Playwright Tony Kushner, filmmaker Robert Altman, and Starbucks Coffee Company CEO Howard Schultz were honored at the fourth annual Sundance Institute Celebrates Risktakers gala benefit on April 21, 2005 in New York City. In an impassioned speech, Kushner shared his thoughts about risk, and how he sees it in relation to his own work. A full transcript of his speech follows:

I’m flattered, honored and grateful to be given this award by Sundance, an organization that does lion-hearted service promoting honest, honorable film-making and theater. I wrote the first two acts of Part Two of Angels in America up at Sundance in the summer of 1990. One day with perfect timing a group of Mormon supporters of Sundance dropped by to see what we were up to, just as we were working on a scene – eventually cut from the play – in which a gay man uses his Mormon lover’s temple garment to mop up vomit. That was an early example of risk taking in the arts, though I think the only thing at risk was Latter Day Saints’ funding for Sundance, and there can’t ever have been too much of that.

It’s hard work, getting an award, because what else is an award for other than to force the person receiving it to look at themselves in the mirror while trying to come up with a way of saying “thank you” and confronting, along with the face in the mirror, the suspicion that you have in fact betrayed or in some secret way incarnated the precise opposite of whatever it is, whatever supposed merit or virtue in yourself or your work, upon which a group of kind people have chosen to bestow a trophy, and you hope you can get off the dais before the audience gets wise?

Because I knew I would have to make this speech I’ve been thinking a lot about risk, and what it means, and who really risks things. George W. Bush going to open the Lincoln Library and inviting comparison between his use of the English language and Lincoln’s – that’s risky, but he shouldn’t get a trophy.

I’ve never really considered myself a risk taker as an artist. For one thing, risk-taking implies courage, and I’m nervous about excessively valorizing the making of art by overemphasizing the amount of courage actually needed to do it. What ten consecutive seconds of life does anyone face that doesn’t require courage? With everything from the ecosystem to geopolitical sanity to secular pluralist constitutional democracy, the balance of powers and the rule of law crashing in sharp pointy splinters down around our ears, not to mention the economy and well basically the entire moral spiritual philosophical and political legacy of the Enlightenment, if not in fact of the Renaissance and post-dark-ages humanism, all engulfed by and fighting against drowning in a huge roaring tsunami of militarist, nationalist, fundamentalist madness, meanness and pinheadedness, it’s hard to talk seriously about taking risks as an artist when no risk any artist faces making art remotely compares to the risk any artist, any person faces just getting out of bed, taking a shower and walking out his or her front door in the morning. Making the decision to read the newspaper these days is scarier than any decision one faces as an artist, and riskier too. Reading the newspaper these days risks a kind of toxic disequilibrium, jeopardizing one’s ability to believe that there’s much of a point to trying to make sense of things in a world in which things more and more firmly decline to make any appetizing sense, any sense compelling to people who aren’t terminally nihilistic, misanthropic or just plain nuts; reading the newspaper in these terrible terrible times so affronts a belief in the probity or even the possibility of truth-telling that any activity predicated on truth-telling – and that’s what art and pretty much anything else useful that people choose to do with their lives seems to me predicated upon – any truth-seeking fact-based indebted-to-causality-history-and-narrative-based activity is at real risk of fatal discouragement. The courage you need to make art is dwarfed by the courage you need to continue to have faith in human progress. And these two types of courage, I think, have a lot in common.

I’ve never felt I was especially courageous; I know that I lack the moral fiber to be complimented on my courage without profound damage being done to my wobbly attachment to reality. If I have done risky things with my art, it’s only because like most artists, I want to entertain. I want people to love me. Outside my immediate family, who more or less have to love me, my grasp of reality isn’t so wobbly that I believe that I can manage to get more than a few people to love me purely on the basis of personal charm or hours spent in the gym and the orthodontist or the number of dinner tabs I pick up. I believe if I want a lot of people to love me – and I do, I have no idea why, it can’t save me from dying and I’ve also learned that the more people you convince to love you, or at least like you, the more theater critics you get, just to balance things out, and yet I still want to be loved, or at least liked, it’s sort of sinister and pathetic but among dishonorable pathetic impulses it’s certainly not worst – and so I have to make art that entertains. And I believe truth to be more entertaining, finally, than lies. I believe that the truth is very hard to tell. It occasions risk, truth does, in that it’s elusive and hence truth forces you to reach for things that lie beyond your comfortable grasp.

