Round 6 Cycle C Recipients:

ON the ROAD

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 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 Imagination Stage Dance Theatre instructors and students. Piano Theatre performers specialize in narrative storytelling through movement. By combining their skills with those of Imagination Stage 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 spoken language. In addition, the Piano Theatre performers and Imagination Stage dancers will collaborate with participants of other Imagination Stage programs, including recent refugees from Central America with limited English acquisition, and members of Imagination Stage’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 Imagination Stage 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.

Out of Hand Theater, Atlanta, GA
Geographic Region of Focus: Zambia; United States of America
Out of Hand’s Artistic Directors will travel to Lusaka, Zambia, to grow their relationship with The Hub Theatre, led by Suzyika Nyimbili. They will lead workshops in their methods for devising and producing theatre with the Hub Theatre ensemble, and will learn about the Hub’s methods of community engagement in both the capital of Lusaka and the village of Lufwanyama. They will conduct readings together of scripts developed by the Hub to learn about their process of creating work around hidden or forgotten history. They will attend a Hub Theatre performance and visit Barefeet Theatre, an NGO empowering impoverished youth through theater, and the University of Zambia Drama Society. As the Hub is a start-up company in its second year, Out of Hand Theater will consult with Suzyika on ways to leverage digital media to grow his company, and share their experience growing and maintaining an ensemble theatre operating without a permanent home. Finally, they will begin the work of planning a collaboration with the Hub, combining their techniques for arts-based, community-led transformation to address local stories and issues that are important to both Lukasa and Atlanta, perhaps including HIV.

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

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.

Round 6 Cycle B Recipients:
ON the ROAD

Margarita Blush, Mansfield, CT
Margarita Blush will travel to Sofia, Bulgaria to work with renowned Bulgarian scenographer, Svila Velichkova, on the conceptual framework, aesthetic, and design of The Rule of the World, an original theatre production that examines the themes of injustice and disillusionment. The title is inspired by a quote from Kafka’s iconic book, The Trial: "Depressing view…The lie made into the rule of the world.” The show will feature live performance, puppetry, movement, and original script, scenography, and music.

Chinese Theatre Works, Long Island City, NY
Chinese Theatre Works (CTW) and Maleonn Studio (Shanghai, China) will embark on the first stage of a year-long collaboration to create and produce Three Women - Many Plays, an original production incorporating traditional and contemporary shadow theatre, digital animation, opera, dance, and film. The piece will tell the stories of three women who pioneered traditional Chinese shadow theatre in the U.S. CTW company members will travel to Shanghai for a three-week residency at Maleonn Studio, share skills, experiment with blending shadow puppets, digital animation, and sound, and develop the script, design, and music concepts.

GALA Hispanic Theatre, Washington, DC
GALA's co-founder and producing artistic director, Hugo Medrano, will travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina to meet and work with leading theatre artists from different sectors of the field including Jorge Telerman, director of the Complejo Teatral, and Horacio Peña, one of the city's leading independent actors. Hugo will learn about recent developments in Argentina and the Southern Cone (comprising Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile), particularly in musical theatre. Additionally, he will identify future collaborators, including independent artists and companies who could travel to DC for residencies, play development, and/or co-productions in future seasons.

Handan Ozbilgin, New York, NY
Handan Ozbilgin will travel to Greece to participate in a global exchange workshop with emerging Greek playwrights curated by Aktina Stathaki (Athens, Greece) and led by the playwright, Jeton Neziraj (Prishtina, Kosovo). This workshop includes a staged reading of Jeton's play, Yue Madeleine Yue, which Handan will direct, and a gathering with the playwrights to share Handan’s experiences working with Greek playwright, Maria Efstathiadi, on her play Privatopia, an experience that encapsulates Handan’s key artistic principles: process, time, collaboration, and participation.

Theater Grottesco, Santa Fe, NM
Theater Grottesco and Kamchatka Theatre will share street-theatre techniques based upon the theme of immigration. Kamchatka Theatre artistic director, Adrian Schvarzstein, will come to Santa Fe to lead Kamchatka’s award-winning workshop MIGRAR, leading participants to see their homes as if for the first time. The workshop will open with cultural protocols led by Dancing Earth to acknowledge the land as Tewa territory, make a small medicine gift, and announce lineages and intentions. Then members of Theater Grottesco will join Kamchatka Theatre in Barcelona to further the discussion and explore new stylistic elements that could enrich the workshop.

