One of the newly-awarded Creative Work Fund grants is going to the KITKA Women's Vocal Ensemble of Oakland, CA. The $35,000 grant is to support the creation of "The Rusalki Cycle," an opera weaving together traditional Slavic folk songs with new music by Richard Einhorn. KITKA's nine vocalists and an ensemble of Western classical and Eastern European folk musicians will perform the opera. Rusalki are powerful female figures in Slavic folklore, mermaids who lure and destroy men in the streams and ponds where they rule. Dvorak and Dargomizhski had treated the topic in operas named after the sirens. The Bay Area collaborators plan to transform the legends into a "non-narrative, contemporary performance." Creative Work Fund awards, which total $504,700 this year, are granted by an organization established by the Columbia Foundation, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, and the Miriam and Peter Haas Fund. The Fund will operate two more years, offering $500,000 for arts support next year. For information about applications, see http://www.creativeworkfund.org/howto.htm. Other awards went to composer-musician Johari Jabir, who will collaborate with Theatre Rhinoceros on a new musical theater piece exploring hair and the role it plays in identity construction - particularly within the Gay and African American communities. The piece will incorporate a musical score by Jabir, and narrative based on oral histories and interviews, co-written by Jabir and Theater Rhinoceros's co-artistic directors Doug Holsclaw and John Fisher. Hairstory will premiere in fall 2002. Composer-musician Wayne Wallace, choreographers Laura Elaine Ellis, Aisha Jenkins, Robert Henry Johnson, and Robert Moses are collaborating with the presenting organization ODC/Theater to create a new work based on the Faith Ringgold quilt, "They Came to America." The work will have three main dance sections, interwoven by music, text, and a movement-based narrative, all accompanied by Wallace's 10-piece orchestra. Janos Gereben/SF [log in to unmask]