2024 Dance & Movement Awards

2024 Dance & Movement Awards is sponsored by Gerbode Foundation. A fund for the creation and development of new dance and movement-based projects by California choreographers, culture bearers, traditional and tradition-based artists, and movement-based artists.

Special Awards in the Arts — Gerbode Foundation Special Awards in the Arts Special Awards in the Arts Special Awards in the Arts The Gerbode Foundation's Special Awards in the Arts Program, established in 1987, has been a cornerstone in supporting new works across dance, theater production, and music composition. The program has consistently backed culturally and aesthetically diverse works by emerging, mid-career, and legacy artists.

These grants have supported artists at critical junctures in their careers, enabled local nonprofit artist-centered groups to produce original works, and enriched Bay Area audiences by showcasing the region’s most promising new works. Click here to view program updates and access the 2026 Music Awards Guidelines & Application Process.

2025 Theater Production Awards In October 2025 , the Gerbode Foundation announced the 2025 Theater Production Awards, awarding a total of $400,000 to support new theater productions led by California artists. These eight projects—spanning hip-hop theater, puppetry, multimedia performance, bilingual storytelling, spoken word, and circus arts—highlight the vision, courage, and creativity that define the region’s artistic landscape.

Building on the Foundation’s long legacy of artist-centered support, these awards continue the three-year cycle of the Special Awards in the Arts program, following last year’s Dance & Movement Awards. This initiative continues a longstanding partnership with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Circuit Network/Dan Wolf & Carlos Aguirre (Felonious) THE BAG, by the hip-hop theater ensemble Felonious, explores commodification, ageism, and survival through the eyes of an almost washed-up band. Presented in San Francisco by Circuit Network in spring 2026 as a series of workshop performances, the production will serve as a precursor to a potential 2026–27 regional theater run.

Dan Wolf photo credit: Stefan Cohen The Silent Assassin is an intimate, theatrical exploration of addiction — revealing how its pervasive and camouflaged grip, particularly within already marginalized and disenfranchised communities, is both deeply personal and universally felt, yet ultimately can be overcome.

MARU/Amy Grace Lam & Scarlett Kim Project Quantum Heart is a participatory play-game following assistant professor Em Wong, who after being denied tenure, applies to be a video game designer—only to slip into the game’s landscape, a shadow realm. A Bay Area workshop production and community “belonging toolkit” exploring healing through theatrical storytelling, community ritual, and immersive technology will be presented in 2026.

photo credit (Amy Lam): Mel Hofmann The Big Whoop Dee Doo , a multimedia theatrical performance and gallery exhibit by Ramon Abad in collaboration with KULARTS, draws inspiration from the “sinulog” parade of the Southern Philippines. Incorporating puppetry, dance, physical theater, live video feeds, and projections, the work explores the stories and struggles of Filipino immigrants.

La Lengua Teatro en Español/Viviana Calderón & Dyana Díaz El silencio árido del agua ( The Arid Silence of Water ) is a world-premiere full-length play commissioned through our Historias de Descolonización multilingual residency. Featuring an ensemble of Bay Area actors, the production will be presented in San Francisco in 2026. sites.

google. com/view/vivianacalderon/inicio instagram. com/dydy17didi/ Between Two Rising Seas is a 75-minute new play written and performed by Gabriel Cortez.

Blending spoken word, archival projections, live sample-based music, and personal narrative, this solo performance examines the interconnected histories of migration, labor, and climate crisis through an Afro-Latinx lens. The work will premiere at MACLA in fall 2027.

Yerba Buena Gardens Festival/Abigail Munn In June 2026, Yerba Buena Gardens Festival and theater-maker Abigail Munn will premiere Resilience (working title), featuring 16 performing artists from Circus Bella with live music by the Circus Bella All-Star Band. This heartwarming, high-flying production celebrates the strength of families — both born and chosen — and the invisible threads that connect us.

JELLYBELLY , a new play by Weston Scott, premieres in workshop at Z Space’s Steindler Stage in August 2026. Born from the “cosmic horror of living in a fat body,” the piece blends vulnerability, dark humor, and technical innovation, marking Scott’s bold reintroduction to the Bay Area theater scene.

2024 Dance & Movement Awards In October 2024 , the Gerbode Foundation announced the recipients of a $400,000 initiative supporting new dance and movement-based projects by California choreographers, culture bearers, traditional and tradition-based artists, and movement-based artists.

