NEFA Announces 2010 National Dance Project Awards

(BOSTON) New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) announces that its National Dance Project (NDP) has awarded $735,000 in Production Grants to support the development of new dance works during the 2010-2011 seasons.

Twenty-one contemporary dance artists and companies spanning the U.S. from Rhode Island to Hawaii, and including Australia will receive NDP Production grants in amounts from $17,000 to $37,500. Projects were selected from a highly competitive applicant pool. Once developed, the works will be available for national touring activity during the 2011-12 or 2012-13 performance seasons.

In addition to the Production award, each U.S. grant recipient will receive general operating support of $10,500 from special funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. These funds are intended to ensure organizational stability during this extraordinarily challenging economic period.

"The diversity and imagination of this year’s grantees showcases the collaborative nature of new dance work and a continued interest by artists to explore ideas that truly engage audiences," said Jane Forde, NDP Manager. "Artists are working from both contemporary and traditional forms, bridging cultures and partnering across multiple disciplines.”  Awardees are listed below.

As of July 2010, NDP has awarded more than $17.3 million to 356 projects reaching over 200,000 audience members annually , NDP grants have supported more than 263 new dance works involving over 300 presenters of dance in more than 4,300 performances and 7,500 community activities. NDP has reached over 2.8 million audience members and funds tours to an average of thirty-six states annually. Projects that receive NDP Production Grants are added to a roster of selected projects available to performing arts presenters, who can then apply for NDP Touring awards to help defray the cost of presenting these works. For further information about NDP, please visit www.nefa.org or call 617.951.0010 x512.

NEFA's National Dance Project Production and Touring awards are generously supported by lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, with additional funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Community Connections Fund of the MetLife Foundation, and the Boeing Company Charitable Trust. 

About NEFA
NEFA creatively supports the movement of people, ideas, and resources in the arts within New England and beyond, makes vital connections between artists and communities, and builds the strength, knowledge, and leadership of the creative sector. NEFA is a 501 (c) (3) that operates with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New England state arts agencies, and from corporations, foundations and individuals.

NEFA currently administers grantmaking programs of regional, national, and international scope that support the performing arts, public art, and Native American artists. NEFA also leads projects and initiatives that range from the analysis of the impact of the creative economy to the creation of online tools which link and advance the cultural community. For more information on NEFA’s grant programs and services, please visit www.nefa.org or call 617.951.0010.

2010 NDP Production Awards:

AXIS Dance Company, San Francisco, CA
Project Title: Full of Words
AXIS and UK-based choreographer Marc Brew will create Full of Words, an edgy series of duets in a variety of gender make-ups taking place in everyday settings.  Marc and AXIS’ unique vocabularies will merge to create stunning dance that is physical, engaging, and thought provoking.

Ballet Hispanico, New York, NY
Project title: New work by Ronald K. Brown
Under the artistic leadership of Eduardo Vilaro, Ballet Hispanico will commission a new work by choreographer Ronald K. Brown for the Company’s 2011/12 touring season.  Set on 9-11 dancers, the abstract work will explore the intersection of the African and Latino diasporas in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Big Dance Theater, Brooklyn, NY
Project Title: Supernatural Wife
Big Dance Theater’s Supernatural Wife is an adaptation of Alkestis, Euripides’ tragic-comic problem play, in which a woman, Alkestis, agrees to die for her husband. Launching off from Anne Carson's bracing translation, Annie-B Parson's Big Dance Theater will use dance, music, video and design to embody a surprising and nuanced response to Euripides' radical views on death, grief and self-sacrifice. 

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, New York, New York
Project Title: One Through Four
One Through Four (working title) is a new evening-length interdisciplinary work exploring the value of physical presence in a world where exponentially advancing technology is transforming the nature of relationships, learning, creativity and everyday experience

Chitresh Das Dance Company, San Francisco, California & Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Project Title: Sita Haran
Sita Haran, choreographed, composed and directed by North Indian classical Kathak dance master Pandit Chitresh Das, is a dynamic and original interpretation of an excerpt from the great epic of India, the Ramayana.  Sita Haran features an international, all-female cast of dancers, utilizing multimedia, an original score, lighting design and Sanskrit poetry to bring to life these iconic characters and highlight the contemporary relevance of and contradictions within this ancient epic.

Chunky Move, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA
Project Title: Connected
Connected  will be a new, movement-based, full length work created by Chunky Move's Artistic Director, Gideon Obarzanek, in collaboration with kinetic based sculptor Reuben Margolin of San Francisco.  The suspended sculpture will be connected by strings to the dancer’s bodies and will respond to their movements, articulating Gideon’s ongoing studies into the duality of the human psyche. 

Dayna Hanson, Seattle, WA
Project title: Goria’s Cause
Inspired by ironies of the American Revolution, Gloria’s Cause is a new, full-length work by 33 Fainting Spells’ co-founder Dayna Hanson. This dance-driven rock musical exhumes the colonies’ forgotten players; warped replays of iconic moments like the drafting of the Declaration of Independence juxtapose with video testimony from citizens of today in a layered, gritty look at the roots of America’s inequities.

