Past
Grantees

A grant of $8,000 was awarded to the NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS, New York City, as fiscal agent for choreographer LAWRENCE GOLDHUBER. Goldhuber, a former member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, began presenting his own choreography in 1993. Jerome funding will support the creation of KNEED: The Life and Times of Barry Goldhubris, which continues the exploration of body image and self-acceptance in a culture that loathes fat and difference. It will be a humorous dance-theater work set in a cinematic landscape, with film projected on three sides of the performance space to create the impression that the performer is immersed in a constantly shifting environment. The intensive visual imagery will take the audience from flying through galaxies to inside the mind of the performer, using dance, song, spoken word, and elaborate giant costumes.

Jerome Foundation Directors authorized a grant of $17,000 to CAVE CANEM, New York City, in support of a summer retreat and poetry workshops. Cave Canem offers emerging African American poets opportunities to improve and strengthen their work and advance their careers. It seeks to deliver the very best in poetic instruction to a group of writers under-represented in professional level writing workshops. Its summer retreat is a week-long immersion in writing and critique for participants who develop their work with prominent faculty writers and teachers. Poetry workshops in New York City are structured around an organizing theme as a context for writing exercises, creation of new work and careful critique of the work generated. Cave Canems activities also include workshops in other locations, public readings, a poetry prize, publication of an anthology, and master classes.

A two-year grant of $20,000 was authorized for the H.T. DANCE COMPANY/MULBERRY STREET THEATER, New York City, in support of the dance series Ear to the Ground. This program supports emerging Asian American choreographers creating innovative works. The series is interested in artists committed to exploring their cultural ancestry through commissioned projects. Selected artists receive production assistance, commissioning fees, rehearsal space, and technical assistance.

CHERRY LANE THEATRE, New York City, received a grant of $26,000 in support of its Mentor Project, which engages emerging playwrights (fellows) in one-on-one working relationships with accomplished mentor dramatists for an entire theater season. The mentors help the fellows refine their writing skills and scripts as each moves toward the final phase of the processa three-week workshop production. The grant will support stipends to the fellows and to the mentors as well as related costs involved in developing and producing the plays.

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.

A grant of $8,000 was authorized for CLUBBED THUMB, New York City, in support of the production of new works by emerging playwrights during the 2003 festival of new plays, titled Homeland Insecurity. Clubbed Thumbs mission is to develop and produce new strange, funny and provocative plays by living American writers. It is particularly interested in providing opportunities for women in the theater, and to increasing and improving the quality of roles for women in dramatic literature. The Festival will present seven new plays by emerging playwrights, including one full production run, two short runs and four readings.

Storyteller and teacher JOHN COLBURN will spend eight-days at Atlantic College in Wales attending the Beyond the Border International Storytelling Festival at St. Donats Art Centre. He will gain insight from the best storytellers available at this internationally recognized event on how to construct, pace, and perform an oral narrative. Colburn will also visit the nearby birthplace of Dylan Thomas, an influential literary figure for him, in Swansea.

The NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for GRISHA COLEMAN, received $8,000 for the production of two performance-installation segments of Faster Than a Speeding Bullet. Coleman, a composer, performer, choreographer, writer, and director, is the founder and artistic coordinator of the music performance group Hot Mouth. Faster Than a Speeding Bullet, developed last summer during a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, is an intermedia performance event that investigates the effects of an increasingly fast paced technological world on contemporary reality. Its envisioned as a series of modular, site-specific installations, each one referencing a natural habitat. Through conceptual dialogues with artists and scientists, Coleman is creating movement-based performance, integrated with technology and presented within these installations. She hopes to immerse audiences in an alternative reality. Technology is positioned in this project as the intermediary that joins ecology and movement and sound performance. Shes working collaboratively with an ecologist, an information architect, an electroacoustic sound designer/programmer, and a writer.

MARK CONWAY, a poet and editor from Avon, Minnesota, will travel for one month in Italy. He has published a collection of poems about his stillborn older brother, an explanation of the world to his brother who never experienced life. On this trip, he will move through Italy as if he is an observer of his brother, who is living Conway's life, as a means of trying to understand him. Conway seeks to create a gap between memory and the imagination, to create a narrative or form that tricks him into seeing his own life from another perspective. After three weeks of writing, he will connect with poet Marie Howe, former winner of the National Poetry Series and a professor of creative writing at Sarah Lawrence, and work with her on developing his manuscript.

Jerome Foundation renewed its annual membership inThe COUNCIL ON FOUNDATIONS, Washington, D.C., and provided a grant in general operating support. The Council is a national membership organization that serves the public good by promoting and enhancing responsibilities and effective philanthropy.

Jerome Foundation Directors authorized a grant of $12,000 to CREATIVE TIME, New York City, in support of emerging artists' fees for the development and production of new works. Creative Time assists artists in the creation and placement of work outside the confines of the studio and the gallery in order to enliven public spaces and enrich everyday experiences. Artists are heralded as key contributors to a healthy and democratic society. Jerome Foundation dollars enable Creative Time to subsidize the creation and placement of public works by emerging artists. In 2004, that will involve a multi-artist program in Times Square and Coney Island. In its current programming season, Creative Time is launching over 13 major projects that will engage a good number of emerging artists.

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.

PAUL T. DOVE is the administrator of the Northern Light Opera Company in Park Rapids. He received funding to travel to Seattle, Washington; Capitola, California; Eureka, California; and Flagstaff, Arizona, to study the administration of opera companies, which might give direction to his own work. Dove has confirmations to conduct study visits as the Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society, Bay Shore Lyric Opera Company, Humboldt Light Opera Company, and the Flagstaff Light Opera Company.

The DULUTH ART INSTITUTE, Duluth, Minnesota, received $13,500 in support of the participation of emerging artists in the 2003 exhibition program. The Art Institute mounts an active exhibition program, offers a comprehensive educational program, supports artist residencies and provides services to artists. Its mission is to recognize, validate and support the creation of visual arts in all of its diverse forms, and to encourage participation in, appreciation for, and enjoyment of the visual arts. Jerome support will be specifically directed to the emerging artists who participate in the annual exhibition program.