Announcing the 2024 Creation Fund Awards
August 7, 2024 • 9 minute read
CONTRA-TIEMPO (L to R) Jose Jose Arrieta, Maria Garcia, Ruby Morales, Kati Hernandez, Jannet Galdamez, Jasmine Stanley, Alek Lopez, Edgar Aguirre. Photo by Tyrone Domingo. Costume by David Reynoso. Kati’s costume by Halei Parker. Crown by Maria Garcia. ¡azúcar! premier at the Ford Theaters (August 2023).
The National Performance Network (NPN) is awarding an initial $242,000 and leveraging an additional $1.2 million to support the creation of 13 new artistic works. The 2024 Creation Fund awardees include a variety of artists spread across nine cities featuring theatrical performances, dance, and music.
These projects represent innovative and transformative arts experiences that explore and challenge aspects of identity, history, culture, and social justice. They blend multiple disciplines like music, dance, theater, puppetry, and spoken word, breaking conventional boundaries. The artists draw inspiration from historical and cultural contexts, often using site-specific locations for immersive experiences.
The works range from a theatrical visualization of trans and non-binary visibility using reflected beams of light, to an exploration of adoption, foster families, and chosen families through the ancestral practices of Afro-Latine social dance, music, and imagery.
The Creation Fund comprises the first phase of a comprehensive three-part program that champions new artistic endeavors, promotes racial and cultural justice, and facilitates vibrant live interactions between artists and communities. This fund specifically targets early-stage projects, which emphasize establishing strong connections among artists, presenters, and communities as they embark on their creative journeys. Each project will also receive additional support through the National Performance Networks’ Development Fund.
Learn more about the Creation & Development Fund here.
The Creation and Development Fund is made possible with support from the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), and co-commissioners.
2024 Creation Fund Recipients
Allie Hankins
Co-commissioners:
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR)
Red Eye Collaboration (Minneapolis, MN)
Velocity Dance Center (Seattle, WA)
By My Own Hand, Part 5: INVISIBLE TOUCH is the final installment of Allie Hankins’ five-part performance series which queers notions of autobiography and self-reflection, threading together ideas of manipulation, suicide, sleight of hand, and self-reliance. INVISIBLE TOUCH is a quintet featuring collaborators from Portland, Brooklyn, and Boston who populate the space with light, shadow, haunted objects, dancing, and songs. Through the slippery processes of deconstruction, distillation, resurrection, and re-membering, INVISIBLE TOUCH reveals an aftermath of contending methods of makers and shared histories of friends and colleagues, and confronts notions of finality, authorship, and perception of self.
Amanda Ekery
Co-commissioners:
Arab American National Museum (Dearborn, MI)
Asia Society Texas (Houston, TX)
Dance Elixir (Oakland, CA)
Árabe is about Syrian and Mexican shared culture and history, covering everything from food, gambling, and evil eyes, to immigration law, biracial identity, and the fraught relationship between immigrant entrepreneurship and workers’ rights. Árabe features 12 original songs performed as a band (voice, mandolin, guitar, piano, bass, percussion) and accompanying essays with the research, history, and stories behind each song. The project will be presented as the Árabe Mahrajan (Mahrajans were part of Syrian homeland culture, similar to block parties used for community formation) with performances + readings of Árabe, community-sourced contributions, food trucks, and cultural activities where this history lives.
Cassils
Co-commissioners:
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles, CA)
ICA San Diego (San Diego, CA)
For Cassils’s 2027 solo exhibition at LACE and activation at ICA San Diego, the artist will create a new live performance and installation titled Refraction: The Slowing of Light. Refraction uses glass to reflect and bend light beams from Cassils to a cast of intergenerational trans and non-binary performers. Each new reflection of light illuminates another performer, while diminishing the power of the beam. Together the space becomes a fractured disco ball. Playing with voyeurism, the frame, this action speaks to the pressure of visibility and the ability to disperse the burden through the slow sharing of the light.
CONTRA-TIEMPO
Co-commissioners:
ArtPower at UC San Diego (La Jolla, CA)
University of Tampa (Tampa, FL)
Shenandoah University (Winchester, VA)
Roots of Loving Us is a collaborative, evening-length choreographic work by CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater, cultivated by Ana Maria Alvarez and holly johnston. Utilizing somatic technologies for healing and ancestral practices of Afro-Latine social dance, music, and imagery, it embodies stories of adoption, foster families, chosen families, queer parents, and single parents. This project includes residencies, community engagements, and partnerships with organizations like Community Coalition, Cornerstone Theater, and Echoes of Hope. Through workshops, storytelling circles, and performances it emphasizes that family is created through love, not DNA, and aims to transform performance spaces with cross-sensory experiences and innovative production elements.
David Roussève / REALITY
Co-commissioners:
Kelly Strayhorn Theater (Pittsburgh, PA)
National Center for Choreography-Akron (Akron, OH)
UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (Los Angeles, CA)
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (North Adams, MA)
Celebrated dance-theater artist David Roussève creates his first full-length solo performance in more than 20 years. Daddy AF is an intimate meditation on life’s purpose, created and performed by a queer African American acutely aware of the finite time he has left on the planet. Like strands of DNA, it connects elements encoded in his body, including 600 years of genealogy, a roller coaster journey with HIV, and the shattering loss of a husband—while revisiting movement from 35 years of dance-making to explore the meaning of virtuosity for a 63-year old body.
