Author: kateharalson

Pones is pleased to announce it has been approved by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to receive a Challenge America award of $10,000.

This grant will support our work with UpSpring, The Carnegie, Good Samaritan Hospital, MOVE, and teacher training. This grant is one of 262 Challenge America awards totaling $2.62 million that were announced by the NEA as part of its first round of fiscal year 2023 grants.

“The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support arts projects in communities nationwide,” said NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. “Projects such as this one with Pones strengthen arts and cultural ecosystems, provide equitable opportunities for arts participation and practice, and contribute to the health of our communities and our economy.”

Pones is overjoyed to announce we’ve received a MAP Fund grant to continue producing our piece “Keeping Our Torch: A Multigenerational Movement Experience” MAP Fund invests nationwide in performing artists as the critical foundation of imagining and co-creating a more equitable and vibrant society.

Now, we need stories! Do you know someone 70+ who’d like to share a story about their life with us? Find out more about the process and submit your story HERE.

Stories may be serious, heartfelt, funny, absurd – we are hoping for expression in many genres. 

Our goals with this project are to expand the creative practice; amplify feelings of control and personal meaning-making; amplify intergenerational joy; and, ultimately, challenge societal myths of maturing populations as burdens and aging as a process of deterioration by celebrating the wisdom and vibrancy of older generations.

At Pones, we use our bodies to speak our minds and believe dance is a powerful tool to amplify and explore issues of social justice and transformation. MOVE started as a response to the protests that began in the summer of 2020, and originates from the long-term systemic racism that permeates our culture and justice system. With the knowledge that there is more than one way to put our bodies on the front lines, we created a platform for Performances & Collaborations, entitled MOVE. MOVE harnesses Pones’ history of creating art for social justice in order to facilitate and fund the work that independent artists need to share, now.

Do you have an idea for the next installment of MOVE? Information on the program, past pieces, and application details can be found here: https://pones.org/2020/06/16/announcing-move/