Announcing the Fall 2022 Development Fund Awardees
January 13, 2023 • 8 minute read
Kesha McKey performing in a staged promotional photo for “Raw Fruit” in New Orleans, LA. Photo: Jafar Pierre Photography.
The National Performance Network (NPN) is pleased to announce we are awarding $110,000 and leveraging more than $185,000 through the Fall 2022 Development Fund to further support 12 Creation Fund projects.
The Development Fund, which is phase 2 of NPN’s Creation & Development Fund (CDF), helps offset managerial, artistic, or technical needs when developing a work. These needs can include supporting technical residencies, building or deepening community engagement, relationship building, storytelling, or studio time to adapt a work 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-commissioner of their choosing, depending on the needs of the project.
The Creation and Development Fund is made possible with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency).
Fall 2022 Development Fund Recipients
J’Sun Howard
Co-commissioning partner: Links Hall (Chicago, IL)
The Righteous Beauty of the Things Never Accounted For is a new experimental dance piece that explores Black Fugitvity—radical ways in which Black people subvert time, race, gender, and family history to refuse/navigate systemic oppression and racial injustice. Featured at co-commissioner CANDY BOX Dance Festival, this first iteration of Righteous Beauty explores the otherwise possibility by considering the theme of home, homes we didn’t know we needed to be in. Development funds will be used for intensive revision and rehearsal process, collaboration with designers, and the next phase of Righteous Beauty with a technical residency at co-commissioner Links Hall.
KM Dance Project
Co-commissioning partner: BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (Bronx, NY)
Raw Fruit is a new immersive dance–theater experience led by Kesha McKey and Catherine Caldwell of KM Dance Project. This multidisciplinary work uses the technology of the kitchen to examine legacy, identity, socialization, unity, and friction inside the Southern Black family.
KM Dance Project will partner with co-commissioner BAAD! to complete a robust week-long creative residency leading up to the performance at BAAD! KM Dance Project will take time to reexamine Raw Fruit, as well as engage in a community exchange of gathering and class offerings at BAAD!, leading with reciprocal learning and generating a sustained relationship. KM Dance Project will also be working with a local dramaturg and costume designer to further define theatrical elements of the work.
The Land Memory Bank
and
Mondo Bizarro
Co-commissioning partner: Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (New Orleans, LA)
Invisible Rivers is a project that employs the artistic practices of music, theater, and boat-building to respond to our region’s interconnected struggles against coastal land loss, environmental racism, and displacement. We are building boats in rapidly disappearing areas of our coast and hosting dialogues and performances on them. The Development Fund project is a collaboration between the Land Memory Bank, Mondo Bizarro, and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Funds will be used to support the planning and execution of community engagement activities before the Bulbancha presentation of Invisible Rivers.
Yvonne Montoya / Safos Dance Theatre
Stories from Home is a series of dances embodying oral traditions of Latinx communities in the American Southwest. Choreographer Yvonne Montoya and an all-Latinx cast of dancers draw upon personal histories and ancestral knowledge, including stories from Montoya’s family members. The work explores how geographies, languages, and stories among Latinx and border communities have shared histories and experiences. NPN Development Funds will be used to support the lighting design for Yvonne Montoya’s Stories from Home.
NAKA Dance Theater
Co-commissioning partner: La Peña Cultural Center (Berkeley, CA)
Y Basta Ya! (Enough!) is a multidisciplinary and multilingual performance project highlighting stories of Indigenous and Latina immigrant women. The work emerges from a multiyear community development process in collaboration with immigrant rights organization Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA). NPN Development Funds will support a three-month residency for NAKA Dance Theater and 4 MUA collaborators to work at La Peña Cultural Center to develop and present a work-in-progress performance for the final touring work.
Papel Machete
Co-commissioning partner: Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (Bronx, NY)
On the Eve of Abolition is Papel Machete’s multimedia, theater and puppetry play which has been in creation and development since 2020. The story is set in the year 2047 in the transnational liberated lands of what used to be known as the US and Mexico, after a movement of abolitionists have created the conditions to end the prison-industrial complex. In the next year, Papel Machete will present the first work-in-progress performance at Cara Mía Theater and hold a production intensive in Puerto Rico to finalize the performance. Development Funds will be used to pay the artists, for travel to Puerto Rico for a creative production intensive, and to purchase materials and equipment needed to mount the final performance.
