Announcing the Spring 2025 Development Fund Awardees
June 4, 2025 • 5 minute read
dani tirrell and The Congregation performing Leviticus or Love and to walk amongst HUMANS: Book I at The Moore Theater in Seattle, WA. Photo: Eric Tra.
The National Performance Network (NPN) is pleased to award $55,000 and leverage $219,124 through the Spring 2025 Development Fund to further support six Creation Fund projects that advance racial and cultural justice.
The Development Fund is the second phase of NPN’s Creation & Development Fund (CDF) and assists in offsetting managerial, artistic, or technical needs when developing projects. These needs can include supporting technical residencies, deepening community engagement, relationship building, expanding storytelling, or studio time to prepare a project for travel.
NPN’s approach to artistic support is built on the notions of partnership and long-term relationship building. NPN actively strives to expand the capacities and connectivity of its constituents. The Development Fund is structured to maximize these goals. Artists can apply independently or as a team with a co-commissioning partner of their choosing, depending on the needs of the project.
“As a small regional experimental performance organization, we struggle to find ways to fund deep and ongoing engagement with national touring artists. It was a gift to have an NPN funded residency a year ahead of our planned premiere of Blood Baby, without the pressure to sell tickets or promote a finished product. We nurtured relationships, asked questions, and invited the work to grow in our city, and the premiere will be so much more connected to our community as a result.”
The Creation and Development Fund is made possible with support from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
Spring 2025 Development Fund Recipients
Meet this year’s artists who are advancing racial and cultural justice with the help of the NPN Development Fund:
Amanda Ekery
Co-commissioning partner: 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 and accompanying essays. 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 and readings of Árabe.
This summer, Amanda and her band will be in residence at the Temescal Art Center in Oakland, CA, through Arab.AMP, developing performance aspects of the Árabe Mahrajan tour, including live music arrangements, dialogue/stories, visuals, community development performance, and curated interactive elements.
Read more about Amanda Ekery’s inspiration and research for Árabe in her Voices from the Network post, “Yenobak Eih?” (What Do You Get?).
dani tirrell and The Congregation
Elysium: Leviticus or Love and to walk amongst HUMANS ~ Book II is an immersive, site-specific performance piece that combines live and recorded music. This offering centers around Black and brown bodies leaving this world and entering the “afterlife.” Book II brings the club to heaven and imagines what heaven or utopia would look like if Black bodies were free to imagine. The performance connects the pomp and circumstance of the church to the pomp and circumstance of the club, where God can live in a community that embraces “sin” and welcomes those who are not traditionally considered “worthy” of God’s grace. The NPN Development Fund will support fees for performers and creators, as well as provide assistance for travel costs and per diems.
James Scruggs
Co-commissioning partner: Art2Action Inc. (Tampa, FL)
OFF THE RECORD: Acts of Restorative Justice is a theatrical intervention that actually changes lives by restoring justice to BIPOC people. Artist James Scruggs works with lawyers, activists, and community participants who have a misdemeanor or nonviolent felony in their past to legally expunge or seal their criminal records, while telling their stories, onstage and off.
This summer, with residency support from co-commissioner Art2Action, James will continue development of OFF THE RECORD through a month-long intensive period of developing script and movement vocabulary at Barnard College’s Movement Lab, a space for experimentation and exploration at the intersection of movement, performance, and technology. During this process, James and his collaborators will explore theatrical ways to “activate one’s activism.” The NPN Development Fund will support artist fees and necessary technical equipment.
Read more about James’ project in his Voices from the Network post, “OFF THE RECORD: Acts of Restorative Justice.”
kNoname Artist | Roderick George
Co-commissioning partner: Williams College (Williamstown, MA)
Venom is rooted in the lasting impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the ongoing erasure of the LGBTQIA+ community. Through movement, kNoname Artist uses art as protest, confronting societal injustices such as the erasure of queer histories, the marginalization of people of color, and the enduring effects of the HIV/AIDS crisis.
To deepen this work, kNoname Artist will partner with Williams College for a two-week residency, expanding Venom into a full-evening-length production. The NPN Development Fund will support the technical salary for a production manager.
Kyle Marshall Choreography
Co-commissioning partner: Drew University (Madison, NJ)
The cornerstone of Kyle Marshall Choreography’s Julius Eastman Trilogy, Femenine is a radically queer, evening-length embodiment of Eastman’s 1974 composition Femenine, a jubilant, minimalist work that includes woodwinds, marimba, voice, vibraphone, piano, bass, and an ocean of bells. This 70-minute journey moves through the shadows of queer history, recognizes the struggles of our present time, and reveals a queer future full of power, trust and softness. The NPN Development Fund will support production elements and rehearsal fees.
re:FRAME Collective
Each of the five artists in re:FRAME collective created and self-produced an evening length solo. Simultaneously, re:FRAME collectively experimented with an artist-driven model for creative exchange and sustainability, seeking to address regional lack of access to dance infrastructure in the South and ways to uplift New Orleans dance artists. The project is culminating in a collectively built archive of the five dance works and learnings from the collective experiment.
