COVID 19 UPDATE: A Message to 2019-20 Grant Recipients
March 12, 2020
If you have received a grant for a project that has not yet taken place, we encourage you to be proactive about the safety and health of your audiences and artists and communities during the current medical emergency, and to strongly consider postponing or canceling any live public events.
We have extended our deadline to complete until June 2021 and will be accommodating to any of our grant recipients who need to move their project into next season, or if necessary to cancel it. We understand there are a lot of unknowns right now, so please just keep us informed as your plans evolve, and we will work out the details with you.
All the best, and stay well.
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Manbites Dog Theater is pleased to announce its first Manbites Dog Theater Fund grants.
We have awarded 24 project grants totaling $37,150, to support an exciting range of Triangle theater productions being presented by local artists and companies during the 2019-20 season. The recipients include an impressive group of theater creators, ranging from newcomers to established organizations.
A call for grant proposals last spring brought in close to 30 applications and inquiries. Applicants who qualified were evaluated by members of a special grants panel who recommended award amounts, which were subsequently approved by the Manbites Dog Theater Board of Directors.
The grants, ranging from $200 to a maximum of $2,500, will help make possible the work of more than 450 individual Triangle theater artists for an estimated total audience of 14,000 across the Triangle counties of Durham, Chatham, Orange, and Wake.
It’s an impressive group of projects, and it speaks to the strength, diversity, and dedication of the Triangle theater community. We’re proud to be supporting all of these artists.
The following theater makers have received Manbites Dog Theater Fund grants for projects during the 2019-20 season.
• Bartlett Theater: The Norman Conquests – a site-specific and immersive repertory production of Alan Ayckbourn’s comedic trilogy, presented at Eno River State Park.
• Torry Bend: Dreaming – an original work, using puppetry, overhead projection, and toy theater, that examines Winsor McCay’s early 20th century comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland.
• The Bipeds Dance Theatre Company: Bury the Light – Artistic directors Stacy Wolfson and Curtis Eller will guide the creation of an original multidisciplinary work about death, seen from a variety of cultural rituals and personal experiences.
• Ian Bowater and Paul Dubliner: Paul and Ian’s One-Man Show – An evening of original improvised theater, performed in various alternative venues and cabaret spaces in the Triangle.
• Bulldog Ensemble Theater: Orange Light – a new play by Triangle playwright Howard Craft (based on the 1991 Imperial Foods processing plant fire in Hamlet, North Carolina, that took the lives of 25 workers) about how a community deals with tragedy.
• Burning Coal Theatre Company: The Container – area premiere of Clare Bayley’s site-specific work telling the stories of five immigrants fleeing their homes in search of a better future, featuring a lecture/talkback series during the run.
• Ren Cleveland: 221-B Baker Street, Reimagined – a new adaptation of the A. Conan Doyle stories, set in the present day with a female Holmes and Watson, exploring the challenges faced by women in the Victorian Age which still continue today.
• Delta Boys Theater Company: Year of the Monkey – a new company-created work exploring the question of what true liberation looks like, and how it can be achieved.
• The Durham Savoyards: Patience, or Bunthorne’s Bride – a new staging of the Gilbert and Sullivan work, last done by the company in 2006.
• Forest Moon Theater: Steel Magnolias – the Wake Forest community theater presents Robert Harling’s 1987 play about the bonds among the women of a small Southern town.
• Full Nelson Theater: Carolyn Adams – a new play by Triangle playwright Mark Cornell about a young woman with a mysterious connection to a woman who died 50 years ago.
• Yvette Holder: Sips & Scripts – a staged reading series showcasing new works by North Carolina playwrights.
• JaMeeka Holloway-Burrell: Single Black Female – area premiere of a two-woman show that uses rapid-fire comic vignettes to explore the lives of thirty-something African American women.
• Honest Pint Theatre Company: Bomb-itty of Errors – area premiere of a hip hop retelling of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors.
• JoRose (Johanna Rose Burwell): ConscioUs Culture – an original movement/modern dance/yoga based theater piece, with audience participation.
• Debra Kaufman: Illuminated Dresses – a new work about transformation, featuring fourteen monologues by women playwrights.
• Soapbox Audio Collective/Tamara Kissane: The New Colossus Audio Drama – A podcast version of Kissane’s original adaptation of The Seagull, set in the age of social media.
• MOJOAA Performing Arts Company: Smoked – world premiere of a new play by Thomas Brazzle, set in an Austin, Texas barbecue joint, that explores themes of family, elders, ancestry, and gentrification.
• OdysseyStage: Suffragist Project – an original immersive work celebrating and exploring the struggle for women’s rights, staged during the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment.
• Pittsboro Youth Theater/Social Justice Theater of the Carolinas: columbinus – local touring production of the play about high school alienation, hostility, and social pressure as manifested in the 1999 Columbine school shootings.
• Rebecca Fox & Rebecca Jackson-Artis: The Rebecca Show: What If I’m the Becky – remounting of the two-person show about how to be a boat-rocking “Rebecca” when confronted with today’s political climate.
• See Saw Projects: Prison Theatre Workshops – a series of devised theater workshops at Wake Corrections Center, involving inmates with script development, rehearsals, and showing of an original work, as part of WCC’s offender reentry program.
• Solace Theatre: Memoriam: An Adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula – an original musical reimagining of the classic horror tale, exploring themes of spiritual warfare and grief over the loss of loved ones.
• Women’s Theatre Festival: Waters Rise – world premiere of a new play by Justine Wiesinger, a satirical near-future look at people attempting to cope with environmental disaster.