Past
Grantees

CLAUDIA BITRAN received support for TITANIC a deep emotion, a 194-minute experimental remake/reinterpretation of the film Titanic by James Cameron. This project was born from Bitran’s genuine obsession with the film, but also from her more general fascination and interest in pop culture and pop productions. She strongly believes that pop culture is the most sincere mirror and the most accurate and expressive portrait of humanity. In this project, she wants to explore the ways in which she can compel spectator responses using the same mechanisms that pop uses, but switching and reinventing the production values, the messaging and moral values of her version of TITANIC. She wants to achieve the same intense experience of being in a theater watching a mainstream film, but with an entirely reconstructed language.

THE FIELD, New York City, as fiscal sponsor for a canary torsi, Brooklyn, New York, received a grant of $10,000 in support of the development and production of CAST. The Field firmly believes that art and artists are a vital part of a healthy, functioning and engaged society. The Field exists, like a small business incubator, to give artists the tools, resources and guidance that they need in order to add their dynamic voices to the marketplace. a canary torsi creates site-adaptable, installation-based performance projects. Formed in 2009 by New York choreographer Yanira Castro, a canary torsi invites audiences to participate in work that is anchored in live performance and extends into other media and online platforms. Ranging from formal movement and immersive audio installations to fictional Twitter feeds and interactive websites, a canary torsi explores the relationship between audience and event, developing scenarios where the audience’s presence dramatically impacts the work.

ROULETTE, Brooklyn, New York, as fiscal sponsor for Maria Chavez, Brooklyn, New York, received $12,000 to support the creation and recording of Chavez’s Tactile Peripheries #1-3, an interactive album/sculpture that can be listened to and viewed in different ways: as regular playback material, as a DJ tool, and as a sound sculpture. Composer, sound artist, and abstract turntablist Maria Chavez is influenced by improvisation and contemporary art. Her compositions, sound installations, conceptual objects, and live turntable performances focus on the benefits of accidents and chance. Roulette’s mission is to provide opportunities for innovative composers, musicians, sound artists, and interdisciplinary collaborators to present their work in accessible, appropriate, and professional productions. 

THE FIELD, New York City, as fiscal sponsor for FAYE DRISCOLL DANCE GROUP, Brooklyn, New York, received a two-year grant of $32,000 in support of the development and production of Thank You For Coming: Play and Thank You For Coming: Space. The Field firmly believes that art and artists are a vital part of a healthy, functioning and engaged society. The Field exists, like a small business incubator, to give artists the tools, resources and guidance that they need in order to add their dynamic voices to the marketplace. Faye Driscoll is obsessed with a basic problem that we all encounter - that of being "somebody" in a world of other "somebodies" - and in her work she attempts to pull apart this daily performance of self. She does this by enacting it in excess, blowing it up to the extreme in order to reveal its edges and create more space, more possibility for who we can be. She draws on familiar images and archetypal scenes, such as poses from classical art, or the physicality of people in extreme states, from torture to religious rapture. She creates manically choreographed physical and aural scores from these scenes and images, filled with unpredictability, ambiguity and a mix of falsehoods and truths.

KELMAN DURAN received support for the feature-length (70-minute) film To The North part 1.  The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home to the Lakota people, is a place that the filmmaker describes as an open-air prison. This experimental documentary uses the diary form to document housing conditions, native knowledge/myths, and the landscape of suicide on Pine Ridge. In 2011, the U.S. government cut $50 million in aid to Native American housing assistance. These cuts hurt the reservations most in need of such assistance, like Pine Ridge, the poorest reservation in the country. This film revolves around four Pine Ridge people who are all members of the same Lakota family: David, LeRoy, Crazy J, and Michelle. Told in chapters, the film documents their lives on the reservation, from the mundane to the mythic. Each chapter of the film will feature different methods of documenting the lives and conditions of its characters, and will use different formats such as 16mm, mini DV, DSLR cameras and iPhone footage to tell their fascinating stories.

BROOKLYN ARTS EXCHANGE (BAX), Brooklyn, New York, as fiscal sponsor for MARJANI FORTE, New York City, received $9,900 in support of the production and touring of being Here…/this time, the final act of a three-year dance work, being Here: a trilogy of works, examining the intersections of mental illness, addiction, and systemic poverty. This work highlights the collection of systems, legislation, and institutions that have historically worked for disenfranchised peoples. Forte will combine imaginative sci-fi narratives with history, scientific research, and dynamic play with multimedia. BAX encourages artists’ risk-taking and stimulates dialogue among diverse constituencies by providing year-round performance, rehearsal, and educational programs that develop artists of all ages.

