Recent arts coverage:
- Evolutionary biology. Aesthetic determinism. Live action role playing. The Rude Mechs are making a new play again
- Suburban battlefield: Women fight invisible foe in Amie Siegel’s ‘Black Moon’
- In eerie paintings by Ana Fernandez, a house isn’t just a house
More arts coverage | Follow this blog on Twitter @artsinaustin | Read recent arts reviews
Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2008 > October > 13
Monday, October 13, 2008
Long Center appoints temporary interim director
With Long Center executive director Cliff Redd on doctor’s orders to take several weeks to rest after suffering a minor heart attack last week, the Long Center’s board of director has has named Carolyn Gallagher, Long Center board chair, to act as interim executive director.
Gallagher will serve as interim executive director until Paul Beutel, who was named the Long Center’s managing director, can begin his job on Nov. 9. Beutel, who was appointed in August, was the longtime director of the Paramount Theater. He is currently wrapping up his position as managing director at Houston’s Miller Outdoor Theatre.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
BAM Festival review: ‘Viva La Diva’
Pro Arts Collective spread its reach far with this year’s Black Arts Movement Festival. And Sunday’s “Viva La Diva” concert at Huston Tillotson University proved that. The impressive recital by three up-and-coming opera singers broadened BAM Festival’s reach into the classical fine arts.
Mezzo-soprano Lori Brown-Mirabal, soprano Othalie Graham and contralto Judith Skinner drew progressively more rousing shouts of ‘bravo’ from the audience Sunday as they presented a very tight and polished program of well-known arias and songs.
The trio started the program together with a lovely interpretation of the traditional gospel hymn “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” before rotating through their individual repertoire.
Skinner stood out, making a sure-fire first impression with the dramatic “Re dell Abisso” from Verdi’s “Ballo in maschera,” her voice rich and mellifluous. She later returned for a sensitive rendition of “The Feeling We Once Had” from the 1970s musical “The Wiz” only to later finish the first half of the program with stirring and almost fierce-sounding a capella version of the hymn “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?”
In the program’s second half, Skinner again demonstrated her ample artistic range with another Verdi aria (“Stride la Vampa” from “Il Travatore”) followed later by an utterly scintillating presentation of “Afraid, Am I Afraid” from Menotti’s histrionic 1946 opera “The Medium.”
Brown-Mirabal garnered the first of the afternoon’s calls of “bravo” with her graceful yet spirited handling of the “Habanera” from Bizet’s “Carmen.” Later, Brown-Mirabal impressed again with a nuanced “My Man’s Gone” from “Porgy and Bess,” deftly handling the song’s jazzy dramatics.
Graham impressed with her sheer volume, if not always the control of tone, especially on “Dich tuere halle” Wagner’s “Tannhauser” and again on ‘in Questa Reggia” from Puccini’s “Turandot.”
As they began, the trio finished together, this time with a heartfelt and humorous version of “Scandalize My Name” that even allowed accompanist Eldon Little to get on the spirited call-and-response.
The audience demanded an encore from the singers. But unfortunately it seems planning didn’t permit for that. Still, it was clear sign that Pro Arts inclusion of opera and classical music struck a high note with their audience.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Reviews
Review: ‘Casket of Passing Fancy’
You know you’re in for something different when you’re handed a legal release form along with your program, and Rubber Repertory’s “The Casket of Passing Fancy” is definitely that.
As you walk into the Blue Theatre, you’re funneled into a tight, closed space. Set designer Anne Marie Gordon has turned a small fraction of the theater into a parlor that, with its arm chairs, tables and board games, would feel homey if you hadn’t just promised not to hold your hosts responsible for physical or emotional damages. The back walls, filled with files and plastic tubs of props, holds out the promise for even more variety.
The premise of the event is that the Duchess, played by Jennifer Underwood, will offer the audience a series of opportunities, drawn as cards from her casket. Each audience member will choose one. Once you’ve chosen your offer, it’s fulfilled, and you leave the theater. The offer will never be made again. Not only is each performance guaranteed to be different, each viewer’s experience is as well.
