Five Receive CalArts/Alpert Award

At 27, writer, actor and teacher Danny Hoch of New York City is the youngest of five “mid-career” artists who will receive a $50,000, 1998 CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, announced today by the Herb Alpert Foundation, of Santa Monica, and the California Institute of the Arts. The awards will be presented May 16 at the foundation.

Hoch plans to use the award to make sure his young peers get a chance to see his latest solo show, “Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop,” which opened Wednesday at P.S. 122 in Manhattan.

Not long ago, a theatrical angel offered Hoch--described in biographical notes as a “rapper, break-dancer, graffiti artist, drug dealer, street mime and magician by the time of his bar mitzvah”--$300,000 to produce the show, with a ticket price of $35. The backer planned to invest another $80,000 on display ads in the New York Times to make sure to attract an affluent audience who could afford a $35 ticket.

Hoch turned the investor down.

“I said to my producers, you can’t do that, because you are telling my whole audience that they can’t come to the show,” Hoch said in a telephone interview.

Hoch eventually found other backers, but says the CalArts/Alpert award--founded and funded by jazz trumpeter Alpert--will help him subsidize 50 tickets, to be priced at $10, for each performance, the better to reach students and other young people.

Since 1995, the Alpert awards have been granted yearly to help support mid-career artists, however they see fit. Artists in five disciplines--film/video, dance, theater, visual arts and music--are nominated by an anonymous panel of professionals and invited to submit samples of their work. Then another panel of judges meets in Los Angeles to select a winner in each field. Winning artists also are invited to serve a residency at CalArts.

Other 1998 awardees are:

Jeanne C. Finley (film/video): Finley makes experimental documentaries, as well as other films, videos and multimedia installations that “wittily critique the roots of power.” A former professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, she now lives in New York.

Joanna Haigood (dance): Haigood is the founder of San Francisco’s ZACCHO Dance Theatre. Her site-specific narrative works often incorporate sophisticated rigging systems that enable aerial maneuvers and suspension. Haigood will premiere her latest work, “Invisible Wings,” at this summer’s Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. The piece was inspired by the history of an Underground Railroad site in Massachusetts, now the site of Jacob’s Pillow.

Roni Horn (visual arts): Horn, of New York City, is a multimedia artist whose drawings, sculpture, photography and installations deal with “identity, the self, gender and the place of the individual body in the world.” Among her works is the on-going project, “To Place,” a series of books based on more than two decades of voyages to Iceland.

Pamela Z (music): Composer-performer and video artist Pamela Z lives in San Francisco, where she creates scores for dance, film/video, radio and solo live performance. Her work involves everything from city sounds to her own voice speaking an imaginary language, brought together through digital processing. She will perform a new work at this spring’s Bang on a Can festival in New York.