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News Releases 
The Children's Theatre Company rejoices upon receipt of Joyce Award 
Awards program supports Midwest cultural institutions to commission works by artists of color
For Immediate Release: January 24, 2005
The Joyce Foundation today announced the recipients of its second annual Joyce Awards, which support mainstream Midwest cultural organizations commissioning works by artists of color. The Children's Theatre Company, along with three other institutions, will each receive a $50,000 grant. The CTC grant supports the commission of a new play by African-American playwright and performer Will Power.
"We are thrilled that the Joyce Foundation has shown this incredible support for Will's work," said CTC artistic director, Peter C. Brosius. He is indeed an artist of enormous power and impact, and it will be a terrific artistic journey for us to work with him." Brosius is accepting the award today in Chicago.
Launched in 2004 as an annual competition, the Joyce Awards target cultural organizations in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee and St. Paul/Minneapolis, with organizations in Indianapolis to be included for the 2006 awards. While the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation has long provided major funding to Chicago-area cultural institutions, the establishment of the Joyce Awards marked the expansion of its culture grantmaking to institutions throughout the Midwest.
"The Joyce Awards advance the Foundation's continued interest in encouraging arts groups to develop programming that relates to and reflects the experiences of diverse audiences," said Joyce Foundation President Ellen S. Alberding. "We were impressed by the quality of the entries, and we hope these partnerships will produce important works of art, strengthen the institutions, and draw people of all backgrounds to experience and celebrate the arts."
The Joyce Awards grants are made directly to arts organizations and are awarded in dance, music, theater, and visual arts. This year's competition drew 54 entries from around the region. Projects were reviewed by independent arts advisors from outside the Midwest and voted on by the Foundation's board in December. Each award supports the work of the individual artist as well as significant community engagement efforts.
MEET THE 2005 JOYCE AWARD-WINNING INSTITUTIONS AND ARTISTS:
Founded in 1965 and located in Minneapolis, The Children's Theatre Company made history when it was awarded the 2003 Regional Theatre Tony® Award. It was the first time a theater for young people had been recognized with that honor. With six productions on the mainstage, an annual production for teen audiences, a Theatre Arts Training program, and education and community partnerships in both the metro area and greater Minnesota, CTC reaches nearly 350,000 people each year. By the end of the 2004-2005 season, CTC will have produced 16 world premieres (since 1998) that were developed in its new play lab, THRESHOLD, and has 14 more pieces currently in development.
Thirty-four-year-old hip-hop artist Will Power is an actor, rapper, playwright, and educator. Working in the new genre of hip-hop theater, Power is best known for his one man show FLOW, an urban fairy tale that chronicles the lives of seven storytellers and incorporates rap music, rhymed language, and hip-hop choreography. FLOW was chosen as one of the Top 10 Theater Performances for 2003 by The New York Times. Power has performed on Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam, was a featured vocalist with the Jazz group Omar Sosa Sextet, and played the lead in Drylongso, a film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999. For his solo work, which includes The Gathering, a hip-hop theater journey to the meeting places of black men, Power received two AUDELCO Awards given for outstanding black plays and performers, and a Trailblazer Award from the National Black Theatre Network. In 2001, Power was commissioned by Thick Description Theatre Company to write and compose The Seven, a hip-hop adaptation of the Greek tragedy Seven Against Thebes. The Seven was staged at the New York City Hip-Hop Theater Festival and won three Bay Area Critics Circle Awards (presented by the Theater Bay Area organization in San Francisco), including Best Book/Lyrics. The Seven is currently in development for an off-Broadway run.
The Joyce Award will enable The Children's Theatre Company to commission Power to develop a new play titled Cipher. Stemming from a conversation between Power and a young soldier on his way to Afghanistan, Cipher will tell the story of a young man who packs his Gameboy and goes off to a war with a video game soundtrack, army recruiters, embedded journalists, and offers of a steady income and a secure future. The play will offer a war story for the current generation of young soldiers.
Founded in 1969, The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago is an academic department and a performance center that offers professional dance presentations, artist residencies, community outreach, and public education programming. The Dance Center has been especially successful when commissioning new works, including two new works from Urban Bush Women: Shadow's Child in 2002 and Walking with Pearl–African Diaries in the Spring of 2004. Both achieved critical success and were performed in other major venues.
A native of Taiwan, Lin Hwai-min first became interested in dance watching the film The Red Shoes. Encouraged by his parents to follow more academic pursuits, he studied writing and published two best-selling novels by age 22. Prior to founding Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan in 1973, he studied Chinese opera movement in Taiwan, modern dance in New York and classical court dance in Japan and Korea. Over the years, through his work for Cloud Gate, Lin has developed an original dance language evolved from Chinese opera, martial art, meditation, Tai Chi, modern dance, and ballet. His choreographies for Cloud Gate have been raved throughout Europe, the U.S. and Asia. Lin has received many awards and honors, including being named Choreographer of the 20th Century by Dance Europe magazine and the 1999 Ramon Magsaysay Award in Journalism, Literature, and Creative Arts, considered one of the highest honors in Asia.
