Live Arts Boston 2021
Calling all performing artists!
In 2021, Live Arts Boston (LAB), created with the support and partnership of the Barr Foundation, supported dozens of Greater Boston area artists to test ideas, explore collaborations and build skills in the process of generating new, original work.
LAB provided up to $15,000 in project-specific funds to create, produce or present new performing arts work for Greater Boston audiences. In addition to funding, grantees will receive project documentation, one-on-one advising, peer networking opportunities and support for other professional development.
Funding supported work in dance, theater, music, opera, musical theater, spoken word, performance art, circus arts, traditional and folk performing arts and any multi-disciplinary combination of the above.
Scroll down to learn more about the program and meet the 2021 LAB grantees.
The Boston Foundation is pleased to have supported the following projects and artists through Live Arts Boston 2021:
Found in Translation is a series of virtual or hybrid theater events, live-streamed with captions to amplify the power and complexities of being multilingual, immigrants, or identifying as AAPI in Greater Boston.
Abria Smith will present a live showcase of theater, music, spoken word and movement based on her poetry book, Somebody Soup.
Adrian Anantawan will perform musical works inspired by his disability identity, collaborating with other musicians with disabilities around the world.
Jacques Schwarz-Bart will write an Afro-Caribbean jazz repertoire based on his Sone Ka-La concept and perform it in a concert series.
ANSON RAP$ will explore 3D sound with a live, 360-degree performance of the musical composition NOSE.
Experimenting with the textual settings in Lillian-Yvonne Bertram's book Travesty Generator and its themes of racial and social justice, this project will culminate in an evening-length musical presentation.
Artists' Theater of Boston is collaborating with accomplished poet Ashley Rose Salomon on her first full-length play, The Roslindale Love Canal, based on personal narratives that surround this little-known tragic event in Boston’s history.
Djeli and Balafonist Balla Kouyate is creating an album of traditional West African and fusion music with his brothers.
Suite Talk will be a full-length performance that layers rap/spoken word, contemporary and hip-hop movement, and original music from a diverse ensemble of artists who represent vibrant cultures emerging from Boston’s inner city neighborhoods.
Malcolm X to Malcolm X will be a compilation album commenting on a journey towards belonging, finding a place to call home, and sharing common ground with roots in both Boston and NYC.
Puerto Rican artists Beatriz Irizarry, Cristina Lugo, Marili Pizarro will collaborate with Boston-based artists Emily Beattie, Jimena Bermejo, and Callie Chapman, and composer Guarionex Morales-Matos, to create a performance through chance, research, and telematics.
Jessie Jeanne Stinnett teams up with ocean physicist Dr. Larry J. Pratt and Boston Dance Theater to create an art and science performance work which focuses on climate change through the lens of sea level rise.
For her debut album Inherited, Burcu will rewrite lyrics to her father's unreleased songs from the 70s, talking about being an immigrant and mental illness, in the form of letters to her father.
Cakeswagg will be creating an innovative hiphop album supported by captivating visuals and live performances.
Circus 617 will be creating an evening-length contemporary circus show focusing on the theme of artistic community and connection.
Claudia Medina is a female saxophone player. She will create an album of original music that will showcase the best of Peruvian music fusion with jazz and the rhythms of different cultures around the world.
In collaboration with patients recovering from neurovascular injuries, David McMullin will create music that challenges and benefits them in their rehabilitation, to be performed by a combined ensemble of patients and professional musicians.
Gapi (DoYeon Kim and Chase Morrin) will be creating a multi-cultural album dedicated to immigrant and women's rights.
Dzidzor is curating a live multi-disciplinary performance centered on God, black church, and West African griot and folklore.
Elae Weekes will be composing an Alternative R&B album and visual project inspired by the stories of young men in his community.
Fabiola Méndez will be producing an audiovisual series of duo collaborations with musicians from diverse origins and backgrounds, in which they'll arrange and perform music written by composers of color.
In collaboration with community members and artists, Faye Dupras will create a sensory-friendly interactive production using puppets, music, and live action for family audiences around themes of inclusion and belonging.
Forbes Graham will be composing a electroacoustic work for chamber ensemble inspired by the migration of the Charles Street A.M.E. Church from Beacon Hill to Roxbury.
Inner Space: A Collective Journey is an accessible, free, and immersive album release concert by Genie Santiago based around three themes: The Awakening, The Healing, and The Ascension.
I Give You My Home is a site-specific opera that paints a portrait of Rose Standish Nichols and her efforts to effect change through the Women’s Peace Movement, Women’s Suffrage, and in her professional work.
Episode 2 of Radio Play(s) will be a stage-performed podcast in which a timely theme is unpacked through a collection of stories, told through the spoken word, musical segments and connected by a powerful score.
