FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACTS: December 20, 2018 Press contact: Gus Schulenburg | gschulenburg@tcg.org | 212-609-5941
New York, NY – Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for theatre, is pleased to announce the recipients of the latest round of Global Connections. Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Global Connections encourages reciprocity and cultural exchange through two programs: ON the ROAD grants to foster new relationships with international colleagues; and IN the LAB grants to further pre-existing international collaborations. Now in its sixth year, the Global Connections program awarded over $93,000 to thirteen projects in this cycle, with over $972,000 awarded to date. Over its first five rounds, the program has awarded 108 grants to artists and companies in 39 U.S. states to collaborate with their colleagues in 53 different countries on six out of seven continents.
“At a time when our country's diplomatic ties are under great stress, artists continue to forge vital relationships with colleagues and communities worldwide. These relationships are built on a sense of respect and reciprocity,” said Teresa Eyring, executive director of TCG. “Thanks to enduring support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, these projects will model the creative dynamism of equitable exchange.”
ON the ROAD
The following seven recipients were each awarded up to $5,000 for unrestricted travel support to foster new relationships with international colleagues and inspire future collaborations:
Jessica Bauman, Brooklyn, NY
Geographic Region of Focus: México
Jessica Bauman will initiate a two-week residency in Tijuana, México to begin collaborating with Tijuana Hace Teatro (THT), a 10-year-old theatre company with extensive community-engaged programming. They will develop a project focused on people crossing the U.S./México border and their stories. During her time in Tijuana, she will get to know the company members of THT and better understand their work, as well as learn about the changing situation for the refugee and migrant communities in Tijuana, and teach theatre workshops for community groups with whom THT works. As someone passionate about telling stories about the refugee crisis that portray the full humanity of the people involved, Jessica views this new collaboration with THT as an organic evolution of the work she has done for the past four years in creating Arden/Everywhere, a reimagining of As You Like It as a refugee story. In developing Arden/Everywhere, she worked with refugee and immigrant communities from all over the world in NYC, as well as teaching a two-week theater workshop at Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. She wants to grow and expand her experience by connecting with both artists and displaced people in other parts of the world.
Atsuko Taneya Dachs, New York, NY
Geographic Region of Focus: Japan
Ako Dachs, founding Artistic Director of Amaterasu Za, has translated and adapted three of Monzaemon Chikamatsu’s moving, double-suicide plays, Courier of Hell, Double-Suicide at Sonezaki, and Love Suicides at Amijima into one play, Courier of Love. Chikamatsu (1653-1725) is often called the Shakespeare of Japan and his work spans over 130 plays for the Bunraku puppet theater and the live Kabuki stage which form the core of the Japanese stage tradition, even today. Following a staged reading in December 2017 at Amaterasu Za’s studio in TriBeCa NY co-directed by Ako and Rob Melrose, a more extensive New York workshop is planned, which includes new collaborator Miki Fukuda. Fukuda, who also works under the stage name Tsugahana Tsuruzawa (indicating she is a member of the famous Gidayu Shamisen ‘family’ Tsuruzawa), is an experienced Gidayu-Shamisen player trained in the live underscoring of actors in the Japanese tradition. She will compose original music to punctuate and underscore the entire work and perform live at each performance.
Velina Hasu Houston, Los Angeles, CA
Geographic Region of Focus: United States of America; Japan; Brazil; Canada-Ontario; Philippines
Velina Hasu Houston will cultivate a play tentatively titled, Pára-sol. The project will investigate Japanese-Brazilian (ethnic Japanese born and reared in Brazil) culture and identity in both countries. Along with her collaborators, she intends to interview Japanese Brazilians living in Japanese factory towns, engage with their community organizations and events, and engage with individuals whose research focuses on Japanese-Brazilian culture and identity. She hopes to integrate her theatrical project into a larger theatrical work about the female condition, especially with regards to the female body as a site of double standards, bias, and discrimination in Western society. Her vision is to present Pára-sol as a stand-alone event as well as a dimension of this larger work.
