Expressing Gratitude to our Supporters and Friends

The New Works Initiative (NWI) at Montclair State University, founded in 2009, has received a leadership gift from HOLLY and BOB GREGORY of Montclair, to promote interdisciplinary, collaborative new works for our students in theater, dance and music. This year NWI will develop two projects, one in dance and another in theater. Meet choreographer CHASE BROCK, who will set a work to composer and singer GABRIEL KAHANE's song cycle For the Union Dead, based on poems of Robert Lowell. Playwright MOLLY RICE, composer STEPHANIE JOHNSTONE and director RACHEL CHAVKIN will develop a music theater work based on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee, with photographs by Walker Evans. Their works will be presented at the L. Howard Fox Theater and the MSU Dance Theater from April 28 to May 3.

Choreographer Chase Brock is on a meteoric rise as one of New York's most innovative young dance artists. He is the choreographer of the bestselling Dance on Broadway for Nintendo Wii and the hit Salzburg Festival production of Gounod's opera Roméo et Juliette. He has created more than 20 original dance theater works for The Chase Brock Experience, including American Sadness (set to music by Gabriel Kahane).

Playwright Molly Rice's works include Don't Stop, Hiroshima 2010: The Apology Module, Watch, Texas Diner Diptych, and the original musicals Saint Enid and the Black Hand, The Mercury Sloop, and Canary (with music by Ray Rizzo). Joining Molly on the Agee project is composer Stephanie Johnstone who was selected as the youngest member of the New Dramatists' Guild's Composer/Librettist Studio in 2006 and Rachel Chavkin, the founder and artistic director of the TEAM (the Theater of the Emerging American Moment), a NYC-based theater company that creates new work to dissect and celebrate the experience of living in America today.