Posts Tagged ‘funding’

OurGoods.org - a bartering network for creative communities, and recipient of a 2011 NYC CIF award.

This year’s Rockefeller NYC Cultural Innovation Fund recipients have just been announced, and I was very excited by the number of awards going to projects that support New York City dance, media and performance artists. The grants of up to $250,000 are some of the largest that non-profit arts organizations can hope to get, and they go a long ways towards getting more progressive and experimental projects off the ground.

One of the most fantastical projects being funded is for the “Dance Films Association to produce, market and distribute high definition and 3D films of NYC dance companies’ performances in partnership with TenduTV.” For companies barely able to afford multiple camera documentations of their work, let alone in HD, this proposal is akin to Kennedy proclaiming we will walk on the moon. Now with this grant audiences in Peoria could experience a performance of DanceBrazil as if they are actually sitting in the Joyce Theater, or better yet, up on stage with the dancers. Maybe, just maybe, this will be the medium that will help artsy dance enter into the mainstream cultural consciousness.

Misnomer Dance Theater has received their second CIF award this year for an intriguing project that will “utilize behavioral science for a stakeholder-engagement program for NYC’s performing arts organizations in partnership with strategy and marketing firm Orcasci.” Seeming to flow from their previously awarded project, the online “Audience Engagement Platform,” Misnomer continues to explore how artists can market their work more effectively and tap into new audiences. Their approach raises the question, can the performing arts be marketed like big media, with their focus groups and huge research budgets? Can small independent artists mine niche markets and come up with huge followings in unexpected places? Misnomer claims they can, and hopefully with this funding they will prove it is possible.

Other projects funded this year are aimed at increasing cultural and political awareness through the arts such as Casita Maria’s partnership with Dancing in the Streets to illuminate the cultural legacy of the South Bronx, and New York University and The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ programs to support and train performance-based political artists. The Field in partnership with OurGoods.org has a particularly subversive project so that artists can get around the capitalist system entirely through an online barter network.

With each of these projects the ramifications for culture and the arts could be huge, or like any grand experiment, it may flop. By the time they get off the ground will they already seem passé? Will the media and technology involved be embraced by consumers or tossed aside as novelties? Time will tell, but at least artists will be able to try these pie in the sky ideas out. Whether or not the masses come flocking to see 3D productions of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in their local iMax theatre, or NYC dance companies find a significant following among NASCAR dads, at least they are in the arena and able to contend, instead of busking for change on the sidewalk outside.

For a complete list of this year’s Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund recipients and their projects, go here.

Dance Films Association members may apply for DFA’s annual post-production grants ranging from $250 to $2,500. This program is open to filmmakers, choreographers or dancers.  Awards will be announced in July 2010.

Proposals should include DVD or VHS of work-in-progress, budget, distribution plans, biographies of key members of the creative team, and a one page description of the project including how funds will be used. There is no form to fill, simply supply the above information.

DFA membership information can be found at http://www.dancefilms.org