Imagination Stage, Bethesda, MD
Geographic Region of Focus: Russian Federation
Imagination Stage (IStage) will engage with Piano Theatre, based at a Russian school for the deaf, to bring together teenage artists to explore the use of movement-based theatre to transcend such barriers as language, nationality, and levels of ability. In April 2019, two of Piano Theatre’s master teachers and four deaf students will spend five days with IStage Dance Theatre instructors and students. Piano Theatre performers specialize in narrative storytelling through movement. By combining their skills with those of IStage dancers, each group of students and teachers will explore a new area of theatre and together will synthesize a movement vocabulary that engages audiences without language. In addition, the Piano Theatre performers and IStage dancers will collaborate with participants of other IStage programs, including recent refugees from Central America with limited English acquisition, and members of IStage’s theatre ensemble especially created for actors with disabilities. They will also engage with outside local groups that serve the deaf community. The Piano Theatre and IStage students will establish a theme they will continue to develop using Skype in hopes of co-presenting at the 2020 Sapperlot International Meeting in Italy.
Marlboro College, Marlboro, VT
Geographic Region of Focus: United States of America; Karuk Tribe
Poet and writer Shaunna Oteka McCovey and theatre artist Jean O’Hara will collaborate in drafting an original play based on the historical book In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River in 1908-1909. Although the book is a historical account of early contact between the Karuk Nation and European-Americans, it is ultimately written from a white perspective. It is our intention to write it from a Karuk perspective that also includes the Karuk language. McCovey and O’Hara will co-create the play while also organizing events that allow for Karuk Tribal member participation in script review and conceptualizing the play as a theatre production piece. Specifically, Karuk artists and language speakers will be invited to participate in community sessions to provide input and help with translation of English into the Karuk language for certain parts of the play. The goal of the project is to write a play that will be ready to be performed in both local and national theatre by fall 2019.
Miracle Theatre Group, Portland, OR
Geographic Region of Focus: Canada
Teatro Milagro artistic director Dañel Malan will travel to Hamilton, Ontario, in the early spring of 2019 to visit Marilo Nuñez, a Chilean-born Canadian playwright. This meeting will begin the process of planning the creation of a production for the 2020 touring season of Teatro Milagro. Ms. Nuñez will then travel to Portland, Oregon in the summer of 2019 to further realize the collaboration. Long term plans include a possible Canadian tour for Teatro Milagro. The idea for the collaboration is to cross both physical and cultural borders, and to create a collaboration that has room to grow into an ongoing partnership between U.S. and Canadian LatinX Indigenous theatre artists. In the current political atmosphere, the collaboration has the potential to demonstrate the power of culture and community over political polarization.
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, New York, NY
Geographic Region of Focus: Hungary
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater would like to bring Hungarian Director Martin Boross to NYC to explore the possibility of adapting Adressless, a piece about homelessness, for the NYC community. Boross would work in collaboration with NYC-based playwright Jonathan Payne, who has a great deal of experience working with the homeless community (specifically through Community Access). Originally created in Hungary, Adressless, is an interactive theatrical game, in which the audience finds themselves standing in the shoes of those who are homeless. The goal of the game is for the audience to survive half a year without any place to live. The piece is performed by four people: two actors, a homeless activist, and a social worker who help the audience to gain insight into the lived experience of homelessness.