JA’TOVIA M. GARY received support for The Evidence of Things Not Seen, a 90-minute personal documentary that chronicles her journey to self-actualization through an intimate look into her closest relationships, exploring the reverberating effects of generational trauma.  This non-traditional confessional reveals her efforts to combat the stigma and shame associated with mental anguish and abuse, particularly within the African American community, showing her determination to redefine herself under tenuous circumstances. From tense meetings with former lovers and estranged siblings to intimate and revealing therapy sessions, she shares the healthy and not so healthy ways in which she attempts to cope. Photos, home video, archival footage, animation sequences, and reenactments will create a collage of memory, nostalgia, and identity that aims to draw connections between the woman Ja’Tovia is today and the most dramatic and harrowing experiences of her ancestors. 

RASHAAD ERNESTO GREEN received support for Big Man, a feature-length narrative about Nick, an ex-con who spent a lifetime protecting himself from those who caused him harm. Through powerlifting, he has even made his body into a weapon of sorts, a first line of defense. Although Nick appears to be a large and intimidating man, he’s actually attempting to protect the vulnerable child within who has suffered a history of abuse, pain and neglect. Underneath his hard exterior, Nick has a sensitive soul. At first glance, many people don’t identify this quality in him because they’re so quick to judge his harsh exterior. Then Nick meets Nia, a nine-year-old who appears to be a normal child, but years of neglect have hardened her to the point of seeming more like a mature adult. This unlikely pair has suffered similar circumstances, and Nia presents an opportunity for Nick to correct mistakes of the past in order to heal his own inner turmoil. As his powerlifting pursuits collide and intertwine with his personal ones, Nick fights with everything he has to save the bond that he and Nia created together.

RUSSELL HARBAUGH received support for a 100-minute narrative called LOVE AFTER LOVE, a sad, funny, romantic account of a mother and two grown sons as they struggle in the wake of a father’s death. After 4 years of development, the project began shooting in July with actors Chris O'Dowd and Andie MacDowell in the lead roles. Glenn and Suzanne are theater professors at a Midwestern University. They enjoy a playful, tempestuous marriage surrounded by students and family. Their two sons, Nicholas and Chris, have grown up and left the nest, making homes in New York City.  Nick is a successful book editor involved in a long-standing relationship with a colleague, Rebecca, whom the whole family loves, while Chris waits tables, trying to find an outlet for his vague, center-less creativity. When Glenn becomes ill with cancer, the family waits out his last summer days together: caring for his dying body that lies in the living room. Unable and ill-equipped to attend to their mounting emotional needs after Glen's death the family implodes, finding release in alternatively abhorrent and comic ways.

SPRINGBOARD FOR THE ARTS, St. Paul, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for composer JOE HORTON, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $12,000 in support of the development and production of A Hill in Natchez, a multi-disciplinary postmodern, surrealist re-telling of an American slave narrative through music, movement, and performance. Horton’s impetus for this work was a family visit in which his father shared with him a bill of sale listing livestock, farm equipment, and new slaves, including his newborn great, great grandmother. Horton is best known for his work with experimental hip-hop band No Bird Sing. He is a professor of Songwriting and Composition at McNally Smith College of Music. Springboard for the Arts is an economic and community development organization for artists and by artists. Its work is about building stronger communities, neighborhoods, and economies.

HANNAH JAYANTI received support for an 85-minute documentary entitled Truth or Consequences. In 1950, the residents of a southern New Mexico town, then called Hot Springs, voted to rename themselves after the most popular radio show of the time—Truth or Consequences. In return, the show’s charismatic host would visit once a year, bringing his celebrity friends to the newly burgeoning resort town. Fame and prosperity would inevitably follow, or so they hoped. For a short while the boom seemed imminent, but soon everything returned to how it was before—a small economically depressed desert town. Sixty years later, the same optimism and frustration is playing out as the world’s first commercial Spaceport is being built 20 miles outside of town. Just as the town’s residents are attracted to the remoteness of the desert, so is Spaceport America. Run by the government of New Mexico, one of the poorest states in the country, and funded with tax payer dollars, the spaceport’s landing strip is rented out to private Space Tourism companies such as Virgin Galactic and Space X. Through an intimate combination of observational and impressionistic filmmaking, this documentary will paint a portrait of a small town in flux by focusing on the daily lives of its residents. Intertwined with traditional documentary footage will be experimental photogrammetric animations of the landscape and the spaceport. Referencing sci-fi tropes of an impenetrable force affecting the status quo (think Solaris, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact), the animations will dramatize the desert landscape and represent the perceptions that the residents have of the spaceport, both fears of unknown progress and the hope that an outside influence could save the town.