I think maybe the riskiest thing I’ve ever done as an artist is to encourage or at least not discourage the general impression that my work is, and is intended by its author to be, of the political left, from the political left, not a flat polemical articulation of any specific political project, but aspiring to be of use to people working on various progressive political projects: overturning at long long last and decisively the Reagan Counterrevolution; the enfranchisement of sexual minoritarians; sounding loud unambiguous alarms about ecocide and the death of the planet; building solidarity between groups of the disenfranchised and the oppressed; rebuilding the basis for progressive legislative, judicial and executive power and restarting the dialectic between that power and the awesome power of the people; thinking about economic justice as well as social justice; all the work of resistance, liberation, community. I have no idea how much use my plays have been to any of the people doing this work, and I think it’s better for playwrights not to think too much about how much they’ve succeeded or failed. I have never wanted my plays to be entirely and exclusively useful, because I want to write good plays and perhaps it matters more that plays are troubling, disruptive, unorthodox, contradictory, bewildering, unmanageable, badly behaved, than useful. But I have always wanted to be and wanted to be known to be working in the tradition of engaged art, as an engaged artist. I guess what I’m saying is that the specific political content of my work has not been such a risk, nor even that my work has political content, but that I’ve asked to be considered as an artist of the American political left, and yet not to be dismissed as an artist, that’s risky. Even if there is no merit in my specific request, there is merit in believing and insisting that politics is as dense and thorny and rich and full of imponderables as any other category of human behavior, and hence worthy as an epistemological arena in which to make art. Generally speaking, the request has merit, and there’s chutzpah in making it, and I take pride in that chutzpah, and so thank you for giving me a Sundance Chutzpadikl in the Arts Award.

And I have to say that I am very, very honored to be in the company of Bob Altman, an artist whose work I revere, and whose exploding and redefinition of what “epic” means changed narrative realism for not only me but I think for every artist in any medium striving for a contemporary way to imagine with a larger field of vision.

Thanks!

	Filmmaker Robert Altman accepting the 2005 Risk-Takers Award.
	Sundance Institute Founder and President Robert Redford with Risk-Takers Award recipient, the playwright Tony Kushner.
	Risktakers Award recipient and Starbucks Coffee Company CEO Howard Schultz with Sundance Institute Trustee Mellody Hobson and Senator Bill Bradley.
	Carlos Sandoval (co-director, Farmingville) with Sundane Documentary Program Director Diane Weyermann and Zana Briski (co-director, Born into Brothels).
	Sundance Institute Executive Director Ken Brecher with Trustees Jeanne Donovan Smith, Glenn Close, and Chairman Wally Weisman.

"Aside from the hard dollar numbers, the Sundance Film Festival generates name recognition, image enhancement and publicity that money, literally, cannot buy," said Utah Governor Jon M. Huntsman, Jr.

Attracting an audience of over 46,000, up 27.6% from 2004, the Festival is internationally prominent and locally popular. In addition to the direct economic activity generated by the Festival, the annual event supports tourism in Utah by attracting thousands of visitors from all over the world and increasing visibility through printed and broadcast news stories that reach an international audience of over 420 million.

Growth of the Sundance Film Festival – 1995 vs. 2005

		1995	2005
	Economic Activity	$12 million	$42.7 million
	Seats available	100,000	242,393
	Films screened	174	202
	Number of screenings	335	674
	Attendance	13,500	46,771

The Egyptian Theatre on Park City's Main Street

Elephant Palm Tree on the Sundance Online Film Festival

By Claiborne Smith
Originally published on January 29, 2005 in the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Daily Insider

London-based filmmaker Kara Miller’s Elephant Palm Tree is a 10-minute short about a former Miss Jamaica who dreams one night that she and her husband are in Africa, on their honeymoon amid the palm trees, when all of a sudden a big old elephant approaches and poops on them. Naturally, after she wakes up, she wants a divorce.