IN the LAB
The following six recipients were each awarded $10,000 to further pre-existing international collaborations by supporting residencies that advance the development of a piece and/or explore elements leading up to a full production:
Javier Antonio González, Brooklyn, NY
Geographic Region of Focus: United States of America; Puerto Rico; Ecuador
Javier Antonio González will collaborate with Puerto Rican composer/ethnomusicologist Pilli Aponte and translator Aurora Lauzardo in the rehearsals and workshop on Jardín de pulpos (Octopus’s Garden), the seminal Latin American political theatre piece by Argentinian playwright Arístides Vargas, at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center (LPAC). Both Vargas and Puerto Rican director Rosa Luisa Márquez will participate in a symposium on the work and its context. Together with González’s predominantly Puerto Rican company, Caborca, they will adapt Vargas’s mournful dream play in its first English language production, infusing original music and Latin American protest songs. The play tells the story of a man who ventures to the seashore, guided by the town madwoman, to search for his memory among the dead and disappeared. They speak of pain and loss at the edge of a sea stained with blood—a place where the people no longer go to dream. Octopus’s Garden will be developed in partnership with LPAC and will feature a cast of Caborca’s resident actors and a crowd of performers from LaGuardia Community College.
Honolulu Theatre for Youth, Honolulu, HI
Geographic Region of Focus: Marshall Islands
Building on their relationship from a 2016 ON the ROAD grant, spoken word poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (Republic of the Marshall Islands) and director/playwright Daniel A. Kelin, II of Honolulu Theatre for Youth (Hawaii) will meet again in the Marshall Islands to collaborate with a select group of local young artists to conduct interviews with multi-generational Marshall Islanders about the personal and communal effects of climate change; and workshop the collected material, with Jetnil-Kijiner writing and Kelin facilitating devising sessions. As a result of this generative process, Jetnil-Kijiner will begin developing a play that is inclusive of and responsive to multiple island voices.
Jeremy Kamps, Brooklyn, NY
Geographic Region of Focus: Kenya
In stage one of this project, Director/Actor Mumbi Kaigwa and Writer/Producer/Co-Director Jeremy Kamps conducted a drama workshop with a group of women who work at a flower farm in Naivasha, Kenya. Since then, Kamps has written a first draft of a play that follows the life of a rose over the course of 48 hours: from the Kenyan woman who picks it, to the Chinese pilot who transports it, to the Pakistani immigrant couple in London who sell it to a woman. Their next goal is to put the play on its feet, experiment, rewrite, and experiment again. This intensive time will help define the frame and form of the play, enrich the characters, and crystallize the story. By the end of the two-week collaboration, they hope to have a script that is near rehearsal-ready.
Mosaic Theater Company of DC, Washington, DC
Geographic Region of Focus: Israel; Palestinian Territories
Mosaic Theatre Company of DC will fly Morad Hassan (Haifa) and Einat Weizman (Tel Aviv) to Washington, DC to rehearse and present a workshop production of their script, SHAME (With Comments from the Populace). The project will have its U.S. premiere in partnership with artistic director Ari Roth, who is helping to adapt and expand the script from January to February 2019, together with director John Vreeke and actresses Colleen Delany and Lynette Rathnam. SHAME is a blistering documentary portrait about the precariousness of cross-cultural collaboration when Israeli and Palestinian artists work against formidable government and societal opposition. Integrating performance excerpts and punctuated by audience comments based on actual Facebook messages, tweets, and telephone threats, the play presents Weizman, a once famous Israeli TV actress, finding herself in the crosshairs of a social media storm when an old photo of her wearing a “Free Palestine” t-shirt resurfaces during the 2014 war in Gaza. The play explores her partnership with Hassan at the now-shuttered Al-Midan Theatre on the embattled world premiere of Oved Shabbat (retitled The Return for its American debut at Mosaic in 2017). Subsequent censorship controversies emerge at the Akko Alternative Theatre Festival involving Weizman’s work on destroyed Palestinian homes and prison conditions, only to be disputed by the character of Miri Regev, the controversial Cultural Minister of the State of Israel, who makes a surprise visit to accuse the artists of cultural disloyalty. Regev ultimately leads in the prosecution of Palestinian poet, Dareen Tatour, whom Weizman is moved to portray in a defiant solo performance.
