XL WEEKEND REVIEWS

American Masterpieces Festival, Catalyst, Dance Carousel, FronteraFest Short Fringe Best of the Week

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Performance

WE LONG FOR SHORT THEATER

During Frontera Fest's Short Fringe, anything under 25 minutes goes. Each Saturday, five pieces from that week of the short-form performance festival are chosen for reprisal, and Week No. 2 celebrated its best in eclectic fashion.

In "Austin in Denial," Stuart Hersh lectured on the history of race relations in Austin. While the topic is important and the speech educational, the presentation didn't add much. In "Jo and Joanne's Yoga Infomercial," Sissy Siero and Amanda Poston were funny enough as a pair of recently single New Jersey stereotypes. But when the dialogue of the infomercial changed to monologue asides, even the characters acknowledged the clichéd tropes.

"Dating Big Poppa E" was Eirik Ott's quest to find a date through slam poetry and performance. The premise is humorous at first, but it skids into the earnest listing of quirks that is ubiquitous, however fun, in slam poetry.

Girls, Girls, Girls, Austin's only all-girl improv troupe, presented "(Blank), The Musical," an improvised song-and-dance routine about the post office and epistolary lovers. While the performers are always entertaining, you can and should catch them doing the same thing Saturdays at the ColdTowne Theater. For originality, my vote for the Best of the Week goes to "The Earth is Fluid," written and performed by Sharon Sparlin. Combining geometry, dance, and bouncing balls, Sparlin celebrates spheroids and mourns the uncertainty Earth's ever-changing circumference.

But with this variety, there's something for everyone.

(Frontera Fest's Short Fringe continues 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays through February 17. Hyde Park Theatre, $12-$14. 479-PLAY, fronterafest.com.)

— Joey Seiler

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Choral music

CONCERT IN A CHORAL PARADISE

Imagine the stage at Riverbend Centre — one of the widest in Austin — nearly chock-full of choral singers, 600 in all, six rows deep in the center, four rows deep on either side. The list of ensembles Sunday afternoon included Conspirare's three groups and choruses from the University of Texas, Texas Tech University, Texas State University, Judson High School in San Antonio, St. Stephen's Episcopal School and Wesley United Methodist Church.

The National Endowment for the Arts provided a big chunk of financing for the American Masterpieces Festival, organized locally by Austin's Conspirare. The massed concert marked the end of a week of workshops and performances. Sunday afternoon's program was compact — 15 pieces of music, 3 readings, 1 massive chorus in numerous configurations, 70 minutes of music without an intermission — so no one and nothing overstayed a welcome. The one real problem was the amplification that made a Bösendorfer piano sound like a synthesizer (which is a very bad thing).

Craig Hella Johnson led a world premiere — with all 600 voices — of John Muehleisen's "Salut au Monde," marred only by some tentative entrances and substandard French vowels. Johnson and the college choirs presenting Eric Whitacre's "Hope, Faith, Life, Love" were luminously beautiful. Joseph Jennings, music director of Chanticleer, led the Texas Tech Choir in an energetic, crisp gallop through Moses Hogan's arrangement of "Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel," with only a few pitches unaccounted for. But the miracle moments were led by Weston Noble, professor emeritus at Luther College, achieving a warm tone that was glowing and solid in every desirable sense.

— David Mead

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Dance

FINDING THEIR WAY IN CHANGING WORLD

In a world framed by imminent danger and constant environmental loss, how do people continue to live? Emily Johnson and her Minneapolis-based dance company Catalyst make a complicated stab at creating and populating that kind of anxious world in their evening-length work "Heat and Life," performed Thursday at Gallery Lombardi. With wit, off-kilter, yet aggressive movement, and small moments of simple beauty, the group confronted and nearly overwhelmed its audience.

Constantly recostuming themselves, the six women in the cast appeared to represent characters ranging from a hazmat team in traffic-cone orange to camouflaged nature warriors whose boots and cargo pants matched the color of sod spread through the gallery. Always moving with absolute commitment and focus (which is what made me so willing to trust the dancers even when the work seemed most abstract), the cast ran back and forth, shouting each others' names into walkie-talkies.