Hyphae is an interactive performance inspired by the behavior of wild mushrooms that brings choreographer Emily Beattie, poet U-Meleni Mhabla-Adebo, and designer Rosa Weinberg together with their audience to create a single, networked organism.
First-generation Russian-Jewish artists, choreographer/dancer Ilya Vidrin and multi-instrumentalist/singer-songwriter Alec Hutson, will create a multimedia evening-length production in response to Soviet-era bard songs of oppression and hope.
Jackie O'Riley & Rebecca McGowan will create a show of traditional Irish dance and music blurring the distinction between movers and band.
Jean Appolon Expressions (JAE) will present Kiltirèl Conexiones (Cultural Connections in Haitian Creole and Spanish) a collaborative dance project with Gerardina Halloran that highlights and celebrates the deep connections between Haitian and Dominican cultures.
Jha D will produce a series of spoken word poetry flashmob events throughout the city of Boston that recall and honor the experiences of the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities.
Jonathan Bailey Holland will create an electroacoustic work for string quartet that deals with the relationship of live vs. prerecorded sound in a live concert setting, as well as the concepts of memory and perception.
Jose Soto will record an album of original music that reflects the life philosophy and social values of the Bribri indigenous community and how this philosophy is expressed culturally.
In collaboration with vocal chamber ensemble Renaissance Men, KAIROS Dance Theater will create FOXY, a contemporary cabaret interpretation of Stravinsky's famed satirical opera-ballet Renard.
Kim McLarin will stage back-to-back readings of her one-woman play Divorce Dog across Boston to explore cultural segregation in the Boston theater community and how audience shapes the creative production of Black artists.
Laura Sánchez will be creating a multimodal live production combining flamenco with poetry, visual art, drama and creative expression inspired her award winning short film After Dark.
Play for Change, led by Tanya Nixon-Silberg (Little Uprisings) & Bonnie Duncan (The Gottabees), will be an immersive theatrical experience for families featuring puppetry, live music, and art-making to talk about power, joy, and liberation.
Altars is an interdisciplinary production that blends dance, spoken word, art song and community, and which will highlight local, BIPOC artists in Boston.
The Medusa Reclaimed team will connect art to action for justice by creating a theatrical fantasia with songs to stir Medusa's voice in all of us.
In community with two-spirit, trans* & queer kin of color, They Watch You Thrive will cultivate a series of live artspace activations rooted in care, belonging, and intergenerational power.
Mohamed Araki’s Al-Murtaja is a livestream, studio recording, and short documentary film showcasing traditional and original music from Sudan.
Uniting local activists, comedians, musicians, and other performers, Muhammad Seven & the Spring will produce Awakenings, a three-act showcase focused around one important theme and accompanied by a musical album.
Naseem Alatrash will be recording an album of his original contemporary Arab music compositions, as well as traditional music from the eastern Mediterranean basin and North Africa.
Naked Empire Bouffon Company will be creating an outrageously satirical, anti-colonial comedy about the diasporic Puerto Rican experience.
Director/pianist Sarah Bob of the New Gallery Concert Series will produce Adopt and Adapt, an evening of new music and new visual art examining how one navigates new realities in family, country, and lifestyle.
Nolan Tesis will be producing a live ballroom show exploring how the underground House / Ballroom scene grew from its roots in the Harlem Renaissance to existing as a global freedom movement and LGBT subculture.
Octavia Bryant is creating with a goal of bringing what R&B does for Black intimacy back to the forefront of the conversation, and making an R&B project that reflects a healthy, evolved psyche for Black people.
Omar Najmi will be composing and producing a workshop of his new opera This is not that dawn, about the Partition of India.
Palaver Strings joins forces with the genre-defying chamber ensemble Warp Trio to present Affirmation, a program centering music and stories that have been suppressed or misrepresented in mainstream media narratives.
Pedro Reina-Pérez will be sharing a multidisciplinary artistic and scholarly presentation on the life and work of cellist virtuoso Pablo Casals, with an original score by Boston musicians Brian and Rosi Amador.
Peter DiMuro/Public Displays of Motion and collaborators offer a platform for "Queer Cabarets" through their multi-media installation Queerhenge, a culmination of intersectional and intergenerational dialogues within the project Stones to Rainbows/Gay to Queer Lives.
Phoebe Potts will be writing and performing a tragic-comic one woman show about adoption, capitalism, and the tyranny of American motherhood.
ReachYou is a transmission from the future to help us be in the present. It is an immersive, free, interactive, performance in Augmented Reality made by Katrina + Jonah Goldsaito with compositions by Beau Kenyon.
