Creation Fund

The Creation Fund leverages resources for the creation and touring of new performance work by contributing at least $10,000 towards the creation process and ensuring a tour to a minimum of two sites.


Link to thesection, which contains stories on Creation Fund and other NPN-subsidized projects.

FY12 Winter Creation Fund Awards

Artist:  Emily Johnson (Minneapolis, MN)
Title:  Niicugni
Discipline:  dance
Commissioners:  Performance Space 122, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Northrop University, Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts
Description:  Niicugni (Listen) is a new performance/installation, centered on movement, story, and sound and housed within a light/sound installation of hand-made, functional fish-skin lanterns. Niicugni equates the land we live on with the cells comprising our bodies and calls upon audiences to remember that land is alive with ancestry, memory, and possibility, and that our bodies also hold these things.
NPN Subsidy:  $14,000

Artist:  Kate Weare Company (New York, NY)
Title:  Dark Lark
Discipline: dance
Commissioners:  Bates Dance Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Florida Dance Association, Juniata College
Description:  Dark Lark is an evening-length work created by Kate Weare to premiere in New York in fall 2013. The work for five dancers draws heavily on ideas about sexuality, darkness and identity, and features a highly graphic and process-based collaboration with costume designer Sarah Cubbage.
NPN Subsidy: $14,000

Artist:  Letta Neely & Company (Boston, MA)
Title:  99% Stone
Discipline:  theatre
Commissioners:  The Theater Offensive, Nursha Project, Real Art Ways, DiverseWorks
Description:  Letta Neely & Melissa Li collaborate to create the musical street theater piece 99% Stone, which tells the story of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising as the original “Queer Occupy Action.” Young Black and Latino Queens & Dykes got fed up, fought back, and sparked an international movement. The piece will be created for outdoor neighborhood performances. The artists and co-commissioners are innovating strategies for staging, collaborations and funding that will be useful to the field.
NPN Subsidy:  $14,000

Artist:  Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People (Brooklyn, NY)
Title:  And lose the name of action
Discipline:  dance
Commissioners:  Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Flynn Center, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, On The Boards
Description: And lose the name of action is inspired by discoveries in neuroscience and paranormal phenomena and draws on the mysterious logic of improvisation, to push Gutierrez’s persistent questions about the wonder of living with an ephemeral body into the beyond. The work treats the inscrutability of dance as its inherent power and savors its unique ability to be something that doesn’t make sense.  This project is commissioned by past and first-time NPN and non-NPN organizations.
NPN Subsidy:  $16,000

Artist:  Paul Flores (San Francisco, CA)
Title:  PLACAS
Discipline:  theatre
Commissioners:  Su Teatro, MACLA, GALA, Pregones, Central American Resource Center
Description:  PLACAS is a new multimedia play written by Paul S. Flores that weaves together the story of a family who lived through the horrors of El Salvador’s civil war and its aftermath; the subsequent refugee migration to the U.S. and the resulting formation of immigrant gangs in California’s inner-cities. The play highlights the powerful and symbolic process of tattoo removal as a means of reintegration and transformation.
NPN Subsidy:  $16,000

Artist:  Sharon Bridgforth (Chicago, IL)
Title:  River See
Discipline:  theatre
Commissioners:  Links Hall, Living Arts of Tulsa, Diaspora Vibe, Pillsbury House Theater
Description:  Housed in the goings on of a juking river boat community deep in the black delta South, River See is ritual jazz theater – exploring blues stories as living arrangements of jazz.  Bridgforth conducts the work, blurring the line between performer and audience, making everyone responsible to one another through the act of creating a piece about love.
NPN Subsidy: $14,000

Artist: So Percussion (New York, NY)
Title:  where (we) live
Discipline:  music
Commissioners:  Myrna Loy, Walker Arts Center, Vermont Performance Lab
Description:  where (we) live is a new evening-length multi-media project conceived and written by the members of So Percussion, together with collaborators Martin Schmidt, Grey McMurray, and Emily Johnson and with direction by Ain Gordon. Each night it will also feature a different additional live performer drawn from the community. Improvisation features heavily in the music, with performers often asked to respond to outside inputs.  Lights, video, and staging are all “homemade.”
NPN Subsidy:  $12,000

Artist:  The Hinterlands (Detroit, MI)
Title:  The Circuit
Discipline:  theatre
Commissioners:  Alverno Presents, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
Description:  The Circuit is a theatrical exploration of the intersection between subculture and common culture in America as seen through the lens of American vaudeville. Daringly physical and shockingly funny, The Circuit will re-imagine vaudeville for the post-industrial age.
NPN Subsidy:  $10,000

Artist:  Turner World Around Productions (Raymond, MS)
Title:  7 Trumpets
Discipline:  multi-disciplinary
Commissioners:  7 Stages, ArtSpot Productions
Description:  Conceived by Maurice Turner, 7 Trumpets is an evening length performance piece that examines the natural, mystical, and man made occurrences of the number 7. New original musical compositions, carefully crafted text, video images, still images, and thoughtful choreography; all develop a sense of comprehending the fear of the pending apocalypse that has confounded man for centuries and turning society on its end.
NPN Subsidy:  $10,000

FY12 Summer Creation Fund Awards

In July of 2011, NPN received 19 Creation Fund Applications and funded eleven projects. NPN subsidized a total of $132,000 which leveraged $766,090 in presenter matches. Each of these projects will receive an additional $15,000 for the creative development process through the NPN Forth Fund.