The Joyce Award will support The Dance Center's commissioning of Lin to create Cursive III, the conclusion of his trilogy influenced by Chinese calligraphy. Cursive III will use movement to explore "Wild Calligraphy," which is considered the highest form of Chinese cursive aesthetics and reveals the spiritual state of the writer. The Dance Center expects to present Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan's U.S. Premiere of Cursive III at Chicago's Harris Theater for Music and Dance in the Fall of 2006, prior to a national tour.
Gallery 400, founded in 1983, is the contemporary art exhibition space of the College of Architecture and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As the nexus between a public education and research institution and Chicago's vibrant artistic scene, Gallery 400 is recognized for supporting the creation of new work and the development of experimental models for multi-disciplinary and culturally diverse exhibition. In support of its central exhibition and lecture series programs, Gallery 400 produces workshops, tours, publications, and educational activities for the general public, artists, students, and at-risk youth and adults.
Visual artist Edgar Arceneaux was born in 1972 in Los Angeles, where he continues to live and work. A graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of Arts and also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and at the Fachhochschule Aachen in Germany. He has been featured in numerous group exhibitions in galleries and museums and has had twelve solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe including those at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In his drawings, sculptures, and installations, Arceneaux pushes the viewer to find unexpected connections and relationships between words, places, and ideas.
The Joyce Award will support Gallery 400 in commissioning Arceneaux to create a short 35-mm film installation entitled The Alchemy of Comedy. The subject of the film will be a performance of jokes, puns, one-liners, and witticisms performed by comedian David Allen Grier. Gallery 400 and Arceneaux will also invite students from UIC and two schools from the Alternative Schools Network, Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School and Westside Alternative High School, to participate as both film crew and audience. The project will be presented from April to June 2005 and will include shooting the film in the gallery with a live audience and coinciding with the ArtChicago and Chicago Contemporary and Classic art fairs. The completed film will be presented in a six week exhibition commencing two and half weeks after the film shoot.
Founded in 1996 and based in Detroit, The Sphinx Organization's mission is to increase the participation of African Americans and Latinos in music schools, as professional musicians and as classical music audiences, as well as to enhance classical music education in grades kindergarten though 12. It is best known for the annual Sphinx Competition for African-American and Latino string players. Participants in the competition are also offered master classes, coaching, and seminars with music professionals, as well as mentoring opportunities with members of the all African-American and Latino Sphinx Symphony.
Born in 1941, Adolphus Cunningham Hailstork began playing piano as a child and continued his musical education at Howard University, Manhattan School of Music, and Michigan State University. Hailstork teaches at Old Dominion University as an Eminent Scholar. A prolific composer, he writes in a variety of forms and styles: symphonic works and tone poems for orchestra, piano concertos, chamber works, duos for instruments, songs for vocals with piano, orchestra or chamber groups, and band works. His work has been commissioned and performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. His work has also been performed by the major ochestras of Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. His numerous awards include first place from the University of Delaware's Festival of Contemporary Music and the Governors Award for the Arts from the governor of Virginia. He was also named Cultural Laureate of the State of Virginia.
The Joyce Award will support The Sphinx Organization's commissioning and production of a new orchestral work by Hailstork for the 2007 Sphinx Competition Finals. The work will be premiered by a professional cellist and the Sphinx Symphony. The composition will be written in three movements and influenced by African, African-American, and Latino expression.
Recipients of the inaugural Joyce Awards in 2004 were: Cleveland Museum of Art, for an installation by visual artist Trenton Doyle Hancock; Chicago's Goodman Theatre, for a play by playwright Naomi Iizuka; the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, for a symphonic composition by composer Roberto Sierra; and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, for a work by composer Chinary Ung.
Based in Chicago with assets of $800 million, the Joyce Foundation makes grants of $30 million a year to support efforts to strengthen public policies in ways that improve the quality of life in the Great Lakes region. The Foundation's Culture Program, with annual grants of $1.4 million, is interested in projects that bring diverse audiences together to share common cultural experiences and encourage more people to see the arts as integral parts of their lives. The Foundation also makes grants in the areas of Education, Employment, Environment, Gun Violence Prevention, and Money and Politics.
For more information on applying for a 2006 Joyce Award or to learn more about the Joyce Foundation, please visit www.joycefdn.org or call 312.782.2464.
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