Past
Grantees

A concluding grant of $15,000 was awarded to MOVIN' SPIRITS DANCE THEATER, New York City, in support of the development and production of new work by Artistic Director Marlies Yearby and her collaborators. The focus of Movin' Spirits is to expand the public's experience of dance theater through the development, creation and production of interdisciplinary work addressing cultural and social constructs such as love, death, longing, intimacy and race. The company operates through performances, residencies, workshops, lecture demonstrations, audience talk-backs and roundtable discussions. The Jerome grant will support the development of (Woom'?n)n (working title) and the development of The Beautiful (working title). The first is an evening-length multimedia work constructed of stories gathered from women through videotaped interviews and community workshops. It's informed by a series of questions including how a woman's life experiences shape who she is in the world and how identity shifts according to the voices doing the defining. The Beautiful is a new piece examining the impact of mainstream media on the individual, as explored within the context of a family. Her collaborative team will explore the complexity and contradictions ingrained in our politically driven, profit-obsessed consumer culture.

A two-year concluding grant of $24,000 was awarded to the FOUNDATION FOR INDEPENDENT ARTISTS, New York City, as fiscal agent for choreographer BEN MUNISTERI, in support of the creation and development of new work over the next two seasons. Funding will underwrite the creation of a new work, Thunderblood, for five to six dancers, set to a commissioned score. It will premiere in the summer of 2005 at Jacob's Pillow and be presented in the fall of 2005 at Dance Theater Workshop. In Thunderblood, Munisteri will continue to explore his formalist methodology of dance making. He will work with movement phrases he's made over the years, adding new ones, reordering them and layering them, playing with patterns, tempos and musical accompaniment. In the second year, he'll work on a new piece with the working title of Remixes. In this, Munisteri will mix and remix someone else's movement phrases, utilizing his particular skills as an editor.

JILA NIKPAY, Minneapolis, received a grant for Keepers of the Garden, an eight-minute black and white film focused on the life of an Iranian youth and how he copes with lack of freedom. The films objective is to examine the ominous presence of the Iranian government in the private lives of its youth. The films principal character, a young man named Payam who lives in the northern part of Iran, has been in constant communication with Nikpay and has supplied rich material for the film. Nikpay will use a number of metaphorical elements in exploring the daily routines of Payams life.

A grant was awarded to KRISTEN NUTILE for Loss, an experimental documentary that explores faded memories and conventional notions of long-term grief. The film addresses the unspoken pressure in society to "move on" and "let go" after losing someone. The story unravels through a personal narrative, which centers on Nutiles loss of her father to a brain tumor over 15 years ago.

Through the fiscal agent services of INTERMEDIA ARTS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, independent choreographer MARGO ABDO O'DELL received $8,000 in support of the creation and production of new work. Funding will support a dance, music, and multimedia concert titled Evolutions for which O'Dell will create a new work inspired by dance and music from Persia, Turkey, and Lebanon, demonstrating how cultures influence each other and how cultural arts evolve as a result of globalization. In a second new work, O'Dell will explore media images of danse orientale and contrast images to reality. She will illuminate the perpetuation of myths and misconceptions about Arab women. The concert will be presented at Intermedia Arts, a multidisciplinary art center whose mission is to build understanding among people through art. It offers presentations in visual arts, media arts, performance and interdisciplinary forms.

RAGAMALA MUSIC AND DANCE THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant of $8,000 to support the creation and production of a new work by choreographer APARNA RAMASWAMY. Ragamala Music and Dance Theater presents classical and contemporary/collaborative work based in Bharatanatyam, an ancient dance of southern India. Ragamala encourages its company dancers to grow as artists and develop as choreographers. Aparna Ramaswamy is Associate Artistic Director of the company. She received Jerome support to create Naveena for the 2004 Momentum: New Dance Work Series, co-sponsored by the Walker Art Center and the Southern Theater, and will engage Speaking in Tongues, a group of virtuoso musicians representing four diverse cultures. Naveena will be structured as a suite of four pieces. It will juxtapose four ancient musical traditions and one ancient dance tradition to create their contemporary reincarnation.

CATALINA SANTAMARIA was awarded a grant for Luminescence, a poetically inspired experimental film about light as mirror, as metaphor, and self-reflection, as shadow, as heat, as the ethereal wave particles of optics and physics and ultimately, as pure energy shimmering, glossing and flickering.

TOM SCHROEDER, Minneapolis, received a grant for A Plan, a 35mm cel-animated film about a familys boat trip. The boy in the family has an over-active imagination and fantasizes about being the hero of the day when the boat runs out of gas. The film will explore a new character style that Schroeder has designed.

KIT-YIN SNYDER was awarded funding for Me & Marco Polo, a 45-minute experimental documentary videotape that explores Marco Polos legendary adventures and accomplishments in 13th Century China as a way of understanding the rich complexities of Snyders own multiple racial, national and cultural identities.

