July 19, 2000

Ramapo College Professor And Filmmaker Demetria Royals Receives Rockefeller Foundation Grant

(Mahwah) -- Demetria Royals, professor of media arts at Ramapo College of New Jersey and a documentary filmmaker, is the recipient of a $25,000 Multi-Arts Production Fund (MAP) grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The funding will support the creation of a multi-media theater production based on Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, from the perspective of African American females. Royals will collaborate with choreographer Anita Gonzalez, an assistant professor at Florida State University and a Fulbright Scholar, and Robbie McCauley, a performance artist who won an OBIE Award for best new American play for Sallie's Rape.

McCauley and Gonzalez were featured in Royals' 1996 film, Conjure Women, a performance-based feature film documentary that had a national screening on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). That film explored the artistry and philosophy of four African American female artists. During a residency at the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue (IACD) at Harvard University last summer, the three artists participated in a project to explore Mother Courage from the artists' disciplines of dance, theater and film. In the process of exploration of the text, each discovered that the text mirrored their personal exploration as African American women artists.

In a joint artists statement the three write: "In the process of a line by line discussion of the play, we began to see Brecht's text within the specificity of our own lives – upper to middle to lower income class, northern, urban and southern experiences – yet also within a larger global and historical context." The IACD residency concluded with a workshop presentation under the direction of Royals of two scenes from the play with five actors, with McCauley in the role of Mother Courage and Gonzalez in the role of her mute daughter, Kattrin. Introducing and linking each scene were short segments of slides with an audio 'track' (sound mix) edited by Royals.

With the Rockefeller Foundation funding, the artists will take the next step in the collaborative process. They will create a new text and using images, performance, music, movement and sound, attempt, through their different disciplines and experience, to look closer and deeper at the complexity of African American women.

Royals, who could aptly be referred to as a Conjure Woman herself, is an award-winning visual artist. She is the recipient of a three-year W.K. Kellogg Foundation Fellowship. In addition to the grants mentioned above, she has received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Black Programming Consortium, New York State Council on the Arts, and the American Film Institute. In addition, Royals was appointed a research fellow of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, where she completed work on a CD-ROM video, "Report to the Ancestors." Her films have been shown at the San Francisco Film Festival, the Chicago Women's Film Festival, the American Film Institute, the New York Film Festival and on PBS. A member of the Directors Guild of America, she heads her own production company, Diamond Royals Productions, Inc.

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