JAMES N. KIENITZ WILKINS received support for Mediums, a 45-minute narrative short centered around the jury selection process known as “voir dire.” This process is when a pool of prospective jurors are questioned about their backgrounds and biases before being chosen. In ideal form, it could be described as a trial before the trial to select those who best represent society. The setting of Mediums is the exterior of an upstate New York courthouse, where participants smoke and drink coffee before, during, and after a day of jury selection. While on break, they naturally form groups and alliances and learn from each other. This trade of information and the small dramas of a single day is the focus of the film. As an experimental narrative, Mediums takes literally the definition of voir dire (“to say what is true”), by collaging original dialogue with texts collected from the internet and found in the world, including jury selection pamphlets, automotive manuals, union constitutions, fast food franchise contracts, health insurance primers, blog posts and more. Bits and pieces from these sources are woven into the fictional dialogue as informal quotations (to be acknowledged in the end credits). As such, each juror-character is a sort of “medium” of specific, real-world knowledge. They each possess a unique expertise as well as a problem to be solved. As the day progresses, they trade tips and insight, finding common ground in a show of civic participation extending well beyond—and literally external to—the legal requirement of jury duty.

JOSH KOURY and MYLES KANE received support for Voyeur, a 90-minute documentary that is an exclusive look at a writer's life, legacy, and process as he develops a new book revolving around a mysterious man who spent 30 years secretly spying on people during their most private moments. The documentary examines both the subject's and writer's motivations as the two intertwine: the man is seeking public validation for his actions while the writer works tirelessly to articulate the man's life story. The documentary follows the writer as he culls through decades of research materials, including diaries with detailed descriptions of the events the man witnessed during his years of observation. The film will follow the story through publication and document the public's reaction, finally bringing to light events kept underground for over 40 years.

THE FIELD, New York City, as fiscal sponsor for theater artist Aaron Landsman, Brooklyn, New York, received $25,000 in support of the development and production of two new multi-media theater works by Landsman, PAKO and Anna. Founded by artists for artists, The Field provides strategic services to thousands of performing artists and companies in New York City and beyond. It fosters creative exploration, stewards innovative management strategies, and helps artists reach their fullest potential. Aaron Landsman constructs performances using people, language, space, and time. Some projects combine formal experimentation and long-term community engagement. Some are staged in commonplace settings, such as homes, offices, and meeting rooms. PAKO is about nostalgia, analog technology in the age of digital production, and the impossibility of reconstructing the past. The work is in early-stage development and will include a gallery installation and live performance. Landsman envisions Anna as both a stage work and a film. Using Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and a 1960 recording of a complete episode of the game show Queen For A Day, Landsman will engage three performers in ongoing conversations on the depiction of gender norms.

MELINA LEON received support for a 90-minute narrative called Song Without a Name. Set at the height of the Shining Path's grip on 1980's Perú, Song Without a Name details the bittersweet journey of Georgina Condori, a young girl from the Andes whose baby gets stolen in a fake clinic. After a lot of vain efforts to find help, Georgina arrives at a well-known newspaper where she meets Pedro Campos, a young and lonely journalist who is commissioned to follow the case. The film explores several primary questions: What is the meaning of being socially invisible? What could be in someone’s mind to join a terrorist group? What is the meaning of denying one’s sexual identity? These questions define the lives of the three primary characters: Georgina, who by losing her kid discovers the magnitude of her social invisibility; Leo, who joins Shining Path (a violent Maoist group); and the young journalist Pedro, who lives a double life in his effort to hide his homosexuality. Georgina and Leo are the quintessential representatives of social invisibility; Pedro is clandestine in his own way, because of his hidden sexual identity. And the stolen baby is a symbol of this society of phantoms who became a fading memory from the day she was born. The film will be shot on black and white 16mm film, which is a statement about the sad times in which the story occurs and its total suppression of color.

ANJA MARQUARDT received support for WOLF, an experimental feature about a Native American tracking unit who patrol the southern Arizona border zone, targeting drug and human trafficking. The unit hunts like a wolf pack, analyzing physical evidence (footprints, tracks, threads of clothing, etc.). Their tracking skills have been passed down from generation to generation, recalling ancient beliefs that the trackers walk slowly across the hot desert sand, and where most people would only see sand, dirt, rocks and some small plants, they see a story. Told from the perspective of one tracker in training who must reconcile conflicting narratives before him, this compelling film will be shot entirely on iPhone cameras.