Where, how and when the plot of Elephant Palm Tree came to fruition are questions that deserve revealing answers. “The cool part of me wants to say ‘I don’t know,’” Miller said. But because she grew up in the Caribbean, which, she pointed out, is highly stratified by class, “my subconscious must have been looking at a certain kind of marriage in the middle classes” – almost, but not quite, an arranged marriage. “What happens when the most popular girl in the school marries the most popular guy? What happens 30 years later?” she wondered.

Miller thought about it and later explained in an e-mail exchange that she probably dreamed Martha having her elephant dream, as well as dreaming Martha’s emotional awakening after her African horror. “They came fully formed,” she explained. “I wrote the script in an hour! From start to finish.”

If Hubert and Martha, the hapless couple in Elephant Palm Tree, once were the most popular kids in school, the intervening years have been a decidedly downhill slide. Martha is an alcoholic; George is a calculating, imperious politician. The zany brilliance of Martha’s dream ushers in a dramatic sadness. “Nobody’s going to want you,” Hubert says after Martha announces that she wants a divorce. “You’ve managed to put me off my food,” he tells her, as if that were almost worse than splitting up.

Miller’s ability to concisely reveal her characters’ world through the telling details of their lives, and her rich visual flair, are skills that did not develop nearly as quickly as the script of Elephant Palm Tree. “I remember my mother saying, ‘Do what makes you happy,’” Miller said, “and I just thought that meant being happy and being decent.” She thought she should be a lawyer, and she studied law at Oxford. “The truth is, I wanted to be creative. But I was conditioned to do something else.”

The 30-year-old director was a professional writer for six years. “It took me most of that time to decide to direct,” she said, “because I didn’t want to risk anything. I thought, ‘I’m a real winner because I’m not losing.’” In other words, she shared common ground as well as dreams with Martha, who destroys her chances of getting what she wants at the end of Elephant Palm Tree. “[Martha] probably couldn’t bear to lose everything,” Miller pointed out. “She wants to pretend that there’s a life out there that’s great.”

By now, after making two other shorts, and with a string of both writing and directing projects lined up, a certain moxie has crept into Miller’s approach to her work. To find a suitably dramatic site for filming Elephant Palm Tree, Miller and her producer walked the streets of a posh London neighborhood, papering the houses with flyers. “We would really like somewhere that is completely out of our price bracket,” the flyers said. “And we would be at your house at all hours.” A British rock star let them use his flat, but won’t let her disclose his identity to the press. “That was real gold leaf on the bathroom walls!” Miller exclaimed, still giddy at the new thrills her filmmaking life has to offer.

Visit the Sundance Online Film Festival at www.sundance.org to watch Elephant Palm Tree and a selection of other shorts along with highlights from Park City of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Hurry! The Online Festival runs through June 20.

Eight Projects Selected for the 2005 Sundance Summer Theatre Laboratory
A musical inspired by the life of Gianni Versace’s murderer Andrew Cunanan, a comedy of manners in which an 18th century male prostitute assumes any one of a range of guises, and a look at New York City during the height of the Civil War among the wide range of new theatre pieces selected for development at the 2005 Sundance Institute’s Theatre Lab. Running from July 11-31 at Sundance Village in Utah, theatre artists who participate in the intensive three-week workshop are given the time, space, and support to develop their new work or explore new approaches to existing scripts, without the pressures of production.

“These eight projects join a distinguished group of plays supported by the Theatre Program over the years, many of which have gone on to garner critical and popular acclaim,” said Philip Himberg, producing artistic director of the Institute’s Theatre Program. Projects developed through past Theatre Labs include Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project, and Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife.

Himberg said that the playwrights and directors invited to attend the 2005 Theatre Lab represent both emerging and established artists, and that their projects represent a diversity of topics. “Their range of work surveys a wide swath of world history, and includes plays set in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as very contemporary issues,” he said. “We’re looking forward to the collaboration between the Lab’s playwrights and directors, and to moving these pieces forward toward future production at theatres around the country.”

