Past
Grantees

SEN CURRAN COMPANY, New York City, received a grant of $10,000 in support of the creation of Art Song Dance. The company was formed in 1997 by Sen Curran to promote the development of the contemporary dance form and the education of the general public through innovative performance, informative lectures and educational workshops. Jerome funding will support Art Song Dance, a collaboration between Curran and contemporary composer Ricky Ian Gordon. A period piece set in the 1920s, Art Song Dance will respond to six songs from Gordons collection Bright Eyed Joys. The songs are written in dance forms; for example, tango and polka. The lyrics are taken from writers such as Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker and James Agee. Currans choreographic process is fed by the poetry of the lyrics. Each of the six songs will be choreographed for a featured dancer who will be supported by a chorus of the remaining five dancers.

The Jerome Foundation Directors made a $15,000 grant to the NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS, New York City, as fiscal agent for composer NATHAN CURRIER. These dollars will be used to support the performance of Curriers Gaian Variations, by the Brooklyn Philharmonic in April of 2004. The piece is an expression through music, text, projections and limited staging of the Gaia Hypothesis, initiated in the early 1970s by British scientist James Lovelock. It asserts, in its most simplified expression, that the earth itself is a living organism. Curriers composition will be divided into three acts, encompassing instrumental sections as well as vocal settings of words by Lovelock and Loren Eiseley.

DANCE COUNCIL MOVEMENT THEATER, Brooklyn, New York, received a grant of $11,000 to support the creation and production of new work by choreographer Alyce Finwall. Funding will be directed to an evening-length project titled A. Pathos, a work for six dancers. Continuing with the theatricality and contemporary movement ideas that have become Finwalls signature style, this modern ballet will utilize intense, physical movement inspired by her ballet and gymnastic training, along with a dramatic sense of staging.

DANSOLOGY, INC., a.k.a. DANCE KUMIKOKIMOTO, New York City, received a two-year grant of $20,000 in support of the creation and production of new work. Artistic Director Koosil-ja Hwang layers visual movement and vocal elements in swirling patterns, which at first may seem impenetrable, yet convey a deep and lasting imagery. Hwangs choreography combines elements of live music, composed in part by herself, song, film, video and dance to create social sculptures. She develops dramatic characters from the inside by investigating her own mythologies and internal stories. Jerome dollars, in the first year of the grant, will support the development of deadmandancing, created in collaboration with video artist Benton Bainbridge and Liminal Projects (architects Laura Garfalo and Omar Khan). The artists will explore cultural expressions of death and dying, focusing on the way societies view death, how cultures imagine the end of living, and how cultures respond to and process lives lost through art and entertainment.

A grant was awarded to JASON DaSILVA in support of Lest We Forget, a feature-length documentary film paralleling the racial profiling of Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians today with the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII.

DD DORVILLIER, through the fiscal sponsorship of P.S.122, New York City, received $10,500 in support of the development and production of Coming Out of the Night with Names. This work concerns itself with the mystery of vessels: the body, a vessel of life; the theater space, a vessel for bodies to share experiences; and the history that echoes after the vessels are gone. Its designed to begin as theater and finish as dance. The text springs from monologues of solitary voices, characters in abstract states of transition. This brings to three years the duration of grant support that the Foundation has offered to DD Dorvillier, who has been creating dance and performance art since 1989. Her company, human future dance corps, is a multidisciplinary arts group established to foster the creative collaborations and individual works of DD Dorvillier and Peter Jacobs. Its dedicated to the presentation of original art in a postmodern idiom, emphasizing creative risk taking and innovation.

MATTHEW EHLING, St. Paul, MN, was awarded a grant for Taking Liberties, a documentary that examines the effects of four decades of National Security Policy on the Bill of Rights. This video will be comprised of two intertwined strands, or components. The first strand will be a brief history of the contemporary debate over security and civil liberties, charting the growth of our national security apparatus as it relates to internal security measures. The second strand will be comprised of present day case studies, where the viewer will meet real people and witness the real-world impact of pursuing security without regard for basic civil rights.

ELEVATOR REPAIR SERVICE (ERS), New York City, received $14,000 in support of the development and production of new work in the 2003-04 season. ERS has been presenting original work since 1991, with a core group of performers, writers, directors and designers. The ensembles aesthetic combines elements of slapstick comedy, high tech audio, low tech set design, obscure historical events, literary and found texts, found objects, discarded furniture, and an unusual style of choreography. ERS aims to create work that, by accepting, illuminating and exploiting theaters temporal and physical limitations, cannot be presented in any medium other than live performance. It pursues a certain kind of absurdity. Jerome dollars will support development work on a new piece, tentatively titled Big Number/Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Early research is focusing on the structure of musical theater numbers, story ballets and the films of Busby Berkeley. Short scenes will be presented to audiences in the fall of 2003 as a work-in-progress. Text work will be developed in the spring of 2004, deliberately separating physical and text components in order to arrive at a raw synthesis of two distinct strains. The text and form collision should create unpredictable offspring, in the form of a series of problems and opportunities addressed in rehearsal.