The 2024 Dance & Movement Awards mark the first round of the Special Awards in the Arts program, a three-year initiative commissioning new works in dance (2024), theater (2025), and music/sound design (2026). Sarah Crowell/ABD SKYWATCHERS “Calling Us In” explores the connection between housing insecurity and the opioid crisis, emphasizing how empathy and inclusion are crucial to understanding our shared future.

Through a process-driven exploration, Sarah will lead a collaborative, process-driven exploration with the SKYWATCHERS ensemble, deeply rooted in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, along with cross-disciplinary artists and advocates for health justice, harm reduction, and community investment. This work comes at a valuable time for the ensemble and Sarah's long-standing practice as an artist, arts educator, and community leader.

“Enraizando/Rooting Within" is a performance led by young women of color who share their personal journeys into womanhood through Bomba, a Puerto Rican music and dance tradition with a legacy of over 400 years. In a world shaped by patriarchy and racism, women are often forced to suppress vulnerabilities as a survival mechanism.

This performance challenges that narrative as these young women embrace their vulnerabilities, emerging as stronger, more confident versions of themselves. By connecting with female ancestors and role models, they reclaim their power and tell their stories on their own terms.

Through a powerful blend of dance choreography and improvisation, song, percussion, poetry, and film work, they create a space to write their own narratives, honoring their roles as future ancestors. This evening-length performance features both youth performers and Bay Area-based Puerto Rican Bomba music and dance group Aguacero.

Ibrahima Ouseynou Diouf/Diamano Coura "Soundiata Keita, The Lion King of Mali," marks a significant milestone in Ibrahima Ouseynou Diouf’s artistic journey. This production blends Diouf's longstanding exploration of African heritage through dance with innovative multidisciplinary storytelling techniques, incorporating advanced technology for projections, sound, and lighting effects.

The opportunity to headline Diamano Coura’s 50th-anniversary celebration with this new work reflects his esteemed position within the artistic community. “Soundiata Keita, The Lion King of Mali” elevates Diouf’s previous work in choreography, costume design, and music to craft a comprehensive cultural narrative.

“Ghadar Geet: Blood and Ink,” is a multifaceted work that explores the Ghadar movement's relevance to modern anti-colonial efforts. It aims to educate South Asian communities about their historical roots in the U.S. while bridging intergenerational participants and audiences through the presentation of diasporic narratives. “Ghadar Geet” documents both its own development and Ghadar history through a dynamic stage performance.

This production integrates dance, music, and visual projections with poetry by Joti and her great-grandfather set to traditional Punjabi music. SAMMAY Peñaflor Dizon/Magic Theatre "WORD TO YOUR NANAY" is an immersive multimedia performance that blends experimentation with spiritual practice. This piece integrates dance, sound, video, and ritual to uncover hidden truths beneath the chaos of our current age of misinformation.

"WORD TO YOUR NANAY" will guide audiences through a journey of refusal, remembrance, and reclamation, weaving together disparate threads of the decolonizing Filipino psyche. This performance aims to create a transformative experience that challenges perceptions and invites deep reflection on cultural identity and heritage.

"De Mangangá" is an Afro-Brazilian dance musical that brings to life the folklore and history of Besouro De Mangangá, a revolutionary freedom fighter. This collaborative vision blends Brazilian Afro-contemporary dance, original music (spanning R&B, Latin, Afro, and Hip-Hop genres), and Capoeira to create a vibrant, immersive storytelling experience.

"De Mangangá" highlights the resilience and cultural richness of the Afro-Brazilian community and focuses on the often-overlooked history and heroes of the African diaspora beyond the African continent. Suhaila Salimpour/Shawl-Anderson Dance Center "Al Zaman" creatively intertwines belly dance with historical, cultural, and personal storytelling.

This immersive experience will blend movement and narrative, offering Arabic-to-English translations to bridge language barriers, while delving into the emotional intricacies of the Maqam melodic system. Through this carefully orchestrated fusion of artforms, "Al Zaman" aims to pay tribute to a bygone era, offering audiences a captivating journey through the rich tapestry of Arabic artistic expression.

Babatunji Johnson/Sozo Impact "The Phoenix Paradox" reimagines the classic phoenix myth in a contemporary setting, exploring urban development, inclusivity, resilience, and the evolution of collective consciousness through the lens of rebirth. Set in West Oakland, where creativity meets conscience, the community grapples with the tangible impacts of urban development.