Theatre of the Oppressed NYC, New York, NY
Theatre of the Oppressed NYC (TONYC) will send three artists to Muktadhara, the bi-annual international festival of practice and performance hosted by Jana Sanskriti Centre for Theatre of the Oppressed in West Bengal, India. During the festival, three actor-facilitators (“Jokers”) who are directly impacted by the issues in TONYC's plays will have the opportunity to learn from, teach, and create with Theatre of the Oppressed practitioners from around the world. After the festival, the TONYC artists will stay with Jana Sanskriti for two days of additional exchange, focusing on how each organization develops artistic leadership from the populations most directly affected by injustice.

Touchstone Theatre, Bethlehem, PA
Community-based theatre practitioners Touchstone Theatre will travel to Goleniów, Poland to meet and work in tandem with Teatr Brama as they plan for and execute their annual theatre festival, Bramat. While in residency, Touchstone personnel will observe practices used in the realization of Bramat, particularly practices wherein Brama’s artists work alongside Goleniów community members in developing performances for the festival. In addition, this Bramat will host Caravan Next, a European Union-funded Social Community Theatre collaborative featuring some of Europe’s top community-based practitioners, allowing for a broader cross-pollination of Touchstone methodologies with those of Caravan Next members.

IN the LAB

CarlosAlexis Cruz, Charlotte, NC
CarlosAlexis Cruz will continue his collaboration with Alicia Martinez-Alvarez and Laboratorio de La Máscara by developing a new work inspired by the reality of Central American immigrants’ difficult path through Mexico to the U.S. Inspired by the Spanish novella, Lazarillo de tormes, and the Picaresque genre, their new work, Pícaro, will tell the story of a 13-year old boy from Guatemala forced by circumstance to leave his family and travel through Mexico. Incorporating elements of contemporary circus arts, fast-paced comedy, masks, magic, and music, the audience will play the role of accomplices in the re-telling of this classic tale. Combining their specialties within the physical theatre realm, CarlosAlexis and his collaborators will embark in workshops to finish creating the show and bring Pícaro to its first main stage presentation.

Cornerstone Theater Company, Los Angeles, CA
Building upon their collaboration in March 2017, Cornerstone Theater Company will host six artists from the Stut Theater and Van der Hoeven Clinic, (both based in Utrecht, Netherlands) in Los Angeles, California. During Fall 2018, they will participate in an exchange of methodology, art making, experiential learning, and planning around a future collaboration. While in Los Angeles, the international artists will participate as both contributors and observers to Cornerstone’s community-engaged theatre-making residency in Watts, a 2.12-square mile neighborhood in South Los Angeles. Their shared objective is to create a clear path for an 18 to 24-month international collaborative residency to make a new play. Their new community engaged theatrical work is planned to premier at the eighth International Community Arts Festival (ICAF) in Rotterdam, Netherlands in March of 2020.

Kevin Doyle, New York, NY
Playwright and director, Kevin Doyle will return to Dhaka, Bangladesh and resume work with six survivors of the 2012 Tazreen factory fire in Bangladesh who he first met in 2016 under a travel grant from the Asian Cultural Council. He and the survivors will collaborate with noted Bangladeshi theatre, performance art, and puppet theatre experts to develop a dramaturgical vocabulary to better frame their stories theatrically in an interdisciplinary theatre project titled TRIANGLE / TAZREEN. The piece will focus on the garment industry through the lens of the workers who survived the Tazreen fire and will then contrast their experiences with the perspectives of workers involved in the nearly identical 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York.

La Peña Cultural Center, Berkeley, CA
Director Lakin Valdez and playwright Andrew Saito will continue to create Man of Rabinal, a two-person multidisciplinary play that explores the history, meaning, and present situation of the Rabinal Achí, an 800-year-old pre-Columbian Mayan dance-drama about a conflict between two rival kingdoms. Central to their process and the resulting play is their growing relationship with the members of Asociación Xajooj Tun, the Mayan Achí performance troupe in Rabinal, Guatemala, that is sworn to keep this dance-drama alive. Man of Rabinal will use docudrama to explore and share Valdez and Saito's evolving relationship with the ancient text, and the Mayan actors in Guatemala.

