Past
Grantees

Lisa Fisher, Minneapolis, MN, $5,000. For the production of "Slash, Burn & Poison", a video documentary about breast cancer, which will consist both of personal testimonies and of political debate over various environmental and medical issues.

The ILLUSION THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for playwright JEFFREY HATCHER, was awarded a grant of $9,500 to support the Hatcher production of The Turn of the Screw. Hatcher is working from the Henry James novella to create a new work scheduled for presentation in 1997. He will direct the work as part of a strategy to promote the idea of playwrights becoming entrepreneurial. The Foundations grant allows this playwright to exercise new creative muscles, and to advance his work and career.

Patrick Hennessey, Minneapolis, MN, $5,000. For the completion of "The Homeless Home Movie", a feature-length video documentary about the wide diversity of people who are homeless in Minnesota, as well as some of the activists who aim to assist them.

Barry Kimm, Minneapolis, MN, $5,000. For the production of "Meteor", a 15-minute personal documentary film in which the explosion of a meteor in 1875 in rural Iowa is used as a metaphor for the disintegration of a nuclear family.

The Jerome Foundation Directors authorized a grant of $10,460 to the New York City-based EXPERIMENTAL INTERMEDIA FOUNDATION, which acted as fiscal agent for composer and performer MICHELLE KINNEY and the ensemble Mississippi Peace. Funds will be used to commission new works from composers and to record concert works with the aim of producing a CD of works by the lead composer Michelle Kinney.

DARESHA KYI received support for Loosen Knot, Release Me, a one-hour experimental docudrama that will explore how and why many beautiful, talented and intelligent women fall into and pull themselves out of abusive relationships. Using her personal story as the heart of the film, Kyi will create a rich, multilayered tapestry of sound and imagery dealing with the issues involved in domestic violence from personal as well as social, political, spiritual and psychological perspectives. Loosen Knot, Release Me will include elements of poetry and dance. Kyi will collaborate with a choreographer and composer to create musical and visual interpretations of the emotional landscapes the women and she explore.

Michele Lepsche, St. Paul, MN, $6,500. For the production of "Ink Blot", a feature length film in the genre of film noir in which the genders of the archetypal characters have been reversed to a female detective, a female criminal and a male femme-fatale.

Funding was awarded to LANA LIN to produce a 45-minute, 16mm experimental film, Almost the Cocktail Hour, interpreting the life of Jane Bowles, writer, eccentric and wife of writer/composer Paul Bowles. The film will examine the perpetual conflicts that characterized Bowles' life: her contagious sense of humor and consuming despair, her lesbian loves and heterosexual marriage, and her sense of isolation matched equally by a need to affect the outside world. Lin's goal is to make visible the crisis of conflict that paralyzes the individual who struggles with basic affirmation of her own experience. Almost the Cocktail Hour will cross genres, moving from tragedy to comedy, mixing documentary, narrative and non-narrative modes. Bowles' struggles can be read as a metaphor for the filmmaking process-a struggle to communicate a personal vision to the outside world through intricate decision-making.

ZEITGEIST, St. Paul, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for artist producer RUTH MACKENZIE, received $9,000 to produce a concert titled Women of the North: Songs of Passion, which will use vocal sounds and oral poetry from the Scandinavian and Finno-Ugrian traditions of ancient womens songs as springboard and touchstone. The result will be an original dramatized concert conceived and produced by MacKenzie. She is functioning as the creator of a multidisciplinary event featuring original and traditional songs, narrative and movement, the last choreographed by Wynn Fricke.

The Minnesota Dance Alliance, Minneapolis, Minnesota, on behalf of Shawn McConneloug and her Orchestra, received a two-year grant of $16,000 in support of the companys 1996 and 1997 seasons. First year support will be directed toward Tina Concertina...Vera Incessu Patuit Dea (Her very walk revealed the goddess), to be premiered in the fall of 1996.