By reimagining the phoenix myth in a modern, urban setting, the story offers a thought-provoking examination of the human experience. dancemagazine.

com/babatunji-johnson Alphabet Rockers/Kaitlin McGaw and Tommy Shepherd 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. 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.

Blood Moon Orchestra/Van-Anh Vo 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 Flyaway Productions/Xoa Asa 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.

Māhea Uchiyama Center for International Dance/Māhealani Uchiyama 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 Manilatown Heritage Foundation/Caroline Cabading 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.

Oaklash/OBSIDIENNE OBSURD & Paul Wiancko 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.

Photo credit: Vita Hewitt/Broke Ass Stuart Women’s Audio Mission/Diana Gameros 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.

In September 2022 , the Gerbode Foundation, in partnership with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation , announced the recipients of a $300,000 initiative to support the creation and production of new theater projects by California writers, playwrights, spoken word artists, creative writers, and theater-makers.

The 2022 Theater Awards are the second round of the Special Awards in the Arts program, a three-year, $900,000 initiative to support the commissioning of individual artists creating new works in dance (2021), theater (2022), and music/sound design (2023).

As a result of the continued impact of COVID-19 on artists, regional theaters, and theater presenters, the Gerbode Foundation’s Board of Directors approved an additional $100,000 for this round, resulting in grants to 8 recipients instead of 6. This is the second year the Foundation has increased the number of awards it has made in its Special Awards program.

Bindlestiff Studio / Golda Sargento 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. 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.

Campo Santo / Marc Anthony Thompson AKA Chocolate Genius Inc 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 Eugenie Chan Theater Projects / Eugenie Chan 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. Eye Zen Presents / Marvin K.

White 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.

Golden Thread Productions / Adam Ashraf Elsayigh and Salma Zohdi 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. Magic Theatre / A.

M. Smiley (aka Smiley) 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. Oakland Theater Project / Lisa Ramirez 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 August 2021 , the Gerbode Foundation, in partnership with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation , announced the recipients of a $300,000 initiative to support the creation and production of new dance and movement-based projects by choreographers and dance artists.

The 2021 Choreography Awards is the first round of the Special Awards in the Arts program and is a three-year, $900,000 initiative to support the commissioning of individual artists creating new works in dance (2021), theater (2022), and music/sound design (2023).

As a result of the impact of COVID-19 on the performing arts field, and a 46% increase in applications, the Gerbode Foundation’s Board of Directors approved an additional $100,000 for this round, resulting in awards to 8 recipients instead of 6, the number of awards approved in every round since 1987.

Artists in Motion Bay Area & Pin@y Educational Partnerships/Patrick Cruz 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. Authentic Arts & Media/jose esteban abad &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.

Dance Mission Theater/Adia Tamar Whitaker 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.

Mahea Uchiyama Center for International Dance/Meridith Kawēkiu Aki 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 Mud Water Theatre/My-Linh Le 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.

Noorani Dance/ Farah Yasmeen Shaikh 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.

The Lab SF/Indira Allegra 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.

Zaccho Dance Theatre/Veronica Blair 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.

In October 2020 , the Gerbode Foundation, in partnership with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation , announced the recipients of a $300,000 initiative to support the creation and production of new music projects by California composers and music practitioners.

These music awards are the third and final round of a three-year $900,000 initiative funded by the Gerbode and Hewlett foundations to support the commissioning of individual artists and investing in their creative vision. In 2019, grants were made for new theater productions. In 2018, grants were made for new works in dance.

East Bay Center for the Performing Arts/Howard Wiley 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. Gamelan Sekar Jaya/I Dewa Putu Berata 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. Musical Traditions – Paul Dresher Ensemble/Lisa Mezzacappa 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.

SFJAZZ/Ambrose Akinmusire 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.

The Living Earth Show/Ellen Fullman 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. Women’s Audio Mission/Lalin St.

Juste 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. 2019 Theater Production Awards In July 2019 , the Gerbode Foundation, in partnership with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation , announced the recipients of a $300,000 initiative to support the creation and production of new theater works by California playwrights and writers.

These theater production awards are the second round of a three-year $900,000 initiative funded by the Gerbode and Hewlett foundations to support the commissioning of individual artists and investing in their creative vision. In 2018, grants were made for new works by choreographers. In 2020, grants will be available for new works by music composers.

Campo Santo (fiscal sponsor: Intersection for the Arts)/Britney Frazier, Playwright & Margo Hall, Director 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