Support Nikki Montana's Artistic Journey

I have started this GoFundMe to raise money for my dear friend, Nikki Montana. Nikki has been an inspiration to me for nearly twenty years. We've made incredible memories, supported each other through good times and bad, and have created some remarkable theatre. I am honored to call Nikki my esteemed colleague and friend. I want to help support her next endeavor to train with some of the best experimental theatre artists in the country, exchange ideas and work in an environment of inventive synergy, and to create a new work of art that inspires, challenges, and educates.

So here's the deal...

Nikki has been accepted into the 10th cohort of new performance makers at the Institute for Contemporary Performance (ICP) with The Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE) in Portland, Oregon from Sept 2024 to May 2025.

PETE’s mission is to propose new ways of being through creative inquiry and performance with a vision for a life of unfolding experience in which multiplicity and complexity is recognized, valued and artfully expressed in community.

The ICP program is a training ground for contemporary theatre artists and acts as an incubator to feed collaborators capable of communicating radical thought in space, time, and body for the development and production of new performance works and the defining of new aesthetics. The cohort trains in Suzuki, Viewpoints, clown, Alexander Technique, voice, and devising. The program culminates in a Performance Festival, created and produced by the cohort. This festival manifests as a practical application of the cooperative and creative processes; producorial effectiveness including proposal writing; and the competency and mastery of live performance, that is of the body and made for now.

Donations will cover tuition and the cost of living for the duration of the program. The goal is financial freedom to focus solely on creative work within the cohort, as additional laboratory hours will be needed outside of the standard curriculum.

As part of the acceptance process, Nikki submitted an Artist Statement and a mission of intent for her time in the program followed by an invited meeting with the faculty.

“I am a queer, first gen Fil-Am artist whose history includes 381 years of colonization ensured by bloodshed plus the usurpation and burial of our indigenous culture. It was only 1946, the year before my mother was born, that the Philippines became an independent Republic. Guided by my ancestors and living elders, I have answered the call to accumulate magic and bravery in liminal spaces by uncovering and sharing in our stories. When erasure is a part of genocide, storytelling is radical resistance.

The story of Babae (“Girl” in Tagalog) is a poetic historically charged musical fantasy following the post-colonial, tele transporting soul of Babae. At the center of the story is the human condition, but what Babae ultimately comes to understand is that this is not about servicing the human world, it has always been and will always be about feeding the Earth, the Holy Wild.

Infused by the Filipino core value of Kawpa (our shared human identity in space), my art is a commitment to cultivating a culture that can embody visionary intuition. May it serve as a portal to our collective memories, where we decalcify buried gifts and light a fire to neutralized power, rousing the wisdom of tacit knowing and pointing the way out of the disastrous limitations of the rational mind. There, even from just one moment’s immersion, we may envision alternative possibilities for the future.”