IOANNIS MOOKAS received a grant for the production of Only Human, a documentary about desire, loss and survival in communities of gay men. This video will examine how the prolonged impact of AIDS on the collective mental health of gay communities affects the ability of uninfected gay men to sustain HIV prevention practices over a lifetime. Only Human is based on carefully composed, disarmingly candid interviews with more than a dozen gay men of different ages, cultural backgrounds and sexual experiences. The oral histories alternate with observational vrit footage and electronically processed metaphoric imagery. Threaded through the video is a fictional narrative that illustrates in dramatic terms several of the issues which the real life subjects address extemporaneously.

The Jerome Foundation Directors authorized a grant of $8,000 to CIRCUM-ARTS FOUNDATION, New York City, as fiscal agent for MOSAIC, an ensemble of musicians who are producing a recording for New World Records of three works by composer Sabastian Currier. This will be the first CD of Curriers work, and will include Theos Sketch Book, Vocalissimus and Broken Consort.

Amy S. Ostergaard, Minneapolis, MN, $6,000. For the production of "White Wash", a short narrative film told through the eyes of a young African American girl who hopes to be made white by her baptism so she'll finally "fit" into her adoptive white family.

The SOUTHERN THEATER, acting as fiscal agent for a new entity, PANGEA WORLD THEATER, received a commitment of $8,000 in support of Pangeas fall production. This multidisciplinary work will be based on Persian poet Farid Uddin Attars classic work Conference of the Birds. In addition to the production of this collaboratively developed piece, Pangea will offer artists workshops and a speakers series, if funding permits. The Pangea World Theater is committed to producing international works which illuminate the universal human condition, end divisiveness and celebrate differences. It will use multi-national casts to celebrate a secular, cross-ethnic vision of tolerance and human rights.

The DANSPACE PROJECT, New York City, received, as fiscal agent for SANDS OF TIME, $7,000 to support the development of Spiritual Survival in a War Zone during the 1996-97 performance season. Sands of Time Theatrical Dance Company was founded in 1991 by Kwame A. Ross, who fuses traditional African and African diaspora dance forms and movement concepts within the contemporary performing arts arena. The fusion illustrates parallel cultural experiences, and offers alternative solutions to societal problems.

Funding for The Look of Love: A Gothic Romance, was awarded to SUZIE SILVER. The grant supports an experimental video collage of original and appropriated images and sound, exploring the expression and representation of female desire and sexual pleasure. The Look of Love will delve into the horror as well as the magnificence of intense sexual experiences. Foremost among her concerns in developing this piece is how women's sexual ecstasy is represented cinematically. The video work will take shape narratively in a conventional form, in which Silver critically examines a consciously narrative form that is often viewed as the embodiment of male desire. She will develop the visual look of the tape by layering and collaging original and appropriated footage with computer-generated special effects.

Rafael Viera, Minnetonka, MN, $6,000. For the production of "The Stall", a short narrative film about the struggle to survive mentally and physically the anguish, pain and brutalities of incarceration, to be set in a single prison bathroom stall.

LAURIE WEN received support for Don't Worry, I'm Fine, a 60-minute documentary about her role as a link between two of her closest blood relatives-one living, one dead-about whom she knows almost nothing. Themes of alienation and secrecy, both cultural and personal, are explored through the search for who these women are. Wen will move from the personal to a wider scale, in which exile, secrecy and silence reflect the mentality of many whose cultural heritage is haunted by the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Massacre. Cinema vrit footage of her grandmother's life in Hong Kong today will be juxtaposed with footage of Wen's search for her Aunt Maisy's past.

John Whitehead, St. Paul, MN, $6,000. To produce "Down in the Valley", a 50-minute per-sonal video documentary about the evolution of a small middle-American city, using as a center-piece the recent gang-related murder/suicide of four teenagers in his home-town of Appleton, WI.

Judith Yourman, Minneapolis, MN, $5,000. For the production of "Refugee Memories", a video installation work which will explore her family's flight from Warsaw at the outbreak of WW II and their subsequent struggle for assimilation in the US, through the use of interviews, archival footage and home movies.