Kaatsbaan Cultural Park To Receive $15,000 Grant From The National Endowment For The Arts

Kaatsbaan Cultural Park has been approved by the National Endowment for the Arts to receive a Grants for Arts Projects award of $15,000. This grant will support We, a piece by Emily Coates and Emmanuèle Phuon combining postmodern dance and Cambodian classical dance to reflect on themes of animism, ecology, and astronomy - and how these themes are embedded within geographically specific cultures and ecosystems. We embodies humanity's ongoing struggle to fully fathom our natural world, and will be part of Kaatsbaan's Spring Festival. This grant is one of 1,251 Grants for Arts Projects awards totaling nearly $28.8 million that were announced by the NEA as part of its first round of fiscal year 2023 grants.

"The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support arts projects in communities nationwide," said NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. "Projects such as We with Kaatsbaan Cultural Park strengthen arts and cultural ecosystems, provide equitable opportunities for arts participation and practice, and contribute to the health of our communities and our economy."

We approaches its themes from a macroscopic/microscopic view of the planet via a series of stories: from an astronaut floating in space, or ancient Egyptian astronomer-priests practicing a dance of the stars around their temple altars, to narratives of land use and abuse crafted into new shadow puppetry for our age of climate destruction. These are hidden, global stories, unearthed for an interconnected planet.

Coates and Phuon spent years dancing together in Mikhail Baryshnikov's and Yvonne Rainer's companies; a shared research fellowship at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts reunited the two artists and became the impetus for this new work.

The performance is separately crafted and interlinked: each artist has crafted an indoor section for the theatrical stage, and an outdoor section in selected landscapes, where the natural landscape is a character in the work as much as the human performers. Together, these combine to form two separate evening-length pieces.

For more information on other projects included in the NEA's grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news.

About the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park

Under new leadership, Kaatsbaan Cultural Park deepens its mission to provide an extraordinary environment for cultural innovation and excellence. As both an incubator for creativity and presenter for diverse world-class artists in dance, theater, music, film, poetry, culinary, media, and visual arts, Kaatsbaan provides artists with state-of-the-art dance studios, accommodations, an indoor theater, and two outdoor stages. Sitting on 153 Hudson River-adjacent acres, Kaatsbaan is free of urban facilities' space and time constraints, allowing for exciting levels of artistic exploration, creative action, and achievement - just two hours north of New York City. Kaatsbaan Cultural Park is committed to the advancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the arts as we aim to present, promote, and embrace programming that accurately reflects our society. We encourage a broadly diverse group of individuals to participate in our programs and join our Board and Staff and insist on being inclusive of all peoples regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socio-economic background, physical or mental ability. For more information, please visit www.kaatsbaan.org.