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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2008 > January > 24
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Review: ‘Dance Carousel’ and ‘Lost/Found’
You have to hand it to Ellen Bartel. She’s a choreographer and dancer, yes, and also the one-woman much-needed leader of Austin’s indie dance scene whose leadership often flies under the radar.
For the fifth consecutive year, Bartel has once again staged “Dance Carousel,” her brilliant contribution to FronteraFest’s Long Fringe, which challenges 10 choreographers to create 4 one-minute dances. That makes for 40 dances in just 40 minutes, and Bartel doesn’t let more than a few seconds transpire between numbers. And that means that Tuesday night at the Blue Theater, the first of four “Dance Carousel” performances, the action whipped by.
Without a doubt, Bartel can rock the short form of her own challenge. Accompanied by inflatable life-size plastic dolls, Bartel and her three dances charmed with four very different, and very humorous, vignettes. Ending with the rousing ballet-inspired finale to “Swan Lake,” Bartel made a wonderfully humorous nod to every ballet fantasy every little girl has ever had. Take that Tchaikovsky!
Caroline Sutton Clark offered smart commentary on the very nature of watching modern dance. With a cell-phone-talking plant in the audience, Sutton opened a window to the secret — and not so secret — feelings of dancers and their audiences. Think viewers never wish themselves on stage? Think performers are never fed up with audiences? Think again.
Unfortunately, most of the remainder of the participants presented very underwhelming dances. Few seemed to grasp what it means to make the most of just a minute on stage. Myia Little got it. Her “Child’s Play” was a fun romp. But too much of the rest felt disconnected, short on impact or too reliant on matching moves directly to music.
Wednesday night at FronteraFest’s Long Fringe, it was “Lost/Found,” by Surface Tension Dance Company,” a new group led by **Rhianon Renae Kjar.
Unfortunately, “Lost/Found” was more lost than found, with lots of vague gestures, predictable modern dance moves and silhouettes, and little sense of any dramatic trajectory or arc to the moody multipart piece. A long and unnecessary intermission only drained more energy and momentum from the 45-minute show, as did a few interludes of fuzzy, collaged footage of the dancers in rehearsal. Huh? Nothing clicked here.
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Testsite re-emerges
After a bit of a hiatus, Testsite, the project space launched by nonprofit arts effort Fluent Collaborative has re-emerged.
“Ether,” a collaboration between Frances Colpitt and Terri Thornton, opens Sunday at 2 p.m.
Colpitt is a long-time critic and art history professor, currently at Texas Christian University. Thornton is an artist and curator of education at Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth. Together they explore the idea of invisibility or near invisibility in art via Thornton’s delicate drawings and pin-pricked words on a wall as well as an essay by Colpitt on contemporary arts works that approach invisibility. Essay and pin-pricked words will merge, we are told, in a never fully legible fusion at Testsite.
Not a gallery, Testsite is the living room space in the home of long-time Austin arts patron Laurence Miller at 502 W. 33rd St. There’s no sign out front, and you’ll have to navigate through a neighborhood to get there. Yeah, it’s more than a bit of an insider-y experience and yes, intimidating for some to visit.
Testsite is open Sundays from 2 to 6 p.m. and by appointment.
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Life imitating theater
Last spring, the Unknown Citizens Theater Company came up with a play based on “Shower of Gold,” a short story by the late Texas writer Donald Barthelme about an existentialist game show on which contestants must answer revealing life questions while hooked up to a polygraph. The objective? Get to a person’s true self.
UCTC called the play “Shoeless, Or The Advantages of Never Knowing Exactly Where You Are.”
Then, in a strange case of life possibly imitating, or at least mirroring, art, Fox TV announced in August that it had bought a game show called “The Moment of Truth” on which contestants competing on the show — which premiered last night — are hooked up to a lie detector and asked to answer 21 revealing questions without lying. Whoever can answer the most honestly wins $500,000. Eww — the end of civilization as we know it?
“Shoeless” opens tonight for a two-weekend run at the Hideout, 617 Congress Ave. Find more information on “Shoeless” click here.
