Announcing the 2023 Documentation and Storytelling Fund Awards
June 27, 2023 • 14 minute read
This year, the National Performance Network (NPN) is awarding over $71,000 to 24 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.
“Documentation is often overlooked and unsupported yet is a necessary component of sustaining the career of an artist,” said Stanlyn Brevé, Director of National Programs. “Access to documentation can be seen as an equity issue. By supporting documentation and preservation of artistic works, this fund ensures that the stories, voices, and experiences of artists are captured and shared for generations to come. It not only helps to amplify the impact of these artists but also contributes to the cultural legacy of our society.”
Celebrating the richness of shared human experience, these works serve as powerful vessels that bridge gaps and challenge preconceptions. From a multi-media piece that reveals how the vibrant aesthetics of queer nightlife culture addresses humanity’s cognitive bias to a multi-disciplinary, interactive performance centered on Black feminism and healing, this year’s fund recipients produce thought-provoking and immersive pieces that reflect the richness of the global community.
2023’s selected projects will develop in cities across the country, as well as internationally, with artists telling their stories in Hawai’i, Arizona, the Dominican Republic, and NPN’s local New Orleans community.
The NPN Documentation & Storytelling Fund is made possible by generous support from the Doris Duke Foundation.
2023 Documentation and Storytelling Fund Recipients
Allison Akootchook Warden/aulayaiqsimarugut
All the Dimensions, All at Once is a series of video artistic statements for Allison Akootchook Warden’s website. Warden is closely connected to her home community of Kaktovik, Alaska, and her Ancestors of the land. She plans to create videos to talk about her connection to her people, her land, and her practice. The hope is that the video statements will be compelling enough to submit to film festivals.
Andrew Saito
Harlem Canary / Tokyo Crow is a comedic theatrical exploration of a little-known WWII-era Japanese propaganda program, “Negro Propaganda Operations,” in which captured African American Prisoners of War (POWs) recorded radio plays that contrasted the supposed joys the POWs experienced living in Japan with the horrors of racism in the US. These recordings were intended for broadcast in Black communities in the US, to foment civil unrest within Japan’s enemy’s borders. The work is geared towards a mixed house of Black and AAPI (not exclusively Japanese) audiences, with the hope that such gatherings can spark conversations and new community building. Funds will support the filming of developmental workshops, community dialogues, and public staged readings of HARLEM CANARY / TOKYO CROW.
Ashwini Ramaswamy
Ashwini Ramaswamy + Kevork Mourad: Invisible Cities is a large-scale adaptation of Italo Calvino’s metaphysical novel. Performed by 13 dancers and featuring hand-created projections drawn and manipulated in real-time, Invisible Cities premiered to widespread acclaim in January 2023. The Invisible Cities Documentation Project aims to take footage from the two performances, filmed with multiple cameras, to create dynamic, short content to share with potential presenters, as work samples, on social media, and other online platforms. This will help lead artist Ashwini find new opportunities to present this work nationally and internationally.
Bakara Johnson
A Portrait of Henrietta Lacks was created during an artist-in-residency program to honor and explore the compelling story of Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells—the first immortalized human cell line. Partnering with the Coleman Center for the Arts to create this installation provided an opportunity for talks about informed consent, medical ethics, and biopolitics. This project will employ film, still photography and interviews to capture the artist’s first residency, an artist-led community workshop, an artist talk with the community and the Portrait of Henrietta Lacks exhibit. Further, the funds will support the artist in upgrading their website and developing a marketing package. Additionally, funding for the planning and execution of Documenting A Portrait of Henrietta Lacks will allow artist to use this documentation to garner support, inform potential constituents/partners and preserve a record of the project for the future.
Carla Forte
Silenced Voices is based on and inspired by stories of Latin immigrant women. The piece explores the human condition and translates their stories into gestures, emotions, and movements, creating a new language to express these women’s thoughts, desires, emotions, and hopes. Documentation of these community voices will expand the research and body work, to share inspiration, ideas, and goals for future subventions and collaborations.
chitra.MOVES
Funds will be used to create promotional material, digital content, and archival documentation for TEMPLE to attract other collaborators and partners and to be integrated into future work. In TEMPLE, Chitra Subramanian uses the language of Indian Classical Dance and Hip-Hop culture to explore the experiences and stories of her South Asian immigrant journey through the lens of the major institutions that were powerful anchors in her life. TEMPLE shines the spotlight on the fraying of public life and the growing reality that people participate in institutions less and less. From her childhood Hindu Temple in Pittsburgh to the Temple(s) of the DC Club, TEMPLE lifts up the limitless ways in which Hip-Hop and dance continue to inspire and transform.