Dean Moss, Brooklyn, NY
Project Title: Nameless forest
Created by choreographer Dean Moss in collaboration with South Korean artist Sungmyung Chun, Nameless forest questions the nature of perception as it translates Chun’s disquieting figurative installations into live dance, and then challenges the translation.  The six diverse dancers—joined at each performance by several invited audience members—inhabit an environment that layers reality with the surreal.

Everett Dance Theatre, Providence, RI
Project Title: BrainStorm
Everett Dance Theatre’s BrainStorm is a multimedia dance/theater production that examines the current state of brain research, and how it will impact people with disabilities, brain injuries and emotional disorders, as well as those with ‘normal’ brains. Everett will seamlessly blend dynamic physicality, storytelling, humor, and mobile video projection onto kinetic sculptural set-elements, to create a dance/theater experience that informs, entertains and provokes thought.

Faye Driscoll, Brooklyn, NY
Project Title: Beautiful
In Beautiful, controversial choreographer Faye Driscoll asks, "What would my most beautiful dance look like?" Challenging her personal, creative and socio-political narratives about "that which is pleasing to the eye," in an attempt to create a work that is blatantly and un-ironically beautiful.

John Jasperse Dance Company, New York, NY,
Project Title: New Work 2011
John Jasperse Dance Company develops an evening-length work for six dancers with a commissioned score by composer Hahn Rowe.  The work centers on the transformative power of loosing oneself in visceral experience, where the supremacy of the intellect is humbled through experience into a state of wonder. 

LeeSaar The Company, Brooklyn, NY
Project Title- FAME
As artists who served and fought in the Israeli Special Forces, we felt the distraction of the war around us on daily basis. This background serves as the inspiration to the work.
FAME will bring mystery and illusion to the stage, exploring the tension between teasing the audience and exposing our fragility.

Living Word Project, Oakland, CA
Project Title:  red, black and GREEN: a blues
With fierce poetry and passionate dance, Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s red, black and GREEN: a blues celebrates new definitions of “green” coming from America’s urban communities.  Set into Theaster Gates’ earthy installation, heightened by vivid films and graffiti murals, red, black and GREEN: a blues posits the idea that valuing your own life, and the life of your community, is the first step to valuing planet Earth.

Martha Clarke, Sherman, CT
Project Title: Angel Reapers
A collaboration between MacArthur Genius director/choreographer Martha Clarke and Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Alfred Uhry, ANGEL REAPERS is a cross-disciplinary work about the Shakers set in New England during the late 18th century. The company of 11 dancers brings the Shaker world to life through Clarke’s imagistic choreography and Uhry’s text, both drawn from historical testimonies and woven throughout with a cappella Shaker songs.

Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, Brooklyn, New York
Project Title: This Dance is Irrelevant (WERQing Title)
This Dance is Irrelevant (WERQing Title) will be an evening-length performance that uses dance and improvisation as the bridge between discoveries from research into neurology, embodied philosophy, somatic/healing practices and the paranormal.

Monica Bill Barnes & Company, New York, NY
Project Title: Creation of new contemporary dance work for 2011/12
Monica Bill Barnes & Company will create a new group work in 2010/11 choreographed by Artistic Director Barnes.  The work will depict strong Americana influences amidst quirky movement invention and gestures, irreverent humor, theatricality, and choreographic virtuosity.  

Nā Kinimakalehua, Wailuku, Maui, HI
Project Title:  Kūlanihako‘i – Living Waters
Kūlanihako‘i – Living Waters is a new hula drama. Drawing from epic Hawaiian myths over 2000 years old, the many facets of water and its continuous relationship between the ocean, land and sky are told through the eyes of contemporary native Hawaiians.  The universal connections between man and this environment – past and present - are explored through hula kahiko, traditional chant, music, and dramatic interpretation. 

Ragamala Dance, Minneapolis, MN
Project Title: Sacred Earth
Sacred Earth brings two rich and ancient Indian visual art traditions—Warli paintings and Kolam rice flour drawings—into conversation with Bharatanatyam, the classical dance of Southern India. Performed against large-scale painted panels by master folk artist Anil Chaitya Vangad, Sacred Earth transforms the stage into a sacred space and invokes a deep connection to the Earth.

Robert Moses’ Kin, San Francisco, CA
Project Title: Fable and Faith
Fable & Faith is an exciting new work created by choreographer Robert Moses in collaboration with playwright Anne Galjour to explore imagination, creativity and identity through the metaphor of children's fables.

Urban Bush Woman
Project Title: visible/invisible
Founding artistic director of Urban Bush Women, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and former company member and independent choreographer, Nora Chipaumire, are creating visible/invisible, which will explore immigration and migration primarily through the stories of Nora, an immigrant from Zimbabwe, and Jawole, whose family migrated to Kansas City.

Wally Cardona, Brooklyn, NY, and Paris, France
Project Title: Tool Is Loot
Tool Is Loot is designed as a game leading to other games of meaning, intent and form that can create multiple interpretations of “a dance” and be in a constant state of renewal. Performed by choreographers Wally Cardona (Brooklyn) and Jennifer Lacey (Paris) and composer Jonathan Bepler (Berlin), the ideal scenario involves a site visit and one-on-one encounters between Cardona/Lacey and “local experts”.