SEVEN arts and cultural organizations have qualified for the Innovation Grants Project 2020, a special project implemented by the Board of Trustees of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP BoT).
They are: Ballet Manila; Casa San Miguel; FilDocs, Inc.; Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Colleges, Marbel, Inc.; Sipat Lawin, Inc.; The Performance Laboratory; and Tuldok Animation Studios.
They will receive grants to create and produce new works in various art disciplines and distribute new content on the arts using online technology, blended or hybrid technologies.
THE PROJECTS
Ballet Manila’s project is Silver Linings: Ballet Manila@25 (Hope and Dance in Extraordinary Times). It aims to celebrate the ballet company’s 25th season during a global pandemic marked by lockdowns and the complete stoppage of live performances. The project will showcase re-imagined presentations of classical pieces as well as new commissioned work specially developed for film as primary medium. It also includes Ballet Minis, a series of short dance films meant to reinforce Ballet Manila’s main strength of performing the classics with the Russian Vaganova discipline; and a Silver Linings Ballet Gala, which will showcase live performances from Ballet Manila studios and dancers’ homes and pre-recorded performances, which will be streamed live via Ballet Manila’s Facebook page and YouTube channels.
Meanwhile, Casa San Miguel’s proposal revolves around the concept of “Spring” in different iterations through music, dance, visual arts, and film. This includes a series of eight 10- to 15-minute episodes about renewal of hope, a celebration of creativity, and how arts have served artists and communities as a medium for reflection and healing.
FilDocs, Inc. hopes to continue the success of DaangDokyu film festival and consolidate the achievements of the virtual cinema festival to sustain and further widen the awareness of Philippine documentaries through various projects. It intends to produce and distribute DaangDokyuDokBook which contains the full program of the festival’s over 45 documentary titles and film details, as well as essays on the study and appreciation of contemporary Philippine documentary. It also plans to have a virtual-access library which will offer private viewing of the documentaries featured in DaangDokyu program and collection. A portion of the grant will go to the development of DaangDokyu website, which will contain information on Philippine documentaries featured in the festival including creative and technical details, trailers, Q&A’s and other updates.
The Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Colleges, Marbel, Inc. proposed “OpenStudio+OpenSeason [The Dancers are Absent but the dance is Not],” an art project undertaking non-traditional collaborations within art genres integrating the performing arts, visual arts, dance, and film. It will feature five short dance films, selected from the Juror’s Choice winners of Teatro Ambahanon’s Director’s Prize Competition; installation art to be placed at the The Nest Art[ist]s Incubation (Teatro Ambahanon’s art space); and the Salamindanaw film project which seeks to create an omnibus film that delves on memory, space and body.
Sipat Lawin, Inc.’s Komunidad X Collective Business takes on “E-mahiNASYON: Community Performance Innovation for Social Change Festival,” a three-year performance innovation development platform which started in 2020 at the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic and will culminate in 2022, the year for the national elections. For its first edition in 2020, E-mahiNasyon gathered 10 next-generation performance-makers working and innovating performances with and within communities from different islands in the Philippines to collaborate with non-theater partners as part of the “Contemporary Ritual Makers Performance Platform.” Further themes to explore will be climate change, new solidarities in time of physical distancing, citizen and voter’s education, rethinking notions of nation, queer and queering, combating discrimination and empowerment of women in children in the time of national and global crisis. The performances and documentation of the performance processes will be shared on kXchange.org.
The Performance Laboratory, Inc. — in collaboration with Teatrokon: West Visayas Theatre Network and CCP Kaisa sa Sining Regional Arts Center Partners in Negros Occidental — will launch “Ang Mga Alates,” a series of four short plays tackling current and relevant societal issues and incorporating stories of realities brought by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic — as part of the weekly staged readings of plays written by emerging Negrense playwrights featured in The Blackbox Presents. The staged readings will be developed into full productions and will be part of an online web series to be premiered next year.
Finally, Tuldok Animation Studios will create an “Edutainment package for Cultural Advocacy: Reimagining Cultural Advocacy through Integrated and Synergized Edutainment (RISE),” which will include two five-minute animated folktales and one Pinoy komiks folktale with a mobile app for an augmented reality component. The project aims to inspire Filipino artists to create compelling, world-class animated films highlighting the Filipino myth and legends.