The Creation Fund leverages resources for the creation and touring of new performance work by contributing at least $10,000 towards to creation process and ensuring a minimum two site tour.

NPN received 11 Creation Fund Project proposals and funded all 11 Projects.

Artist:  ArtSpot Productions (New Orleans, LA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners:  Ashé Cultural Center, 7 Stages, Pangea World Theater
"Go Ye Therefore…." examines the Southern Baptist Church through textual and oral history, a verbal and physical deconstruction of scripture, and the autobiographies of two Southern Baptist preachers’ daughters, one black and one white.  The piece will include choreographic imagery, gestural scenes, sets depicting the irony of water as both purification and the washing away of culture, and a live piano score with two and three-part vocal harmony..
NPN Subsidy Award:  $12,000

Artist:  Daniel Valdez (San Juan, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners:  El Centro Su Teatro, Multi-Cultural Education and Counseling Through the Arts
Composer Daniel Valdez will work with the Su Teatro company and Mariachi MECA to create a new musical composition, "Songs for the Pregnant Earth".  The composition will be versatile enough to be performed as either a choral or instrumental piece.
NPN Subsidy Award: $10,000

Artist:  Doug Varone and Dancers (New York, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners:  Bates Dance Festival, University of Akron, San Francisco Performances
"Chapters From A Broken Novel" a new work for Varone’s eight dancers, features music by composer David Van Tieghem and lighting and set design by British scenic designer John Bausor. The choreographic material will be built from evocative phrases and descriptive language collected by Varone in an ongoing journal forming a continuing poem that depicts human nature at its most naked and vulnerable, expressive and poignant. 
NPN Subsidy Award: $12,000

Artist:  Gesel Mason Performance Projects (Capitol Heights, MD)
Lead Partner/Commissioners:  Dance Umbrella, Joyce SoHo
"Women, Sex, and Desire: Sometimes You Feel Like a Ho, Sometimes You Don’t" is a multi-media investigation of how women navigate sex, desire, choice, and perception. Through dance, personal stories and video imagery, this work challenges cultural programming, examines belief systems, and reflects the struggle, humor, and pleasure sexual beings encounter. "Women, Sex, and Desire…" seeks to empower and inform sexual choices, whatever they may be.
NPN Subsidy Award:  $10,000

Artist:  Holcombe Waller (Portland, OR)
Lead Partner/Commissioners:  Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents, VSA/Out North
Holcombe Waller will write and direct,  "Surfacing", a 40 to 50 minute narrative musical composition, organized into two acts with intermission, to be presented with live performance and video material.  Performance context will be flexible, allowing for presentation on a grand scale with large ensemble and projection, or on a smaller scale with more modestly arranged parts for three or four musicians and visual elements suitable for a gallery context.
NPN Subsidy Award:  $10,000

Artists:  John Jasperse Company (New York, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners:  Museum of Contemporary Art, Walker Art Center, REDCAT (CalArts), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
Choreographer and performer John Jasperse’s"Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies" is a ensemble work that addresses belief systems, the relative nature of truth, and how we construct meaning in our lives. Jasperse will also create the visual design. Composer and electronica artist Hahn Rowe will create a sound score for electronics and strings, which will be performed live by Rowe and the International Contemporary Ensemble.
NPN Subsidy Award:  $14,000

Artist:  Lakin Valdez (Oakland, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: La Peña Cultural Centert, El Teatro Campesino
"Victor in Shadow"  is a dramatic play with music based on the life and art of Chilean activist and folk singer Victor Jara. Set in the year 1973, the play chronicles the hostile coup d’etat that led to the violent installation of dictator Augusto Pinochet and the symbolic and tragic death of Victor Jara.
NPN Subsidy Award:  $10,000

Artist:  Radiohole (Brooklyn, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners:  Walker Art Center, Andy Warhol Museum
"Whatever, Heaven Allows"is a star-spangled American meta-melodrama inspired by film director Douglas Sirk’s 1950s potboilers and Milton’s epic Paradise Lost by avant-garde New York theater troupe Radiohole.
NPN Subsidy:  $12,000

Artist:  Rosanna Gamson/World Wide, Inc. (Los Angeles, CA)
Lead Partner/Commissioners: REDCAT (CalArts), Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents
"Tov" is an evening-length work choreographed by Rosanna Gamson. Inspired by Gamson’s Polish Jewish ancestry, who were horse traders from Szczezin, and the story of the tarpan horse, a species bred back from the brink of extinction in 1930s Poland. Tov is informed by Jerzy Grotowski’s seminal ensemble theater techniques and the vibrant physical theater now being created in Poland, and will be developed in both the US and Poland with artists from both counties.
NPN Subsidy Award:  $10,000

Artist:  The Working Group (St. Johnsville, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners:  Legion Arts, Grand Valley State University
"RUST" is a new site-specific theatre piece incorporating real interviews with laid off and disenfranchised employees abandoned by the American Dream.
NPN Subsidy:  $10,000

Artist:  Yasuko Yakoshi (New York, NY)
Lead Partner/Commissioners:  DiverseWorks, Dance Theater Workshop
"Tyler Tyler" is a full-evening, cross-cultural dance created by choreographer Yasuko Yokoshi and produced by MAPP International Productions. Yokoshi’s primary collaborator, Masumi Seyama VI, is a revered teacher of Kabuki Su-Odori and head of the Seyama Dance Family in Tokyo. Tyler Tyler is performed by two postmodern dancers from New York City, three traditional performers from Tokyo, and composer/musician Steven Reker.
NPN Subsidy:  $13,000

The NPN Creation Fund is made possible by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), the MetLife Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation.