Past
Grantees

Julie Murray - Untitled, a 16mm experimental short which will consist of footage the filmmaker will shoot herself along with "found" and archival footage that will be made into a multitude of loops, by sectioning out and splicing end to end shots, or groups of shots, which the filmmaker will combine into multiple overlays within a single film. Spoken and inscribed texts will be used as a narrative vehicle in an associative and non-linear way to render a charged and personal filmic event. Ms. Murray has long been interested in recontextualizing footage from her own and other sources which examines how, through various procedures of isolation, juxtaposition, framing and repetition its logic can be inverted and abstracted and its apparent ordinariness be transformed into a rich poetic and personal landscape.

THE FIELD, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for TERE O'CONNOR DANCE, received $8,000 in support of the creation of new work for the 1998 season. O'Connor is interested in challenging the boundaries of dance by developing a dense, eclectic movement style filled with references and nuance, and a fierce commitment to encountering stark emotional territory. O'Connor will focus on the use of spoken word in dance as he develops a major new piece for his 1998 Dance Theater Workshop season.

Through the fiscal agent services of the NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS, New York City, the Jerome Foundation Directors authorized a grant of $10,000 to support OTHER COUNTRIES. This is an arts organization dedicated to the development, dissemination and preservation of literature and other forms of cultural expression of gay men and lesbians of African heritage. It began as a writing workshop in 1986. It published its first journal two years later, with a second anthology published in 1993, noted for its depiction of the realities of black gay men in the midst of the AIDS crisis. In addition to publications, Other Countries offers workshops, readings and performances. The Jerome Foundation was persuaded to offer subsidy because of the focus on nurturing and bringing to public attention the work of emerging writers.

SARAH PENMAN and MARK ANTHONY ROLO, Minneapolis, MN, $15,000. Penman and Rolo received support for The Great Woodland Indian Mini-Tour, a 30-minute S-VHS documentary about a fast-moving road trip through the Ojibway reservations of Minnesota. At a time when perceptions about Indians are too often shaped by mainstream news coverage of treaty rights issues, and Indian gaming, the real lives of everyday Indians remain invisible. This film will provide a glimpse into some of those lives.

The Jerome Foundation made a grant of $6,000 to the MINNESOTA DANCE ALLIANCE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for choreographer JELENA PETROVIC, in support of the creation and production of new work. The Dance Alliance frequently acts as fiscal agent for independent choreographers and their companies. In the coming season, Petrovic will perform new work at Red Eye Collaboration, Studio 6A in the Hennepin Center for the Arts and a dance festival at Mount Holyoke College. Petrovic will investigate her process of making dance and will create one large evening-length piece. She will work on an extended duet with dancer Kelli Tennyson, exploring the more angular and confrontational sides of a relationship. She intends to layer and focus her ideas into stronger statements.

The Jerome Foundation previously authorized two grants to the PICK-UP PERFORMANCE COMPANY, New York City, in support of the development of new works by Ain Gordon. A new grant of $10,000 will be directed to the development of Eighteen Fifty, an evening-length play. The work will be a mini-historical cavalcade of a city that has changed entirely, but actually never changed at alla city where social reform, social ideals, commerce and reality have always been in conflict. The drained out, filled in, paved over Collect Pondwhich in New York Citys early days was the islands largest body of fresh wateris the entry point for Gordons script. In less than 200 years, the site has evolved from a quiet pond, to a place of execution for Revolutionary War prisoners, slaves and criminals, to a respectable waterside residence, to a waste repository for surrounding tanneries, to a landfill supporting the slum known as The Five Points, to a parking garage, and finally, to the ghost of a pond found under the future site of a home for law and order.