Artist: AXIS Dance Company (Oakland, CA)
Project Title: Full of Words (Dance)
Commissioners: Tigertail Productions, Dance Place
Description: AXIS Dance Company, (the leading U.S. integrated dance company) and UK-based choreographer Marc Brew will create Full of Words, a series of duets fusing complex movement with very human content to tell poignant stories about ‘being.’ This work will tour with related education/outreach events in 2012/2013.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Body Cartography Project (Minneapolis, MN)
Project Title: Super Nature (Dance)
Commissioners: Walker Art Center, Performance Space 122 (P.S.122), PADL West
Description: Super Nature is a new evening length dance work fueled by Body Cartography’s recent commission for the Lyon Opera Ballet titled Mammal. Super Nature will be a visercal emotionally charged group choreography, with an aural landscape developed by electric harp pioneer/composer Zeena Parkins, which investigates how the body lies at the precipice between nature and culture, full of artifice and animal appetites, engaging the wild, the domestic and the civilized in each of us.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

 Artist: Nora Chipaumire (New York, NY)
Project Title: MIRIAM (Dance)
Commissioners: Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, EMPAC
Description: MIRIAM is an hour-long, multidisciplinary solo performance conceived by Nora Chipaumire (choreographer, writer, performer) with an original musical score by Omar Sosa. The work is inspired by Chipaumire’s personal history of self-exile and self-discovery as an artist, and by the legendary South African artist, Miriam Makeba. Chipaumire will portray one fictional woman’s journey to address the broad theme of “Women and Success.”
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Desmar Guevara (Bronx, NY)
Project Title: Grados Inefables (Ineffable Degrees) (Music)
Commissioners: Pregones Theater, MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, El Centro Su Teatro, AMLA/Artistas y Musicos Latino
Description: Grados Inefables is a new chamber music work in four movements for piano and string quartet. The work will reference compositional and rhythmic patterns commonly found in classical, folk, jazz, and popular music of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and its diasporas.
NPN Subsidy: $14,000

Artist: Aaron Landsman (Brooklyn, NY)
Project Title: City Council Meeting (Theater)
Commissioners: DiverseWorks, Here Arts Center, Z Space
Description: City Council Meeting is an interactive theater work with live video, in which viewers and actors share the roles of council members, activists and bystanders of a fictional city that exists for a single night at a time. Borrowing tales from half a dozen cities where Landsman sat in on government meetings, the piece asks everyone in the room to perform participatory democracy together.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: Liz Lerman Dance Exchange (Takoma Park, MD)
Project Title: How to Lose a Mountain (Dance)
Commissioners: John Michael Kohler Art Center, Dance Place, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
Description: Dance Exchange artistic director Cassie Meador will set out on a 500-mile walk to collect stories and research as part of the creative process to develop a stage production called How To Lose a Mountain which will examine our natural resources. This work will involve communities on multiple levels-as storytellers, dancers, and inspiration.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: Lionel Popkin / Guy Klucevsek (Santa Monica, CA)
Project Title: Looking For Ruth (Dance)
Commissioners: REDCAT (CalArts), Dance Place, Alverno Presents
Description: Choreographer Lionel Popkin and composer Guy Klucevsek are creating Looking for Ruth, an evening-length quartet that questions the acts of cultural sourcing, representation and transmission. Loosely inspired by the career of Ruth St. Denis (1880 or so – 1968), the piece serves as a way for Popkin, who is half Indian and half Jewish, to wrestle with his own uncertainties and awkwardness with representations of South Asia. The score will feature accordion and string quartet.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: Augusto Soledade (Miami, FL)
Project Title: CORDEL (Dance)
Commissioners: Florida Dance Association, Alabama Dance Council, South Miami Dade Cultural Arts Center
Description: In Cordel, choreographer Augusto Soledade will draw on the historical and social contexts of the Argentine Tango, American Hip-hop and Brazilian Cordel in order to create an abstract contemporary dance.  The senses of poetry, structure and social commentary are the main underlying concepts around Tango, Hip-hop and Cordel to be explored in this new choreographic project.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

 Artist: Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis, MN)
Project Title: DIG (Dance)
Commissioners: Alverno Presents, ODC Theater, Legion Arts, CFA Wesleyan, Red Eye Theater
Description: DIG (working title) is a new dance created by Morgan Thorson that invents and displays movement artifacts.  Excavating personal history through layers of the body, DIG looks at physical patterning in the body and in dance composition as a way of accumulating and communicating both fact and fiction. With sound by Alan Sparhawk, DIG uses auctioneering-style verbal chants to extend patterns into the aural realm.
NPN Subsidy: $16,000 

