Guy Mendilow Ensemble Awarded 2018 Live Arts Boston Funding From The Boston Foundation To Continue International Sand Animation Collaboration
The Boston Foundation recently awarded the Guy Mendilow Ensemble a Live Arts Boston grant to support the continuation of the international collaboration between GME and Ukrainian sand animator Kseniya Simonova towards the show The Forgotten Kingdom.
In the animated The Forgotten Kingdom, intertwining music, storytelling and captivating sand animation conjure voices lost to war and upheaval. The show springs from late 19th and early 20th century women’s songs from Sephardi communities in the former Ottoman Empire. It tells the stories of ordinary people caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the Great War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of fascism and WWII. All music is in the endangered Ladino language, a combination of archaic Spanish with Turkish and Greek. The narration is in English.
Mendilow and Simonova began collaborating in 2016 with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Boston Foundation. Their first animation piece, “Una Noche Al Borde De La Mar,” was premiered by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Live Arts Boston now makes it possible for the artists to take further steps towards completing the ambitious project and bringing the final project to Boston as well as communities across the USA.
Live Arts Boston (LAB) is designed to respond directly to the needs articulated by Boston's arts community through Boston Creates. LAB provides critically needed, flexible, project-specific grants to Greater Boston’s performing artists and small nonprofit performing arts organizations to create, produce or present artistic work for Greater Boston audiences. To learn more about this grant program, go to http://www.tbf.org/lab.
The Boston Foundation, Greater Boston’s community foundation, is one of the largest community foundations in the nation, with net assets of more than $1 billion. In 2017, the Foundation and its donors paid $130 million in grants to nonprofit organizations and received gifts of more than $194 million. The Foundation is a close partner in philanthropy with its donors, with more than 1,000 separate charitable funds established either for the general benefit of the community or for special purposes. It also serves as a major civic leader, think tank and advocacy organization, commissioning research into the most critical issues of our time and helping to shape public policy designed to advance opportunity for everyone in Greater Boston. The Philanthropic Initiative (TPI), a distinct operating unit of the Foundation, designs and implements customized philanthropic strategies for families, foundations and corporations around the globe. For more information about the Boston Foundation and TPI, visit tbf.org or call 617-338-1700.