The tone is set consistently, though, by an opening song from the Duchess’ servants, rotating through an open window with blankly cheerful faces, and a monologue from Underwood herself on the nature of pleasure. “I do everything in my power to make them happy,” she says of those she meets, “and yet…. And yet.”
That seems to be the underlying theme of “Casket.” A buffet of choices await you, each offering a chance at happiness or at least passing fancy, but you choose only once. And your choice may not always live up to expectations — of course sometimes it exceeds them.
A notion of fleeting fancy carries a bittersweet tone, and Underwood exemplifies it. When the offer to become her fourth husband — or first wife — came and went with no one jumping at the chance, the Duchess merely sighed, lingered with her card in the air, and tossed it into the recycling pile. When a member of the audience chose to see indoor fireworks, an experience that was shared with the rest of us, Underwood beamed gleefulness.
The options carry on like that, ranging from mundane to spicy to the absurdly bizarre to the unavoidably poignant. The choice to watch a “daring display of love and invulnerability” gives off the sense that you’re living in a fairy tale told by Jonathan Safran Foer, all piquance and heartstrings. Others, like the option to “poop your pants,” which went unchosen, seem designed to either pluck at taboos or childish goofiness.
It’s an idea that’s beautiful in concept and in the descriptions from the troupe and the Duchess. In practice, there are moments of potential revelation and true joyfulness, but also shy awkwardness and a feeling that you should push yourself toward seizing delight. Regardless, it’s a truly unique experience, and that’s a fancy worth seizing on. But watch out, because “The Casket of Passing Fancy” is bit like life: the longer you wait, the fewer your options.
(Joey Seiler is a freelance theater reviewer and writer.)
(“The Casket of Passing Fancy” continues at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Sundays through Nov. 1 at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Road. $15-$25.1-800-838-3006, rubberrep.org.)
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Reviews
Review: ‘So You Think You Can Dance’
More people may be watching dance today than have since the so-called 1970s “dance boom.” It’s just that all those dance fans aren’t necessarily making it to the theater. They get all the dance they want on television. This burgeoning dance audience left the living room’s safety Sunday for Austin’s Erwin Center to see the “So You Think You Can Dance” tour, the live version of the popular TV show featuring 13 dancers from season four.
The evening worked on a “best of” format, including snippets from the TV show, last season’s favorite dances, and spoken introductions from the dancers, who tried very hard to be funny.
Choreographically a few pieces stood out. Mia Michael gave season runner-up Twitch (Stephen Boss) intense duets built from sensitively phrased choreography. As Twitch and Kherington Payne slid down a tilted bed, Twitch’s bare chest sank and expanded, displaying emotion without too much melodrama. Mark Kanemura’s turn to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” had more musical dynamics than most. Kanemura understands how to use different parts of his body as the initiation for movement, drawing attention to something other than big tricks, the jumps, turns, and high kicks packed in elsewhere. Katee Shean, the season’s top female winner, also practices nuance in her choices.
Where the television show prizes versatility, on tour dancers can showcase specialties. In a solo and in Tabitha and Napoleon D’Umo’s duet to “Party People,” Comfort Fedoke displayed the fluidity and groundedness that makes good female hip-hop dancers captivating.
Despite performance and choreographic innovations, the touring show revolves around some painful clichés. The first time hip-hop was highlighted, the dancers, Boss and Payne, performed as escaped convicts. Dancers like Fedoke and winner Joshua Allen prove that hip-hop represents a much larger spectrum of culture than delinquency. And then there was Gev Manoukian, the Russian/Armenian b-boy from Utah. During a segment about the range of dances on the show, Gev continually appears in dresses to be mocked by his peers for his gender transgression. Gev ostensibly dons the dresses to woo dancer Courtney Galiano, so the cross-dressing, peer mocking, and girl chasing unfold in a familiar story: men should be masculine and women should be feminine. And don’t worry living room audience, he might be wearing a dress, but he’s chasing a girl — he’s not gay.
With such a diverse cast, artistically and culturally, the show could be so much more than another way to fill in familiar stereotypes.
