthries "1913 Massacre") and the story it tells. The film is about how the past lives in the present, about the redemptive power of music, about work and union, and about hope and survival.

ZEITGEIST, Saint Paul, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for composer ANTHONY GATTO, received $9,000 in support of the development and production of The Making of America. Zeitgeist, a new music ensemble, is an advocate and catalyst forging new links between contemporary composers and music lovers. Composer Anthony Gatto and the Walker Art Center will co-produce The Making of America. This evening length work will integrate live music with text by Gertrude Stein, a sound design, new digital films, and early American archival footage of silent movies. As a meditation on American history, the work will be presented in four sections, featuring the commissioned work of four filmmakers. The performing ensembles will be Zeitgeist and the New York City-based string quartet Ethel.

A grant was awarded to CATHERINE GRAY, Edina, for Grace on a Stick, a narrative short film about awakening to beauty in the world. It is a response to Grays own queries into religion, purpose and interdependence. It poses the question "what if?" and suggests hope where many, including Gray, fear. The films protagonist, Grace, is forced to confront her inner demons and preconceived notions through an unexpected (and not altogether welcome) relationship with a Muslim woman named Faiza.

Funding for The Great Journal of Hmong History in China was awarded to XINXAI HER, Brooklyn Park. This feature-length video documents the great journey of the Hmong people over hundreds of years from China to Southeast Asia. The work will contain interviews with Hmong elders and include information on migration patterns, agriculture, cultural ceremonies, artistic performances, Hmong life and the natural environment. This work will be presented in two versions, one in the Hmong language and one with English subtitles and will serve as one of few historical records of the Hmong Diaspora.

ALLISON HERRERA, Minneapolis, received a grant for Prayer of the Sorrowful Mystery, a personal story about Herreras grandmother, a Salinan Indian from the mountainous region of California known as the Santa Lucias . This personal account is framed by the larger context of the social conflict that birthed California.

THE SOUTHERN THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as fiscal agent for HIJACK, received a two-year grant of $21,000 in support of the creation and production of new work by the choreographic team of Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder. Their process for making dance is always evolving to address knowledge gained and changes in the choreographers' bodies and the world around them. Hijack is the confluence and clash of independent compositional/kinesthetic impulses. The choreographers use subtlety and wit as tools to provide an avenue into an exploration of serious subjects. Hijack employs a site-specific approach to every performance, and sustains a commitment to movement research. Jerome Foundations subsidy will result in the creation of at least four new works.

DAIN INGEBRETSON, Minneapolis, was awarded support for August 22, a short narrative film about a young man on the day of his fathers death. The film endeavors to explore the idea of witnessing the passing of a loved one and the subtle catharsis that such an experience entails.

Funding was awarded to DENISE IRIS for A Year of Minimentals, 52 short digital videos (one every week for a year), a web site to host them and a DVD featuring 20 of the pieces. The minimentals will be simple observations, or evocations of a mental state, rooted in everyday life and distilled to their purest forms in audiovisual terms.

SPRINGBOARD FOR THE ARTS, St. Paul, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for CATALYST, DANCES BY EMILY JOHNSON, received a two-year grant of $24,000 in support of the creation and development of new work. Catalyst is a seven-member contemporary dance company under the direction of Emily Johnson. Heat and Life, a new work, will use the sweeping scientific phenomena of global climate change to reveal the emotional and psychological connection between the ways people choose to live and the environments to which they adapt. It will investigate the coercion that comes from power and profit, which often has little regard for sustainability. In the second year, Johnson will develop four of the dancers' roles in Heat and Life into solo performance pieces. Funds from the Foundation will allow Johnson to work with dancer and choreographer Ossie Kairaiuak to learn the elements of Yup'ik dancing, which Johnson expects will enhance her movement-based storytelling and the ways in which her dances connect to culture, community and tradition.

