I am pleased to announce that on Friday, February 18th I was awarded a Performing Arts Grant by the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, enabling me to spend ten weeks in development of new experimental performance work culminating in a public showing at the Flynn Center.

As outlined in my project narrative, the goal of my work will be “to create work that is challenging to both me as an artist and to an audience; intellectually, emotionally and artistically.”  The emphasis will be strongly centered on the exploration of avant-garde performance art concepts which vet and question universal themes of thought, perception, belief and emotion while combining a variety of skills ranging from those for which I am currently known such as sword swallowing to others that I am not typically associated with in performance, including dance, musical performance and spoken word art.

The focus of the grant work itself will be centered on the creative process itself rather than on a final, marketable product, thereby enabling me to take creative risks that I would not normally attempt in my current commercial markets. The show that ultimately comes of this work will, though having much broad appeal, be marketed primarily to an art house theater audience.

I’m very excited about this opportunity and work and expect the results to be entirely original and provocative. For those interested in attending the work-in-progress viewing, I will be announcing the show dates on my website and via email once they are known.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 21st, 2005 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Roderick Russell News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.