Artist: Katie Ka Vang (Minneapolis, MN)
Project Title: Hmong Bollywood (Theater)
Commissioners: Pangea World Theater, Out North, ArtSpot Productions
Description: HMONG BOLLYWOOD will reflect the experiences of immigrants and “others” in the political and social landscape of North America and explore how and why Bollywood becomes a political choice for many young Hmong women.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000 

Artist: Nejla Yatkin (New York, NY)
Project Title: Oasis: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Arabs & the Middle East… (Dance)
Commissioners: Dance Place, Bates Dance Festival
Description: Oasis is a new multi-media dance piece choreographed by Nejla Y. Yatkin with music composed by Persian American composer Shamou. This new work is centered around a specific juxtaposition: that between the desert and the oasis. With this tension, the dance will be developed like a Persian Miniature dance and guided by human stories of the Middle East.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

FY11 Winter Creation Fund Awards

Artist: Pua Ali’i ‘Ilima (Honolulu, HI)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Asian Arts Initiative, La Mama, PA’I
E Hui Ana Nā Moku is new choreography of hula kahiko (ancient style Hawaiian dance) using traditional chants found in Hawaiian language newspapers, Bishop Museum Archives, and private collections to give them voice and movement, ensuring that the words of our ancestors live on through a new generation of chanters and dancers. The mele (chants) reflect the prophecy chant that those that are above will fall, those that are below will rise up, our islands(people) will unite and our walls will stand firm.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: Quinteto Latino
Lead Partner/Commissioners: MACLA, Pregones Theater, Quinteto Latino
Voces del Desierto will be a new composition created and performed by Quinteto Latino working with composer Guillermo Gallindo, premiering at MACLA in April 2012. The piece will incorporate visual elements and movement and speak to the immigrant experience.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: Lucky Plush Productions (Chicago, IL)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)  Chicago, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center
The Better Hal is an evening-length dance theater work, and first-time collaboration by choreographer Julia Rhoads and theater director Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, set on three dancers from Lucky Plush including Rhoads, and two performers from Buxbaum’s physical theater company 500 Clown. The work updates Gaslight – the classic melodrama about a husband manipulating his wife into believing that she is insane – for a tale about today’s unhinged partners and their alternative (and thrilling) story lines.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Kyle Abraham (New York, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Miami Dade College Department of Cultural Affairs, On the Boards, Dance Place, 651 Arts, Bates Dance Festival
Inspired by the duality of Pinocchio’s plight to be a “real boy,” Live! The Realest MC investigates gender roles in the black community and societal perspectives of the black man through hip hop and celebrity culture. Accompanying this overlying theme of realness is the juxtaposition of live performance versus all things prerecorded, articulated through Abraham’s original hip hop lyrics and his love of the mysteries a karaoke system can evoke. Live!
NPN Subsidy: $16,000

Artist: Meg Wolfe and Aaron Drake (Los Angeles, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: REDCAT, Fusebox Festival
trembler.SHIFTER is a full-evening work by Los Angeles artists Meg Wolfe (choreographer) and Aaron Drake (composer). Five dancers are propelled through sequences of high-velocity movement and unsustainable acts of balancing — with the joy, anger, angst, sweat and hell of bodies as its fulcrum. Alongside performers Gregory Barnett, Taisha Paggett, and other dancers, Wolfe delves into the far reaches of opposing forces to create a choreographic language from the exchange of extremes.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Eiko & Koma (New York, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Skirball Center, Lincoln Center Out of Doors
Water is a new, site specific work from Eiko & Koma, performed in architectural reflecting pools and employing a live score from Robert Mirabel. The work explores water as a ceremonial element in global rituals.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Dennis Kim (San Franscisco, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Youth Speaks, Asian Arts Initiative, Intersection for the Arts, Hip Hop Theater Festival
Tree City Legends is an evening-length musical theater work chronicling the life of a Korean-American family – focused on the lives of the Kane brothers: Junie, Sum, denizen, and Min. The Legends of the story are at once flesh and fiction, men and make-believe. Their story is a remembering, a reworking of myth. Their song is a dub, a version; the sound the dead make, mourning themselves.
NPN Subsidy: $14,000

FY11 Summer Creation Fund Awards

NPN received 14 Creation Fund proposals in July 2010 and funded 14 projects.