At the Lab, Fellows will focus on issues and challenges specific to their works-in-progress while working with a team of creative advisors and dramaturgs. The creative advisors for this year’s Lab include: dramaturgs Jocelyn Clarke (Abbey Theatre, Dublin), Sydne Mahone, Mame Hunt and Tony Taccone, Artistic Director of Berkeley Rep. Meg Simon is the casting advisor for the 2005 Lab.

The eight projects selected for the 2005 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab are:

MOST WANTED Music and Lyrics by Mark Bennett, Book and Lyrics by Jessica Hagedorn
Directed by Michael Greif
Inspired by the short, tragic life of Andrew Cunanan and the events leading up to and surrounding the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace, MOST WANTED is a music theatre piece, which explores the cult of celebrity, the contradictions between narcissism and notoriety, issues of "passing", sexuality, class and race.

Terra Haute by Edmund White
Directed by David Drake
Terre Haute is Edmund White's two-character play about a young man on death row for a political crime and the visit paid him just before his execution by an old man who is a celebrated writer.

Measure for Pleasure by David Grimm
Directed by Peter Dubois
Measure for Pleasure by David Grimm is a neo-restoration comedy of manners, set in the 18th century, but told with a uniquely contemporary feel. The play’s protagonist is a 20-year-old male prostitute who passes himself off as a chambermaid, a valet, a landed gentleman and his wife, a beautiful country lass and a handsome rake.

Blue Door by Tanya Barfield
Directed by Marion McClinton
Blue Door by Tanya Barfield is an exploration into the rich oral history of African-Americans during slavery and Reconstruction. Written for two actors who play a wide range of roles, the play follows four generations of black men, spanning a hundred and fifty years. Blue Door was commissioned by Playwrights Horizons.

BFF by Anna Ziegler
Directed by Lisa Peterson
Anna Ziegler’s play, BFF (which stands for “best friends forever”) deals with the effects of adolescence on a deep young female friendship. The story follows the journey of two teenage girls who enter puberty at different times and how that gap in their physical growth takes a serious toll on their relationship as they grow into adulthood.

Taking Flight by Adriana Sevan
Directed by Giovanna Sardella
Taking Flight, a solo piece from writer/performer Adriana Sevan, tells the story of two close friends, one of whom is seriously wounded during the 9/11 attacks in New York. The play examines the sacrifices of caregivers and the cost of giving without time out to replenish and refuel.

New York is Bleeding by Said Sayrafiezadeh
Directed by Kate Whoriskey
New York is Bleeding by Said Sayrafiezadeh is set in 1863, in New York City, at the height of the Civil War. The play follows the lives of seven New Yorkers, including Irish-Americans, African-Americans and a wealthy white family as they respond to our country’s first conscription army.

Passing Strange by Stew, and co-composer Heidi Rodewald
Directed by Annie Dorsen
Choreography by David Neumann
Passing Strange by poet and composer Stew, and co-composer Heidi Rodewald, began as an evening of music and spoken work in Joe’s Pub at the New York Public Theatre. It is the story of a young man whose search for belonging takes him from the African-American middle class culture into various Bohemias.

Emerging Indie Filmmakers Head to Sundance for Directors and Screenwriters Labs
Sundance Institute Feature Film Program has announced the selection of 13 projects for the annual June Directors and Screenwriters Labs. The diverse range of projects join films like Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry, Joshua Marston’s Maria Full of Grace, Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, and David Jacobson’s Down in the Valley which premieres at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival – all of which were developed during the Institute’s Feature Film Program Labs.

The filmmakers are bringing an eclectic assortment of projects to the Labs at Sundance Village in Utah from May 31- June 30 and will work with a group of accomplished creative advisors, including Sally Field, Walter Mosley, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Redford as part of a month-long mentoring process. The Labs offer emerging independent directors and screenwriters the opportunity to develop new work under the guidance of experienced filmmakers in an environment that encourages innovation, collaboration, and risk-taking.

As in years past, projects at this year’s Labs explore topics that range from hate, race and religion, terrorism, and the immigrant experience.

