Guggenheim funds quirky research

With his cigar in hand and a calabash of rum at his side, Manuel
dispenses practical advice to those who come to visit him.

Manuel, who can be found on occasion in East Hollywood, is a
500-year-old African spirit channeled through seances by an
Argentinian priest.

He is also a subject of the kind of research which won Donald
Cosentino, a UCLA professor of cultural studies, a Guggenheim
fellowship.

Cosentino was one of four UCLA faculty members to be awarded
fellowships from the New York-based John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation for 2005.

Victoria Marks, professor of choreography and performance,
Simone Forti, adjunct assistant professor of dance, and Harryette
Mullen, professor of English and African American studies, were
also awarded the highly prestigious fellowship.

The four were among 186 recipients of Guggenheim fellowships out
of a pool of over 3,000 candidates from the United States and
Canada, according to a Guggenheim foundation press release, which
also notes that fellowships are awarded on the basis of
“distinguished achievement … and exceptional promise for
future accomplishment.”

The fellowships granted this year totaled over $7 million,
according to the release, with the average grant being in the
neighborhood of $38,000.

The fellowship is, in essence, a salary replacement for up to a
year, which allows the winners to focus their attention primarily
on the research interests which they submitted to the foundation.
In the case of the UCLA fellows, the research topics are highly
diverse.

While Cosentino plans to write a book detailing his research on
Charles Guelperin, the Los Angeles priest who channels the spirit
of Manuel, Forti will concentrate on a form of dance she calls
“logomotion,” which involves improvisational dancing
and speaking.

Marks intends to create performance work with disabled veterans,
while Mullen is researching her American ancestors with the intent
of writing a creative family history.

Being awarded the fellowship is a huge honor, the professors
involved agreed.

“I hope they didn’t make a mistake,” Marks
said, laughing. “I feel like it’s so extraordinary that
I hope I can live up to the opportunity.”

Cosentino compared the feeling to hitting three home runs in one
baseball game, adding that the honor was compounded by the fact
that some could consider his topic of research rather offbeat.

Forti, who has been studying motion since she was 20 years old,
said she was surprised to win a Guggenheim fellowship the first
time she applied, at age 70.

“I’ve been exploring movement. That comes out of me
very naturally. I’m an improviser,” Forti said.
“Logomotion” involves speaking on topics she wonders
about or is meditating on, from the news to her garden, while she
is in motion.

“It’s been a way for me to know what’s on my
mind before I think it through, while it’s still a wild
feeling in my bones,” Forti said.

She doesn’t stick to certain dance movements, stating that
instead she likes “to swing out and feel the space”
around her.

Mullen hopes to travel to Africa in her attempt to trace her
heritage and write it in a creative format.

“They have DNA tests now that can tell you the general
area of Africa that you’re from,” Mullen said, adding
that with any luck she may run into some of her distant
cousins.

“These are big ideas ““ we’ll see how much of
this I actually get to do,” she chuckled.

Mullen was inspired to look into her family history when she saw
her grandmother standing by her cake on her 90th birthday
celebration, a moment in which she realized the importance of
knowing the stories that combined to make her life. She began
interviewing her grandmother and mother and is trying to decide
whether to write the history as poetry or fiction.

Marks also plans to travel as part of her effort to further her
research in the field of performance art with veterans. Trips to
San Francisco and Miami are on her itinerary for the coming
summer.

“I’ve been thinking about what it means for dance to
play a larger role in a civic discourse,” Marks said.

“Everybody has different challenges and understands some
things better than others, so rather than feeling like you’re
making choreography for some generic body, I feel like I’m
trying to make dances for particular people in the room,”
Marks said.

Marks sees her work as giving disabled veterans an opportunity
to share their story through “their voice, or they could
speak through their actions.”

Meanwhile, Cosentino will further explore the disembodied spirit
of Manuel in his attempt to better understand religions and the
devices people use, such as bones, to maintain contact with the
dead.

“I think I’ve always been fascinated with how people
deal with deaths and how they continue in the role of the
living,” Cosentino said.

He drew a parallel between his upbringing as a Catholic, where
he saw saints’ bones being treated as venerated objects, and
his studies as a scholar in Africa, where people see the dead as a
presence they could contact.

Cosentino met Guelperin through mutual friends about 15 years
ago, after doing research in Haiti on voodoo and getting interested
in its offshoots in Los Angeles.

Cosentino was fascinated with “how the dead relate to the
world of the living, particularly how certain religions use human
bones … to connect to the real world.”

Guelperin offered to get him in contact with Manuel to help him
learn about this, “which was helpful, because he was
dead,” Cosentino said.

He compared the personality of Manuel to that of a dirty old
uncle. “He’s very funny. He’s got a gross way of
speaking, but it’s a nice gross,” Cosentino said.

Cosentino will be using his time as a fellow to write a book
which will include dialogue from transcripts with Manuel and
Guelperin interwoven with his delving into the religious
significance of bones. He sees their stories as a new kind of
spirituality, a kind of global voodoo.

“These guys find themselves in shopping malls. It’s
not like they’re hidden in some corner,” Cosentino
said.