Allison Prete - Lavender Lake, a one-hour documentary about South Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal which, when opened in 1866 was hailed as "one of the shortest and most important waterways in the world." Today it's known as one of the world's dirtiest cesspools and has been dubbed Lavender Lake. To give some idea of how extensive the problem is, local residents say its putrid, perfumed airs are highly recommended for head colds. One hundred-thirty-years of raw sewage, toxic sludge, dumped corpses and drowned dogs later, the community continues to fight to clean up the Gowanus by demanding it be flushed out or filled in. And, they just may win. Prete, who is from the area, chronicles the battle of her fellow community members.

Pola Rapaport - Blind Light, one-hour, color, 16mm mixed genre/experimental narrative about emotional repression and liberation, as well as about vision, light and blindness. Two parallel stories, one real and one fictional; two women drawn in by the same experiences of transformation. Both find their emotional lives re-awakened by their discovery of the Villa San Michele on the Mediterranean Isle of Capri in Italy.

A mid-career project grant of $10,000 was authorized for SHAPIRO & SMITH DANCE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of the further development of an evening-length dance/theater collaboration titled Babel. Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith are collaborating with the Ilkhorn Theater Company and composer Dmitry Yanov-Yanovski to explore how human relationships inform choreographic

GIDEON SHMORAK was awarded support for An Ocean Apart, a one-hour documentary in two parts (30 minutes each) about fifty African-American and Jewish students from the Frederick Douglas and Stuyvesant high schools in New York, who were united with Palestinian and Israeli students from high schools in Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv and Nazareth. The documentary will follow these students on their journeys to Israel and the United States, where they toured historical sites, visited with families, and took part in leadership and conflict resolution workshops. Through the students' perspectives, the documentary contrasts the Black-Jewish and the Israeli-Arab relations and presents their testimonies of how the Crown Heights riots, the Million Man March, the Palestinian uprising, and the terrorist suicide attacks affected the students' lives. By observing this group of youngsters, the documentary provides a study of how complicated race relations affect young adults when they try to communicate with members of a different race.

NANDINA SIKAND was awarded support for Don't Fence Me In, a twenty-seven minute coming-of-age story of a young woman in post-colonial India. With the use of personal narrative, this documentary will weave together memories, photographs, letters and interviews to create a story of her mother, Krishna Sikund. This will be a retelling of the personal history of Krishna Sikund, who was born in the fall of 1938 and grew up in a country struggling for independence from the British. It was a nation which was just beginning to develop a national identity. This is a personal story told against the backdrop of a political and social context, it is not a historical documentary. It is the story of Krishna Sikund's life, her choices and her personal battles. It is a personal narrative of a life that is poignant and humorous, ironic and passionate. Don't Fence Me In will also look at the parallels between the life of Krishna and her two daughters, who have immigrated to the United States. Ironically, even though both daughters have grown up in different eras, many of the choices they face are the same as their mother's - choices that cut across lines of time and space.

JOE SOLA was awarded support for The Anxiety of the Rented Room, a ten-minute experimental video about anxiety in hotel rooms. Mr. Sola will check into a business hotel in midtown Manhattan for a period of five days. He will not leave the hotel at any time, nor will he have any visitors apart from those that are instrumental to the workings of the hotel. With two video cameras, one surveillance camera and one Hi-8 camera, he will record his daily activities and his relationship to the environment as it deepens over time. The goal of this project is twofold; one intellectual and the other aesthetic. The visual narrative will articulate the attitudes and moods that exist within the mass produced, impersonal objects of the hotel room, ultimately exploring the spiritual void of this space. And aesthetically it will build a new visual vocabulary that uses the colors, patterns and textures of the objects in the hotel room. The mass produced objects of this room survive in a narrow bandwidth of color, density and saturation: Dull brown flowery bedspread, the crushed yellows of the low watt tungsten lights, the hazy white of the marble bathroom tile counter, the garden flower faucet, a lightly braised rust wallpaper, a frail pink lamp, and so on. The list is indefinite.