Artist: Zoe/Juniper (Seattle, WA)
Lead Partner/Commissioner: Bates Dance Festival, On the Boards, Dance Theater Workshop, Jacob’s Pillow, PICA
zoe|juniper’s (Z|J) new project, A Crack in Everything (ACIE), is a dance and visual experience that uses the Oresteia, a trilogy of Greek tragedies, as a lens to understand the emotional, physical and psychological spectrum of justice and retaliation. Conceptualized for both physical and virtual environments, ACIE began in 2009 and 2010 residencies and is slated for presentation between 2011 and 2012 at national and international performance venues.
NPN Subsidy: $16,000

Artist: Carpetbag Theatre (Knoxville, TN)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Carpetbag Theatre, Junebug Productions, Mason/Rhynes Productions
Carpetbag Theatre will develop a new work with primary playwright Linda Parris-Bailey entitled Speed Killed My Cousin. The play will be developed collaboratively by the ensemble company and will be a multi-generational, multi-discipline work, rooted in the story of an African American female combat soldier and her struggle with suicidal thoughts upon her return home. A third generation soldier, the central character considers death by vehicular suicide.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: Edgeworks Dance Theater (Washington, DC)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Dance Place, Legion Arts
Helanius J. Wilkins’ s Trigger is a cross-disciplinary work that will unfold as a choreographed play where ordinary people have extraordinary lives. Human stories of strength, honor, family and triumph will be revealed against a backdrop of some of our nation’s darkest moments involving black gangsters. Trigger will address issues of class and how economic conditions affect individual choice, exposing the double standards of the differential treatment received by minorities.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Paul Zaloom (Los Angeles, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Dance Place, Center for Puppetry Arts
Using the old school media of toy theater; “cantastoria,” a.k.a. picture performance; and ventriloquism, White Like Me: A Honky Dory Puppet Show will be a solo puppet and picture spectacle, which will explore the idea of whiteness, not only as a race but as a concept of purity, morality, innocence, and “civilization.” A comedy.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: L.A. Poverty Department (Los Angeles, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Highways Performance Space, Tuscon Pima Arts Council, VSA Arts of New Mexico — North Fourth Art Center, Queens Museum of Art
LAPD’s performance, History of Incarceration: State of Incarceration examines the personal and social costs of incarceration in the US. It is being developed in workshops with performers who have been there. The performance evokes the mental and physical challenges of incarceration and the resources needed to endure and recover from it.
NPN Subsidy: $14,000

Artist: Robert Farid Karimi (Minneapolis, MN)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Intermedia Arts, Asian Arts Initiative, Kaotic Good Productions
Diabetes of Democracy is a multidisciplinary, interactive theater performance and gallery exhibition that uses culturally-specific cuisine, stories, and rituals to provoke discussion on the epidemic of Type 2 Diabetes and shares strategies for combating the disease, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) names as one of the leading causes of death in communities of color.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: Adelina Anthony (Los Angeles, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: La Peña Cultural Center, ALLGO   Jotalogues is a solo show that features a pan-Latino, pan-sexual, and pan-generational “conversation” between zany comedic characters and audiences grappling with issues ranging from queer immigration, queer marriage, queer prison, queer spirituality, queer motherhood, queer education, and what it implies to lead a queer political life in our post-2012 century.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Chris Aiken and Angie Hauser (Collegeville, PA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Links Hall, University of Utah, Department of Modern Dance, Kenyon College
Chris Aiken and Angie Hauser are developing an evening-length dance performance, Utopia Parkway, inspired by the assemblage boxes (or “poetic theaters”) and films of surrealist Joseph Cornell. They seek to develop a new way to create improvised dance/theater/music performance that combines the depth of extensive preparation and research and the adaptability from creating modular components which can be re-contextualized for different theaters and audiences.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: Maile Meloy and Greg Bolin (Helena, MT)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Myrna Loy Center, Flynn Center for the Performing Arts
Adapted from Maile Meloy’s short story “Two-Step, Tango” from her book Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, tells the story of Alice, a talented interior designer who has just given up her comfortable life in L.A. to follow her husband, a charismatic doctor, to Montana.  Bolin will utilize a small ensemble, singing pianist, and background voices as both an orchestral and dramatic element to create Tango, an evening of contemporary opera.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Thaddeus Phillip (Philadephia, PA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Painted Bride, Manitou Art Theater
Theater director/designer/performer Thaddeus Phillips weaves together actual accounts of international border crossings between Israel/Jordan, USA/Mexico, Bosnia/Serbia, Colombia/Brazil, etc. Armed only with a satellite GPS system and a micro projector packed in a classic Samsonite suitcase, THE TRAVEL AGENCY is a solo visual epic about imaginary lines, deadly crossings, arbitrary passports, and curious customs.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Andrea Assaf (Tampa, FL)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Pangea World Theater, Esperanza Peace & Justice Center, El Centro Su Teatro
Outside the Circle, a new play by Andrea Assaf and Samuel Valdez, examines the nature of love, and what happens to love when we internalize society’s phobias.  A straight man with a disability and an able-bodied queer woman recount their adventures, and share their woes, of unrequited love, becoming entwined in each others stories. Their parallel and interweaving tales reveal the illusions of normalcy, and the liberation possible when choosing life … outside the circle.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: Chaunesti Webb Lyon (Durham, NC)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: St. Joseph’s Historic Foundation, Naropa University, MFA Theater Department
I Love My Hair When It’s Good… is a multi-discipline theater art project that explores the relationship African American women have with their hair and how that relationship has shaped their identity and sense of being in the world.  It will include interview text, original sound and music composition, video and installations, featuring an ensemble of women of African descent as performers.  It will include a community engagement component facilitating dialogue around diversity, race & class.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Teo Castellanos/D Projects (Miami, FL)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Tigertail Productions, 7 Stages
Fat Boy is an original dance/theater work written and directed by Teo Castellanos that coalesces ancient and current art forms to tell a timeless and timely story. Fat Boy explores its theme of abundance and waste versus scarcity and economy in a non-linear narrative. By deconstructing the narrative elements of American consumerism and wastefulness juxtaposed with world hunger and poverty, Fat Boy tells its compelling story.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Sean Dorsey, (San Francisco, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: The Theater Offensive, Links Hall, Queer Cultural Center
Notes from the Gender Underground is a full-length dance concert employing dance, theater and music to explore the role of the ‘undergound’ in the formation and evolution of trans-gender identity and community. Conceived of as a suite of three dances, Notes will be created by Sean Dorsey and performed by an ensemble of four LGBTQ dancers.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