Goat in the Road Productions
Goat in the Road Productions will premiere Carlota, a new musical built in collaboration with ensemble member Denise Frazier. Carlota will examine the life and descendants of Carlota Ruíz de González, a fictionalized version of a 19th-century Afro-Cuban revolutionary. Jumping back and forth in time, the story will revolve around González’s time as an enslaved woman in colonial and Reconstruction-era New Orleans, her work in the Cuban War for Independence, and the connection with her great-great-grandaughter Carlota James, living in present-day New Orleans.
Kyle Marshall Choreography
Co-commissioners:
Bates Dance Festival (Lewiston, ME)
Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, NY)
Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival Inc (Becket, MA)
Kyle Marshall Choreography (KMC) is in-process on a trilogy of dances embodying the legacy of Black, Queer composer Julius Eastman (1940–1990). This is a radically queer, 70-minute embodiment of Julius Eastman’s jubilant minimalist composition, Femenine (1974). One of Eastman’s most joyful works, Femenine begins with a gentle call of bells and vibraphone as six Black and Brown performers softly emerge. Gestures of touch build into flowing phrases of rhythmic joy. With Femenine, we push boundaries of Black artistry, queer expression, and cultivate conversations with audiences and communities affirming Black and Queer’s people history and influence on this country.
Pioneer Winter
Co-commissioners:
Miami Light Project (Miami Shores, FL)
Carolina Theatre of Durham Inc (Durham, NC)
DJ Apollo is a dance-theater work exploring intergenerational queer dynamics, memory, HIV/AIDS, and legacy by the Pioneer Winter Collective. The work in development comes from a deep desire to explore the complex dynamics of intergenerational community, mentorship, and the ever-evolving landscape of the queer experience. A biomythography grounded in devised dance-theater, it delves into the intersection of cultural memory, myth, and storytelling.
Roderick George | kNoname Artist
Co-commissioners:
New York Live Arts (New York, NY)
National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts Inc (Miami, FL)
Guild Hall of East Hampton (East Hampton, NY)
2023 NYFA Mertz Gilmore Foundation Dancer Award and 2021-22 YoungArts Fellow Awardee and Roderick George | kNoname Artist presents Venom, a new work inspired by the impact of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic and present events on the erasure of the LGBTQIA+ community. Venom exposes how the queer community faces silencing, isolation, being forced into hiding, and death through fear, media, and ‘God’s reckoning.’ As a queer Black man from Houston, Texas, George recognizes his existence lies on the backs of these individuals and pays homage to his community in its ability to uplift each other using the underground nightlife as a sanctuary.
Rodney Garza
El Pazchuco for Prez is a lampoon of the American electoral system. El Pazchuco is a zoot-suited lecturer who is tired of the politricks and decides to shake things up by throwing his tando (Zooter hat) into the political arena.
Sean Dorsey Dance
Co-commissioners:
Dance Place (Washington, DC)
Maui Arts & Cultural Center (Kahului, HI)
American Dance Festival (Durham, NC)
7 Stages (Atlanta, GA)
Highways Performance Space & Gallery (Santa Monica, CA)
Sean Dorsey Dance’s THE OPPOSITE OF GRIEF IS is a love letter and a balm. For transgender/queer communities who endure constant trauma (and who live under the constant threat of more trauma), often end up living suspended in a state of “anticipatory grief” – constantly vigilant, and always bracing for the next harm, the next death, the next loss. This project asks, “What is the opposite of grief? What is an embodied antidote? Joy? Rest? Connection?” Featuring contemporary dance, theater, intimate storytelling and exquisite queer partnering.
Synamin Vixen
Co-commissioners:
Ashé Cultural Arts Center (New Orleans, LA)
Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas (Seattle, WA)
Daughter of a Nymph Divine is a journey through a sensory expansion of Synamin Vixen’s book (of the same title) into a physical world of movement, projection, and sound. This work is a living meditation on grief, pleasure, and inviting silence; and audience members are invited to take their own journey through this space as Synamin reconciles her own space of grieving her grandmother. Audience members are invited to experience the space in the physical world with provided headphones and will also have an opportunity to explore the virtual world of Nymph Divine as it evolves.
Yosimar Reyes
Co-commissioners:
Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (San Jose, CA)
The Living Word Project (San Francisco, CA)
Su Teatro Cultural & Performing Arts Center (Denver, CO)
Following the success of Yosimar Reyes’ debut one-man coming-of-age show, Prieto, this new production seamlessly continues the narrative about migration, sexuality, and socio-economic struggle, while balancing caregiving. Si Dios Quiere, Regreso (God Willing, I’ll Return) intricately weaves together the narratives of two undocumented immigrants – one with DACA and the other without – representing a multigenerational tale of resilience amidst the uncertainties of living without legal status. This dramatic comedy will be a 90-minute solo show will draw in multi-generational Latinx, undocumented, and immigrant audiences.