Springboard for the Arts, Saint Paul, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for composer Kathy McTavish, Duluth, Minnesota, received $12,500 in support of the development and production of the new work The Railway Prophecies. The mission of Springboard for the Arts is to cultivate a vibrant arts community by connecting artists with the resources they need to make a living and a life. McTavish is a cellist, composer, and multimedia artist. In live performance, installation, and online environments, she blends improvisational cello, found sound, text, data, and abstract, layered, moving images. Her recent work has focused on creating generative methods for building multichannel video and sound environments. The Railway Prophecies is an evolving tale that centers on an everyman character named Pullman, whose story revolves around planetary climate change and the extinction of animal species. The work explores themes of over-consumption and meaningless productivity through its central character who travels through oceans of data washing over us every day.

MICHAEL BEACH NICHOLS and CHRISTOPHER K. WALKER received support for Welcome to Leith, a feature-length documentary chronicling the attempted takeover of Leith, a small town in North Dakota, by notorious white supremacist Craig Cobb. Filmed in the days leading up to Cobb's arrest for terrorizing the townspeople of Leith while on an armed patrol with other supremacists, and his subsequent release from jail six months later, the film is an eerie document of American DIY (Do it Yourself) ideals. Welcome to Leith is a fascinating and frequently suspenseful story about race, civil liberties, and freedom in America. That it takes place in the shadow of the biggest oil boom in North Dakota's history makes the film a complex document exploring unforeseen causes and effects. 

MADELEINE OLNEK received support for Wild Nights With Emily, a 90-minute narrative about the secret life of Emily Dickinson. The poet’s persona that has become popularized after her death is that of a reclusive spinster – a lonely woman who never left her room, did not talk to people, and never fell in love. Olnek’s film explores the vivacious, personable side of Dickinson that was recently revealed to have been covered up by her editor, most notably her lifelong romance with another woman. Advances in science have recently allowed scholars to look deeper into Emily Dickinson’s work and find erasures, as well as obvious and major edits to her poems by Mabel Todd, Emily’s self-appointed literary executor after her death. Looking at her letters and poetry without these alterations, Dickenson’s devotion to this other woman is palpable. Emily’s love for her jumps off the page. The woman in question is Susan Gilbert, who met Emily as a teenager and went on to become her sister-in-law, marrying her brother Austin and moving in nextdoor so that they could remain as close as possible. Austin eventually grew unfaithful to Gilbert, entering into a highly public affair with Mabel Todd after the death of his and Susan’s son. It was this affair that drove Mabel’s rivalry with Susan, which led to Mabel taking extraordinary measures to erase Susan from Emily’s poems and letters after Emily’s death. Wild Nights With Emily was originally a play that Olnek wrote and directed. She is now adapting this story for the screen.

RATI ONELI received support for City of the Sun, a feature-length (100-minute) documentary in which three remarkable stories intersect in the half deserted ghost town of Chiatura (located in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia) run by an international mining corporation. Once a leading mining town and paragon of Communist utopian society, Chiatura supplied 60% of the world’s finest manganese during the reign of the Soviet Union. It’s a town that represented a triumphant marriage of human will and technology. In addition to some 35 mines, a leading theater, cultural centers and universities, a spectacular super airway system was built for the town some 60 years ago. To this day, Chiatura is the world’s only city with the largest number of air cable cars used as public transport with the total length of the cableways exceeding 6,000 meters. Running continuously since 1954, never repaired and dangerously outdated, they resemble phantasmagorical floating prisons and are still the main mode of transportation. Here three improbable but true stories intersect: a group of toothless pensioners get together to demand their teeth from the government that extracted them for election campaign purposes a year before; a music teacher turned demolition expert sets out to find the thieves who stole his precious construction metal that he hoped would pay for his son’s asthma treatment; a miner-turned-actor has to make a life-altering choice between sticking with his dream of being in theater or remaining in a miserable life by keeping his job at the mines in order to feed his family; and two malnourished champion athletes have to overcome the odds and win the next Olympic games to survive. City of the Sun is a surreal vision of a post-apocalyptic ghost town and its inhabitants who live in the shadow of an international mining corporation - the most powerful player and the biggest employer in the city.