We Can See Today by Los Angeles resident Stew (co-writer/director) and Heidi Rodewald (co-writer), is a story of the deeply intimate and complex relationship between two families – one black, one Jewish – living in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles circa 1973.

In a recent interview Stew said, “At Sundance there exists what I’d call an ‘anti-institutional’ vibe that encourages, if not dares, one to go beyond oneself. The only thing artists are better at creating than art is self-imposed limitation, but, come to think of it, you don’t even have to be an artist to pull that trick!”

Stew is certainly no stranger to taking risks and overcoming self-imposed limitations – he recently made his Lincoln Center debut, as part of its “American Songbook Series”, and his musical-in-progress, Passing Strange has been invited back for the second year in a row to this year’s Sundance Theatre Lab.

“Sundance for me represents two huge artistic challenges: my first work for theatre is being developed at the Theatre Lab and my first shot at filmmaking is taking place at the Directors Lab. And I’ve only got an eleven-day break between them! So, despite the mellow surroundings, Sundance is anything but,” said Stew.

Continuing the Sundance Theatre Lab connection is Colorado native Martin Moran, writer of Celestial Navigation, the story of a Roman Catholic boy's sexual relationship with an older man and its effect on the adult he becomes.

“A couple of years ago I had the great good fortune to attend the Sundance Theatre Lab. At the time, I was forging a one-man stage play from a memoir about Catholic boyhood and sexual coming of age; a memoir I'd been working on for a long time,” remembers Martin Moran.

The resulting one-man play, The Tricky Part, went on to win a 2004 Obie Award and he continues to perform the play all over the country Moran’s memoir, The Tricky Part: One Boy’s Fall From Trespass into Grace, will be released by Beacon Press this June and his book tour will coincide with the Labs.

Despite his busy summer, Martin is relishing the prospect of returning to Sundance. “I experienced the extraordinary place and people at Sundance as a kind of crucible that helped me to form a more potent theatrical piece. Now, for the first time, I'm looking at telling the same story in an entirely new way – through the medium of film. What a blessing and an honor to return again to the mountain for guidance.”

The participants and projects selected for the 2005 June Filmmakers Lab, May 31 – June 30, are:

Taika Waititi (writer/director), Something Beginning with Love, New Zealand: For two awkward misfits, life is the question, and love is the answer.

Taika Waititi is of Te Whanau-A-Apanui descent, from the east coast of New Zealand and directed the Academy-Award nominated short Two Cars One Night.

Cruz Angeles (co-writer/director) and Maria Topete (co-writer), Don’t Let Me Drown: In a post-September 11th world overflowing with fear and hate, two Latino teens discover that sometimes the only thing that can keep them from drowning is love.

Born in Mexico City and raised in Los Angeles, Cruz Angeles is an award-winning student filmmaker from the graduate film program at NYU. A Bay Area native, Maria Topete began her film career while studying at U.C. Berkeley, and has collaborated as co-writer and producer on several award-winning short films.

Dante Harper (writer/director), Dreamland: An unflinching portrayal of the origins of domestic terrorism, Dreamland is the tragic story of Tim McVeigh, from his boyhood dreams of being a soldier to his life as a man at war with his own country.

Dante Harper is an independent filmmaker, video artist and co-founder of CLC Films and director of the independent film The Delicate Art of the Rifle.

Andrew Dosunmu (director) and Darci Picoult (Writer), Mother of George: Torn between her African culture and new life in America, a woman struggles to please her husband and give him the son that will carry on his family's legacy.

Originally from Nigeria, Andrew Dosunmu has photographed artists including Outkast, Erykah Badu, and Mos Def, and recently directed several episodes of the highly acclaimed South African television series YIZO YIZO 3.

Darci Picoult lives in New York and her one-woman show, My Virginia, was presented in theatres and solo festivals both nationally and internationally.

Catherine Stewart (writer/director), Transit Cafe, South Africa: Set in post-apartheid South Africa amid a volatile landscape of fear, hybrid cultures, and shifting identities, three unusual love stories intertwine with startling results on the streets of Johannesburg.

Catherine Stewart received and MFA in screenwriting and directing from Columbia University in New York City before returning to Johannesburg to direct documentaries and the thirteen-part dramatic television series Tsha Tsha.

