Announcing the 2024 Documentation and Storytelling Fund Awards
June 24, 2024 • 12 minute read
Annie Hollowell and Bill Hollowell sitting under the main pavilion at Foxfire Ranch (2023). Photo Credit by Jai Williams.
The National Performance Network (NPN) is awarding over $63,000 to 21 Documentation & Storytelling projects. NPN’s Documentation & Storytelling Fund aims to create pathways for artists’ career advancement and to support their ability to document, promote, and share their work, ideas, and selves.
Celebrating the richness of shared human experience, these works serve as powerful vessels that bridge gaps and challenge preconceptions. From a collection of work that spans decades of curation to live performances fusing art and expression with modern technology, this year’s fund recipients are creating captivating and inspiring works that showcase the vibrant diversity of our community.
“With the support of the NPN Documentation & Storytelling Fund, my collaborators and I were able to place the archival process as a central part of the work of radical embodiment, rather than an afterthought, for it places equal value on generative process (not just performance), and ensures that the dialogues, experiences, lessons, and tools of the work live beyond its insular setting,” says Marina Magalhães, NPN 2022 Documentation & Storytelling Fund recipient.
2024’s selected projects will take place in cities across the country, as well as internationally, with artists telling their stories in Chicago, Austin, and NPN’s local New Orleans community.
The Documentation & Storytelling Fund is made possible with support from the Doris Duke Foundation.
2024 Documentation and Storytelling Fund Recipients
AB Contemporary Dance
Quare Dance & Other Stories is an intimate exploration of Black queer identity and belonging that offers audiences a powerful reimagining of classical ballet. This evening-length work combines movement, video, text, and adornment to explore the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Showcasing the transcendent power of unapologetic embodiment and self-acceptance, Quare Dance enacts a new paradigm rooted in radical joy and possibility. Documentation & Storytelling Funds will be used to capture video of the creation process, high-quality photos for promotional purposes, and build out QuareDance.com as a digital archive for process footage, oral histories, artist profiles, and marketing and promotional collateral.
Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson
The Seasoned Woman is a collaboration between poet and vocalist Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson and Syrian opera singer Lubana Al Quntar that celebrates the beauty, strength, resiliency, and wisdom of womanhood across time and cultures. This collaboration marries poetry, music, and soaring vocals of reimagined Jazz standards through the cultural and musical influences of the artists, including R&B, Hip-Hop, and Middle Eastern music. Support will enable documentation of live rehearsals and the live show depicting the dramatic and emotional landscape of The Seasoned Woman.
Anna Martine Whitehead
FORCE! an opera in three acts follows a group of Black women and femmes as they wait to enter a prison and escape a memory-erasing mold. The work shares the story of their interior lives and shared fantasies blooming in the shadows of the prison. This archiving project will begin to collect writing (including the libretto, critical essays, and interviews), audio, video, collages, maps, and ephemera into a volume that can give context and further expansion to the work beyond the live performance.
Boni B. Alvarez
MIX-MIX: The Filipino Adventures of a German Jewish Boy is an epic WWII play inspired by the true-life experiences of Ralph J. Preiss. MIX-MIX tells the coming-of-age of 13-year-old Rudy Preissman, who escapes Nazi Germany at the age of nine with his family, finding safety in the Philippines. Their tropical refuge is upended when Japan invades the islands. MIX-MIX takes place when the Priessmans and their Filipino friends hide in the heights and depths of sacred Mount Banahao. Funds will support the building of a website and social media presence to create future collaborations and opportunities.
BRKFST Dance Company
STORMCLUTTER is an exploration of relationships and ongoing efforts to resolve opposing states of interpersonal tension. Misunderstanding, compassion, resentment, egoism, love, loss, betrayal – moving through or attempting to compartmentalize complex dynamics between family and friends and the emotional baggage we collect over time becomes an overwhelming task that piles up. While maturation requires us to accept that which we cannot change, BRKFST members illustrate the efforts individuals may take when working to resolve the inner chaos that triggers feelings of dissociation, paralysis, and isolation. Funds will support the creation of documentation, promotional material and a press kit.
