Special Awards in the Arts

Alphabet Rockers (AR) will develop "Shades" (working title), a global hip hop commission, focused on colonialism and colorism, reflecting on themes such as the American vs. global experience, personal community impact, and the value of restorative justice. Since 2007, Alphabet Rockers have been visionary thought leaders and GRAMMY-winners, creating brave spaces to shape a more equitable world through hip hop. AR curates content with the community that centers youth voices. Through this project, AR will work with collaborators, conduct research, and interview at least 25 international artists. AR will also collaborate with many other organizations, both in the U.S. and internationally, that share similar values to AR and are interested in exploring ideas around colonialism and colorism and working towards challenging broken systems.

alphabetrockers.com

Red Clay Sound Haus (RCSH) is a multi-site immersive sound project focusing on the land, love, labor, and legacy of Black San Francisco composed by San Francisco native, Tossie Long. The commissioned project will include recordings of physical places within San Francisco that are threatened by gentrification. Tossie will take recordings and produce new sounds on top of them using Audium’s sound spatialization system. Tossie will create visual projections of the locations that will be seen in the lobby of the theater and perform a series of shows of the commissioned artwork.

audium.org

Road To A Hidden Home shares the experiences of Vietnamese refugees as they establish a new life in America. Displaced by the Vietnam War, they faced the challenge of assimilation while preserving their identity. Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the war's end, the project explores the resilience found in discovering a hidden home. The composition integrates traditional Vietnamese instruments with Western instruments, spoken word, and refugee literature. Authentic refugee voices from interviews will be integrated into the music, revealing their emotions, struggles, and triumphs. Through this project, the stories of Vietnamese refugees will be told, honoring their journey and resilience.

Instrument pictured: T'rung

bloodmoonorchestra.org

Flyaway Productions and composer Xoa Asa are collaborating on a sound score for Flyaway Productions' site-specific dance, ODE TO JANE. Inspired by the Janes, a network of Chicago activists in the pre-Roe v. Wade era, ODE TO JANE connects resistance strategies of the 20th century to women in the SF Tenderloin navigating addiction crises, threats to women's bodies, racial reckoning, and the complex intersection of these realities. Xoa’s score will incorporate recorded interviews with women on the front lines of this struggle and elements of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, transformed to address 21st-century feminist resistance.

flyawayproductions.com

Pōpolohiwa Songs of Resilience & Joy is a song-creation project that will celebrate the untold stories of people of African descent who came to Hawaiʻi as a direct result of colonization and enslavement. Much of the history of African-descended people in Hawaiʻi from the time of King Kamehameha Paiea onward is unknown. This commission will shine a light on the Black experience in the context of the difficult histories of colonization and the missionary presence in the Pacific. The intended audience for this commission is the communities of the Bay Area, Hawaiʻi, and beyond, especially those who have a supportive and respectful relationship with indigenous people of the Pacific Islands and the African American community.

centerforinternationaldance.org

The Sugilanon project will be a Filipino-American epic poem patterned in the aesthetic style of pre-colonial Philippine epic poetry and featuring a suite of original spoken word and jazz music compositions informed by pre-colonial Philippine melodic and polyrhythmic motifs and instrumentation. The suite will tell the story of three generations of lead artist Caroline Cabading’s San Francisco family covering the years 1904-2005. The CD/vinyl/digital release will include a live performance of the Sugilanon suite.

manilatown.org

Oaklash will commission a staged concert by Drag artist and violist OBSIDIENNE OBSURD with original compositions by Paul Wiancko of the Kronos Quartet and accompaniment by the One Found Sound quartet. This new work will make use of a wide variety of experimental sonic techniques as well as visual and performance art components including costuming, video, lip-sync performance, technology, and set design by OBSIDIENNE OBSURD. This project will transform the classical concert into one with a queer sensibility and will raise Drag performance out of the realm of nightlife and onto a large-scale symphonic stage.

oaklash.com

Photo credit: Vita Hewitt/Broke Ass Stuart

Diana Gameros amplifies the stories of people who dream of better futures, the stories of people who migrate, stories of hardship but also stories of love and hope. Festejo reunites musician and composer Diana Gameros with Women’s Audio Mission to arrange, compose, record, and perform an album collection of heavily reimagined Mexican classics and new music. Following the success of her debut award-winning album, Arrullo (2017), Festejo is bolder, brassier, and features a much larger ensemble of musicians and global collaborators that is celebratory and festive.