FY10 Summer Creation Fund Awards

In July 2009 NPN received 11 Creation Fund proposals and funded all 11 projects.

Artist: ArtSpot Productions (New Orleans, LA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Ashé Cultural Center, 7 Stages, Pangea World Theater
Go Ye Therefore…. examines the Southern Baptist Church through textual and oral history, a verbal and physical deconstruction of scripture, and the autobiographies of two Southern Baptist preachers’ daughters, one black and one white.  The piece will include choreographic imagery, gestural scenes, sets depicting the irony of water as both purification and the washing away of culture, and a live piano score with two and three-part vocal harmony.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: Daniel Valdez (San Juan, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: El Centro Su Teatro, Multi-Cultural Education and Counseling Through the Arts
Composer Daniel Valdez will work with the Su Teatro company and Mariachi MECA to create a new musical composition, Songs for the Pregnant Earth. The composition will be versatile enough to be performed as either a choral or instrumental piece.
NPN Subsidy Award: $10,000

Artist: Doug Varone and Dancers (New York, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Bates Dance Festival, University of Akron, San Francisco Performances
Chapters From A Broken Novel, a new work for Varone’s eight dancers, features music by composer David Van Tieghem and lighting and set design by British scenic designer John Bausor. The choreographic material will be built from evocative phrases and descriptive language collected by Varone in an ongoing journal forming a continuing poem that depicts human nature at its most naked and vulnerable, expressive and poignant.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: Gesel Mason Performance Projects (Capitol Heights, MD)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Dance Umbrella, Joyce SoHo
Women, Sex, and Desire: Sometimes You Feel Like a Ho, Sometimes You Don’t is a multi-media investigation of how women navigate sex, desire, choice, and perception. Through dance, personal stories and video imagery, this work challenges cultural programming, examines belief systems, and reflects the struggle, humor, and pleasure sexual beings encounter. Women, Sex, and Desire… seeks to empower and inform sexual choices, whatever they may be.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Holcombe Waller (Portland, OR)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents, VSA/Out North
Holcombe Waller will write and direct, Surfacing, a 40 to 50 minute narrative musical composition, organized into two acts, with intermission, and to be presented with live performance and video material. Performance context will be flexible, allowing for presentation on a grand scale with large ensemble and projection or on a smaller scale with more modestly arranged parts for three or four musicians and visual elements suitable for a gallery context.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: John Jasperse Company (New York, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Museum of Contemporary Art, Walker Art Center, REDCAT (CalArts), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
Choreographer and performer John Jasperse’s Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies is a ensemble work that addresses belief systems, the relative nature of truth, and how we construct meaning in our lives. Jasperse will also create the visual design. Composer and electronica artist Hahn Rowe will create a sound score for electronics and strings, which will be performed live by Rowe and the International Contemporary Ensemble.
NPN Subsidy: $14,000

Artist: Lakin Valdez (Oakland, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: La Peña Cultural Center, El Teatro Campesino
Victor in Shadow is a dramatic play with music based on the life and art of Chilean activist and folk singer Victor Jara. Set in the year 1973, the play chronicles the hostile coup d’etat that led to the violent installation of dictator Augusto Pinochet and the symbolic and tragic death of Victor Jara.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Radiohole (Brooklyn, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Walker Art Center, Andy Warhol Museum
Whatever, Heaven Allows is a star-spangled American meta-melodrama inspired by film director Douglas Sirk’s 1950s potboilers and Milton’s epic Paradise Lost by avant-garde New York theater troupe Radiohole.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: Rosanna Gamson/World Wide, Inc. (Los Angeles, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: REDCAT (CalArts), Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents
Tov is an evening-length work choreographed by Rosanna Gamson. Inspired by Gamson’s Polish Jewish ancestors, who were horse traders from Szczezin, and the story of the tarpan horse, a species bred back from the brink of extinction in 1930s Poland. Tov is informed by Jerzy Grotowski’s seminal ensemble theater techniques and the vibrant physical theater now being created in Poland, and will be developed in both the United States and Poland with artists from both counties.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: The Working Group (St. Johnsville, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Legion Arts, Grand Valley State University
RUST is a new site-specific theatre piece incorporating real interviews with laid off and disenfranchised employees abandoned by the American Dream.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Yasuko Yakoshi (New York, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: DiverseWorks, Dance Theater Workshop
Tyler Tyler is a full-evening, cross-cultural dance created by choreographer Yasuko Yokoshi and produced by MAPP International Productions. Yokoshi’s primary collaborator, Masumi Seyama VI, is a revered teacher of Kabuki Su-Odori and head of the Seyama Dance Family in Tokyo. Tyler Tyler is performed by two postmodern dancers from New York City, three traditional performers from Tokyo, and composer/musician Steven Reker.
NPN Subsidy: $13,000

