These innovative performing arts projects won $10K grants to probe life, COVID in Miami
The Miami-based Knight Foundation awarded $10,000 grants to 18 performing arts projects by local artists exploring new ways to present works in a pandemic.
Locally based artists working in music, theater and dance have won $10,000 grants from the Knight Foundation to develop 18 proposals for original works that probe the pandemic experience and life and history in Miami, while exploring novel approaches to the performing arts in a time of social isolation.
The winning 2020 proposals in the Knight New Work initiative, announced Thursday, range from digital pieces meant to be experienced at home to works that would be performed live in an outdoor setting. The projects include Grammy-winning trumpeter Brian Lynch’s “7 for 7 by 7: A Jazz Work Exploring Distance, Interaction And Chance,” which consists of seven digital performances by seven jazz musicians over seven minutes, for a total of 343 new pieces, and a site-specific performance by Carlos Fabian Medina that depicts the true experiences of Miamians during the pandemic “new normal.”
Intriguingly, and closely in tune with many South Floridians’ auto-centric experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, three of the proposals will use the medium of “by car,” either literally or metaphorically, according to the artists’ proposals. They include “Escape 2020,” a drivethrough circus by cabaret-theater artist Diana Lozano.
“Combining the socially-distanced excitement of a drive-through safari, with the visually immersive experience of a theme park ride, we set out to create an innovative theatrical journey,” a description of Lozano’s project says.
Other winners include the Jugger knot Theater Company, for a live, immersive dramatic experience in which bus passengers meet neighborhood residents in a series of virtual bus stops in Miami neighborhoods; writer Octavia Yearwood, for a mixtape of music and poetry paired with visuals that detail the experiences of a queer artist; and artist Fereshteh Toosi, for an interactive “virtual seance” that deploys “fossil spirits, ocean garbage and ruthless oil tycoon Henry Flagler” to explore the cultural history of oil.
If the winning proposals have something in common, it’s innovation in presentation and conception as a way of overcoming and even capitalizing on the obstacles to performers and audiences