Titus Ogilvie Laing/Works & Process at the Guggenheim.
The National Performance Network (NPN) is awarding an initial $341,500 and leveraging an additional $1.5 million to support the creation of 19 new artistic works. The 2023 Creation Fund awardees include a variety of artists spread across sixteen cities featuring theatrical performances, spoken word, experimental sound, variety shows, video installations, and more.
These projects represent innovative and transformative arts experiences that explore and challenge aspects of identity, history, culture, and social justice. They blend multiple disciplines like music, dance, theater, puppetry, and spoken word, breaking conventional boundaries. The artists draw inspiration from historical and cultural contexts, often using site-specific locations for immersive experiences.
Learn more about the Creation & Development Fund here.
The Creation and Development Fund is made possible with support from the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), and co-commissioners.
Dance Place is honored to have been selected to partner with the following three artists through this program. Dance Place will be hosting these three artists on campus, providing support as they develop new works, and helping them to build community. Follow Dance Place on social media @DancePlaceDC to stay updated and get engaged.
Music From The Sole (pictured above)
New York, NY
http://www.musicfromthesole.com/
Currently untitled
Co-commissioners:
Dance Place (Washington, DC)
Guild Hall of East Hampton (East Hampton, NY)
Jacob’s Pillow (Becket, MA)
The Joyce Theater Foundation (New York, NY)
Works & Process, Inc (New York, NY)
The Yard (Chilmark, MA)
Music From The Sole will develop an evening-length work of tap, Afro-Brazilian and house dance, and original live music. This new piece will dig deeper into their practice of creating and presenting tap dance as both movement and music, with choreographic and compositional processes inseparable, embracing dancers’ roles as active creators of the music they move to. The narrative will expand their work celebrating tap’s Afro-diasporic roots and its lineage to forms encompassing jazz, funk, soul, house, samba, and hip hop while exploring themes central to the Black, immigrant, queer/LGBTQ2IA+ identities that make up our company of dancer-musicians.
Makini
Durham, NC
https://makinimakes.com/project/terrestrial/
TERRESTRIAL
Co-commissioners:
Dance Place (Washington, DC)
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL)
New York Live Arts (New York, NY)
TERRESTRIAL is a series of multimedia performance installations that unfold in various outdoor and indoor spaces. Inspired by the hot brown granules in both desert dirt and beach sand, TERRESTRIAL is an examination of humans as earth and Black humans as having a long, continuing terrestrial history that far precedes—and will outlive—the past five centuries of white supremacy’s specific oppressions. This project features a combination of vocal composition and choreography that magnifies and investigates social hierarchy and themes of nobility as they relate to the creation of civility and culture and humans as both earth and artifacts, building a speculative time capsule of what black life was like in the current moment of creation.
Ananya Dance Theatre
Minneapolis, MN
https://www.ananyadancetheatre.org/
ANTARANGA: BETWEEN YOU AND ME
Co-commissioners:
Dance Place (Washington, DC)
John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI)
Links Hall (Chicago, IL)
The Yard (Chilmark, MA)
Ananya Dance Theatre’s ANTARANGA: BETWEEN YOU AND ME, an original full-length work, is inspired by the Sufi concept of Humsafar: “fellow traveler” or “those who journey together” and by a central tenet of Baul culture: moner mānush, “cherished person.” This project highlights the intimacy of traveling together, invigorating solidarities with complex understandings of history and memory. Their community-embedded creation process challenges fundamentalist/supremacist politics as they uplift the concept of love with site-specific public workshops, shared food-making traditions, and community dialogues.