Charlotte Street Foundation Announces Generative Performing Artists Awards Fellow

Charlotte Street Foundation is pleased to announce the selection of two Kansas City based generative performing artists to receive unrestricted cash Awards of $6,500 each in 2010. Selected through a competitive, two-phased process by a panel of area performing arts professionals, the recipients are composer/musician Brad Cox and cross-disciplinary director/writer/performer Stephanie Roberts.

Launched in 2008, the Charlotte Street Generative Performing Artist Awards support and recognize artists creating outstanding, innovative, original work in the fields of dance, theater, music, experimental music performance, theater/performance art, and hybrid/interdisciplinary versions thereof. The awards seek to foster the continued creative and professional development of the selected artists, provide the means for them to further focus on and develop their work, and increase exposure for their accomplishments, as the CSF Visual Artist Awards have done since 1997. Through its Awards programs, CSF seeks to contribute to the vitality of Kansas City's art community and to enhance Kansas City's desirability as a place for artists to work and live.

The recipients were selected based on the quality of their work and accomplishments to date, as well as promise for continued development as generative artists; relevance of their work in relation to local, regional and national contemporary art discourses and to the contemporary moment and culture in which we are living; and the potential of their work "stand up" nationally, influence the field, and have lasting value. With these latest awards, Charlotte Street Foundation has now recognized a total of 78 Kansas City based visual and generative performing artists, with a total of $490,500 in unrestricted cash grants distributed directly to the artists. A public performance of the work of this year's Generative Performing Awards Fellows is planned for fall, 2010.

The 2010 Generative Performing Awards Advisors responsible for selecting the recipients included David Ford, multi-disciplinary artist; Michael Joy, Director of Artists and Educational Programs, Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey; Joette Pelster, Executive Director, Coterie Theatre; Cynthia Rider, Managing Director, Kansas City Repertory Theatre; and Paul Rudy, Professor of Composition, UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance.

The panel first met in early February, at which time they selected six semi-finalists from a pool of 25 nominated artists. In addition to Cox and Roberts, semi-finalists included composer Christopher Biggs, choreographer Sabrina Madison-Cannon, composer Ingrid Stolzel, and director/writer/actor Heidi Van. Between February and the final selection meeting on May 18, panelists were encouraged to attend live performances and expand their familiarity with the work of the semi-finalists.

Partial funding for CSF's 2010 Awards programs has been generously provided by Dallas and Scott Pioli, J Scott Francis, Nancy and Rick Green, Julie and Mike Kirk, Meg and Bill Zahner, and Jeanne and Charlie Sosland.

ABOUT THE 2010 FELLOWS:

BRAD COX

As a performing composer, Brad Cox embraces a wide range of musical traditions and expressions. His explorations include techniques central to Western Classical music, such as notated pitch, rhythm, and timbre, as well as improvisation and chance elements. Fascinated by the communal aspects of music making, he has been strongly influenced by the tradition of jazz music, in particular the collaborative aspects of the jazz ensemble.

Cox views composition not as a process in which the composer notates every idea as fully as possible in order to have it rendered exactly by performing musicians, but rather as an ongoing creative collaboration. The resulting music may range from fully notated to freely improvised, and just as in life, the most interesting moments are often unplanned. He frequently makes use of a collage-like compositional approach, with different layers of a piece having varying degrees of improvisational freedom. Being interested in a wide range of musical expression, Cox endeavors to create a body of work that encompasses a spectrum of human experience, from the comic to the terrifying, and from the absurd to the sublime.

Brad Cox received his Master of Arts in Music from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2001. He is co-founder, composer, arranger and musical director of Owen/Cox Dance Group, whose recent projects include The Lewis and Carroll Expedition, Bottom of the Big Top, Presumed Lost, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, and The Christmas Story - A medieval Mystery Play. He is also composer, arranger and ensemble organizer of The People's Liberation Big Band of Greater Kansas City, which performs extensively, and whose recent projects include The Battleship Potemkin, an original score created for the classic Eisenstein film.

STEPHANIE ROBERTS

Stephanie Roberts is what has at times been called a "slash artist" - an actor/creator/writer/singer/songwriter/musician/teacher. For fifteen years she has been creating original ensemble theatre. Although she specializes in mask and red-nose clown traditions, with each project she allows content to inform the form. Her work is typically character-driven, informed by music, and embraces the poetic clown - flawed, ridiculous, fiercely determined, and desperately seeking love.

Roberts' most recent work, Boom! An international Lost and Found Family Marching Band, mixes genres both theatrical and musical. The ensemble of six portrays reunited sibling orphans from around the world, whose "sad, sad story" unfolds with each new song. Roberts is inspired by the collision of disparate characters and how despite, or perhaps because of their differences they are inextricably connected to one another through a beautiful and human need.

Roberts received her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Ensemble Based Physical Theatre from the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre in Blue Lake, CA in 2006 and her BFA in Acting from Cornish School of the Arts, Seattle, WA in 1990. Currently Assistant Professor of Physical Theatre at University of Missouri, Kansas City, she has directed productions at UMKC including Slammed! (2010), and Meanwhile (2006); has provided movement coaching/choreography for productions including The Cripple of Inishman, Nebraska Repertory Theatre; Under Midwestern Stars, Kansas City Repertory Theatre; and numerous productions at UMKC, most recently Train to 2010, directed by Ricardo Khan, and Pericles, directed by Carla Noack.

Solo performance projects include 60x60 Dance, Electronic Music Midwest Festival, Kansas City, KS; At the Beach, Byrd Productions; Party Girl, Annex Theatre, Seattle; and Threads, Bumbershoot Arts Festival, Seattle. Collaborative performance projects include Broke People's Baroque People's Theatre with My Barbarian at Urban Culture Project's la Esquina as part of the exhibition Ecstatic Resistence, produced by Grand Arts, and The Greatest Story Never Told and The Whisper, both at the Mad River Festival, Blue Lake , CA, the latter of which was awarded "Best of the Fest." Roberts is the recent recipient of an Inspiration Award from the Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City and is an Urban Culture Project Performing Studio Resident. She is currently working on a one-woman play, The Mask of The Broken Heart, which will premiere in Kansas City in June.

Charlotte Street Foundation (CSF) supports and recognizes outstanding artists in Kansas City; presents, promotes, enhances, and encourages the visual and performing arts; and fosters economic development in the urban core of Kansas City, Mo. On all levels, CSF places artists at the center of its mission and has built an infrastructure that depends on and reflects their involvement. As a result, we are an organization that continually evolves in response to their input and in relation to the city's larger cultural ecosystem. For more about the Charlotte Street Foundation, visit www.charlottestreet.org

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