Roberta Levitow, Santa Monica, CA
Roberta Levitow will continue her collaboration with Eric Wainaina in Nairobi, Kenya through Rainmaker Ltd’s NBO Musical Theatre Initiative, which aims to develop and produce new musical theatre written, composed, and performed by African artists in Africa and beyond. This four-year initiative, based in Kenya, works through collaboration with a range of international mentors, including U.S. artists from the Sundance Institute Theatre Program and artist-teachers from the NYU Musical Theatre Writing Graduate Program. Roberta and Eric along with producer Angela Wachuka and their consultant, the vocalist and songwriter Somi, will take a crucial step in the project’s process by engaging in a 10-day workshop to develop 16 in-progress musical theatre projects.

Theater Breaking Through Barriers, New York, NY
Theater Breaking Through Barriers (TBTB) will collaborate with the BIRD Theatre to host the First International Symposium for Disabled Theatre during the opening week of the 11th BIRD International Theatre Festival this September. Following TBTB's first appearance at The 7th BIRD International Theatre Festival in 2014, BIRD Artistic Director, Makoto Nakashima, became interested in developing theatrical programming with disabled artists. In 2015 he created The Freedom Theatre, an offshoot of the BIRD Company, integrating disabled and non-disabled artists. Like TBTB, The BIRD Theatre wishes to alter perceptions of disability in Japan. Their collaborative symposium will mark a signficant first step in this process.

PANELISTS INCLUDED:

Simón Hanukai, Theatre Director, Pantin, France; Ouida Maedel, Grants Manager, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington, DC; and MK Wegmann, Independent Consultant, MK Arts Co, New Orleans, LA

Round 6 Cycle A Recipients:
ON the ROAD

Annalisa Dias, Washington, DC
Annalisa Dias and DeLesslin George-Warren will continue their artistic exploration of the effects of global colonialism and unrestrained capitalism on all forms of life experiencing the impending signs of catastrophic climate change, in a new collaboration with Sámi Center for Contemporary Art in northern Norway. They will use the residency to speak with local Sami (indigenous) communities about the already unfolding effects of climate change in their communities. This residency has two goals: 1. to create a multimedia album using found and processed sounds and visual media presented through an interactive website, and 2. to complete a crucial stage of research in contemplative arts practice leading to the production of Annalisa's full-length play, The Earth, That is Sufficient, to be produced by The Welders in 2019.

EgoPo Classic Theatre, Philadelphia, PA
Artistic and administrative representatives from EgoPo will travel to Central Java over two weeks to train with Javanese artists, attend Javanese performance experiences and establish connections for a future collaborative production of the Ramayana. Re-establishing cultural exchange with Indonesia will bring new understanding of the diversity of the Muslim world to U.S. audiences in a time of growing suspicion and xenophobia. The project also focuses on building a unique cultural experience based on Javanese long-form performance events to reinvigorate and expand U.S. theatre-going audiences.

Ismail Khalidi, New York, NY
Playwright and director, Ismail Khalidi, will collaborate with director/producer Aliya Khalidi, in association with Dar El Nimer Center for Palestinian Art and Culture in Beirut. They will develop Ismail’s solo play, Foot, which has been translated into Arabic by Eyas Younis and was selected to be part of Dar El Nimer's Stories of Palestine festival. He will direct the play, which will be performed by a local actor and will tour to Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut.

Emily Mendelsohn, Bronx, NY
U.S. object theater director, Emily Mendelsohn, and Ugandan short story writer Doreen Baingana will spend two weeks in Kampala to explore adapting Baingana's story about a woman's journey across Kampala to sell used clothes. This workshop will help both find shared vocabulary across discipline and culture, as they work towards a new object theatre piece that explores migration, home and memory through everyday journeys in Kampala and San Francisco.

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington, DC
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company will collaborate with a Zimbabwean theatre director who will serve as assistant director and Shona cultural consultant on their production of Danai Gurira's Familiar during their 2017-18 season. The cultural consultant will engage in dialogue about accurate representation of Familiar's Zimbabwean characters and references to Shona cultural traditions. Furthermore, this will be the Zimbabwean artist’s first time working at a theatre in the U.S., which she views as a crucial step for her career and to advance her goals towards building capacity for Zimbabwe's theatre industry.

