Charlotte Street Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of the Charlotte Street Awards for Generative Performing Artists, a new program designed to nurture and stoke the grassroots performing arts community in Kansas City. These Awards aim to support and recognize outstanding, innovative, original generative performing artists with unrestricted cash awards, as Charlotte Street Awards to Visual Artists have done for over a decade.
 
A multi-disciplinary panel of performing arts professionals recently selected three generative performing artists to receive unrestricted cash awards of $5000 each this year. They are choregorapher/dancer Deanna Hiett; producer/director/playwright/actor Ron Megee; and composer/musician/cross-disciplinary performer Mark Southerland.

Envisioned as an annual program, these Awards are intended to recognize artists in the fields of dance, theater, music, experimental music performance, theater/performance art, and hybrid/interdisciplinary versions thereof. As exemplified by this year’s recipients, awarded Artists will be generative artists, meaning that they are actively creating new work in their fields – i.e. they are composers, playwrights, choreographers – in addition to very often being performers as well. As with the Visual Arts Awards, these new Awards for Generative Performing Artists are unrestricted, seeking to support the continued creative and professional development of the selected artists, provide the means for them to further focus on and develop their work, and increase exposure for their accomplishments. A public presentation of the work of this year’s recipients and a printed brochure or alternative set of documentary materials are planned.
    
Charlotte Street Foundation is most appreciative to the Founding Funders for this new initiative: Grand Arts, Muriel McBrien Kauffman Foundation, J. Scott Francis, Karen McCarthy,  Louis and Elizabeth Nave Flarsheim Foundation (Bank of America, Trustee) and Theater League. Charlotte Street Foundation is still seeking other donors to complete the necessary funding.