CARPA San Diego
La Carpa De La Frontera/Las Voces is a mobile people’s theater, a modern vaudeville show that travels to any community that wants to experience the group’s comedy, drama, political satire, circus, music, grassroots ‘edutainment’. These cultural productions allow audiences to experience the ‘Rascuache’ (People’s Theater) formula that focuses on political and social artistic expression. The group works following the tradition of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s Chicano Mexicano revolutionary TEATRO movement and is rooted in the campesino and obrero (worker) tent shows (carpas) throughout Mexico in the early and mid-part of the 20th century. Support will continue the building of an archive, capturing the history of the Carpa movement.
Eiko Otake
Eiko Otake’s exhibition I Invited Myself features choreography of place, movements of both performer and viewers, and video and film works that Eiko has created since the 1980s. Working closely with Patrizia, Eiko will contextualize and share her media works with diverse audiences now and in the future. Weaving selected film/video works with footage of exhibition, dialogues, and on-site performances, this film shares Eiko’s artistic process and challenges while contemplating why and how she came to invite herself.
jaamil olawale kosoko
The (chrysalis) Archives is a hybrid live performance installation, living archive, and virtual theatrical experience that uses original and found footage, expanded cinema techniques, and queer feminist archival strategies to create participatory traces of a Black past. It investigates the ghostly way in which Blackness travels through digital mediums and how it digitally haunts the material world as a means to examine concepts of metamorphosis, intergenerational knowledge, blood memory, and the complexities of living and dying while Black in America.
LEIMAY (Ximena Garnica & Shige Moriya)
Funds will support LEIMAY to video document, photograph, and archive the development process and the upcoming premiere of their multi-year project, A MEAL. With extensive digital material accumulated over the project’s development, LEIMAY aims to enrich its archive. Assistance from a Dance USA Archive Fellow in Summer 2024 will aid this effort. Additionally, funds will help LEIMAY’s team document and edit footage from the September 2024 premiere at HERE in NYC.
Linda Parris-Bailey
Full Circle is the story/documentation of the origins, of what began as an exploration of a political moment and became a family quest for belonging and safety in the Caribbean. What is behind and what lies ahead for Yankee Bajan, a play with music that challenges the limitations imposed by racism in America and the agenda of “The Right” and proposes the expat experience as the solution. The origins of Yankee Bajan are both political and personal.
Lisa B. Thompson
The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body is part spiritual mixed tape, roadmap, “us” help book, and collective diary of nursery rhymes, sacred stories, praise dances, and love songs, this urges us to honor all our pieces, even the broken ones. The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body Documentation Project will support archiving, documenting, and writing an essay about the rolling world premiere that includes interviews with key collaborators who worked on the play at The Vortex in Austin, the Pyramid Theatre in Des Moines, and the Lorraine Hansberry Theater in San Francisco.
LubDub Theatre Co
THE MAGIC BULLET follows an ensemble of seven contemporary artists telling the story of a French colonial magic show that took place at Algiers’ Bab-Azoun Theatre in 1856. The project is inspired by historical accounts of the marabouts—Sufi leaders who animated Algeria’s revolt against French colonial rule—and French stage magician Robert-Houdin, who crossed the Mediterranean to prove the “superiority” of European conjuring. Drawing contemporary parallels and weaving archival sources, ritual, original writing, stage magic, and documentary filmmaking, THE MAGIC BULLET offers an uncanny confrontation between the power of illusion and the illusions of power. Funds will support the documentation of the development process and a work-in-progress presentation of THE MAGIC BULLET.
Nejla Yatkin
Ouroboros is an interactive, evening-length theatrical solo dance presented in the round that resurrects and centers the ancient healing symbol of Ouroboros. The piece communicates through personal storytelling, contemporary and Middle Eastern dance, cabaret-style song, live finger cymbal/zill play through English, German, Turkish, and ASL, and audience participation. The Documentation and Storytelling Fund will support capturing the origins of Ouroboros’ creation, interviewing collaborators, and producing a short five to ten-minute film featuring rehearsal and performance footage along with the interviews.
re:FRAME Collective
The re:FRAME initiative’s primary goal was to support the development of 5 artists’ solo works. In its final stage, the project weaves these pieces into a collective terrain, creating both a physical archive and a metaphysical ritual. This will encompass their journey of individual performance creations, community organizing, residency and grant applications, pandemic reorientation, displacement from the South due to resource scarcity, and collective healing. The documentation aims to advance their artistic voices and contribute to the well-being of dance communities in the South and beyond.