IN the LAB

Ty Defoe, New York, NY
Long term collaborators Ty Defoe (citizen of the Oneida/Ojibwe Nations) and Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota), co-founders of Indigenous Direction, will deepen their artistic partnership and continue a two-year collaboration with Native Hawaiian and Pacific Island artists through PA'I Foundation and the University of South Pacific, Fiji. This project will engage members of four indigenous nations in an effort to decolonize theatre practices and create an indigenized community-engaged theatre piece, Water is Sacred.

W David Hancock, St Paul, MN
W David Hancock is in the process of co-authoring Cathexis with Nick Millett, a participative judicial-theatrical event which imagines the performance space as an interactive tribunal of the future. The trans-media, multi-national collaboration is partly supported by the European Union's Creative Europe program as a pilot project to create a theatre work that incorporates socio-technological research and open innovation.

Wendy Jehlen, Somerville, MA
Wendy Jehlen will co-create The Conference of the Birds, an evening-length movement theatre work inspired by the epic poem of Farid Ud din Attar and embodying stories gathered from modern-day refugees and other migrants. Collaborating artists will come together from eight countries and five continents. Commissioned by Boston Center for the Arts, created by ANIKAYA Dance Theater, funded by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, Jacob's Pillow, New England Foundation for the Arts, The Boston Foundation, and the James K. Spriggs Charitable Foundation, a Fidelity Charitable donor-advised fund, and the Kates Foundation.

Zoey Martinson, Brooklyn, NY
Writer, director and actor, Zoey Martinson, will travel to Berlin, Germany with her company Smoke & Mirrors Collaborative to continue development of #HASHTAGPROJECT with a creative team from the U.S., Germany and China. The #HashtagProject is a theatrical experiment in the creation of extremist movements and online protests. A collaboration between theatre artists and interactive technology designers, #HashtagProject translates online social interactions into an immersive and surprising live performance event where the audience makes the decisions about what happens next.

Ron Ragin, New Orleans, LA
Ron Ragin and co-director, Rebecca Mwase, will bring two performing artists from Ghana to participate in the remaining development process and perform in the premiere ensemble of Vessels, a seven-woman harmonic meditation on the Middle Passage that seeks to answer the question "what does freedom sound like in a space of confinement?" The work will debut in New Orleans in Fall 2018, and the collaborators' presence and participation in the show will deepen the transatlantic dialogue that is critical to amplifying the healing potential of this project.

Tricklock Company, Albuquerque, NM
Tricklock Company will travel to Colombia to embark on the second phase of their international collaboration, Mother of Exiles. Tricklock will be joined by Dagmara Zabska of Poland and Lucho Guzman of Colombia to expand the stories and create a theatrical structure inspired by Colombian issues and policies on immigration. The company will continue their research and rehearse new facets of the work before performing two shows with audience feedback.

PANELISTS INCLUDED:

Philip Boehm, Artistic Director, Upstream Theater, St. Louis, MO; Tracy Cameron Francis, Free-lance director, Portland, OR; and Anthony Moseley, Artistic Director, Collaboraction, Chicago, IL.

Round 5 Cycle B Recipients:
ON the ROAD

ArtsEmerson
HowlRound: A Knowledge Commons by and for the Theater Community (Boston, MA), will meet three nationally focused Canadian theatre organizations: the National Theatre School in Montreal, the theatre think-tank SpiderWebShow in Toronto, and The Playwrights Theatre Centre in Vancouver. The goal of these new partnerships is to facilitate the creation of more knowledge, dialogue, and connection between the many aesthetically and culturally diverse theatre communities that are isolated from each other within Canada, and between Canada and the U.S. These three companies are also interested in media content such as livestreaming and online curation—skills that HowlRound is versed in and eager to share.

Simón Adinia Hanukai
Director Simón Adinia Hanukai (Brooklyn, NY) will visit Istanbul, Turkey, and Dubai, United Arab Emirates to solidify organizational and artistic partners for the implementation of Living Altar, a multi-disciplinary performative celebration of the lives of individuals killed in conflict, regardless of origin, gender, religion, status, and profession. In Turkey, he will also visit the bordertown of Gaziantep, which is surrounded by over a dozen refugee camps, to meet individuals affected by the Syrian conflict and to connect with NGOs working there. In Living Altar, through successive 30-minute performance pieces, casualties are given a name, face, story, and equal value. Each piece is based on surveys completed by those close to the deceased. Living Altar will be presented in four cities—New York, Paris, Istanbul, and Dubai—and performed around the clock by dozens of artists from various disciplines in a storefront-like space that is visible and easily accessible to the audience of passers-by. Simón is the co-artistic director of Kaimera Productions, a live-performance company based in New York and Paris.

