Austin Arts
XL weekend reviews
Io: A Myth About You, UT faculty of music, Anthony Bourdain, 'Far Away,' New Music Co-op, Wideman/Davis Dance Company
Monday, October 22, 2007Theater: 'Io: A Myth About You'
There are some performances, some moments, that should absolutely invigorate anyone, artist or audience, involved in Austin theater. "Io: A Myth About You" is crammed to overflowing with them.
The new play by Monika Bustamante staged by Shrewd Productions recasts the tale of Io as a story about down-at-the-heels gods plotting over gentrification, drugs and murder. It's a "Rent" meets "Rocky Horror Picture Show" sort of aesthetic with more than a dash of "Dallas."
From Elena Araoz's direction that wrings out passion and comedy from a superb ensemble cast to Ann Marie Goron's creative junkyard set to the rocking live music written by T. Lynn Mikeska and Adam Sultan, every piece meshes together for a sum that's almost better than its parts.
There are still rough patches — moments of writerly self-consciousness, a tune that doesn't quite match the mood, or a pop culture joke that rides a half beat early over a tender line — that make it hard sometimes to pick the final point and tenor of the play from all the individual moments. But those moments! Some of Bustamante's language is obtuse, but most is hauntingly beautiful or wickedly funny. The rough patches just highlight how much more promise Shrewd Productions has for the future.
It's almost criminal that the house wasn't packed. This is a group, a play and a time worth celebrating.
("Io: A Myth About You" continues at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through Nov. 10 at the Vortex, 2307 Manor Road. $15-$25. 478-5282, www.vortexrep.org.)
— Joey Seiler
Music: UT faculty
The atrium of the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas is definitely a nice place to hear music, though it'll never be a concert hall. On the positive side, it has a stratospherically high ceiling and richly reverberant reflecting surfaces; on the other, it has all kinds of distractions — conversations in adjoining rooms, people coming and going at odd times in one's peripheral vision, a room that is never completely silent — that break the concentration of both the audience and the performers.
So the first works on Sunday afternoon's program of instrumental chamber music by faculty from the UT School of Music were quite good, but not incandescent. Mozart's Duo in G for violin and viola played by Brian Lewis and Roger Myers was consistently pleasant despite moments of dubious tuning.
Flutist Marianne Gedigian joined Lewis and Myers for the Serenade in G by Max Reger and the Duo for flute and viola by François Devienne (1759-1803). Having been performed by these artists recently in Australia, these works were well-tuned and incisively together.
Brahms' Trio for horn, violin and piano received a really excellent reading thanks particularly to the way Rick Rowley navigated the tricky piano part and drew a wide range of tone colors from the undersized piano.
Rowley and hornist Patrick Hughes made the sometimes boisterous writing satisfying without wiping out the violin. Lewis in his turn was a strong presence, but too strong in the third movement, thought to be a response to the death of Brahms' mother. It was Rowley who established the darkness in the mood and in the composer's soul. Hughes needed more variety in dynamics and expression, but the tone of the horn was consistently beautiful.
— David Mead
Theater: Anthony Bourdain
Add rock star to the list of Anthony Bourdain's careers. At least that's how the sold-out and hyped-up crowd Saturday night at the Paramount Theatre treated the chef-writer-TV star.
They burst into applause spontaneously, took drinks to the stage and even commented on his "smokin' hot body." Bourdain could have stood and posed for an hour and this crowd of groupies would have eaten it up.
Instead, he strode out, dressed in black and carrying a Shiner, and spoke for about 45 minutes about the evolution of his career and life. He's as quick-witted in person as he is on the page ("Kitchen Confidential," the new "Nasty Bits," a "Top Chef" blog and crime fiction novels). He's also as charismatic as he appears on his Travel Channel show, "No Reservations," which explains the audience catcalls and whoops of delight that rang out at random moments.
He was not shy about sharing his opinions on fellow celebrity chefs, a culture he seems to find little redeeming value in even while being grateful for what it's meant for his life. And he offered his own tips for travel, based on his many adventures around the world — eat anything offered to you (from snout to rectum) and ask the hotel cooks, not the concierge, where to eat. Refusing a host's offering is rude at best (he's not wild about vegetarians for this reason) and at worst denies what might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Bourdain could certainly handle his role as star attraction and ringleader, both during his talk and a free-for-all audience Q&A. But a moderator might have helped, someone who could push Bourdain, a great conversationalist, to share something beyond what we already know. Not that the crowd minded; the chef answered all their fanboy questions about specific scenes from his show, his family and even how he kicked heroin (eight years of methadone and a lot of rage). He wisely refused to say where he'd had "respectable" Austin barbecue for dinner and left the crowd with this delicious morsel — a promise that an Austin episode of "No Reservations" is inevitable.
As with everything he served Saturday night, the audience ate it up.
— Sharon Chapman
Theater: 'Far Away'
Caryl Churchill's chilling play "Far Away" is perhaps the oddest yet most impactful hour you may spend in a theater this fall. Currently getting a sturdy production by Austin Community College and directed by guest artist Laura Somers, "Far Away" rockets in quick little scenes from cold, bare realism to frightening, chaotic surrealism.