womensaudiomission.org

dianagameros.com

DarkHeart, a Filipina|x|o Futurism Punk Rock Sci-Fi play, is set in a dystopic diaspora where creativity is outlawed. Mary (played by Sargento), an off-bounder in an authority-controlled corporate kingdom, is arrested for being creative and is detained for Off Planet Work Reprogramming. When Mary’s songs find their way into a rogue recording device during a memory wipe, a special frequency connects her to inner-dimensional entities – Art, Artist, and Heart – with whom she discovers a source of liberating power.

bindlestiffstudio.org

Photo: Clare Adamos

Be Like Water examines the mental health impacts of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies on undocumented families through the story of Lorna, the matriarch of a Filipino American family of four women. Tension builds as they come to terms with their differing immigration statuses and the lies that Lorna tells to keep her adult daughters in the dark about their “illegal” status. The family is thrown into further turmoil when Lorna’s daughter, Leah, decides to leave for the Philippines to see her estranged dying father, knowing she can never return to the US.

brava.org

katevasco.com

Photo: Mark Marking

Marc Anthony Thompson AKA Chocolate Genius Inc. will write and create the world premiere of The N***** Lovers for Campo Santo, a performance piece inspired by the miraculous journey of the Crafts, a Black couple who escaped chattel slavery in antebellum Georgia, with the wife, Ellen, masquerading as a white boy, and her husband, William, playing her slave! The story was made historical in their book “A Thousand Miles to Freedom.” The piece will be written and shaped for an all-Black company of Campo Santo performers aesthetically owning minstrel and masquerade notions to reclaim history in the modern world and theatre. This follows Campo Santo’s history supporting ground-breaking first-time plays by lead artists from an array of backgrounds.

facebook.com/camposantosf

The Truer History of the Chan Family, A Virtual Vaudeville, spoken in English with Chinese subtitles, explores the impact of America’s legacy of anti-Asian legislation and sex trafficking of three generations of the playwright’s Chinese American family – peasants are sold into prostitution and turned traffickers when legitimate employment becomes impossible. The project exposes the racist policies and practices, and surfaces the pain that drives depression and suicide in a Chinese clan, a long-silenced issue for Asian Americans, while offering hope for reconciliation and healing. This pre-recorded video will be streamed free online and shown in-person at watch parties with community partners.

eugeniechantheater.org

OUT of Site: Mighty Real in the Haight is a new collaboration between theater company Eye Zen Presents; writer, minister and public theologian Marvin K. White; and community partner SF Heritage. Through an intensive research process and two 3-month theatrical runs over two years, the collaborating team will explore the hidden history of queer ancestor, Sylvester, providing an accessible historical understanding of racial equity within the queer liberation movement in San Francisco’s Haight neighborhood of the 60’s and 70’s against the backdrop of the civil rights and anti-war movements, student uprisings, feminism, and gay liberation.

eyezen.org

marvinkwhite.com

Photo: Fox Nakai

Adam Ashraf Elsayigh’s new play, Alaa, in collaboration with Dramaturg Salma Zohdi, is based on the real-life story of the Egyptian blogger, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who spent much of the last decade in Cairo’s Tora Prison. In 2011, Abd El-Fattah’s writings made him one of the Egyptian Revolution’s leading youth voices. Today, Abd El-Fattah continues to write from solitary confinement, smuggling treatises to the outside world. Elsayigh’s Alaa invites us to bear witness to one man’s struggle for freedom by juxtaposing physical storytelling and embodied ritual with Abd El-Fattah’s words from his recently published anthology, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.

goldenthread.org

adamaelsayigh.com

DIRTY WHITE TESLAS MAKE ME SAD (DWTMMS) is a performance work written by A.M. Smiley (aka Smiley) about the regentrification of San Francisco and the displacement of Black folks from their neighborhoods. DWTMMS is a testimonial about people and their struggles with hope. The story unfolds over a few days in the life of Sloosh, our protagonist. We follow Sloosh, a young Queer Afro Latina from Bayview Hunters Point caught up in a transcendental rut, as she navigates the City of San Francisco and the consequences of policies that favor new affluence over long-term investment in San Francisco’s most diverse sectors.

magictheatre.org

Chorus of Huertas is a chamber piece that explores the life of California activist Dolores Huerta. Drawing from both the unique activist style of Teatro Campesino and the choreopoetry of Ntozake Shange, the play seeks to offer a highly theatrical and nuanced portrayal of an underrecognized and impactful figure in California, American, and global history. The play aims to empower audiences and renew the activist spirit Dolores cultivated, while paying homage to the revolutionary life she led.