FY10 Winter Creation Fund Awards

Artist: Dance Theatre X  (Philadelphia, PA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas, Painted Bride Art Center
World Headquarters is inspired by a fictional religion created by the late African-American author Octavia Butler. World Headquarters will be a multimedia dance-theatre work set in the near future.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Kristina Wong (Los Angeles, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Diverse Works, OCD Theater
Cat Lady is an interdisciplinary performance blending the parallel worlds of two pathetically lonely personae living at the margins of gender and society—musty cat ladies and fast-talking pick-up artists. Cat Lady first seems to be about Wong’s failed attempts to stop her cat Oliver from spraying, but soon opens into larger examinations of humans as awkward actors within the food chain, painting the growing disconnect between human beings and their animal instincts.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

 

Artist: Allison Warden (Anchorage, AK)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: FITLA (International Latino Theatre Festival of Los Angeles), OutNorth, Perseverance
Ode to the Polar Bear is a one-woman show created and performed by Inupiaq Eskimo performance artist Allison Warden. The show explores themes of global warming and the fate of Alaska’s polar bear through an Inupiat perspective. Warden takes on different characters to explore environmental issues, including an elder, hunter, herself, and a polar bear. The show also touches on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which surrounds Warden’s home village of Kaktovik, Alaska.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: inkBoat (San Francisco, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Highways Performance Space & Gallery, SF International Arts Festival (SFIAF)
The Crazy Cloud Collection is an evening length collaborative work inspired by the life of 15th Century Buddhist monk Ikkyu Sojun. The piece will be choreographed by Japanese butoh master Ko Murobushi and Shinichi Iova-Koga, artistic director of inkBoat. Crazy Cloud will be performed and toured by Ko, Shinichi and the members of inkBoat.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Danya Hanson  (Seattle, WA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: On The Boards, Under the Radar Festival
Gloria’s Cause is a dance-driven rock musical by 33 Fainting Spells co-founder Dayna Hanson, bringing together The Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s legendary ride and more obscure moments of the Revolutionary War. Gloria’s Cause uses dance, theater, music and testimonials to link ironies of the American Revolution to modern day hopes and failures.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Every House Has A Door  (Chicago, IL)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Performance Space 122, Fusebox Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL)
Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never proposes an encounter between Croatia and the US, through responses to an unlikely “equidistant” third entity, Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. The performance extracts texts from an essay by Stanley Cavell, and re-enacts, by way of the performers copying the film in real time off of computer screens, a scene captured in Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie about the commune overseen by Viennese Aktionist Otto Muehl.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

Artist: Q. Ragsdale  (Garland, TX)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: South Dallas Cultural Center, DiverseWorks
the bull jean stories: a multi-media adaptation adapts the stories that comprise Sharon Bridgforth’s book, “the bull-jeans stories” as a multi-media performance work that includes interviews with multi-generational bull-jeans. It incorporates both a live performance
and an online televised performance, giving it a life beyond its two performance venues.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Jess Curtis/Gravity Dance  (San Francisco, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Tigertail Productions, Inc, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies is a multi-component performance project examining the role(s) of imagined societal ideals as a kind of “fictional body” that disables individuals in terms of our ability to see others – and to be seen – as beautiful, empowered, and autonomous. The work integrates contemporary dance, live music, acrobatics, post-dramatic text actions, narrative, and movement-based performance.
NPN Subsidy: $10,000

Artist: Sarah Michelson/Richard Maxwell  (New York, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Walker Art Center, On the Boards, ODC Theater
Narrative Ballet on the subject of Martyrdom is a collaboration between choreographer Sarah Michelson, and playwright/theater director Richard Maxwell. Composer Pete Drungle will create an original score. Performers will include NYC based dancers Parker Lutz, Rebecca Werner, Nicole Manorino; actors from New York City Players Jim Fletcher and Brian Mendes; and Non Griffiths and James Tyson from Cardiff, Wales.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000

FY09 Summer Creation Fund Awards

NPN is happy to announce that 11 exciting projects have been awarded for the Summer 2008 (FY09) Creation Fund cycle.