Honolulu Theatre For Youth
Honolulu Theatre for Youth (Honolulu, HI), a company dedicated to telling stories of Pacific life and cultures, will collaborate with spoken-word poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner of the Republic of the Marshall Islands to foster writing by Pacific Nation writers. Director and playwright Daniel A. Kelin, II will travel to the Marshall Islands, with Jetnil-Kijiner and writers, to participate in discourse and workshops about the displacement of islanders from their homes due to impending climate threats such as the rising of the Pacific Ocean. The collaborators desire to develop a site-responsive theatre event to be presented in the Marshall Islands and Hawaii.

John Jarboe
John Jarboe (Philadelphia, PA) will engage in a 10-day research trip to Berlin, Germany, to study the history and contemporary practice of Berlin Cabaret with Dieter Rita Scholl, a star of the Berlin scene. Scholl will act as an ambassador for Berlin cabaret and introduce Jarboe to local artists. Simultaneously, they will engage in a workshop to share their cabaret practices with each other. This will be a pilot for a larger project thatseeks to document and share contemporary cabaret practice around the world so that artists can access each other's work more easily across borders.

Mel Krodman
Creator and performer Melissa Krodman (Philadelphia, PA) will engage in a studio-based artistic exchange of ensemble devising processes, tools, exercises, methods, aesthetics, and values with the Slovenian director Nina Lampic and a team of collaborators from Berlin, Germany and Ljubljana, Slovenia. The project will focus on the creation of a full-length performance work entitled A Potential Performance to be developed in these two cities. Participating in a lineage of theatre ensembles creating original work, this project honors the sharing of skills and practices as a means of evolving individual and collective artistic practices, and the field at large.

Kaneza Schaal
Theatre artist Kaneza Schaal (Brooklyn, NY) and her collaborators will travel to Rwanda for a creative and cultural exchange centered on theatre that honors the dead. Drawing from her theatre piece Go Forth, which was inspired by her experience of Rwandese ritualized grieving process, Schaal's team will collaborate with Rwandan theatre director, Hope Azeda, to create a theatrical work for Kigali's Ubumuntu Theater Festival. Azeda's theatrical tradition is rooted in dynamic story telling traditions, and Schaal's theatrical tradition comes from Experiential Theatre that integrates different artistic mediums. Through this exchange, both artists will expand and deepen their aesthetic repertoire and creative tool set.

IN the LAB

Bond Street Theatre
Bond Street Theatre (New York, NY) and Thukhuma Khayeethe are continuing to develop a dual-­language version of Ben Jonson's 1605 play Volpone, titled Volpone­Yangon, combining contemporary theatre techniques and Burmese traditions. Bond Street Theatre will complete the production and premiere it publicly in Yangon and Mandalay, which they had been unable to do previously due to potential political repercussions. The aim of the project is to a) help revitalize contemporary theatre in Myanmar, b) further Thukhuma Khayeethe's ability to create innovative theatre, and c) use theatre as a tool to promote awareness and dialogue around social and political issues.

GALA Hispanic Theatre
Director Arellano Garcia, composer David Peralto, and choreographer Andoni Larrabeiti will travel to D.C. to conduct a workshop on classical Spanish theater, movement, and voice with GALA Hispanic Theatre (Washington, DC) company members and additional Latino artists. This project will bring together outstanding Spanish artists of diverse disciplines with Latino and non-Latino artists based in Washington, DC and New York City. The workshop will develop a new dramatic work based on the life and times of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. The new play, under the working title Cervantes: El último Quijote/The Last Quixote, will be developed in collaboration with Spanish playwright/director Jordi Casanovas and the artistic team. The play will examine the work and life of Cervantes, which will provide the Spanish collaborators the opportunity to work with Latino artists who are not familiar with the classical language and society of Cervantes's time but are able to bring distinctive perspectives to the work.

