We are thrilled to further expand our Research + Development (R+D) program with an opportunity specifically for artists who are parents/guardians, with support from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Artists Daria Kaufman and Mireya Lucio have been invited to participate in this inaugural program.
Each artist will receive a $1,200 stipend, an $800 contribution towards childcare expenses, and one week or approximately 40 hours in a work/rehearsal space.
We received 8 interest forms from artists this year, and all proposals were reviewed by Los Angeles artist and LAPP Board Chair, Shannon Scrofano, along with our full staff.
Read below to become familiar with their work and their projects!
ma ma
In her new performance piece titled ma ma, experimental dancer/choreographer Daria Kaufman uses movement, sound, and text to explore what it means to make and shape a person. For the LAPP residency, she will be working with performer-composer Cassia Streb, sourcing from the dissonant chords of children’s choirs, pre-language utterances, and home audio recordings of Kaufman’s 4-year old son. Movement-wise, Kaufman is exploring early developmental stages of movement and the physical labor of care, such as rocking, wrangling, and states of anticipation. From the squirmy, jolting motions of infants, to the ceaseless bouncing and swaying that new life demands, ma ma aims to blur the lines between mother and child, care and abandon.
Photo by: Joshua LaCunha
Daria Kaufman is an experimental dancer, choreographer, and performing artist whose work spans movement, theater, and writing to explore the multiplicity of female identity. Her practice is rooted in the body – its mutability and capacity for (un)making meaning.
After earning her MFA in Dance from Mills College, Kaufman lived and worked in the SF Bay Area and Lisbon, Portugal, where she gained influence from the cross-genre, contemporary performance movement Nova Danca Portuguesa. While in the Bay, she was nominated for the Isadora Duncan Dance Award (the “Izzie”) for Individual Performance in 2015.
An avid collaborator, Kaufman has frequently worked with Berlin-based intermedia performance collective StratoFyzika, including on their most recent piece, “Human/ID” – an immersive media installation that explores full-body deepfake mapping technology (presented by CounterPulse, 2021).
Kaufman’s performance works have been presented throughout Europe and the US, at venues including: Cutting Ball Theater (SF), ODC Theater (SF), NOHspace (SF), Mills College (Oakland), Pomona and Scripps Colleges (LA), Armazem 22 – in scope of Festival Dias de Danca (Porto), FAKI Festival (Zagreb), Zaratan Contemporary Art Gallery (Lisbon), Festival Cidade PreOcupada (Montemor-o-Novo), and Montras Festival (Sao Luis). Her projects have received funding from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Portugal), Gestao dos Direitas dos Artistas (GDA, Portugal), and the European Cultural Foundation.
Conversations with my Descendants via Sci-Fi Space Odyssey: a screenplay for the stage
Conversations with my Descendants via Sci-Fi Space Odyssey: a screenplay for the stage, is a live multimedia performance that fuses speculative fiction, memoir, and post-colonial essay as an embodied future archive of inheritance concerned with the body/mind/spirit as technology. In the narrative, Mireya Lucio’s consciousness is reincarnated as a sentient spaceship in a distant future where humans have fled into space following the devastation of planet Earth. This narrative screenplay is the site for a conversation between Mireya-as-spaceship and her future descendant, Viajerx, the first space-born human to be sent on a return mission to an ecologically restored Earth.
Mireya Lucio (born and raised in Puerto Rico, living in Los Angeles by way of New York) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, director, and performer. After training as an actor (BFA Tisch/NYU; Moscow Art Theatre; MFA CalArts), Mireya developed a performance-making practice stemming from a love of dramaturgy and intuitive assembling. Mireya’s work has taken the form of dinners, lectures, walking tours, videos, stage shows, and game nights. Her full-length solo performances unravel timelines embedded with precise historical reenactment into musical extravaganzas: “Brandenburg Gate: The American Hits” (an episodic timeline of US presidential visits and foreign celebrity presence in Berlin, along with renditions of number-one Billboard Chart hits of the day), and “¡Con la boca es un mamey!” (a non-authoritative lecture-cum-personal revisionist history of Puerto Rico as a U.S. colony). Her collaborative practice with Sallie Merkel, Emotional Labor Co., weaves popular culture and academic inquiry into non-linear, transgressive studies of girlhood (as in “Our-So-Called Sleepover, or, Freud and Jung Crash 1995 Through a Ouija Board”), and creates transformative ritual via playful entertainment (as in “The Commons” digital series and the iterative “Witches’ Cabaret”).
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