oaklandtheaterproject.org

In Art of Work, through a choreographic mentorship process, Patrick Cruz will explore the intersections between Hip Hop dance, Filipino identities, colonial trauma, and somatic healing work. Through conversations around labor, healing, and dance, the choreographers and dancers become historians and storytellers. The project will culminate in a film that uses dance to explore an understanding of self, family, community, and what it’s like to work in the world as a Filipino American. Art of Work is where dance is in conversation with history, healing, and identity.

aimbayarea.org

pepsf.org

&theruptureisnow. is a multimedia performance choreographed by jose e. abad in collaboration with an all-queer Black cast of interdisciplinary artists: Styles Alexander, Gabriel Christian, Clarissa Dyas, and Stephanie Hewett. Honoring the Black Radical Tradition of experimentation, improvisation, and intergenerational wisdom circles, these artists will engage in the exploration of the expansiveness and future of Black life within the diaspora to create a genre-defying performance that hybridizes improvisation, contemporary dance, electronic music, altar installations, and rituals of healing through somatic work.

houseofbea.com

Adia Tamar Whitaker’s project Following The Road to Ose Tura, is a dance and music response to The Road to Ose Tura, a dance film created by Ifa priestess, dancer, choreographer, and scholar, Efeya Ifadayo Olaberinjo Makala Sampson. Before Sampson transitioned into the ancestral realm, she charged Whitaker and other dance family members with setting the second part of her ancestral dance prayers and completing the dance film she began. Following The Road to Ose Tura is a four-chaptered, site-specific, ritual dance theater performance featuring Whitaker’s choreography, including film projections of Sampson’s work.

dancemissiontheater.org

asedance.com

This new dance project will introduce the tradition of hula ki'i, a type of hula where dancers use puppets to tell the story. This work will encompass the research of classical themes, the construction of the hula puppets, and development in the hula ki'i tradition. Meridith Kawēkiu Aki will work with key collaborators in Hawai'i to expand and deepen her experience in the form. She will then lead members of Hālau Ka Ua Tuahine to construct and dance with the puppets. The project will culminate in a performance featuring the lead artist, the hālau, and key collaborators.

centerforinternationaldance.org

My-Linh will work with the Oakland-based turf/dance theater collective known as Mud Water Theatre to produce a new evening-length performance piece that investigates dance as a method of autoethnographic research and as a pathway to healing. Autoethnography is the reflexive study of self in the context of one's own culture, using personal experience to understand cultural experience. The resulting research will be presented as a staged performance piece that critically and deeply represents the lives and experiences of the participating artists, whose ethnic backgrounds include African-American, Nicaraguan-American, and Filipino-American, and that incorporates artistic disciplines such as dance, storytelling, art technology, and digital media.

mudwatertheatre.com

In Saabit Qadam (Perseverance), Farah Yasmeen Shaikh, with her 25 years of Kathak practice, explores the tumultuous evolution of performance and preservation of the arts in Pakistan. In collaboration with dancers, musicians, writers, and filmmakers, Farah will research and document the evolving style of dance and music that is accepted in that country. The culmination of these collaborations will be performances by Farah, the Noorani Dance Company, and other dancers and musicians of the South Asian arts, incorporating the findings from this research, to honor the persistence of artists in Pakistan, and the power and beauty of what they have created to ensure the survival of arts in their country.

nooranidance.com

Indira Allegra's The Dispersal of a Feeling is Another Subject is an evening-length dance and installation-based performance which explores the choreography of indecision—the everyday movements, tics, utterances, and moments of quiet associated with not knowing what to do next. This extensive, multidisciplinary project will be composed of Allegra's original sculpture and choreography alongside videos and interviews collected by the artist, documenting indecisive moments enacted by people in public spaces. The audience will experience this immersive performance in the round as one continuous happening for 60 minutes.

thelab.org

indiraallegra.com

Inspired by legendary playwright/poet Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf,” COLORED GRRLS is a reimagining of an American theater classic expressed through the lens of contemporary circus. Using circus, aerial arts, dance, and original text, COLORED GRRLS peers into the lives of five women of African descent as they share intimate stories of existing in a world shaped by patriarchy, sexism, racism, and the sisterhood that grows from these shared experiences.

zaccho.org

veronicablairaerial.com

Jazz saxophonist, drummer and composer Howard Wiley will create and record a full suite for an original jazz theater work, “Mattie Mae’s.” Set in Richmond’s massive WWII shipyards and a legendary African-American juke joint as the city leaps from 22,000 immigrant fishermen, railroad and refinery workers, to an industrial powerhouse of 100,000, Wiley’s composition will embody and extend the church, blues and jazz traditions that anchored Richmond’s Black workers and families then and today. As Richmond imagines a post pandemic world so, too, we need to hold to our roots and journey. The full recording will be completed in Spring 2022 with the musical theater premiere in Fall of 2023.