Eva Husson (writer/director), Tiny Dancer: In Spanish Harlem, a talented high school girl struggles to find the right balance between her overpowering family, her need for love, and her passion for contemporary dance.

Eva Husson attended the Sorbonne-Nouvelle University in Paris before graduating from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where she wrote and directed the award-winning short film Hope to Die.

Stew (co-writer/director) and Heidi Rodewald (co-writer), We Can See Today: The vibrant and authentic story of the deeply intimate and complex relationship between two families – one black, one Jewish – living in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles circa 1973.

Stew is a critically acclaimed singer/songwriter whose releases have won numerous “Album of the Year” accolades. Born in Pomona, California, Heidi Rodewald is the other half of the multi-disciplinary art team known as STEW.

Ryan Eslinger (writer/director), When a Man Falls in the Forest: The lives of three lonely men intersect as they struggle to overcome their deepening isolation and search for connection.

Los Angeles resident Ryan Eslinger directed his first feature, Madness and Genius, at the age of 23.

These filmmakers will be joined at the 2005 June Screenwriters Lab by the following participants and projects:

Martin Moran (writer), Celestial Navigation: Celestial Navigation is the story of a Roman Catholic boy's sexual relationship with an older man and its effect on the man he becomes.

Martin Moran grew up in Denver and attended Stanford University and The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. He won a 2004 Obie Award for his one man play, THE TRICKY PART, which was developed at The Sundance Theater Lab.

Jake Mahaffy (writer/director), Free in Deed: Three years after attempting to perform a miracle in Oil City, a religious man returns to confront the town's few remaining residents with the reasons for his criminal act.

Born in Ohio and currently residing in southwest Virginia, Jake Mahaffy has made award winning short films and the feature-length WAR.

Sabiha Sumar (writer/director), Rafina, Pakistan: Rafina is the story of a young woman struggling to define herself in a new, emerging Pakistan - a Pakistan that is steeped in a timeless way of life and, at the same time, is in the throes of cataclysmic change.

Born in Karachi, Sabiha Sumar studied filmmaking and political science at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and then studied international relations at the University of Cambridge. Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters), her first feature film premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2003 where it won the Golden Leopard for Best Film, Leopard for Best Actress and three other awards.

Annemarie Jacir (writer/director), Salt of the Sea, U.S.A./Palestinian: A Palestinian-American girl, intent on asserting her right of return, travels to the West Bank and meets a dynamic young man who joins her on an adventure journeying across borders.

Palestinian-American filmmaker Annemarie Jacir has written, directed and produced both narrative and documentary shorts.

Salvatore Stabile (writer/director), Where God Left His Shoes: A struggling ex-boxer and his family, desperate to leave the shelter they've been living in, get a Christmas Eve gift of an apartment to call their own - but only if Dad can find a job by the end of the day.

New York native and LA resident Salvatore Stabile made his directing debut when he was 21 years old with the film Gravesend.

Documentary Series Presents Imelda on May 5 in Park City
On June 2 in Park City, the Institute's Documentary Film Series presents DIG!. Seven years in the making, and culled from fifteen hundred hours of footage, Ondi Timoner's DIG! tracks the tumultuous rise of two talented musicians, Anton Newcombe, leader of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and Courtney Taylor, leader of the Dandy Warhols, and dissects their star-crossed friendship and bitter rivalry. The free monthly screenings are followed by open forum discussions with filmmakers, critics, and subjects of the films. Screenings begin at 7 p.m. in the Jim Santy Auditorium at the Park City Library, 1255 Park Avenue. Tickets or reservations are not required. The series is part of the Institute's Arts & Audiences Utah Initiative and is generously supported by the Summit County Recreation, Arts, and Parks Program.

Deadline: Sundance/NHK Filmmakers Award
Application Deadline: June 30, 2005

Applications for the Sundance/NHK Filmmakers Award are now being accepted through June 30, 2005. Applications are by professional recommendation only, and a written referral must accompany each application. If you are unsure if you qualify, please contact the program administrator at nhk_award@sundance.org.