Rebecca Chifuniro Mwase
Rebecca Mwase (New Orleans, LA) will travel to Accra, Ghana with members of the Vessels creative team—co-director, Ron Ragin, and designer, Jeffrey Becker—to work with David Quaye and members of the University of Ghana Legon Dance Department. In collaboration with performers from the University of Legon graduate and undergraduate programs, they will develop choreography, movement, and song for Vessels and envision how to further their international collaboration throughout the creation of the piece. Vessels is a seven-woman performance on a boat floating on the Mississippi River that explores song as the primary coping mechanism for enslaved African people during the Middle Passage. Utilizing songs and other spiritual technologies of the African diaspora, Vessels explores our ability to transform and transcend.

Lilliam Vega
Cuban-born, U.S.-based theatre director Lilliam Vega (Miami, FL), in collaboration with director Flora Lauten, playwright Raquel Carrió of Teatro Buendía in Havana, and filmmaker Dinorah de Jesús Rodríguez, will develop a play with multimedia on the subject of gender violence in Latin America and among Latinas in the U.S. The residency will support research and development of the play, including the gathering of archival imagery and footage, as well as an initial staging of the work with actors from both companies. This work will be featured in the Festival of Latin American Women's Theater, and be presented and hosted by El Ingenio Teatro in Miami in Spring 2017.

PANELISTS INCLUDED:

Sarah Bishop-Stone, programming director, FringeArts, Philadelphia, PA; Evren Odcikin, director of marketing and new plays, Golden Thread Productions, San Francisco, CA; Kyoung H. Park, artistic director, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat, Brooklyn, NY; and Lisa Portes, head of MFA Directing, The Theatre School at DePaul University.

Round 5 Cycle A Recipients:

ON the ROAD

Boom Arts, Inc.
Boom Arts, Inc. (Portland, OR), a presenter and producer of socially engaged global theatre, and ILBIJERRI Theatre Company, Australia's leading and longest-running Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander theatre company, will engage in a two-part exploratory exchange. Through an artist talk in Portland by ILBIJERRI's core artists in February 2016, and a trip by Boom Arts' curator and producer to attend the world premiere of ILBIJERRI's newest work Blood on the Dance Floor in Melbourne in May 2016, Boom Arts and ILBIJERRI will begin to envision how ILBIJERRI might make an artistic and social impact in Portland.

Dell'Arte International
Dell’Arte International’s (Blue Lake, CA) founding artistic director Joan Schirle will collaborate with Norwegian/Danish sculptor Marit Benthe Norheim to conceive Life-Boats, a theatrical performance in/on/around three women-shaped ferro-concrete boats made by Norheim. The boats will be launched in Aarhus in June 2016 and will also be launched into European waterways in 2017 from Aarhus, the 2017 European Cultural Capital. Life-Boats is an international-sailing, social-participatory art project and the final project will involve women actors from the Americas (Mexico, Brazil, Canada, U.S.) in an international cultural exchange, celebrating rivers and artists as connectors of people and independent of borders.

Jason Lasky
Jason Lasky (Shanghai, China) will establish a new collaborative relationship with the citizens, artists, and theatres of the city of Murmansk, Russia that will lead to the creation of a new play titled 40 Days of Night. In the first phase of the 40 Days of Night project, Lasky will engage in interviews, Q&A sessions, cultural visits, and workshop exchanges. His goal is to jointly create a full production of the play in Murmansk to mark the city's 100th anniversary that he will present in the United States as a means of furthering the cultural exchange.

Tricklock Company
Tricklock Company’s (Albuquerque, NM) artistic director Juli Hendren, along with four Tricklock Company members, will travel to Bogotá, Colombia to begin work on a new collaborative performance with Colombian clown master Luis "Lucho" Guzman Cardozo. In addition to working on this new piece, Tricklock members will meet with artists from PortalEscena, a collective of Colombian artists, in an effort to create stronger relationships between Tricklock and Colombian artists. Tricklock will also attend performances at the Ibero-American Theater Festival of Bogotá to meet with producers to further the connection between South American theatre artists, Tricklock Company, and their Revolutions International Theatre Festival.