Rogue Artists Ensemble
HAPPY FALL: A Queer Stunt Spectacular is an original highly interactive theatrical experience about a queer closeted stuntman’s journey to discover himself in a world of faux masculinity, unmasking the importance and danger of being true to oneself. HAPPY FALL is based on true-life stories and direct testimonies and illuminates issues of racial and cultural identity in Hollywood. The full production, set for a premiere in 2024, will come to life as an interactive stunt show, with life-size puppets, special effects, and death-defying physical acts. Funds will support documentation of HAPPY FALL, including photos, video and audience reactions.
San Cha
Sharing the World of Inebria me will build visually rich materials supporting documentation, promotion, and circulation of LA-based multidisciplinary artist San Cha’s NPN Creation Fund performance, Inebria me. A queer, experimental opera inspired by telenovelas, Inebria me uses San Cha’s personal story, powerful stage presence, and signature musical sound drawing from a range of styles and subcultures and the specificity of her East LA queer, brown communities. The full project will include a professionally designed deck as well as video documentation of San Cha’s creative process to help pitch, market, and fundraise for the full life of this performance.
Sol Ruiz
Positive Vibration Nation is a Rock Guaguanco Opera written and created by Sol Ruiz. Blending live performance with integrated technology, the new work fuses sound, visual art, costume, dance, and music with Caribbean influences to investigate contemporary issues, explore Miami’s cultural singularity, and convey a positive message to audiences. Greth Castillo filmed the performance which will be crafted into an electronic press kit, serving as a virtual promotional tool. They aim to showcase Miami’s vibrant essence and export their unique culture to audiences worldwide. This film will help them secure future venues and transport the piece to different cities, spreading “the positive vibrations and Miami-licious swag” to the rest of the world.
Sugar Vendil
Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia is a memoir of a Filipinx American childhood that interweaves music and movement, taking an imaginative approach to interdisciplinary performance and music composition. Excavating insignificant yet indelible experiences, Antonym envisions the future as an escape from pain and ponders how we can possess painful memories without being beholden to them. The Documentation and Storytelling fund will support the project and will be a 100-page book of essays, photos, and sketches documenting the NPN-supported performance of the same name. The book will also be viewable for free online as a PDF.
Sydnie L. Mosley Dances
Sydnie L. Mosley Dances (SLMDances) is a New York City-based dance-theater collective that works in communities to organize for gender and racial justice through experiential dance performance. Support from the Documentation and Storytelling fund will allow SLMDances to develop and activate a storytelling strategy to document their performance and education work, share it with their contacts in the field, and increase their opportunities. This includes digital marketing materials for PURPLE: A Ritual in Nine Spells and The Window Sex Project.
Timur
The Great Soviet Bucket is a dark musical comedy that follows Timur, a dutiful Soviet citizen, and an unhinged puppet, Comrade Bucket. Like a true believer, Timur patiently tolerates the complexities of the USSR, knowing that a better future is almost here. His local commander, Comrade Bucket, encourages Timur to embrace the collective ways of living. As the Soviet Union empire crumbles, so does Timur’s Soviet identity. Kazakh-American opera singer Timur, backed by a cadre of brilliant musician-performers, uses the Soviet songs of his youth to ask pressing questions about the intertwined forces of identity, politics, and history. Funding supports the creation of a promotional trailer, using footage and images from the world premiere production.
We Are the Promised Land
We Are the Promised Land is an altar dedicated to Black land legacies in the Mississippi Hill Country, focusing on the Hollowells and Foxfire Ranch in Waterford, Mississippi. Amid stories of Black land loss, it highlights how the Hollowell family has preserved their land for over a century, exploring the sacrifices, risks, and cultural mechanisms involved. Through a podcast, poetry, photography, and video, the project presents diverse views of the region and sparks conversations about inheritance and the echoes of ancestral legacies. Funds will be used to create a visual alter, in the shape of an online platform, that encourages archiving and deepened engagement with the different components of the project.