Dan Froot & Company
The NPN Storytelling & Documentation Fund makes it possible for Arms Around Americato be simultaneously released as an audio podcast and a vlog (video podcast) in Fall 2023 and Winter 2024. The podcast will be a companion to the live iteration of Arms Around America (Fall 2024), a performance and community forum in which we stage six short plays based on oral histories of families around the country whose lives have been shaped by guns.
DANCE IQUAIL!
The Making of Public Enemy will be a heartwarming documentary by Carmella Vassor Johnson in collaboration with Iquail Shaheed that chronicles Iquail’s harrowing journey through his family’s lore about incarceration, sex, betrayal, and death toward self-discovery of love during the creation of his dance work also titled Public Enemy.
Deneane Richburg
Deneane Richburg’s work blends dance, theater, and figure skating to affirm honest and nuanced narratives rooted in Blackness. Representation of Black skating artists in the world of skating is rare and essential. This project will document Richburg’s ensemble process, including how her approach cultivates collectiveness and shared aesthetics. The project will not only document this unique approach but will serve as a tool to reflect and grow her creative process.
Donia Jarrar
Funds will be used to adapt music-based performance, BUTHCER, into a professionally recorded album, expanding audiences for the work. Outside of infamous Egyptian serial killers Raya and Sakina and the mythological Aicha Qandicha, North African women as figures of darkness have rarely been explored, much less so in music. BUTCHER is a loosely autobiographical concept album based on Jarrar’s own experiences with domestic and intimate partner violence and sexual assault, in which she takes on the persona of a vigilante and antihero doling out punishments through the power wielded to her via a sonic cleaver.
Ivette Román-Roberto
HOUricán captures and showcases the profound and transformative journey of RÉQUIEM, a performance that united Puerto Ricans from the Island and Houston, TX. During their weekly gatherings, the participants found solace in expressing their collective experiences of loss caused by climate disasters, the COVID-19 pandemic, hate crimes, and migration through experimental voice techniques. These documented authentic moments will be launched in six YouTube videos as a platform to inspire meaningful interactions with the viewers, while serving as a catalyst for promoting RÉQUIEM to other communities who seek to address their pressing issues creatively, and to obtain funding to further expansion.
Jasmine Hearn
Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr is a migrating performance and archive that preserves the living memories of eight Black matriarchs of the North and South sides of Houston, TX. Their shared stories will be the source for original sound scores, choreographies, and garments that will be experienced as a site-specific performance, album, online archive, anthological catalog, and a mercurial system of somatic, embodied sound, and dance practices. Memory Fleet will articulate the numerous connections between people and places in Houston, and then travel across the country. Funds will be used to create an online archive and catalog of artists, archivists, and care workers core to the project.
Lionel Popkin
Reorient the Orient is a durational performance unpacking the history of inter-culturalism through Popkin’s 30-year archive of dance-making, placed in the historical context of presentations of the South Asian diaspora within the United States. Part performance event, part durational installation, and part social agitation on the history and assumptions that have attached themselves to performances of South Asian identity. The project is a personal response to the dubious history of inter-culturalism, expanding the conversation on how South Asian artists inhabit contemporary art and performance, shifting the context away from religious and spiritual tropes and toward an investigation of diasporic existence. Funds will be used to document the 8-hour durational work, create dynamic web content, and a printed primer to accompany the work.
Micaela Tobin
This outdoor, site-specific opera follows the diasporic pilgrimage of the displaced pre-colonial Philippine God of Sun and War, APOLAKI, as they travel through time and space searching for a new home in the San Gabriel Mountains overlooking the city of Los Angeles. Their pilgrimage begs the question–on whose land are we walking upon? Funds will be used for drone documentation of a core element of the work – the labyrinth at Zorthian Ranch. Documentation will serve as both a valuable relic for the community of Zorthian Ranch and help attract more opportunities to perform this piece in other locations.
Moira (Miri) Villiard
Waiting for Beds is a traveling experimental duo-exhibit exploring the “wait” often associated with crisis care. It features an embedded, rotating community exhibit of objects and artwork from time spent in incarceration, institutionalization, or during the “wait” for care generally. Funds will be used to document these items, as well as to develop a website landing page to hear recordings of exhibit programming and panels, and to document artwork created by lead artists Moira Villiard and Carla Hamilton.
NAKA Dance Theater
This project will result in a 15-minute video documentary telling the story of Circulos de Aprendizaje, a collaboration between NAKA Dance Theater and grassroots Latina-immigrant advocacy organization, Mujeres Unidas y Activas’. Documentation will tell the story of how this ongoing community collaboration resulted in publishing a Fotonovela and producing public performances. Media will be used to communicate the story of project, enhance the capacity to fundraise, connect to other organizations and communities, garner publicity for upcoming events and much more.