VOLCANO LOVE, Brooklyn, New York, received a two-year concluding grant of $24,000 in support of the development and production of new work by choreographer Sarah East Johnson for her company LAVA, a troupe of strong women performing physical feats of power, strength, stamina and daring. Johnson's movement vocabulary encompasses dance, wrestling, circus acrobatics, aerials, contact improvisation and more. One new work under development is (w)H.O.L.E. (Whole History of Life), which draws inspiration from two distinct sources-natural phenomena/science and the female body/psyche. The structure of the piece will mirror scientific and mathematical processes that describe earths evolutionary cycles, iterations, compressions and loops, through movement, music, visuals, text and lighting. The piece will be configured in three one-hour cycles, that vary slightly with each repetition. The audience will enter the show already in progress and be allowed to come and go at any point within the cycle, mirroring the essential elements of evolution, geologic change and the behavior of living systems.

Support was awarded to JACQUIE JONES for Diagnosis: Babies, Breast Cancer and the Lives of Modern Women an impressionistic, hour-long autobiographical documentary about a pivotal year in one womans life following a diagnosis of breast cancer. The story focuses on the womans struggle against cancer and desire to preserve her fertility. The film will be a poetic meditation on the meaning of choices in life.

SHIN IL KIM was awarded funding for The Invisible Masterpiece, a video and drawing installation based on the ideas in the book of the same name by Hans Belting. The idea is to investigate the status and meaning of the masterpiece, with the goal of getting closer to the idea of nothingness, but also showing something with nothingness. Working from videotaped clips of people looking at art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kim will transfer the images to pressed line drawing animation on paper, eliminating the masterpieces. The drawings will be looped together and projected onto large walls.

Support was awarded to CHRIS LARSON, St. Paul, for Three Story Shack, a highly idiosyncratic film that presents the activities of a futuristic wooden capsule, a one-legged woman, and two farm hands operating a mechanical top-loaded vehicle inside a three story shack on a Midwestern landscape.

The FOUNDATION FOR INDEPENDENT ARTISTS, New York City, as fiscal agent for NICHOLASLEICHTERDANCE, received $10,000 in support of the creation and production of two new works. nicholasleichterdance is committed to the development of innovative and exciting dance performance, breaking down the barriers between audience and performer, seeking to create a kinetic journey in which emotion itself is the story. The first work, Never End, deals with individuals who are messengers of hope, who continue to light the flame in order to pass the torch to the next disciple. It will feature seven dancers and will be set to original music. The second work, Skin Diving, explores how race influences the way people watch other people move. It examines whether differences and similarities be understood through; as well as the emotional and conceptual complexities of touch in interracial relationships. The centerpiece is two duets, framed by two solos.

JEANNE LIOTTA received funding for observando el cielo, a 16mm experimental color sound film, documenting and imagining the human relationship to the cosmos by collecting starlight in the night sky, a civilian act of scientific observation available to anyone.

CYNTHIA MADANSKY received a grant for Presence, an experimental film that will explore two distinct forms of diary writing, namely an intimate diary of a teenage girl from Chinatown, New York and an online community based web log that addresses the suicide of Hong Kong based actor Leslie Cheung.

TRICIA McLAUGHLIN received funding to support See World, an installation of two animations back projected from inside a corner to make an aquarium. It will be an aquarium full of people where viewers can look at themselves behaving as themselves, revealing their adherence to structure, both natural and invented.

The NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS, New York City, as fiscal agent for YIN MEI DANCE, received $10,000 in support of the development and production of Nomad: The River. Yin Mei Dance supports the aesthetic vision of choreographer and director Yin Mei in the research, creation and presentation of new performance works. Her choreography blends training in traditional Chinese dance, Western modern dance, Tai Chi and Chinese contemplative practice, to explore themes of artistic and spiritual significance. Nomad: The River draws its context from the Yellow River in China and the Ganges in India. The duality represented in these two fabled riversthe sacred and the profanedrives the choreography and visual environment for the work. The piece will be developed through creative residencies in 2004, and will be premiered in 2005.

MOVEMENT RESEARCH, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for choreographer SARAH MICHELSON, received $9,000 in support of the creation and development of new work. Michelson works as a site-specific choreographer, temporarily manipulating performance spaces for each work. Jerome support will assist her in making the first three of five separate evening-length group works over a two-year period. The working title is Gold Parts 1 through 5. In this project, the social implications of the implicit direction of vision of an audience in relationship to theatrical experience is central. Gold will become a moveable module in sequential city sites. The dance will be based on the structure of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice.