The Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists supports new cutting-edge dance and movement-based performance work by self-identified women, gender-nonconforming, and non-binary artists.
“Folks who care about the art of dance—an art of the moving body in time and space—try to preserve its wonders against disappearance. In a society ambivalent about, and sometimes hostile to, both the body and its artistry, lovers of dance honor the body in all of its variations, its rich stories, its wisdom and creative expression. With this award, we seek to record and honor the creative innovation and labor of queer women dance artists. To acknowledge them as full humans and artists informed and nourished by love, by experience, and by culture. To support and revere our artists for exactly and completely who they are; so they know a fierce community of peers, elders, and ancestors has got their back; and to make our world a safer, more empowering place for queer artists and, in truth, for all artists and for all people.”
— Eva Yaa Asantewaa
ABOUT
The Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists is a new $7,000 grant awarded to US-based artists for making cutting-edge dance and movement-based performance work. Women(+): The Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant employs an expansive definition of the word “woman." Queer|Art strongly encourages self-identified women, gender-nonconforming, and non-binary artists to apply. The 2018 grant is administered through Queer|Art by women(+) for women(+), including an intergenerational panel of judges from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Named in honor of visionary dance curator, critic, and educator Eva Yaa Asantewaa, the grant seeks to highlight the important contributions queer women have made to dance throughout history.
Applications for the Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists were open September 10th – November 10th, 2019. Within the application process, funds can be requested to support work at any stage of development, from concept to presentation. Qualifying work may be dance and/or movement-based performance work of any format. The awardee was announced in January 2020.
For questions, email Yaa Asantewaa Grant Manager Bree Breeden at bbreeden@queer-art.org.
QUEER|ART AWARDS SECOND ANNUAL
EVA YAA ASANTEWAA GRANT
FOR QUEER WOMEN(+) DANCE ARTISTS
Queer|Art is pleased to announce the winner of the Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant For Queer Women(+) Dance Artists, collective Hollerin Space. Hollerin Space will receive a $7,000 cash grant to support HOLD ON, which will research into algorithms of black assembly and theories and practices of being free. The development period will include a year of gatherings among black women(+) and queer identified folks to imagine and determine places where their bodies can breathe and move as they wish, as an act of futuritive investment.
Hollerin Space is initiated by artists muthi reed and Angela Davis-Johnson. They make dream culture. They collaborate to unpack shared preoccupations with data, objects, materials, space, displacement, embodiment. Black life is a particular lens through which they center their work. They study and reproduce cultural ways and artifacts, generating a Hollerin Space “happening.” They world build, evoke blood memory, love, kinship, Black women and Queer sensibility. Their combined tools for making include paint, found objects, trash, fabric, light, sound, photo and video technology, the QR code, public practice, migration, dreaming and speculation.
About Hold On: devotions for hotfoot living by Hollerin Space
“Hold On: devotions for hotfoot living is a series of site responsive performances that explore algorithms of black assembly, philosophy, and acts of being free. Exploring the devices of devotional hymn raising, hush harbors, drill team stepping, and trauma release exercises, Hold On gathers and interprets Black odyssey from memories that are archived in the body. Our work is meant to evoke the transformative energy of the antebellum black church gatherings such as hush harbors. Hush harbors were land-based pre-Christian sacred gathering groves conducted in wooded areas away from the eyes and ears of a master. They emerged in a period when black folks faced homogenization and were determined nonhuman savages unfit for spiritual elevation and unfit to worship in a church building. They were denied their tools— the drum, the voice, memory, language, cultural diversity. Together, they created their own syncretic cosmology. For HOLD ON: the antebellum black church tradition is picked up by the drill team, the translinear Juneteenth street teams who drummed and marched through black publics to announce emancipation from slavery.
The Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant will support an incubation period for ensemble development at House of Black Infinity, located in the historic abolitionist neighborhood of LaMott, Philadelphia. During this time we will research ourselves— gather in story circle, perform body work with each other, investigate how Black queer masculinity and Black femme sense lives in our bodies and how our families and communities are shaped in relationship to us. We will groom one another, read together, map our geographies, learn and shape choreography, make folk remedies, and develop a collective style—including a manifesto and wearable works of art. Our goal is to move the ensemble practice into a performance work that will be publicly shared. Our goal with this practice is to develop emotional intelligence for our interiors and be in right relationship with masculinity within ourselves, in intimate partnerships and in our families and communities. Our engagements of the body, movement, stepping, call/response, acoustic instrumentation, noise, narrative, vernacular, local algorithms, story, and public ceremony are where we incorporate the discipline of a drill team. Our process is both improvisational and choreographed. The work takes us on a dreamy journey through heart, breath, muscle, speech, devotion, collective making, memory, myth, love, accountability, archive, and geographies. We are so happy to be receiving funding support and inclusion in the Queer|Art network.”
- muthi reed & Angela Davis Johnson of Hollerin Space
2019 YAA ASANTEWAA GRANT FINALISTS
Xianix Barrera
For a work about her experience as a plus sized queer woman who self-actualized later in life and how her “otherness” affected familial relationships, created Electra and Oedipal complexes, spotlighted machismo, and uncovered the unconscious biases inherent in Latino culture toward queerness.
ChE Ware
For The People Can Fly: A #DignityInProcess Black Dreaming Exodus, a 4-part Ring Shout ritual beginning with an origin folktellin’ moaned through a body conjuring precolonial gender-expansive medicine traditions alive; intersectional organizing ignites a movement of Queer Afro-Indigenous marooning!
Taja Will
For Blood Language, a new contemporary dance work for an ensemble that centers identity, authorship and the artistry of BIPOC, queer, non-binary and artists with invisible disabilities.
Anna Martine Whitehead
For FORCE!, a punk opera about queer and trans women and femmes of color waiting to get into a prison.
2019 YAA ASANTEWAA GRANT JUDGES
Gabrielle Civil (Los Angeles) is a black feminist performance artist and poet, originally from Detroit MI. She has premiered over forty original solo and collaborative performance art works around the world, including a year-long investigation of practice as a Fulbright Fellow in Mexico and a trilogy of diaspora grief works after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. A widely published writer and journal editor, Civil is the author of the memoir Swallow the Fish, which intersperses original performance texts, essays, and images with critical meditations on black feminist performance practice. Her recent book, Experiments in Joy, engages race, performance, and collaboration in essays, scores, critical dialogues, and performance texts. In addition, she has designed and facilitated workshops in writing and performance in California, New York City, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Haiti, among other places. The aim of her work is to open up space.
Jasmine Hearn (New York City) is a performer, director, choreographer, organizer, and teaching artist. A native Houstonian, they graduated magna cum laude from Point Park University with their B.A. in Dance. She currently is a member of Urban Bush Women Dance Company and also collaborates with BANDportier, Vanessa German, and Alisha B. Wormsley. They have worked and performed with David Dorfman Dance, Alesandra Seutin’s vocabdance, Solange Knowles, Kate Watson-Wallace, STAYCEE PEARL dance project, Marjani Forté-Saunders, will rawls, Tara Aisha Willis, Jennifer Myers, Helen Simoneau Danse, Lovie Olivia, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, and with Nick Mauss as a part of exhibition, TRANSMISSIONS, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Awarded a 2017 “Bessie"Award for Outstanding Performance with Skeleton Architecture, Jasmine has had residencies at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Camargo Foundation, and Dance Source Houston. She currently is a 2018 Movement Research AIR and a 2019 Jerome Foundation Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.
Jane Jerardi (Chicago) is a time-based artist working in the media of choreography, performance, and video. Her work has been presented by spaces such as the Joyce Soho, Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, the LUMEN Festival (in New York); Links Hall, 6018North, Sector 2337, and defibrillator performance gallery (Chicago); at Transformer, The Warehouse, Dance Place, and the Kennedy Center (in DC), among other venues. A recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities' Artist Fellowship and a three-time recipient of its Young Emerging Artist award, she has also received support through its New Media grant program. She received a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist award in 2019. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Performance and a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she studied choreography and cultural studies. She is currently on faculty and staff at the Dance Center at Columbia College, Chicago.
APPLY
* Applications for the Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant For Queer Women(+) Dance Artists are currently closed. *
APPLICATIONS OPEN - TBA 2020
COMPLETE APPLICATION - TBA 2020
AWARDEE ANNOUNCED - TBA 2021
***There is a $6 application fee***
Queer|Art uses the online application software SlideRoom to organize applications. SlideRoom charges applicants for the Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists a fee of $6 for each individual application. The fee does not profit Queer|Art.
What information does the application require?
Contact info, narrative bio, and headshot
Synopsis of project and strategy for presentation
Budget
Work samples (1-2 samples, no more than 7-10 minutes total)
2 professional references
CV
What is required in the synopsis and budget?
Synopsis:
1. Description of the project and the process by which it will be made. (Up to 800 words) *Required
2. What is your timeline for completing the work and strategy for its presentation? (Up to 400 words) * Required
3. Are there any additional aspects of this work you would like the judging panel to know? (Up to 400 words) *Not required
Budget (one page, uploaded as PDF):
Your budget should account for how the work will be made (you do not need to include presentation costs). If the cost of production exceeds the grant amount, please indicate within the budget any confirmed funding you have received or additional funding you anticipate that will enable you to complete this project.
ABOUT EVA YAA ASANTEWAA
Eva Yaa Asantewaa is Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney, New York’s acclaimed center for dance and social activism. She won the 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance as a veteran writer, curator and community educator. Since 1976, she has contributed writing on dance to Dance Magazine, The Village Voice, SoHo Weekly News, Gay City News, The Dance Enthusiast, Time Out New York, and other publications.
Ms. Yaa Asantewaa joined the curatorial team for Danspace Project’s “Platform 2016: Lost and Found” and created the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds, an evening of group improvisation featuring 21 black women and gender-nonconforming performers. Her cast was awarded a 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Performer. As EYA Projects, she has begun partnerships with organizations such as Gibney, Abrons Arts Center, Dance/NYC, BAX, and Dancing While Black to curate and facilitate Long Table conversations on topics of concern in the dance/performance community.
She was a member of the inaugural faculty of Montclair State University’s MFA in Dance program and has also served on the faculty for New England Foundation for the Arts' Regional Dance Development Initiative Dance Lab 2016 for emerging Chicago-area dance artists. In May 2017, she served on the faculty for the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography's inaugural Forward Dialogues Dance Lab for Emerging Choreographers.
A native New Yorker of Black Caribbean heritage, Eva makes her home in the East Village with her wife, Deborah, and cat, Crystal.
YAA ASANTEWAA GRANT ARCHIVE
2018