« Vol 4, Issue 1, Summer 2004

Space and Time for the Artist: Irvine Fellowships in Dance

In the summer of 2001, choreographer Amelia Rudolph developed "Crossing," a mountaineering dance piece set in the Sierra Nevada. Nearly three years later, she was performing a new multimedia version of the work at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. What took her from mountain range to urban performance, from nature trek to national tour, was a process of artistic development made possible by a unique program called the Irvine Fellowships in Dance.

"The program looks at artists as individuals, not as service providers," says Dance USA's Julie Carson, director of the project. "Usually, it's, 'What dance product can you make, how fast and for how many people?' The fellowship program says: 'What do you need to be a better dance maker?' It speaks directly to the growth of the art and the artist."

Funded by the Irvine Foundation and administered by Dance USA, the fellowship program is designed to support California dance artists in researching and developing a broad range of voices, genres, cultural traditions and community connections across the state. Since 1998, 24 "dance makers" from California have been selected as fellows, based on both the quality of their work and their role as leaders in the dance field.

Reading through the dance fellows catalogue is like taking a bird's-eye tour of California's myriad forms of dance and dancer, seemingly with roots in every culture on the globe.

There is C.K. Ladzekpo, founder of the African Music and Dance Ensemble, who used his fellowship to travel to West Africa for research in creating a new work. Or Lily Chai, who used the support to investigate and then forge a new work out of the movement vocabularies of both Chinese opera and daily life in China and San Francisco's Chinatown. Los Angeles-based Anthony Shay used his fellowship for dance scholarship on Islamic traditional and folk dance. Patrick Makuakane used his to do further study of the hula dance tradition.

Two features of the program make it unusual. One is its support for individual artists rather than the more customary support for arts organizations. The other is its investment in research and development rather than performance, in artistic process rather than product.

"There are so few mechanisms for supporting individual artists," says Elisa Callow, the Irvine Foundation's new Program Director for the Arts. "Few foundations fund the kinds of fellowships that allow artists to do research and development. This kind of funding recognizes the importance of the artistic process and the continual refreshment of the form. Some say there isn't enough impact in funding individual artists. But I say, if you look at their careers and the ripple effects these leaders create, you see that they can affect a whole art form."

The fellowship program has also been widely welcomed in the artistic community, in part because opportunities to explore new work are often the first casualty in a time of tightening budgets. "Where do the new forms come from?" Callow asks. "Sometimes R&D is the last thing supported because so many artists and organizations are dealing with simply surviving. But if you keep retreading existing work, it's the death knell. I hope the program's success encourages other funders to support the genesis of new art forms."

One of the most riveting examples of artistic renewal enabled by the fellowship program is Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, a Los Angeles resident who is helping to spearhead the revival of classical Cambodian dance. In 1988, after the fall of the Pol Pot regime, she was part of the first graduating class of the School of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. When she emigrated to Los Angeles in 1991, she was one of the few practitioners of classical Cambodian dance who had survived the Pol Pot tyranny, and she soon became a global ambassador of the art form.

Cheam Shapiro used her Irvine Fellowship for an especially inventive purpose—to adapt William Shakespeare's Othello as a Cambodian classical dance drama. "When I first read the play, I was struck by how similar its tragic story was to Cambodian folklore and mythology," she wrote in the Fellowship's 1998 catalogue. "As Cambodia reaches out to become part of the world community, this tale can form an artistic bridge between east and west…allowing classical dance to play a vital role in maintaining Cambodian culture's well-being."

The resulting dance piece is "stunning," says Julie Carson. "It's so different from what an artist born and raised in America would do, so much a part of this very foreign culture. And yet it speaks to things we all understand."

The fellows program has been expanded to include other kinds of support, managed by Dance USA, including additional grants to the fellows to support their sharing new work with others in the field and grants to other California dance makers for the creation of specific new works.

Reports from the fellows indicate that one of the greatest benefits of the program, Carson says, "is the value of time—time to be able to really learn and grow in their work. Over the years I've seen their artistry move forward in really spectacular ways—in ways I'm certain would not have happened without the program."

top of page