Continuing her exploration of music for bicycles, Reynaliz Herrera will compose, present and record BIKEncerto: a concerto for solo bicycle and orchestra, performing it at Somerville Community Growing Center with her company Ideas, Not Theories.
Smirna Ortiz will compose and record a collection of Latin transcendental etudes for piano.
Soyoung L Kim, in collaboration with Ashley-Rose Salomon and Fernadina Chan, will be creating a performance art comprised of of spoken word, dance, and visual art, inspired by 강강술래 Ganggangsullae, a traditional Korean dance.
TC Squared will be creating a devised virtual theatre piece that explores people's biases and prejudices through an incident in a laundromat.
Theatre of Eternal Values will be creating a devised play about the power of womanhood, based on a historical meeting between Harriet Tubman and Pandita Ramabai.
Todd Dahn will create an urban musical that tells the story of how women of color have been affected by the founding and growth of America.
Transient Canvas is commissioning and recording new works by four BIPOC composers: Jonathan Bailey Holland, Yoon-Ji Lee, Jennifer Jolley, and Matthew Evan Taylor.
Triy will create an album based on love, fatherhood and being a black man in America.
In the Space Between follows VLA Dance Director Victoria L Awkward and company members on a journey from reality, to a dream world, and to uncomfortable spaces "between."
Villada will be staging a Fashion Theatre piece inspired by the way that our bodies hold emotion and the textiles we choose to hold ourselves.
White Snake Projects, Cerise Lim Jacobs, Mary Prescott & Elena Araoz explore the "pandemic within the pandemic," the surge of Intimate Partner Violence during Covid-19 through the lens of Homer's Odyssey using live, virtual opera.
Zayra Pola will be creating a grand release live concert for her very first Salsa album Te Va Gustar, that was made possible by 2020/Live Arts Boston grant from the Boston Foundation.
Thank you to our 2021 Live Arts Boston Reviewers
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Ali Rosa-Sales Jacob’s Pillow Andrea Blesso Boston Center for the Arts Andrés Holder Boston Children’s Chorus Angela Gladue A Tribe Called Red Annie Yang-Perez New England Foundation for the Arts Anny Thach College of the Holy Cross ALANA Alums Ashton Lites StiggityStackz Worldwide Inc Beau Kenyon Northeastern University, College of Arts, Media + Design; Beau Kenyon Studios Benjamin Evett Independent Artist Catherine Stewart New Hampshire Theatre Project Charmagne Glass-Tripp Gripp Productions Christina Leonard Center Stage Dance Studio Corey DePina ZUMIX David Norville Castle of our Skins Elizavette Cordero Education Development Center Eve Alpern Harvard University George Yamazawa, Jr. Artist Gregory Ball King Boston Gwendolyn Quezaire-Presutti Woventales Production LLC/QuezairePresutti-Arts LLC James Dargan Ring Shout Jasmine M. Rush Actor/Writer/Director JD Stokely UnBound Bodies Collective Jonathan Secor Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Secor Productions Joya Powell Movement of the People Dance Company
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JuanCarlos Gonzalez Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, INC
Karen Young Independent Artist
Lilly Manycolors Woven Womxn
Lyndsay Cox Boston Center for the Arts Marci Diamond Diamond Family Circus Marge Buckley Independent Artist Marian Taylor Brown Arts Connect International | Heilbronn University Meagan Dilworth Independent Artist/Educator Mehmet Ali Sanlikol Composer, Performer & Professor at New England Conservatory Mwalim DaPhunkee Professor Polyphonic Studios & UMass Dartmouth Nell Breyer Artist Nismah Osman The Record Co. Rashaad Pearson Soulmatic LLC Regie Gibson Shakespeare to Hiphop Rhea Vedro Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Romy Saint Hilaire Arts Consultant Sal Medrano SOMA Agency Samantha Gambaccini Arts After Hours, Community Music Center of Boston Sara Porkalob Storyteller, Cultural Worker Sidney Hargro Philanthropy Network Simone D. Cottrell Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange Stacy Handler Urbanity Dance Stephanie Mckay Co-chair of the Medford Arts Council, Educator, Recording Artist Taylor Leonard Independent Artist Zakiyyah Sutton Artist-Activist |
Live Arts Boston: Advancing Creativity, Equity and Entrepreneurship in Boston's Performing Arts Ecosystem
In its first three years after launch in 2017, Live Arts Boston supported nearly 200 performing artists in music, theater, dance and more, providing well over $2 million in funding in its first three years. In 2020, Animating Democracy released an assessment of the LAB program that explored how the investment has changed the trajectories of artists and the Greater Boston community, and providing insights into how the program could evolve and grow for greater impact.