The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Winter Performance Grant to Karen Kandel and Mallory Catlett for their project with composer Eve Beglarian, “The Vicksburg Project”.

The Vicksburg Project traces the experiences of women and gender-complex people in Vicksburg, Mississippi in four different eras. Spanning the Civil War 1860s, the Jim Crow 1910s, the Civil Rights 1960s, and the current moment, The Vicksburg Project evokes intersections of race and gender through deeply researched and resurrected stories from a small city pivotal to the painful history of our country. A live theatrical song cycle The Vicksburg Project will be presented in a co-production between Mabou Mines and Harlem Stage.

The inspiration for the project began when composer Eve Beglarian, a long time Mabou Mines collaborator, visited Vicksburg while traveling the length of the Mississippi River by kayak and bicycle during summer/fall of 2009. At the National Military Park, she came across journals kept by Confederate women during the siege. She also learned about Albert Cashier, a soldier from Illinois, who served during the siege, and was later revealed to be a woman.

Initially imagined as a song cycle, once Eve began working with collaborators writer/performer Karen Kandel and director Mallory Catlett, the project grew beyond the confines of that form. Repeated visits to Vicksburg revealed the artists’ distinctive research interests and methods, and have resulted in an evening constructed from historical diary entries, newspaper accounts, letters home, and live interviews with women in Vicksburg as well as material based on the creators’ own experiences as women – black and white, straight and gay, the descendants of enslavers and the enslaved.

The Vicksburg Project seeks to acknowledge the humanity in every person’s story, even as we are horrified by the realities uncovered. How can we speak honestly about what happened in this place that haunts us still? Can we create a sanctuary where grieving together is possible? Where healing becomes imaginable?

KAREN KANDEL is a writer, performer, visual artist and a Co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines. Awards: 3 OBIEs, Dramalogue, Connecticut Critics Circle, Edinburgh Festival's Herald Angel Award; Drama League Outstanding Performance citation. Grants: US Artists Fellow, Audrey Skirball-Kenis T.I.M.E. Grantee, Asian Cultural Council, TCG/Fox Fellowship, TCG Future Collaborations, Jim Henson Foundation, Spencer Cherashore Fund. Writer/Poet: Song for NY (Mabou Mines); Co-Writer/Co-Creator/Performer: Washi Tales (Asia Society); Portraits (TNC). Performer: Mabou Mines Lear, Peter & Wendy, Ecco Porco with Mabou Mines; Futurity at Soho Rep/ArsNova; Love In The Wars at Bard Summerscape; Love And Information, A Civil War Christmas and Beckett Shorts at NYTW; The Bacchae at Shakespeare In The Park; The Silver River at Spoleto USA, Singapore Arts Festival and Lincoln Center Festival; The Children Of Herakles European Tour; Quartet Court Theatre; Talk Foundry Theatre At The Public, Fragments Of A Trilogy at La Mama; House Arrest at Arena Stage.

MALLORY CATLETT is a creator and director of performance across disciplines, from opera and music theater to plays and installation art. She is a Co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines since 2020 and the founder of Restless NYC whose Bessie and Obie Award winning production This Was The End was developed and performed at Mabou Mines (2018). Her work in new opera and music theater includes: Mika Karlsson’s The Echo Drift (Prototype Festival), Stefan Weissman’s The Scarlet Ibis (Prototype Festival), Tarik O’Reagan’s Wanton Sublime (American Opera Projects) Aaron Siegel’s Brother, Brother (Experiments In Opera), Dave Malloy’s Beowulf (Adelaide & Edinburgh Festivals - Herald Angel Award), Christina Campanella’s Red Fly/Blue Bottle (HERE, Noorderzon Festival & Empac), Oh What War (HERE) and The Banana Bag And Bodice's Fall And Rise Of The Rising Fallen (PS122). In New York her work has premiered and performed at 3LD, HERE, Ontological- Hysteric, PS122, Abrons, Chocolate Factory, EMPAC, LaMama; featured at COIL, Prelude, Prototype and BAM’s Next Wave; developed at CultureHub, Baryshnikov Arts, Pioneer Works, Watermill Center, McDowell, Performing Garage, Mabou Mines, LMCC, EMPAC and Yaddo; and toured internationally to Canada, France, UK, Ireland & Australia. She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Grant and a 2015 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. She is an Associate Artist at CultureHub and a member of the Collapsible Hole at the WestBeth Arts Center.

For more information on the The Vicksburg project please visit Mabou Mines’ website.