Parris-Bailey Arts Inc.
Co-commissioning partner: Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (Miami, FL)
In this moment of uncertainty, there is a commonality to our search for connection. We look to the past in the spirit of Sankofa, looking back as we move forward, never forgetting the lessons of the past. Yankee Bajan, a play with music, focuses on the growing movement of Black individuals and families to explore Black life outside of the US. These expatriates, building homes and communities in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean, seek a return home or a new life without the pressures and assumptions of the “white gaze” and racism in America. Development Funds will support community events in Barbados, Miami, Boston, and Charleston, South Carolina, as well as virtually.
Ashwini Ramaswamy
Co-commissioning partner: The Great Northern Festival (Minneapolis, MN)
Bharatanatyam choreographer and dancer Ashwini Ramaswamy’s Invisible Cities reinterprets Italo Calvino’s novel through interwoven cultural perspectives, with interactive, projected artwork created live.
The work is a largescale production featuring thirteen dancers, one visual artist, and one technical director, and Development Funds will be used to compensate team for intensive studio and technical rehearsals. It will also support community engagement events, including “Choreograph Your Classic” with Magers & Quinn Booksellers and the digital and in-person experience “Becoming Visible: Immigrant stories through dance” in collaboration with Green Card Voices. The artists hope that these events will foster deeper conversation and generate a breakthrough on how immigrants are perceived, treated, and accepted.
Sandglass Theater
Co-commissioning partner: The Yard (Chilmark, MA)
Feral addresses the act of making visible and reclaiming the work of women through celebrating intuitive knowledge, how it is housed in our bodies, and how it can be used as a tool for individual and cultural repair. Navigating the tension between domesticated and wild behaviors, the project reveals and challenges the cultural construction of our identities in everyday life.
Funds will be used to support a development residency at the Yard on Martha’s Vineyard that will focus on the physical movement and choreographic elements of the show, particularly in the use of body puppets that are deeply attached to movement quality of the puppeteers. Sandglass will also offer workshops for the Yard’s community on how puppets and movement can truly enhance storytelling and artmaking.
Sean Dorsey Dance
Sean Dorsey Dance’s the Lost Art of Dreaming is an invitation to embrace expansive imagination, reconnect with longing, connect with joy and pleasure, and propel ourselves toward loving Futures. The project includes a new full-evening production that is a fusion of full-throttle dance, intimate storytelling, soul-stirring song, and exquisite queer partnering, as well as Dream Labs, trans-supportive dance workshops, the Dictionary of Joy and Pleasure, Postcards from the Future, and many more magical opportunities to connect and create.
Development Funds will support a creative residency for lead choreographer Sean Dorsey to finish the script, soundscore, and choreographic plans, as well as to rent rehearsal space.
Lisa B. Thompson
Co-commissioning partner: The Vortex (Austin, TX)
The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body is part performance, part health fair, and part block party. The raucous performance meditation includes stories full of joy, fear, sorrow, lust, hunger, confusion, pride, and shame presented by dancers and a chorus of Black women, girls, femmes, sisters, aunties, mamas, and nanas of various body types, skin colors, hairstyles, and personas. The show explores the beauty and pain of inhabiting a Black female body from birth to death.
This award will support a three-day developmental workshop and reading of The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body at the Vortex. The workshop will allow the director, playwright, composer, choreographer, and performers to collaborate in person for the first time. The reading will be held for invited guests as well as selected community partners and organizations that will be part of the first production.
Helanius J. Wilkins
Co-commissioning partner: RedLine Contemporary Art Center (Denver, CO)
Rejecting finite points or products, The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging is an ongoing and always shifting dance-quilt, confronting and celebrating heritage, resiliency, justice, and hope. Activating technologies of the body, tools, and toys in a non-colonizing fashion, this work centers belonging to disrupt the erasure of silenced stories and forge paths towards justice/equitable landscapes.
Funds will support revision and development, including rehearsals to evolve elements of the stage production leading to the Louisiana premiere performance in October 2023; fees for artists and collaborators; and community-centered investigations and building in Denver through activities in collaboration with Lead Commissioner REDLINE Contemporary Arts Center.