New York Theatre Workshop, New York, NY
Geographic Region of Focus: Russian Federation
New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) will collaborate with Russian director Dmitry Krymov in partnership with the New School College of Performing Arts where Dmitry will be in residence from January through February 2019. NYTW will host a 29-hour workshop over the course of two weeks during which Dmitry and his creative team will be provided with the technical and financial resources to support the early stages of his new piece Chaplin and Mikhoels. Additionally, NYTW’s 2050 Directing Fellows and the New School’s graduate directors will be allowed to observe in the style of a master class. The partnership evolves from NYTW’s ongoing desire to create a Directors Institute; to find the means to support the ongoing development of a director’s craft after the director has emerged and becomes employed as a working professional. To date, NYTW has organized four focus groups at Adelphi University and with SDC to engage with directors and artistic directors to air the challenges freelance directors face. Dmitry will be a vital contributor to NYTW’s efforts in building a laboratory dedicated to directors in the field.
Silk Road Rising, Chicago, IL
Geographic Region of Focus: United States of America; Russian Federation; Kazakhstan
Silk Road Rising will organize a two-way artistic exchange between Chicago-based and Moscow-based artists to further develop new plays that explore concepts of belonging, cultural identity, and immigration. Silk Road Rising will partner with Kazak playwright Olzhas Zhanaydarov and Russian playwright Evgeny Kazachkov in presenting Staging the Stans, a series of four plays by playwrights from former Soviet Central Asian states. The pair has selected ten plays representing current theatre in the 'Stans. Of these, three plays will be selected to include in the festival along with Zhanaydarov's play The Store. Zhanaydarov and Kazachkov will travel to Chicago in June 2019 for Staging the Stans, which will feature two-day staged readings of each play. They will open the festival with a workshop production of The Store to ready this piece for a full production in the U.S.
The Global Connections selection panel included Sophie Ancival, assistant producer, American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, MA; Dr. Lillian Manzor, associate professor and chair of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Miami, Miami, FL; and Howard Shalwitz, theatre specialist, Alexandria, VA.
Building upon TCG's core value of Global Citizenship, Round Six of Global Connections aligns with other TCG international activities to maximize impact. Those activities include the Global Theater Initiative (GTI), a partnership that combines the unique reach of TCG’s international programming with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics (the Lab) at Georgetown University’s experience in humanizing global politics through the power of performance. GTI strengthens, nurtures, and promotes global citizenship and international collaboration in the U.S. professional and educational theatre field through programs like World Theatre Day, international-themed convenings, and delegations of U.S. theatre people to international festivals. TCG’s global reach includes numerous programs and services for the field, such as advocacy efforts urging Congress to increase resources to support cultural exchange through the U.S. Department of State, and to enact the Arts Require Timely Service (ARTS) Act, S. 2510, which would require U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to ensure timely processing time for petitions filed by, or on behalf of, nonprofit arts-related organizations. Learn more about TCG and GTI’s international activities here.
Founded in 1969, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies by supporting exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work. www.mellon.org.
For over 55 years, Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for U.S. theatre, has existed to strengthen, nurture, and promote the professional not-for-profit theatre. TCG’s constituency has grown from a handful of groundbreaking theatres to over 700 Member Theatres and affiliate organizations and more than 12,000 individuals nationwide. TCG offers its members networking and knowledge-building opportunities through conferences, events, research, and communications; awards grants, approximately $2 million per year, to theatre companies and individual artists; advocates on the federal level; and through the Global Theater Initiative, TCG's partnership with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, serves as the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute. TCG is North America’s largest independent publisher of dramatic literature, with 16 Pulitzer Prizes for Best Play on the TCG booklist. It also publishes the award-winning American Theatre magazine and ARTSEARCH®, the essential source for a career in the arts. In all of its endeavors, TCG seeks to increase the organizational efficiency of its Member Theatres, cultivate and celebrate the artistic talent and achievements of the field, and promote a larger public understanding of, and appreciation for, the theatre. www.tcg.org.
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