IN the LAB

Latinos Progresando
Latinos Progresando’s theatre, Teatro Americano (Chicago, IL), will collaborate with OPEN Center for the Arts and Teatro La Capilla with the goal that Teatro Americano will be able to learn fundamentals of contemporary Mexican theatre to incorporate into its programming. Members of Teatro Americano will travel to Mexico City, Mexico, where Teatro La Capilla has been promoting contemporary Mexican theatre for over 60 years. Teaching artists from Teatro La Capilla will host the group for one week and provide contemporary Mexican theatre workshops, from which Teatro Americano and OPEN artists will learn components to be incorporated into a performance piece that tours Chicago.

Sage Lewis
Border Labs is a performance and social exchange between artists, small organizations, and audiences in Los Angeles and Tijuana. The collaborators of this program, including Sage Lewis (Los Angeles, CA), will produce a second series of Labs in both cities that expands upon their pilot exchange launched in January 2015. During the weekends of February 12-14 and 19-21, artists will travel to each city, share work and conversation about performance, collaborate in a "portal" between cities, and see local performance. Through home stays and shared meals, Border Labs sets a personal tone for exchange between Los Angeles and Tijuana's thriving experimental performance scenes, and their political, social, and cultural context.

Mabou Mines
Mabou Mines (New York, NY) artistic director Terry O'Reilly (易光海) will engage in a six week residency in Taiwan in the development of his play My Sunshine Book at the Bamboo Curtain Studio in cooperation Taipei Artist Village and Treasure Hill (TAV/TH). The piece originated during a three-month artist residency at TAV/TH with the assistance of the Asian Cultural Council in Taipei, and continued during O'Reilly's 2014-2015 Fulbright in Taiwan. This will be the second phase of the development of the piece in Taiwan with Taiwanese artists and is supported by the Asian Cultural Council in New York. Their work will include intensive rehearsals with a focus on the interplay of the full-scale projection of miniature puppetry with physical performance.

Machine Project
Machine Project (Los Angeles, CA) and founder Mark Allen will host a 10-day intensive collaborative script writing workshop with collaborators Jon Rubin and Sazmanab, an independent non-profit art space in Tehran, Iran. Their work will encompass research and formulation of the script for The Sitcom, a transnational theatrical project using the form of a domestic comedy to investigate the cultural misrepresentations that characterize current U.S. relations with Iran.

PANELISTS INCLUDED:

James Haskins, managing director, The Wilma Theater, Philadelphia, PA; Erwin Maas, director, teacher, and international performing arts advocate, West New York, NJ; and Joanna Ruf, managing director, The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, Georgetown University.

Round 4 Cycle B Recipients:

ON the ROAD

Chinese Theatre Works
Chinese Theatre Works, (Long Island City, NY) company members will meet with members of the Yangzhou Puppet Theater in Yangzhou, China (one of the foremost puppet theaters in China) for two weeks beginning in early July 2015. The purpose of the meetings are: to establish long-term personal and working relationships between the artistic staffs of both companies that will further their missions and artistic capacities in both China and the U.S.; to discuss and lay the groundwork for future collaborative projects; and trade technical knowledge and skill sets.

Imagination Stage
Imagination Stage (Bethesda, MD) artists will foster a relationship with Barcelona's Mons Dansa to explore new possibilities for visual theatre and movement in Theatre for the Very Young (TVY) productions. Mons Dansa is an expert in highly imaginative movement-based work for audiences 1-5 and incorporates innovative and fun production elements into its work. Imagination Stage will share their experiences in story-telling and building an interactive experience, as well as knowledge of the early childhood audience. Through the exchange with Mons Dansa, they hope to strengthen and grow their TVY offerings.

Jeremy Kamps
Playwright Jeremy Kamps (Brooklyn, NY) will co-facilitate a drama workshop with Kenyan theatre artists for women who work at "flower farms" in Naivasha, Kenya as a way to collaborate across cultures. Secondarily, this will be research through experience for a play he is writing about the life of a rose. The play will follow a rose from the woman who picks it, to the pilots who transport it, to the storeowners who sell it and the person who receives it. While the drama workshop is research, its primary purpose is to be a full, cross-cultural experience unto itself.