Frightened chaos gave way to beauty and humor at times. A projected film slowly lapsed from lush green fields to mountainous glacier walls with clips of oil refineries and other environmental hazards interspersed. Once two dancers lolled on their backs atop the sod as a voiceover remembered the pleasures of childhood-romps through grass. Near the work's end one dancer gave another quick instructions about how to move, creating a fast-paced, hilarious "Simon Says."

All these vignettes occurred amid red, blinking lights and haunting live music by J.G. Everest, a constant reminder that breakdown, be it natural or human, always lingers.

— Clare Croft

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Dance

ENTERTAINING US IN A NEW WORK MINUTE

No show in town offers the diversity of the annual Dance Carousel, as 40 one-minute pieces by ten choreographers ensure an engaging experience. If a piece stinks, it will be over in moments. If a piece works, there's reason to look forward to the choreographer's other three contributions to the evening. In Friday's performance at the Blue Theatre, there was much to anticipate.

Several choreographers took a comedic tone, an approach well-suited to the one-minute format. A quartet from Elsewhere Dance Theater/Sheep Army built four characters over the course of their appearances, beginning with over-the-top facial expressions and finishing by tackling each other in superhero garb. Choreographer Molly Roy and dancer Debra McAdoo focused on their backsides in four odes to the butt. They induced much laughter by flexing their rear ends' muscles to a soundtrack of throat-clearing coughs. Lisa Nicks developed humor across her contributions, starting with just Kate Warren, and then building intensity by adding Cherami Steadman in a duet to Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack."

Choreographers Allison Orr and Sharon Marroquin were more somber standouts. Orr's solo for the fluid Khoi Le stretched languidly across familiar Vivaldi music. Marroquin offered four prayers: the first three done with taped spoken prayers and then, quite effectively and angelically, in silence.

(Dance Carousel continues 2:15 p.m. Saturday and 9:15 Sunday at the Blue Theater, 916 Springdale. 479-PLAY, fronterafest.com.)

— Clare Croft

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Art

'DARK MATTER' EXHIBIT HAS MANY BRIGHT SPOTS

The second in a trio of globe-trotting shows at Okay Mountain, "Dark Matter" gathers a half-dozen Tokyo artists whose work (excepting maybe a bit of acid-trip phantasmagoria from Ryo Mizuno) is generally playful even when dealing with icky subjects.

Not shying away from Japanese culture's oft-noted predilection for the cutesy (Akino Kondoh's comic-book-like dreamscape of ladybugs and young women), the pornographic (Genrou Miyake's "Meat Love," a series of drawings incorporating a dash of Hans Bellmer and a generous splat of Hustler), and inventively disturbing combinations of the two (Miyake's less explicit "B.D.G.," where two children appear to morph together in a mid-air wrestling move), the collection sticks mostly with drawings. One exception, a half-funny, half distressing sculpture of a baby with its tongue stuck out, serves as both a conversation-starting centerpiece and (echoed in a set of shiny-tongue keychain fobs available for $15 each) a souvenir.

Selling faster than the keychains — half were taken by the official start of the exhibition, the rest in the seconds after the clock struck seven — were an addictively whimsical sextet of drawings by Mizuno, each a collection of beautifully malformed imaginary life forms arranged in a gridlike menagerie. "300 People" was the most fascinating, with postage stamp-sized portraits offering plenty of detail, but the obsessively rendered, sequin-sized characters in "7,500 People" were impressive in their own way.

Two video works on display were unexpectedly good at holding viewers' attention: Kondoh's big-screen bedtime story "Ladybird's Requiem" and the time-lapse "Dreaming" by Daisuke Nagaoka. In the latter, the artist animates a salaryman's flight of fancy not in the normal stop-motion fashion, but by drawing an image, erasing it and then drawing the next movement over the ghost-like erasures of the preceding one. Less consumer-friendly than the "People" series, perhaps, but every bit as weirdly obsessive.

("Dark Matter: New Work from Japan" continues 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesdays and 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays through Feb. 24. Okay Mountain, 1312 E. Cesar Chavez St.)
— John DeFore