MP+D awarded grant from national endowment for the arts
The Museum of Performance + Design has been awarded a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support its project Preserving Bay Area Dance Legacies, which will process, preserve, and make accessible the personal papers of dancer/choreographers June Watanabe, Gary Palmer, Welland Lathrop, and Carlos Carvajal.
The son of a Filipino immigrant, folk and ballet dancer/choreographer Carlos Carvajal has been recognized as one of the leaders of the San Francisco Bay Area's dance renaissance in the 1970s and served for 12 seasons as Co-Artistic Director of the SF Ethnic Dance Festival. Although he began as a folk dancer, in 1951 Carvajal started dancing with San Francisco Ballet (SFB), then abroad with companies such as Ballet Nacional of Venezuela. He served as ballet master and associate choreographer with SFB in the 1960s and has created more than 200 works for ballet, opera and television including SFB, SF Opera, Oakland Ballet, and Dance Theater of Harlem. In 1970, he founded Dance Spectrum, choreographing ballets that explored religion, mythology and eastern philosophies, as well as folk dance from around the world.
Welland Lathrop was a dancer, teacher, choreographer, and a leader of the west coast modern and avant-garde dance movement. In 1928, he moved to San Francisco and began studying dance with Ann Mundstock. In 1946 he established the Welland Lathrop School and Dance Company, where he was joined by legendary dancer/choreographer Anna Halprin, MP+D’s most heavily researched subject. Lathrop retired and closed his school in the late 1960s, but continued to work with other SF area dance groups including Shela Xoregos Performing Company.
In 1982, Gary Palmer created Men Dancing, a popular SF Bay Area dance series that featured only male dancers and choreographers in order to "give male dance artists a creative space outside of traditional roles (as partners to ballerinas) or archetypes (heroes or villains)." The series included works by Remy Charlip, Jose Limon, Lucas Hoving, Robert Moses and dozens of others.
June Watanabe has created contemporary dance theater works and collaborated with distinguished artists from diverse disciplines including taiko masters, visual artists like Ruth Asawa and Sandra Woodall, and choreographers Remy Charlip and Alonzo King. Her work incorporates and illuminates the Japanese American experience and explores ritualistic formalities and womanhood. June and her family were held in an internment camp for three years, and her internment works have been used to teach students and the general public about the relocation and displacement of Japanese Americans during WWII.
During the year-long project, 65 linear feet of original documents, photographs, costumes, and video recordings will be sorted, arranged, rehoused, described, preserved, and cataloged for broad public access.
For more information on this National Endowment for the Arts grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news
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