The National Endowment for the Arts has announced that Dance Theater Workshop will receive two highly competitive and prestigious grants. Through the American Masterpieces: Dance 2010 program Dance Theater Workshop will receive $150K in support of projects highlighting the works of Trisha Brown, Meredith Monk, John Kelly, and Yvonne Meier. “It is an incredible honor to receive an American Masters award of this magnitude. We are thrilled to be able to provide these four influential artists with the opportunity to share seminal work with a new generation of dance makers and audience members.” said Andrea Sholler, Dance Theater Workshop’s Executive Director. Carla Peterson, Artistic Director, agreed saying “It is both a privilege and a joy for Dance Theater Workshop, which continues to support artists who mine complex ideas out of contemporary culture in ways that both delight and challenge, to bring curatorial focus to works by such expansive luminaries as Trisha Brown, Meredith Monk, John Kelly, and Yvonne Meier. These rigorously imaginative artists provide context and provocation to our reading and understanding of the animated field of dance and performance, in both its recent history and lineage, and current evolution.”

All four artists will be presented through Dance Theater Workshop’s “Season of Returns” initiative founded in 2008 that annually presents significant masterworks from past decades by acclaimed American experimental choreographers. The “Season of Returns” initiative advances Dance Theater Workshop’s evolving curatorial mission by facilitating increased understanding of the role and lineage of experimental dance and performance, and of its connections in theory and practice with other art forms including music, film, visual arts, and popular culture. Past “Season of Returns” artists supported by the American Masterpieces Dance grant have included innovators of such high caliber as David Gordon, Lar Lubovitch, Anna Halprin, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.

In addition, through the Access to Artistic Excellence program Dance Theater Workshop will receive $20K in support of dance residencies in partnership with the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) at Florida State University. Through this partnership, now in its third year, choreographers Juliette Mapp and David Neumann will each receive a two week technical residency at MANCC in support of new projects commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop.

Each project will premiere at Dance Theater Workshop at a later date not yet released.  Previous MANCC residencies co-ventured with Dance Theater Workshop include artists Dean Moss with Korean collaborator Yoon Jin Kim, DD Dorvillier, Koosil-ja Hwang, and Yasuko Yokoshi.

About National Endowment for the Arts, American Master Pieces: Dance
American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius is a major initiative to acquaint Americans with the best of their cultural and artistic legacy. Through American Masterpieces, the National Endowment for the Arts will sponsor performances, exhibitions, tours, and educational programs across all art forms that will reach large and small communities in all 50 states.

This component of American Masterpieces will celebrate the extraordinary and rich evolution of dance and choreography in the United States. Through American Masterpieces: Dance, reconstructions and restagings of significant work of the highest quality will be experienced by Americans in communities across the nation.

About National Endowment for the Arts, Access to Artistic Excellence
Access to Artistic Excellence encourages and supports artistic creativity, preserves our diverse cultural heritage, and makes the arts more widely available in communities throughout the country. While projects in this category may focus on just one of these areas, the Arts Endowment recognizes that many of the most effective projects encompass both artistic excellence and enhanced access.