2020 Summer GrAntees

Performance Grantee - Olivier Glissant

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2020 Summer Performance Grant to Olivier Glissant for the upcoming performance of “Ladja” The 2021 performance is based on footage from 1936 filmed by Katherine Dunham in Martinique, featuring a traditional fighting dance called Laghia, or Ladja, curiously resembling Capoeira. An orchestral composition was created to make it appear as if the dancers are moving to the music. Modern choreography and concept by Rambert artistic director Benoit Swan-Pouffer was added to create a longer ballet and movie. The Brooklyn Orchestra will be performing with the video as well as Rambert’s live dancers.

Performance Grantee - Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2020 Summer Performance Grant to Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya in support of the first two borough premiers of Correspondences, a sculptural performance installation envisioned as a hyper-local work that will tour each of NYC’s five boroughs. As part of Correspondences, single bodies are enclosed inside transparent chambers partially filled with sand. Bodies are donned with gas masks as they try, time and again, to rise and stand. At intervals, machines attached to the chambers trigger a blast of sand causing the performers to lose their footing, sinking them back down into the ground. In Correspondences, performer, observer, machines, natural elements, and the urban square mingle in an entangled poetic microcosm while opening inquiries into animate life and environmental ethics.

Literature Grantee - Jane Elias

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2020 Summer Literature Grant to Jane Elias, an actor, writer, and teaching artist based in Brooklyn, for her project #SonnetCoronaProject, a series in which Jane writes a new sonnet each day for a different actor to perform. Launched on May 14, this project was conceived as an ongoing creative collaboration that champions a generative and tenacious spirit, building an ever-growing chain of many artists’ voices.

Literature Grantee - Danica Novgorodoff

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2020 Summer Literature Grant to Danica Novgorodoff to help continue her work on her project Me/Not Me, a hybrid-form memoir on the ways in which being an artist and a mother conflict and converge. It seeks answers to the questions: Can a woman be both a good artist and a good mother? Is there not some ferocity and single-mindedness necessary for art-making that is incompatible with the selfless generosity of a mother?