July 20, 2006 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Photograph by Marc Ray
Creating new dance works can be expensive for organizations on shoestring budgets. But during the past decade scores of groups have had a fairy godmother in the National Dance Project, a grant-making program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, in Boston.
The project’s grants have provided support not only to commission new contemporary dance works but also to help the pieces gain a larger audience through tours around the country.
In addition to backing well-known choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, project grants have helped catapult relatively unknown ones, including Rennie Harris, into wider visibility.
The National Dance Project gave early support to Mr. Harris for the creation of “Rome & Jewels,” a hip-hop version of “Romeo and Juliet” that won a New York choreography award in 2001.
Among current grant recipients is the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, in Ohio, which received $65,000 from the National Dance Project to produce and present a new work inspired by the American painter Jacob Lawrence that involves contributions from several choreographers and designers. Without the grant, says Kevin Ward, the company’s artistic director, “we would have had to scale back the project’s scope.”
Formed in response to the 40-percent cut in the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996, the National Dance Project has since distributed $13.7-million to almost 170 artists and dance companies.
A grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, in New York, provides the bulk of the program’s $1-million grant budget.
Last year Eiko and Koma, two dancers who were born in Japan and later moved to the United States, received a $70,000 National Dance Project grant to create and arrange a performance tour for a piece called “Cambodian Stories: an Offering of Painting and Dance.” Here, on one of the tour’s 11 stops, Eiko (third from right) performs the piece with dancers from Cambodia.