eastbaycenter.org

Dewa Berata’s Sudamala is a musical prayer for healing. In this global age of sickness, Balinese traditional artists are faced with an existential challenge- to create, in isolation, music that has always depended on community and closeness. In the summer of 2021, Pak Dewa will begin working with multidisciplinary collaborators on this suite of nine musical vignettes to be premiered at a Bay Area outdoor venue in the Spring of 2022. Each vignette will focus on an aspect of the Balinese spiritual concept, Tri Harta Karana (divinity, humanity, nature), emphasizing the commonalities and discontinuities of creating and performing with local artists as a Balinese composer in the Bay Area.

gsj.org

The Electronic Lover, an original opera by Berkeley composer Lisa Mezzacappa with a libretto by Beth Lisick. The work explores the naïve moment when we first invited computers into the most intimate aspects of our lives. The digital opera, set in chatrooms in the early 1980s, features a versatile and diverse cast of Bay Area vocalists and instrumentalists. The work will be released as a serial podcast - a pilot episode plus eight-season episodes - over the course of 2021.

dresherensemble.org

PORTER explores the rich history of intergenerational mentorship and oral tradition in the Bay Area, through interviews and archival footage of jazz greats and local legends. Featuring the Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet backed by a 30-piece orchestra, PORTER will premiere a new jazz and orchestral composition, set to the voices, images, and stories of jazz mentors. This work will premiere Spring 2022.

sfjazz.org

Ellen Fullman’s composition Heart Wire for her installation, The Long String Instrument, will be performed with The Living Earth Show. Set in an enormous industrial sized space filled with delicate shimmering thread-like music wires, “Heart Wire” will take the listener on a journey through intricately woven texture and spacious expanse, producing sounds like a chamber orchestra, at times phantom horns rising up, or reed organs and strummed guitars. Fullman’s “Heart Wire”, will synthesize components into a startling new form that might seem to have physical mass or to even be turning inside out. This work will premiere Winter 2021.

thelivingearthshow.com

This project supports the production/presentation of Lalin St. Juste’s debut work, Siren Song: From Silence to Resilience, her first major solo project, which blends R&B, Haitian folkloric influences, experimental acoustic/electronic elements, dance/choreography, and video. St. Juste is best known as the frontwoman of the critically acclaimed Bay Area ensemble, The Seshen. Siren Song will tell St. Juste’s story of growing up as a first-generation Haitian-American girl trapped by societal expectations of her race, gender, and sexuality, coming out as queer and coming into her blackness/identity, in a story of healing and growing into one’s own power, authenticity, and truth. This work will premiere in Spring 2022.

womensaudiomission.org

$50,000

Laveau is a ritual theatre piece that explores the life and work of Marie Laveau, Louisiana Voodoo Queen. Starting from a ceremony in Congo Square in New Orleans through pilgrimage, reverence rituals, song and dance, we are guided into a lineage of mysteries that both catalyzes the spirit of Marie Laveau and reveals a higher calling. This premiere will be a short film playlet of the evolving stories of both Laveau’s eternal ritual powers and the performance rituals playwright Britney Frazier, director Margo Hall, and performer Dezi Soléy have taken the project through. This new piece will have video direction by Joan Osato and will be presented by Campo Santo in Spring 2021. A celebration of Black Women, this multi-disciplinary performance ritual entwines storytelling with ceremony, honoring cultural tradition, and challenging the current idea of what engaging Black Theatre is and “should be.”

camposantosf.tumblr.com

$50,000

Featuring actors from age 80 to 8, this performance shaped in collaboration with a multigenerational, multi-bodied ensemble of thirteen will grapple with the complexities of how adults shape and influence children -- definitively and inadvertently wielding the power of words and gesture to create the cultural constructs that we struggle against today. Subverting adult language in our youth’s mouths, and our children’s worldview in our elder’s mouths, this piece will seek to discomfit the familiar and make us consider the power we wield over our children and therefore a future society. This work will premiere in Spring 2021.

www.crowdedfire.org

Prieto is an autobiographical one-man show. Known for his frequent exploration into themes of migration and sexuality, Reyes takes his audience on a journey into his experience growing up queer in the ‘hood of East San Jose.

