XL COVER STORY

'Cult of Color' a creative collaboration

Artist Trenton Doyle Hancock. choreographer Stephen Mills and composer Graham Reynolds create a wholly new multi-media dance

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Thursday, March 20, 2008

A world awash in vibrant color versus one in lifeless black-and-white. Meat-eating, pleasure-seeking "Mound" creatures facing off against the self-righteous, colorless "Vegans." Good locked in an eternal fight against evil that never seems close to ending.

The cosmology created by Houston artist Trenton Doyle Hancock in his monumental collage-like paintings is as singular as it is all-encompassing. Its narrative is part Old Testament and part Marvel Comics, with god-like (superhero-like?) figures leading bands of disciples in dramatic battles against an enemy. It's rendered in a visual style that is equally inspired by the grotesque epics of Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch as it is by imaginative alternative cartoons or science-fiction movies. And Hancock has been adding to his story — mapping out backstories, creating characters and their complex genealogies — since he was a teenager in the northeast Texas town of Paris, filling notebook after notebook with his elaborate tale that still has not arrived at a resolution.

Since the 33-year-old burst onto the art scene in 2000, when he became one of the youngest artists ever included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial show, he has been racking up the critical kudos, impressively expanding his exhibition credits (he had a solo exhibit at Arthouse, an Austin contemporary art museum, in 2002) and adding up the collectors who now jockey to pay tens of thousands of dollars for Hancock's paintings. (The Blanton Museum of Art is just one of at least 20 museums around the world that have acquired a Hancock painting for its permanent collection.)

But for all his meteoric art world success, Hancock's vibrant yet terribly personal mythology will explode here in Austin in a way that even the very imaginative artist never once imagined.

Thanks to creative contributions from Ballet Austin artistic director Stephen Mills and Austin composer Graham Reynolds, "Cult of Color: Call to Color" will see Hancock's tumultuous "Mounds versus Vegans" world erupt from the stage as a live hour-long ballet encased by its own wholly original musical score.

Opening April 3 for just nine performances in Ballet Austin's intimate 275-seat AustinVentures Studio Theater, "Cult of Color" has been three years in the making, and it represents milestones for each of its creative contributors, not just Hancock.

Just a distillation of one piece of Hancock's epic, "Cult of Color" finds the patriarch of the skeletal Vegans, Sesom (Moses spelled backwards), ready to lead his band of disciples — the "Cult of Color," they sport names such as Baby Curt, Shy Jerry, F-Shine and Betto Watchow — out of their colorless underground world into the warm, rainbow-hued world above ground. But rather than end with a neat, happy finale, the tale ends at an ambiguous point, the conflict not fully resolved.

To add to the public's understanding of just how the unusual collaboration took place, Arthouse is mounting the exhibit "Cult of Color: Call to Color — Notes on a Collaboration," which opens Saturday and runs through April. Really, what the exhibit explains is that though "Cult of Color" is a collaboration and is based on Hancock's story, Hancock, Mills and Reynolds worked independently, each creating his own unique layer or part of the final project.

Hancock's preparatory notes, sketches and drawings for the costumes as well as four installations that represent different scenes of the ballet will be on view. So will Reynolds' entire score, with audio samples. Monitors will feature video footage of Mills working with the dancers to create the movement for the ballet.

"Collaboration is very important in a city like ours where we have a lot of small and midsize arts organizations, because that's how they can together make a huge impact," says Sue Graze, executive director of Arthouse and the person who introduced Mills and Hancock three years ago.

Already "Cult of Color" seems cued to make an impact. Art collectors from across the country and around the world have been scheduled for months to attend the ballet on opening weekend. Ditto with the specialized arts press and presenters interested in producing the ballet in other cities.

Even for someone used to being on the receiving end of a lot of buzz, Hancock is a little wide-eyed from this latest venture. "I still haven't wrapped my mind around the fact that this is happening," he says with a modest smile. He was in town recently to oversee the final touches on the scenery.

"I had been thinking about how to take my work outside the confines of the typical museum and gallery setting," Hancock says. "But I had never even seen a ballet before Stephen approached me three years ago."

Mills had certainly seen Hancock's work. A besotted fan and modest collector of contemporary art ("I own a very, very small Hancock painting," Mills says), the choreographer had long been dreaming of collaborating with an artist. And Mills wasn't just interested in doing what so many choreographers or opera directors have done before, which is to have a visual artist give his or her twist to sets and costumes for a pre-existing story.

No, Mills wanted to actually re-create the work of a visual artist as a ballet — live and on a stage.

Hancock's immense — and immensely complex — narrative seemed perfect. "I like the way Trenton's work asks you to complete it," Mills says. "There's never — really, there's no way — this complicated mythology that Trent's been creating for years can be revealed in just one of his paintings. I liked that incredible richness."

Mills has also liked the way Hancock's otherworldly creatures — not to mention the complex costumes — have demanded that the choreographer come up with an entirely new vocabulary of dance movements. Mills' "Cult of Color" is not a ballet of pointe shoes and pirouettes, but of angular, expressive gestures and sometimes simian moves.

Mills invited Reynolds to join the project. A lifelong fan of classic comic books and sci-fi tales, Reynolds felt an immediate affinity for the source of Hancock's tale. And though Reynolds has scored movies (Richard Linklater's "A Scanner Darkly" among others), written symphonies, operas and multiple scores for theatrical productions, he'd never written for a ballet before, let alone for a visual artist. "It's an inspiring world to build on, but this is a story Trent has been creating his whole life," Reynolds says. "We were a bit cautious about poking at it too much."

Rather than poke, Reynolds decided to make the score almost its own free-standing effort — a recording characterized by lots of studio-only effects where the individual movements weren't necessarily free-standing from the whole. Partly symphonic, partly electronic sounds, the score is recorded in the all-encompassing effect of surround-sound. "I thought of it kind of like the Beatles 'Sergeant Pepper' album," Reynolds says. "I wanted to create a score that couldn't be done live."

In other words, music that is just as other-worldly as Mills' unconventional dance movements and Hancock's completely other world.

"It all fit together like a puzzle in the end," Hancock says.

"Cult of Color" might be Hancock's world, but for a while Mills and Reynolds — and now the rest of us — will get to be in it.

For a while.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699