The FOUNDATION FOR INDEPENDENT ARTISTS/UNIQUE PROJECTS, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for REGGIE WILSON/FIST & HEEL PERFORMANCE GROUP, received a grant of $8,000 to develop and produce Black Burlesque (revisited). Reggie Wilsons Fist & Heel Performance Group has joined with Black Umfolosi and Noble Douglas Dance Company in an international creative partnership to create and perform Black Burlesque (revisited). This work is the culmination of ten years of research and illustrates the mutable essence of culturethe complex interaction of popular cultural forms with religious beliefs and behavior, and the ways people have transformed traditions and rituals into dances, musical styles and entertainment venues. Wilsons work explores the intense involvement people of the African Diaspora generally have with religious and/or ritual life, and the historic arc from spiritual practice to popular entertainment in the participating artists homelands.

ELLEN FLANDERS received a grant in support of Zero Degrees of Separation, a feature-length documentary examining the lives of gay and lesbian Palestinian/Israeli couples and their attempts to negotiate, not only the larger conflict in their area of the Middle East, but also those of their daily lives. Upon discovering that Ezra, one of the films characters, once worked for her grandparents in Jerusalem, the director is further encouraged to examine her own family history and its relationship to the current conflict.

STEVEN FOLEY, St. Paul, MN, received a grant for Strange as Angels, a feature-length narrative film that examines the loves, lives and relationships of six African Americans living in Chicago, Illinois. A work about timing and circumstance, two variables that govern all of our lives but over which we have no control. This film is about identity, perception, sex, longing and the way that in one instant, another person's skin and breath can make you feel still and eternal in a weighted world.

LEAH GILLIAM received support for Agenda for a Landscape Vol. 6, an experimental video that investigates intersections of history, identify and technology in NASAs 1997 Pathfinder mission to Mars.

SARAH GOODMAN was awarded a grant in support of Build Me Up, Break Me Down, a documentary that examines the daily reality of three diverse youth in the US Army. It will explore their motives for joining and the impact of training on their respective identities.

Funding was awarded to JACQUELINE GOSS for Kishlak Dwellers, an animated video illustration of Soviet scientist A.R. Lurias 1933 book Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundation. This animated video will present data collected from three years of experiments with Uzbek farmers who lived in the outer regions of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.

Funding was awarded to SHAUN IRONS & LAUREN PETTY for Artificial Paradise, a four-channel video/audio installation inspired by the mysterious and strange beauty of the miracles performed by Jesus as described in the New Testament; exploring the connections among miracles, faith, deceit and illusion. Irons and Petty are attracted to the notion that people are willing to suspend belief that their lives could be magnificently and instantly altered, releasing them from the tension and banality of daily existence. The work will be a meditation on the need for faith and the desire for the miraculous in contemporary life.

ANNEMARIE JACIR received funding for Travelogue: Fractured Landscapes, a film that is both a visual poem and narrative exploration of how the rhythms of daily life are interrupted for a mixed group of artists traversing the emotional and material geography of a landscape fractured by political and military turmoil.

Jerome Directors authorized a $10,500 grant to SPRINGBOARD FOR THE ARTS, St. Paul, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for CATALYST, DANCES BY EMILY JOHNSON. The Foundation has provided annual support to choreographer Emily Johnson and her dance company since 2001. This grant was offered in support of the creation and development of two new works. The first, With Perfect Aim, is a duet focusing on the ability loved ones have to harm (with intent or not) the very people they love. The second new work, Safehold, is a trio dealing with the evolution of patterns and how they become engrained in everyday life and are relied upon more frequently than the more difficult original thought.

KEITH ROLLINS LOCKWOOD, Minneapolis, MN, was awarded funding for Radio Documentary, a documentary that will explore the vanishing culture of American radio. It will examine the large corporate dominance of radio, the disappearance of DJs, and the struggle of non-profit radio stations, through the microcosm of Bozeman, Montana, and the small non-profit community-owned radio station KGLT.

PANGEA WORLD THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for the experimental theater ensemble MAMA MOSAIC, received $9,000 to support the development of BRIDEPRICE. The mission of this theater collective is to evoke positive social change through female-centered theater that is empowering and entertaining. BRIDEPRICE is being developed by the core members of MaMa mOsAiC in dialogue with collaborating artists and members of the broader community. MaMa mOsAiC will explore institutionalized misogyny, and how we collectively take responsibility for our roles in its practices. BRIDEPRICE will incorporate text (poetry and prose), movement, music, and multimedia.

A grant was awarded to STEPHEN MARSHALL AND JOSH SHORE, in support of True Lies, a documentary that seeks to inform people about the way in which media is used to obscure the true intent of its disseminationnamely to target people with coercive techniques to make better consumers out of them.