DEBRA SOLOMON was awarded support for EBP (aka, Everybody's Pregnant), an animated short which examines identity issues related to pregnancy. In the theatre of the body the individual must sacrifice to attain socially accepted goals. The goal for increasing numbers of women is pregnancy. Fertility in the end proves the self and is the final stamp of gender. This film pits the self-negation of infertility against the process of infertility treatment itself.

THE FIELD, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for ROSEANNE SPRADLIN DANCE, received a grant of $6,000 in support of the ensembles 1998-99 season. Spradlin explores movement and themes that express emotional and physical states; and she creates work that reveals under-disclosed facets of human behavior. She believes that the exploration of ones physicalityhow ones history is carried in the body and how that history is expressed in movement, however unlovely and strange that movement may beis a pathway to emotional, intellectual and moral growth. Funding will contribute to the revision and touring of Ends of Mercy and the development of

The Jerome Foundation authorized $12,000 to DANCE THEATER WORKSHOP, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for choreographer WIL SWANSON AND DANCERS. The funds authorized will support the development and production of new work for Swansons 1998-99 season. Swanson, an exemplary dancer in the Trisha Brown Company, has choreographed sporadically over his dance career. A year ago, upon his departure from the Brown Company, he dedicated himself to choreographic and teaching pursuits, and secured support from the Jerome Foundation, among others, for his 1997-98 season at Dance Theater Workshop. For the upcoming season, Swanson will trim his company to five dancers in order to create a tighter ensemble and secure residencies. He is exploring the idea of unison, prompted in part by a commission he received from a dancer in the Lyon Opera Ballet to set a solo piece. He will take what hes learned from that commission and translate it to a unison group piece for six dancers, including himself

Two years of subsidy at $12,000 per year was granted to the SOUTHERN THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for MORGAN THORSON AND DANCERS. Thorson received support to develop and produce new work over the next two years, focusing on three projects. The first is a restaging of the dance Bottom Heavy. The second is a new solo for Thorson; and the third is the development of Toe the White Line. Bottom Heavy explores the fluidity and intermingling of sensuality, fantasy and sexuality in contemporary club social dancing. Toe the White Line will critique the behaviors associated with whiteness and privilege, layering movement phrases and exploring codes and systems that ensure the hierarchical existence of power, privilege, class distinction and lineage.

KIM-CHI TYLER was awarded support for what i remember of her, an intensely personal look into the life of her mother, who was forced into prostitution to support her children during the Vietnam War. It will recount Ms. Tylers memories of seeing her mother have sex with American soldiers, and the emotional prison of her mothers eventual marriage to an American. Visually the film will be shot from the point of view of Ms. Tyler, whose journey begins in America where she talks to people who knew her mother. She will eventually end up in Vietnam, the place of her birth, to visit her biological father and others who were well acquainted with her mother. An old Vietnamese proverb says, Go out one day, come back with a basket full of knowledge. Tyler hopes to achieve this through her quest to know her mother.

RICHARD WORMSER received funding for Behind the Veil, a 30-minute documentary film that will examine the Farmville student strike of 1951, during which a group of African-American high school students rebelled against the inferior conditions of their segregated school.

WOVEN SPACES, Brooklyn, New York, was founded in 1996 by artist Rosa Valado. She designs and creates sanctuaries, buildings of approximately 2,000 square feet, located in public areas, either as independent structures or within existing complexes. The interiors are filled with art work, primarily sculpture and painting, built to encourage visitor interaction. The interiors are also designed to hold a variety of artistic performances for the benefit of the general public including readings, musical performances, symposia and community forums. Jerome subsidy of $8,000 will allow Valado and Woven Spaces to test the viability of this concept.

The MINNESOTA DANCE ALLIANCE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for independent choreographer CATHY YOUNG, received a two-year commitment of $24,000 toward the creation and presentation of new work in the 1998-99 and 1999-2000 seasons. Young intends to present two full evenings of work, as well as smaller and more informal showings of works-in-progress. Young brings to her creative work an understanding of many kinds of movement including jazz, postmodern, improvisation