Nia O. Witherspoon
Priestess of Twerk: A Black Femme Temple is a multi-disciplinary work of live and interactive performance that offers participants embodied experiences of Black feminist spirituality, inspired by African traditional religions, Black feminist literature, Southern folkways, healing justice movements, and the lived experiences of Black women + femmes. This work erects a functional temple that re-imagines our ancestral spaces for healing, and thus re-claims “the sacred” from white supremacy + toxic masculinity, supporting the wholistic health of Black femmes in a society that denigrates our bodies, minds, and spirits. Project funds will be used to document the process of creation, diving deep into the rehearsal room, as well as following the journey of the collaborators, the work, and its impact on and with the artists, collaborators, and community.
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UnFiNiShEd aNiMaL is a party and multimedia performance that uses the vibrant aesthetics of queer nightlife culture to reveal how cognitive bias connects us all. This piece tells the story of humanity coming to grips with our collective inheritance, a ramshackle meshwork of cognitive processes evolved to survive, not for self-awareness. The creative team will journey to the Dominican Republic for Performance Awareness-building workshops and a video shoot in nature. This video will be used in projection during the live performance, and this Documentation and Storytelling Fund would support that footage being transformed into a VR experience.
PearlDamour
Ocean Filibuster is a performance that explores the intimate, critical relationship between humans and the ocean. Using large-scale projections, music, a locally cast “ocean ensemble” and augmented reality, Ocean Filibuster draws from myth, stand-up, and science to plunge audiences into the most heated debate of our time. Ocean Filibuster includes an interactive intermission that lets audience members explore ocean health and human-ocean interconnection in playful and provocative ways. Some of the intermission activities tour with our show; others are designed specifically with local partners to tackle hyper-local issues. It is difficult to convey the texture and wonder of these “stations” on the website and tell the story of the deep collaborations that created them. PearlDamour will work with a web designer to bring the story of the interactive intermission to life on our website — as a resource for presenters, artists, art-science educators and more.
The Peek-a-Bows
Adventures with The Peek-a-Bows is a series of place-based educational videos designed for family viewing to teach and inspire young children about Hawaiʻi businesses, programs, and organizations. These videos will explore fine art and traditional Hawaiian practices that feature local specialists and Hawaiian cultural practitioners.
Rashaud Michel; 7NMS | Marjani Forté-Saunders + Everett Saunders
A 4-year archival, research, & multi-genre storytelling project on the life journey of a Lyricist, Prophet: The Order of Lyricism, illuminates the distinctive practices, systems, philosophies, and political ideologies that have shaped Hip Hop’s Emcee/Lyricists. The Lyricist is an Order of craft, of prose, oration, and exposé (to name a few). Through the coming-of-age story of Everett as ‘Mental’ the Emcee, audiences are invited to enter a world of courage, self-determination, and devotion. Using text, sound, film, and performance, Prophet is our critical and embodied offering to the scholarly, civic, and ancient bodies of radical Black expression.
Shamel Pitts | TRIBE
TOUCH OF RED: RECOLLECTION (TORR) is an ethereal dance documentary following acclaimed dancer/choreographer Shamel Pitts as he embarks on a journey of discovery through multiple art residencies with members of his Brooklyn-based collective TRIBE. TORR weaves together the threads of memory and experience leading up to a live premiere. Cinematographer Taylor Antisdel captures the creation process of Touch of RED, which is set in a stylized ring, designed by McArthur Fellow Mimi Lien. The duet examines the way Black men are perceived and perceive themselves and how masculinity and vulnerability can be reconsidered in a compassionate, and healing way.
slowdanger
SUPERCELL is an evening-length multidisciplinary quintet, responding to climate change, media sensationalism, desensitization, and environmental collapse. Funds will be used to document the premiere of SUPERCELL to share with possible presenting and community partners who we are in conversation with, while simultaneously cultivating new relationships for the work’s tour. Documentation will also be used to create an audio companion that will serve as an assistive device and available to audiences to stream after the work has premiered.
Yvonne Montoya/Safos Dance Theatre
The Documentation & Storytelling Fund will support the video and written documentation of the full premiere of Stories from Home by Yvonne Montoya taking place at GALA Hispanic Theater in Washington, DC, October 28-29, 2023. Stories from Home is a series of dances embodying oral traditions of Latinx communities in the American Southwest exploring how geographies, languages, and histories among Latinx and border communities have shared histories and experiences.