Artist: Cloud Eye Control (Los Angeles, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: REDCAT (CalArts, Los Angeles), Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts (Portland, OR)
Title: Polar Ice
Description: “Polar Ice” will be a blend of projected animation, live theater and music that combine to tell the tale of a woman who inexplicably emerges from a block of glacial ice. Featuring four separate interactive video projections of digital animation layered onto two-dimensional surfaces, three-dimensional sculptures, the floor and the bodies of the performers themselves, the result will be a theatrical hybrid of screen and stage that creates an immersive multimedia world.
Award: $10,000

Artist: Queer Exchange (Valley Village, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Highways Performance Space (Santa Monica, CA), Sushi Performance and Visual Art (San Diego, CA)
Title: Fringes-Margins-Borders
Description: Queer Exchange, a performance collective of six LGBT artists who deliberately question commonly held beliefs about feminism, biology, multiculturalism, race, gender, age, sexual identity and explore separatists philosophies through a spectrum of performance and literary practices, will create and present Fringes-Margins-Borders, a multidisciplinary performance of six original, 15-minute, autobiographical works that will be shaped into a compelling, linearly cohesive production.
Award: $10,000

Artist: Ruby Nelda Perez (San Antonio, TX)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Jump-Start Performance Co. (San Antonio), Teatro de la Esperanza (San Francisco, CA)
Title: Chavela & Her Three Husbands
Description: The creation of a new one-woman play titled Chavela & Her Three Husbands, A Woman’s Journey through the Chicano Movement
Award: $10,000

Artist: Mondo Bizarro (New Orleans, LA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Junebug Productions, Inc. (New Orleans), Appalshop (Whitesburg, KY), Turner World Around Productions (Raymond, MS)
Title: Race Peace
Description: Race Peace is a cross-generational performance work about the debilitating fog of racism. The work provides an opportunity for people to celebrate and explore common bonds, debate their differences, and lay the civic foundation to pursue solutions to their problems. This project aims to create safe spaces where communities can honestly and aggressively explore the realities and myths of racism in America.
Award: $12,000

Artist: Ariel Luckey (Oakland, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: La Peña Cultural Center (Berkeley, CA), Matrix Center/While Privilege Conference (Colorado Springs, CO)
Title: Free Land
Description: Free Land is a dynamic hip hop theater solo show written and performed by Ariel Luckey, directed by Margo Hall and scored by Ryan Luckey.  The show follows a young white man’s search for his roots as it takes him from the streets of Oakland to the prairies of Wyoming on an unforgettable journey into the heart of American history.  Free Land challenges us to take an unflinching look at the truth buried in the land beneath our feet.
Awards: $10,000

Artist: So Percussion (Brooklyn, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents (Helena, MT), Flynn Center for the Performing Arts (Burlington, VT), DiverseWorks (Houston, TX), Newman Center for the Performing Arts (Denver, CO), The cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, OH)
Title: Imaginary City
Description: Imaginary City will be an evening length work comprised of the music of So Percussion and film from video artist Jenise Treuting.  The work will explore the various ways that depictions of cities past and present often collide with the the myriad faces that any one city can contain.  Utilization of sounds and images from the particular cities involved in the commission will be an integral part of this process.
Award: $16,000

Artist: Universes (Bronx, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: New WORLD Theater/University of Massachusetts (Amherst, MA), Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents (Helena, MT)
Title: Ameriville
Description: Ameriville is a cross-disciplinary, bi-lingual, multimedia exploration of what it means to be an American in the post-9/11 world – a world of terror-level color codes, government misinformation policy and media-fed xenophobia. Ameriville is created and performed by Universes, one of the nation’s foremost ensembles working in the field of New Aesthetics and directed by the celebrated director and playwright Chay Yew.
Award: $10,000

Artist: tEEth (Portland, OR)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: On the Boards (Seattle, WA), Refraction Arts|FUSE Box Festival
Title: Grub
Description: Grub, a full evening of contemporary dance theatre, explores the complexities, oddities, and layers of group dynamics, human relationships, and the relationship to self.
Award: $10,000

Artist: Cynthia Oliver (Urbana, IL)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Painted Bride Art Center (Philadelphia, PA), Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas (Seattle, WA), Dance Place (Washington, DC), Bates Dance Festival (Lewiston, ME), Danspace Project, Inc. (New York,NY)
Title: Rigidigidim de Bamba de:  Ruptured Calypso”
Description: Rigidigidim De Bamba De: Ruptured Calypso is an evening-length multidisciplinary dance theatre project on the nature of calypso dancing as an agent of Afro-Anglo Caribbean identity across geographical, national and aesthetic borders. A meditation on “rupture” as a defining feature of calypso performance, Rigidigidim places performers from the Caribbean diaspora in positions between real and imagined borders that force them to navigate their Caribbeanness via calypso.
Award: $16,000

Artist: A Street Theater Named Desire (Cambridge, MA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: The Theater Offensive (Cambridge, MA), Flynn Center for the Performing Arts (Burlington, VT), Camposition-Hybrid/Theater/Works (Miami, FL)
Title: X-uality
Description: X-uality is a touring performance event to mark the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots with a celebration of diverse queer sexualities. X-uality will be created under the leadership of A Street Theater Named Desire with input from numerous queer artists from around the country. Wherever it tours, local performances may be integrated into the piece.
Award: $12,000