Through the playful, lovably naive lense of an 8-year-old Reyes, Prieto tells the story of an overprotective grandmother who recycles bottles to support her family while her grandson wonders why they can’t have money like his friends. It tells the story of chismosa vecinas (gossipy neighbors) who peek through their windows and watch as the neighborhood boys tease young Reyes for “acting like a girl.” To escape from the taunting and the daily toil, 8-year-old Reyes creates an imaginary world for himself -- one made up of books and ’90s R&B.

Reyes masterfully navigates topics that are often grave and entrenched in struggle, and he instead offers levity and celebration of becoming his full self against the backdrop of poverty, politics, and an unshakable spirit. Prieto remains unabashed and unapologetic in its critique of oppressive laws and traditions while offering truth, clarity, and above all joy.

yosimarreyes.com/bio

$50,000

The proposed work involves the development of a unique genre originated by Ms. Floresislas – a Latinx trilingual play incorporating English, Spanish, and American Sign Language and deaf actors. Drawing on her life experience, the playwright examines themes and topics that speak to diverse audiences of marginalized groups in our society, including those who have a voice and those who do not. The new piece will explore issues of mental-health, and isolation at a multi-generational level, all while inspiring people to reach out and connect with one other in the most basic level of humanity. This work will premiere in Fall 2022.

$50,000

She Who Is Queen will be an evening-length dance piece with live music by choreographer Susana Arenas Pedroso, artistic director of Arenas Dance Company. An expansion of her Manos de Mujer a la Obra (Women’s Hands at Work), Susana’s new work will be based on the tale of Ochún Ada Ara, and draw from her expertise in Afro-Cuban folkloric sacred dance. CubaCaribe will present the new work with a cast of approximately 25 in San Francisco, either as part of its annual CubaCaribe Festival of Dance and Music or a stand-alone weekend of performances. This work will premiere in the Spring of 2020

cubacaribe.org

Photo: Brooke Anderson

$50,000

The Big Reveal is a multi-faceted participatory, day long performance event created by Fog Beast directors Melecio Estrella and Andrew Ward for a cast of seven. Presented at the Asian Art Museum, The Big Reveal drew on family histories and immigration stories to consider questions of access and belonging, revealing unspoken collective agreements that we all share. The museum setting was transformed between an interactive learning environment and an immersive dance theater performance with an original musical score performed live by Ben Juodvalkis. This work premiered on July 18, 2019.

dancersgroup.org

Photo: Tony Nguyen

$50,000

Between Underground and Skyworld (BTW US), emerges from Dancing Earth’s director Rulan Tangen inviting diasporic intergenerational communities for gatherings to envision a collective, Indigenous-centered future that considers practical, spiritual, and cultural expressions of renewable energy. Interdisciplinary Indigenous artists translate these diverse intertribal perspectives into an embodied story experience that moves from outdoor urban nature space to indoor ritual theater dreamscape, following the journey of escapees from apocalypse to remembering ancestral wisdom, becoming Indigenous eco-warrior superheroes! This work will preview in Fall 2020 and premiere in Fall 2020.

dancingearth.org

$50,000

Kekeli (Enlightenment) is a coming of age story that follows a 17 year-old African-American male dancer who, seeking enlightenment, takes a journey through ancient cultural traditions of Ghana. Inspired by a real life student of his, CK Ladzekpo, a venerable scholar, master dancer, drummer, and choreographer, will collaborate with his student, Aziza, to weld hip-hop, aerial dance, Afro-Pop and Anlo-Ewe dance/drumming rituals into a searing look at acceptance, personal identity, and heritage through the lens of a dance: the “blood and bone of African culture.” This work will premiere in Spring 2019.

eastbaycenter.org

$50,000

Living in the Belly of the Eagle is a dance theater piece created by Alleluia Panis in collaboration with composer Joshua Icban and media artist Wilfred Galila that explores the painful legacy of internalized racism and misogyny that manifests in overt and stealth exploitation and xenophobia within the Pilipino community in pursuit of the American Dream. This project will explore the ways Pilipinos ‘live in the belly of the eagle’—a metaphor for our lives and labor in the United States and the harsh, exploitative realities of human trafficking within our community. This work will premiere in Spring 2021.

kularts-sf.org

$50,000

Through Butoh, modern dance techniques, multimedia and performance art, POOLREADY! will explore the complexities of climate change, and the futility of individuals being able to act collectively in their self-interest and for the good of humanity. Ledoh will choreograph and perform in the piece as a slightly comic character, prepared for the next Noachian flood-at the ready, with floaties, snorkel and fins. This performance will take place within an immersive video environment and LED light-framed cube that can facilitate site-specific staging. This work premiered in May 2019 in a co-production with Circuit Network.

ledoh.org