Everyone is all too familiar with the situation at first — and Churchill milks that comfort for all it's worth. Things do, after all, go bump in the night, and when a young girl, Joan, questions her Aunt Harper late one night to ask about those noises outdoors, terrifying secrets are unraveled: "If it's a party, why was there so much blood?" Joan asks.
From there, "Far Away" spills ever more quickly into a world gone terribly wrong. By the second scene we find Joan a decade later, a young woman working in a haberdashery, charged with making fanciful hats for all the wrong reasons: "Too bad they burn them with the bodies," she tells Todd, her co-worker and object of her affection, though her complicity in the immorality of her task is all too obvious — and reprehensible.
Next, Churchill sends us a few more years in the future, when Joan and Todd, now married, are taking refuge in Harper's house while outside a war of epic proportion rages, "them" and "us" defined to the extreme. Even the animal kingdom has taken sides. "The elephants have gone over to the Dutch," snorts Harper.
Churchill's nightmare fable of terror and prejudice taken to its extreme is tough stuff — for both an audience to watch and the cast of three to pull off. Most notable is ACC drama instructor Jodi Jinks, who as Harper effects a quiet hysteria that never lets up. Costume designer Jenny Hanna's fantastical hats are appropriately full of dark whimsy.
Not for the faint of heart or faint of conscience, "Far Away" is a necessary fable for our times.
('Far Away' continues 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday at Gallery Theater, Austin Community College, 1212 Rio Grande St. Admission by donation. 223-3343.)
— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Music: New Music Co-op
The New Music Co-op rocked Saturday night at Harmony Hall — in several different ways.
Ambitiously, the barely six-year-old nonprofit collective has gone in a short time from being a loose group of like-minded new music enthusiasts to marshalling the finances to impressively commission new work from one of the most regarded avant-garde experimenters on the scene today.
New York-born Berlin-based composer and media artist Arnold Dreyblatt — who has been delightfully called "the minimalist who never forgot that music is still the human mating call" — was on hand Saturday night to introduce his "Kinship Collapse" to an enthusiastic audience. And Dreyblatt's vigorous, affective rhythms and rich, emotional tonal textures were a perfect fit for the self-proclaimed Live Music Capital of the World. So were his distinctive modified instruments — what better place to find curious musicians to retune and electrify their instruments and transform them into what Dreyblatt calls "excited strings." Those technical modifications and Dreyblatt's restructured 20-tone tuning system, which he's developed over the course of three decades, result in the familiar instruments (violin, cello, contrabass, guitar) sounding familiar and at the same time rich and thick with multiple otherworldly tones.
"Kinship Collapse" built on ever more compelling rhythms as the piece progressed through its first part, the snare drum snapping out with greater and greater impact pushing the intensely growing convergence of tones to an almost fevered pitch. If the second, more improvisational section seemed too scattered and sedate, it might only have been because the energy level was set so high with the first movement; we might have been more in the mood to end with a bang, not an introspective moment.
No matter, in the end. "Kinship Collapse" still stood strong.
Dreyblatt first hooked up with the New Music Co-op in 2006 when he needed musicians for his Table of Elements showcase at South by Southwest — the first time the fest carved out room for experimental music. Let's hope the kinship created between Dreyblatt and New Music Co-op continues.
— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Dance: Wideman/Davis Dance Company
Here's a welcome sight: Friday night, a beyond-standing-room-only crowd packed the aisles of the Boyd Vance Theater at the Carver Museum and Cultural Center. And at least three dozen people had to be turned away at the door.
What was the crowd there for? Modern dance.
Since winning Ballet Austin's New American Talent choreographic competition in 2006, New York-based dance maker Thaddeus Davis has cycled back through Austin a few times. Last year, he and his wife, Tanya Wideman-Davis (together they are Wideman/Davis Dance Company), brought the critically acclaimed "The Bends of Life," Davis' expressive interpretation of the story of the female African American quilters of Gee's Bend, Ala. (Davis is an Alabama native.) This fall, Davis has been working on a commission for Ballet Austin II, the apprentice company of Ballet Austin.
The time here in Austin has also given Davis the opportunity to develop his latest foray into topical, issue-charged dance theater. "Bosket Affair" is Davis' creative interpretation of the story of Willie Bosket, the 15-year-old whose arrest for murder in 1978 ended a youth filled with acts of random violence but also launched an investigation into the family and cultural circumstances that produced such a child.
Such a complex story and sociological investigation clearly warrants artistic response. But it's not easy to do with the vocabulary of modern dance. Hence, while all Davis' signature styles as a dance maker were there — the compelling physicality, the quick expressive gestures, the vigorous athleticism — the moments of dramatic, spoken storytelling (not necessarily a bad tactic in and of itself) ended up cumbersome, interrupting the vigorous energy that Davis' choreography naturally sets up.
Wideman-Davis is an instantly captivating dancer; it's impossible not to stay riveted to her every movement from the moment she takes the stage. And Davis is clearly, and impressively, pushing himself to tackle bigger and bigger and things. Perhaps given more time in development, the talented duo will finesse "Bosket Affair."
— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