Artist: May Lee-Yang (St. Paul, MN)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Out North (Anchorage, AK), Kaotic Good Productions (Minneapolis, MN)
Title: Sia(b)
Description: In this two-woman show, May Lee-Yang tells her personal story of feeling silenced as a Hmong woman living in the U.S., and how she seeks a balance between Hmong culture and American pop culture. Yang will develop the piece by working with the Hmong communities in Minnesota and Alaska. Robert Karimi is helping to develop the script and will direct the production, which will star May Lee Yang and actress Katie Vang as the two sides of Yang’s personality.
Award: $10,000

FY09 Winter Creation Fund Awards

Artist: Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak (Chicago, IL)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Alverno Presents, Denison University Dance Department
Stamina of Curiosity is Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak’s three-year choreographic project emphasizing ensemble movement research and multiple performance iterations that are an intrinsic part of the process. Through Stamina Shanahan explores movement that stems from an integrated self that is free from compulsive muscular restriction while advancing her study of the observer/observed relationship as a catalyst for composition and the meaningful exchange between artist and audience.
NPN Subsidy Award: $10,000

Artist: Miguel Gutierrez (Brooklyn, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Dance Theater Workshop, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Flynn Center for the Performing Arts
Last Meadow mines movements and texts from James Dean’s three films to create a non-narrative patchwork which describes an America where the jig is up and the dream has died. Gutierrez will collaborate with performers Michelle Boule and Tarek Halab, musical composer/performance artist Neal Medlyn, lighting designer Lenore Doxsee, and visual artist/dramaturge Paul Chan.
NPN Subsidy Award: $12,000

Artist: Denise Uyehara (Tucson, AZ)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Highways Performance Space, Dinnerware Artspace
Archipelago:  Islands of Land, Water and Legend is a new multi-disciplinary work directed and performed by Denise Uyehara, in collaboration with video artist/performer Adam Cooper-Teran. It retells legends, oral histories of the Okinawa and the Huichol Indians, re-imagined in contemporary times. Archipelago comments on occupation and displacement of indigenous people, and sheds light on the complex identities of these two award-winning, Tucson-based artists.
NPN Subsidy Award: $10,000

Artist: Jose Torres Tama (New Orleans, LA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: MECA, GALA Hispanic Theatre, Ashe Cultural Arts Center
Aliens, Immigrants & Other Evildoers is a bilingual multimedia solo piece by Jose Torres Tama, which explores the current criminalization of immigrants and the rise in hate crimes against Latinos in the US. Torres Tama chronicles his Ecuadorian family’s search for the mythic “American Dream,” and with the sci-fi look of the movie The Matrix, he transforms into numerous Latino “aliens” who challenge the flaws of a country built by immigrants, which vilifies the same people it exploits.
NPN Subsidy Award: $12,000

Artist: Bridgman/Packer Dance (Valley Cottage, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: VS Arts of Alaska/Out North, Dance Umbrella
Bridgman/Packer’s new work will further their integration of live performance and video technology by augmenting photo realistic video with a rich palette of commissioned animation. In a departure from their previous work, they will draw from archetypal and mythic characters to reveal a range of personae. With a contemporary technological spin, mythic archetypes will collide and compete, moving the work into a fantastical and raucous exploration of identity and relationship.
NPN Subsidy Award: $10,000

Artists: Bill Frisell, Rahim AlHaj, Eyvind Kange (Berkeley, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Outpost Productions, Walker Art Center
Musical worlds meld to form a new concept, as three independent voices come together for the creation of Baghdad/Seattle Suite. The improvisation and composition of jazz and Americana by renowned guitarist Bill Frisell meets the world of Iraqi maqams and originals via Iraqi oud virtouso Rahim AlHaj. The two worlds are bridged by long-time Frisell associate – violist, tubist and erhu player, Eyvind Kang – whose interests span, new music, folk, rock and middle eastern music.
NPN Subsidy Award: $10,000

Artist: Maria Hassabi (New York, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Crossing the Line Festival, FIAF
Solo Show is a work consisting of two evening-long solos featuring interrelated performance and installation. Hassabi applies similar design elements to both solos:  transforming space and image. Each solo is alternatively performed by Hassabi and her longtime collaborator Hristoula Harakas. The first solo is performed on a Persian carpet. The second solo is performed on a large chalk drawing replica of the carpet that is destroyed by the dancer’s movement.
NPN Subsidy Award: $10,000

Artist: Axis Dance Company/David Dorfman (Oakland, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: Tigertail Productions, Dance Place, Flynn Center for the Performing Arts
David Dorfman will create a new work for AXIS Dance company.  This first-time collaboration will also have a community involvement aspect to be incorporated into education programs when the work is on tour. An original score will be composed by Albert Mathias and Michael Wall and lighting design by Heater Basarab.
NPN Subsidy: $12,000




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