THEA ST. OMER received a grant for Lovers, a feature-length experimental documentary that celebrates the diversity of New York City couples, and elevates the meaning of "couple" to that which transcends gender. Using art and the beauty of naked bodies as its rhetoric and discourse, not a single word is spoken. The film celebrates all couples whether straight, gay, lesbian or transgender and shows, ultimately, that each couple, comprised of two singular and distinct bodies, merits artistic study and appreciation.

MARJAN TEHRANI received a grant in support of ARUSI (Iranian Wedding), a documentary that follows Alex Tehrani, an Iranian-American and his soon to be American bride on their journey to Iran in the summer of 2003. The two embark on their journey and witness Iran as a couple. The film will examine their different perspectives of the country, insisting on the complicated cultural and political exchange at a time of heightened tension as the couple is forced to deal with their differences in the face of a simple and traditional act, a wedding.

THE SOUTHERN THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for SPACE-T.U.-EMBRACE, received a two-year grant of $22,000 in support of 2004 and 2005 concerts. Founded in 2003 by Co-Artistic Directors Uri Sands and Toni Pierce Sands, Space-T.U.-Embrace brings people together through dance, creating concerts in which music, thought and movement are drawn from a variety of genres and cultures. In 2004, the company will present revised and repertory work by choreographer Uri Sands at The Southern Theater. In 2005, the company will mount an entirely new season and launch a community outreach program.

SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS, New York City, received $9,000 in support of the development and production of a new work titled The Second Enter in the Palace. Shen Wei Dance Arts is dedicated to the creation of new multidisciplinary dance works that are a hybrid between Western and Eastern cultures. At once representational and abstract, Shen Wei's choreography is the moving medium among complementary visual elements in the works he creates. In this new work, his aim is to create a contemporary version of the Peking opera, of the same title, which tells the linear story of the transfer of power from a King to his son. Shen Wei's focus will be to reveal its essence through contemporary movement and the Chinese Opera form.

Funding was awarded to SCOTT WESTPHAL-SOLARY for All Gods Children, a feature length documentary that takes a personal look at the damages three former Christian missionary families have endured due to unthinkable abuse their children suffered at the hands of staff at a missionary boarding school (the Mamou Alliance Academy in West Africa).

The NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS, acting as fiscal agent for YASUKO YOKOSHI, received a two-year grant of $20,000 in support of the development and production of new work. Multidisciplinary artist Yasuko Yokoshi imaginatively entwines cultures and personal insights to create radical performance work with grace, passion and biting wit. Jerome subsidy will underwrite the development of a new work titled what we when we, inspired by a Raymond Carver short story. Yokoshi is interested in the subtle interaction of men and women, the ambivalent environment that Carver creates, and the verbal and physical dialogue of which the story is predominantly constructed. She'll transform Carver's quintessentially American world into Japanese traditional Kabuki dance. Over the past ten years, Yokoshi has been exploring her personal tradition in narrative and character development as a primary strategy of her performance work.

Funding was awarded for Fire Flies and Junebugs by MELISSA YOUNG. This short narrative film is about a ten-year old character named Summer who thinks that her brother is missing, only to find out later that he has been in an accident. She has to learn to deal with his death in her own, unique way. This is also a story about how adults sometimes do not deal directly with children about serious subjects such as death, leaving children to draw their own conclusions.

PANGEA WORLD THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for WOMEN IN MOTION, received $9,000 in support of the development of the new work Bandh. Women in Motion is the performing company of choreographer Ananya Chatterjea, whose movement aesthetic is based in classical forms, updated to reflect a contemporary consciousness. Chatterjea, trained in Indian classical and folk dance traditions, became an exponent of the Odissi style of classical dance at a young age. She brought into that style elements of street and political theater. Bandh is autobiographical, based on the story of an immigrant woman who leaves a difficult marital situation, with a young child, to search for a different life and safety. On a larger scale, it is a plea that children be raised in contexts that are not embattled or ridden with violence. The piece will be choreographed through metaphors and suggestions.

OLIVE BIERINGA & OTTO RAMSTAD, Minneapolis, MN, received support for Bodycartography Minnesota, a multidimensional dance video work that focuses on Minnesotas rural, urban and wilderness landscapes. They will create a series of short dance videos for outdoor projections alongside live performance events in rural and urban areas across the state.

SEOUNGHO CHO received funding for Wind Project, an experimental video that conveys the simultaneous banality and grandeur of our existence, as experiences that are exceedingly familiar are transformed into the fantastic. Time becomes distorted as water ebbs and flows in a continuum that never comes to a conclusion.

A grant of $10,000 was awarded to DANZAISA, Staten Island, New York, in support of the creation of new work by choreographer Gabri Christa. Funding will support a new piece titled Ri-Te-S of the Americas, an evening-length work inspired, in part, by a novel authored by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. Christa will also take another look at The Rite of Spring, by Stravinsky, as well as the rites of contemporary city people. Shell create new out of old, reinventing and referring to recent and distant histories, and to Western and non-Western traditions.