Artist:  Kikuchi + Liu
Lead Partner/Co-commissioners:  Asian Arts Initiative, Hawai’i Arts Alliance, The ARTS at Marks Garage
Title:  "Chinatown Orange"
Description:  "Chinatown Orange," a performance art project by the Boston-based duo Kikuchi + Liu, will draw upon the concept of Instruction Pieces that are performance and installation-based to interrogate the Glidden paint company and the meaning behind their choice in naming this particular paint color in their Bright and Lively series; and to engage Chinatown community members in reclaiming the color by using it to highlight neighborhood locales that are marked for change.
Award:  $9,000

Artist:  Tania Isaac Dance
Lead Partner/Co-commissioner:  Bates Dance Festival, Philadelphia Live Arts Festival
Title:  "Stuporwoman"
Description:  Tania Isaac Dance will create “Stuporwoman” at the Bates Dance Festival and in Philadelphia for a September 2008 premiere at the Philly Live Arts Festival. “Stuporwoman” is a 40-minute movement operetta for four dancers, a violinist and signer, co-written with playwright Bridget Carpenter, and featuring music by Michael Wall and Claire Stollack-Gustavsson. The piece examines multigenerational perspectives on work, family, conflict, and the sometimes absurd results of balancing it all.
Award:  $9,000

Artist:  Washington Reflections Dance Company
Lead Partner/Co-commissioner:  Dance Place, National Pan-Hellenic Council (Winthrop University)
Title:  "Bronzeville"
Description:  During the peak of the “Great Migration,” between 1910 & 1920, thousands of African-Americans fled the oppression of the south and emigrated to the north in search of industrial jobs. “Bronzeville” is the second installment of
Hunter’s exploration of the “Great Migration” of African Americans. His first for Washington Reflections Dance Company was “South Country,” a ballet in four movements set to traditional African-American folk music.
Award:  $9,000

Artist:  Pat Graney
Lead Partner/Co-commissioner:  Dance Theater Workshop, DiverseWorks
Title:  "House of Mind"
Description:  In “House of Mind,” Pat Graney will explore the nature of how one conceives of memory.  Memory is geometric and changes with time passing - how one remembers an event changes based on what has happened and has been remembered in the time since it’s occurrence. The concept of the work is to create a complete world in an approximately 6 – 10,000 square foot warehouse/space and invite the viewer into that world, experiencing the performance in the environment in which it was created.
Award:  $9,000

Artist:  Ain Gordon/Pick Up Performance Co(S.)
Lead Partner/Co-commissioner:  DiverseWorks, Spoleto Festival USA
Title:  "The Storm Show"
Description:  DiverseWorks requests creation funds for “The Storm Show” by writer/director Ain Gordon and media artist Mary Ellen Strom – produced with Stages Rep Theatre, April 2009, plus performances at Spoleto Festival. “The Storm Show” is a monologue rooted in the Galveston, TX hurricane/flood of 1900, a Gulf Coast disaster that took 6,000 lives. In 1900 disaster books were bestsellers.  This work imagines one woman writer.  Outraged at her nation’s politics and the failure of her art, she speaks.
Award:  $9,000

Artist:  Anne Galjour
Lead Partner/Co-commissioner:  Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Hopkins Center for the Arts
Title:  "Class Divide in New England"
Description:  Anne Galjour is creating a new work exploring class and culture in Northern New England. Galjour has led story circles and interviews with New Englanders from all walks of life, from farmers to filmmakers. With sensitivity and humor, she voices truths about class and culture that often go unspoken.
Award:  $9,000

Artist:  Cupola Bobber
Lead Partner/Co-commissioner:  Links Hall, PS122
Title:  "Way Out West, the Sea Whispered Me"
Description:  Cupola Bobber’s new performance will study what it is to look at the sea and feel moved. Through a study of Edwardian British seaside resorts, the story of a town  creeping westward to avoid the advancing sea while surrendering its buildings, and images of Dust Bowl era Kansas, this performance seeks the fragile joy and beauty discovered when reflecting upon nature and existence within its immense, powerful, and mechanical actions.
Award:  $9,000

Artist:  Holcombe Waller
Lead Partner/Co-commissioner:  On the Boards, PICA (Portland Inst. of Contemporary Art)
Title:  "Into the Dark Unknown: The Hope Chest"
Description:  “Into the Dark Unknown: the Hope Chest” is a mutli-disciplinary performance of contemporary folk songs presented as a new form of popular art music.  The combination of banter-like monologues and song lyrics hold a potent mirror to Holcomb’s generation’s psychology in a time of war, religious divisiveness, economic  stratification and environmental demise, evoking a changing American “liturgy” where weekly curbside recycling may trump Sunday church.
Award:  $9,000

Artist:  EDGEWORKS
Lead Partner/Co-commissioners:  Dance Theater, Painted Bride Art Center, Dance Place
Title:  "the determining factor"
Description:  “the determining factor” is a multi-media dance that examines the often difficult issues around gender, sexuality and spirituality. Through choreography that is fast-paced and intricately woven into solo, duet and group vignettes, sexual minorities are accepted as valued participants on the common ground of the human family. "the determining factor” addresses the denial of homophobia and homosexuality that is so prevalent in the black community.
Award:  $9,000

Artist:  Renita Martin
Lead Partner/Co-commissioner:  The Theater Offensive, Flynn Center for the Performing Arts
Title:  "Blue Fire on the Water"
Description:  "Blue Fire on the Water" is a multi-generational, two-act, multi-media play with music, explores how hurricane Katrina washed up our now hidden, but ever-present, economic and racial segregation. The lives of queer, transgendered, poor, African Americans are examined as they face the aftermath of Katrina. This play speaks to a particular blues experience and gives life to people not usually seen on stage.
Award:  $9,000

Artist:  Emily Johnson/Catalyst
Lead Partner/Co-commissioner:  VSA of Alaska/Out North, Franconia Sculpture Park
Title:  "Lonesome, and at the bottom of a River, Waiting"
Description:  Emily Johnson will create an evening length solo performance with a sculptor and musicians JG Everest and Joel Pickard. The work acknowledges her Yup’ik heritage, nods to cultural assumptions, comments on urban living and architectural elements of ‘home’ and mixes story, dance, music with truth, half-truths and mixed-blood. It will be performed in cities (Minneapolis, Austin, Anchorage), and small towns (Shafer, MN and Homer, AK) and a Yup’ik village (Bethel, AK).
Award:  $9,000

Artist:  Sharon Bridgforth
Lead Partner/Co-commissioner:  Women & Their Work, Center On Halsted
Title:  "delta dandi"
“delta dandi” is a multi-disciplinary theatre piece that charts the life of a Black blues/Conjure woman musician traveling with a jazz band in the 1940’s at the height of the birth of modern jazz. delta dandi’s (fictional) life documents black American history through a theatrical re-incarnation of the tradition of “Sacred Concerts” and “Tone Poems” which jazz icons Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams innovated in the 1960’s.
Award:  $9,000