Kyoung H. Park
Playwright and director Kyoung H. Park (Brooklyn, NY) will travel to Santiago, Chile for an artistic residency at the Centre Gabriela Mistral, GAM, to write and direct a workshop of K-ONDA Hamlet, a new performance piece about a group of young performers who occupied GAM's public squares to dance choreographies inspired by Korean pop music. With support from GAM's Artistic Director, Javier Ibacache, Kyoung's Pacific Beat's TALA will also be discussed in a public forum in the context of GAM's current season, which celebrates the 70th Anniversary of Gabriela Mistral's Nobel Prize awarding, and lay the groundwork for TALA's Chilean premiere at GAM in 2016

Riti Sachdeva
Riti Sachdeva (Brooklyn, NY), author of the stage play Other Farmers' Fields, will collaborate with kathakali dance theatre interpreter and practitioners, Viswanath Kaladharan and Shanmukhan Kalamandalam, to start the process of adapting Other Farmers' Fields (OFF) to kathakali form. She will travel to Kerala, India for a five-week intensive collaboration to interpret her script into kathakali context and build a movement vocabulary for each character and scene. This would be the beginning stage of a multi-stage process of adapting the text, training U.S. based actors, and producing OFF as a hybrid western stage play/ kathakali drama.

Indika Senanayake
Indika Senanayake (New York, NY) plans to travel to Colombo, Sri Lanka with the acclaimed Chilean playwright and director Guillermo Calderón. They will collaborate with artists in Sri Lanka on a production of Villa, his play in which three women reckon with the legacy of a notorious Pinochet-era torture site. Guillermo will direct the production, and Indika will act and co-produce, initiating an artistic conversation between theatre-makers from these two countries with strongly resonant experiences of national trauma on opposite ends of the world.

ARTFARM
ARTFARM’s (Middletown, CT) artistic leaders, Dic Wheeler and Marcella Trowbridge, will travel to Sri Lanka and work with Sri Lankan artists Ruhanie Perera and Jake Oorloff of Floating Space Theater, observing and sharing strategies for new work development and workshopping and creating original performance works with underserved and stressed populations utilizing physical theatre techniques, circus disciplines and traditional sound and music pathways. Marcella and Dic will also participate in the Inter Act Arts Colombo International Theater Festival as U.S. theatre artist representatives.

Kathleen Doyle
Kathleen Doyle (New York, NY) will travel to Hanoi, Vietnam and meet Mr. Hoang Tuan Nguyen, artistic director of the Thang Long National Water Puppet Theater and a living master of the ancient tradition of water puppetry. In preparation for designing and directing her own water puppet theater event, she will meet with Mr. Nguyen and observe his work from behind the scenes and meet the puppeteers and craftsmen who carve and lacquer the puppets. She will also bring her puppets to show him. Doyle’s goal is to discover how these Vietnamese artists make theatre magic using just basic materials in pools of water that were originally flooded rice paddies.

Tracy Cameron Francis
Tracy Cameron Francis (Brooklyn, NY), a theatre director, will travel to Beirut to meet acclaimed exiled Syrian playwright Mohammad Al-Attar in anticipation of her opportunity to direct Al-Attar's play in translation, A Chance Encounter, as part of a Boom Arts program in Portland, Oregon in April 2015. Through this initial visit, Francis seeks to allow conversations with Al-Attar to inform her interpretation of his play, and hopes to begin building an artistic relationship with the playwright towards possible future collaborations.

Sage Lewis
Sage Lewis (Los Angeles, CA) will engage in a performance and social exchange between Estación Teatro (Tijuana) and Automata (Los Angeles) called Border Labs | Laboratorios Fronterizos. He will initiate a pilot for a two-year project of micro-festivals connecting small experimental arts organizations in both cities. Over January 15-18, artists and representatives from both organizations will travel to and spend a day in each respective city, sharing work and conversation about performance. Through home stays and shared meals, Border Labs sets a personal tone for exchange between Los Angeles and Tijuana's thriving experimental performance scenes, and their political, social, and cultural context.

Julie Rada
Julie Rada (Salt Lake City, UT) and Serbian theatre/film artist, Saša Perić, will construct/reconstruct performances, hold salons and pop-up happenings, and conduct research into the art movement known as Zenitism, in order to reawaken conversation about this vibrant moment in art history which has been lost to time. Like the Beat poets, Zenit artists traveled through the former Yugoslavia and Julie and Sasa will do the same; tracing through the Balkans by road trip, staging performances, performing interviews, and cultivating future collaborative relationships with artists along the way. Throughout, they will develop a vocabulary that, like Belgrade, will stand where two rivers meet.