(Clare Croft is a freelance dance and theater critic.)
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Reviews
Charles Dutton show cancelled
Pro Arts Collective just announced that due to unforeseen circumstances, actor Charles Dutton has had to cancel his one-man show “From Jail to Yale” scheduled tonight for the Long Center. The show will not be rescheduled.
Dutton’s show was a part of Pro Art’s Black Arts Movement Festival.
Pre-sold tickets will be refunded. Call 474-5664.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
BAM Festival reviews: ‘No Boundaries’ and ‘Delta Rhapsody’
Historically black women have had to fight for control over how their bodies and their lives get written into history. Two shows presented in Pro Arts Black Arts Movement Festival — Gesel Mason’s “No Boundaries” and Nadine Mozon’s “Delta Rhapsody” — helped bring black women and their bodies into view on their own terms.
The range of choreography in Mason’s show last week at AustinVentures Theater works to explode any easy categories of “black dance.” Two pieces, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s “Bent” and Reggie Wilson’s “Seeline ‘oman,” rewrite bits of history, but from different directions. In “Bent,” Mason first appears in silhouette, an Afro wig and bellbottoms rewind time.
Dancing a breakdown, Mason slouches, settles into her torso, then reaches out. Partnered with George Clinton’s “Maggot Brain,” “Bent” returns blackness to hippie counterculture, a historical moment too often literally whitewashed.
Wilson takes one of culture’s most frequent references to African American life, the spiritual, and places it in a broader context. There is no Alvin Ailey here. “Seeline” begins with Bessie Smith, but the Abyssinian Baptist Gospel Choir overtakes her. A female soloist’s voice burst upward; Mason walks, pushing a grocery cart or skimming a small wave — a series of arm dances. The voice hurls upward: Mason changes clothes, puts on make-up. Tiny dances of labor and life undo the fixation on the scream, the outburst, the ecstasy of the African American spiritual. Later, on a darker stage, Mason will do the space-eating movement the wail called for earlier, but in the dimness, the openness in the middle of a circle of candles resonates more. Still not everything can be seen.
David Rousseve’s “JumpBroom” deserves a review all its own, as it connects the lynching of a black woman after trying to marry her slave husband to a lesbian couple’s halted attempt to marry today. First Mason swings limp and twitching from an unseen rope, and then crawls across the stage, feet bound, reaching for another woman’s sleeping body. As the two stories are told by recorded voices, the impact of words on bodies, laws on bodies, creeps into the theater.
In “Delta Rhapsody” Saturday at the Off Center, Nadine Mozon, as the campy cabaret performer Delta, gives everything and more. Mozon, who wrote and performed the show (Madge Darlington directed), arrives in a flurry of white feathers — a white boa is Delta’s favorite prop. Mozon plays deftly with her words, her stage environment, and her audience. Delta’s monologues, half earnest self-help, half poetry, make theater through their attention to rhythm. Mozon knows when to let words flow and when to make them pitter-patter. As Delta grows increasingly drunk, Mozon’s body spreads out. She sprawls over a wooden stool, and then falls, giving her funniest line from the floor. Looking up through mussed hair, she says, “Well, since I’m here.” The audience laughed uproariously throughout the show, following Mozon on her trip through Delta, from knock-knock jokes to a mid-show reincarnation of a Katrina evacuee Delta met in Omaha. The woman’s story fit a bit oddly into the cabaret act, but Mozon’s portrayal had honesty and specificity in its storytelling.
Both Mozon and Mason shared programs with local performers. In Mason’s show, Houston’s Sandra Organ danced a solo that felt simple in its progress narrative of black life in Houston. Leigh Gaymon-Jones solo was a slow reveal beginning with a backwards walk, climaxing with a turn forward on the floor, limbs unfurling. Almost shy details — a heel drag, foot flexed in reticence — texture the story of a body expanding. The second half of Saturday’s Off Center show featured The Austin Project Performance Company’s “American: love out of context.” (Clare Croft is a freelance dance and theater critic.)
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Reviews
