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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > October
October 2009
Art Palace Gallery heads to Houston
It’s official news now. The chatter that’s been whispered for several weeks is now public.
After almost five years and lots of kudos, attention and even national press Art Palace Gallery is leaving Austin for Houston, gallery owner Arturo Palacious says. With its innovative shows and sophisticated roster of emerging artists, the East Austin gallery has been a mainstay of the developing indie gallery scene.
In Houston, Art Palace will set up its new home at 3913 Main Street in the Historic Isabella Court building. New neighbors will be Inman Gallery, Kinzelman Art Consulting and CTRL.
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Let the Arthouse renovations begin!
With a few ceremonial whacks of a sledgehammer against a wall, Arthouse officials along with Mayor Lee Leffingwell and former mayor Will Wynn kicked off the start of the major renovations on the Congress Avenue contemporary arts institutions.
The $6.6 million architecturally adventurous re-design of the building comes at time when many arts groups have scaled back on programs and future plans. But with $5 million already raised, the Arthouse expansion is on schedule. Re-opening is planned for fall 2010.
New York architects Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis forward-thinking design promises to be a smart update of the historic downtown building. Check out the project web site.
A model of the Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis designs for Arthouse — with the multi-purpose roof amphiteatre — stands against a pile of debris leftover from the recent wildly popular ‘24 Roman Reconstruction Project,’ artist Liz Glyn’s participatory adventure that had the public building, and then destroying, a miniature version of ancient Rome.
Everything on the buildings first floor — including the staff offices, here just a pile of rubble — will be remodeled. However, the design calls for many features of the historic structure to be preserved.
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‘The House of the Sun’
Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara based his opera ‘The House of the Sun’ on the true tale of two sisters who fled the Russian revolution in 1917 and lived in virtual isolation in Finland for almost 70 years, refusing to believe that the revolution had ever happened and that their previous life of luxury was over. Finally in the winter of 1987, the sisters froze to death in their house in the woods, a house called Solgården (‘Sun’s garden’).
The Butler School of Music collaborates with the Sibelius Academy of Finland in this new production.
Sometimes characterized as a mystic or romantic composer, Rautavaara nevertheless employs a fundamentally post-modern musical language in which theirs a blend of modern and traditional tonalities and elements.
‘The House of the Sun’
7:30 p.m. Thursday through Sunday
McCullough Theatre, UT campus
$10-$20
www.music.utexas.edu
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‘An Unlikely Weapon: The Eddie Adams Story’ screening
Earlier this fall, the University of Texas announced that the acquisition of Pulitzer Prize-winning photo-journalist Eddie Adams.
Adams made history with his 1968 photo of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong prisoner. “Saigon Execution” is widely considered one of the most influential images to come out of the Vietnam War.
The continuing story of the Saigon photograph became the subject of “An Unlikely Weapon,” directed by Susan Cooper and narrated by Kiefer Sutherland. A free screening of the film will be offered Wednesday followed by remarks by photojournalist David Hume Kennerly Alyssa Adams (Adams’ widow).
‘An Unlikely Weapon: The Eddie Adams Story’
6:30 p.m. Wednesday
Blanton Museum of Art Auditorium, Congress Ave. and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Free
See a slide show of UT’s Eddie Adams collection.
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Paul Baker, legendary Texas theater educator, 1911-2009
Paul Baker — influential Texas theater educator — passed away at the age of 98.
He died at the hospital on Sunday morning, October 25 due to complications from pneumonia, a press release from Dallas Theatre Center reported. Baker was the founder of the Dallas Thearre Center as well as the founding principal of the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.
Among Baker’s contributions to the fields of theater and education continue to be celebrated. Over a long career as chair of the drama department at Baylor University, Baker honed his ideas about an integrated approach to the study of the arts (theater in particular), an approach still upheld today.
Read anAmerican-Statesman profile of Baker.
The Baker Idea Institute at the Dallas Theatre Center continues his legacy.
A public memorial and celebration of the life and work of Dr. Baker is being planned to take place at Rosewood Center for Family Arts in Dallas in early December. Details to be announced.
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Blanton ‘Petrobelli Altarpiece’ lecture a total sell-out
Crowds turned out for Sunday’s lecture by British art historian Xavier Salomon.
Too many in fact.
All 300 seats were sold an hour before Salomon’s 2 p.m. lecture on how he discovered that a painting in the Blanton’s collection was actually a missing fragment of a famous altarpiece painting by Italian Renaissance painter Paolo Veronese. Dozens of people were turned away.
Yes, a good art history mystery makes for a sell-out crowd.
‘Paulo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece’ continues through Feb. 7, 2010 at the Blanton Museum of Art. www.blantonmuseum.org.
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Review: ‘Earthwork’
Where’s there a will, sometimes there is art.
Written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Chril Ordal, the delightfully quiet and quirky “Earthwork” recounts the true story of Kansas artist Stan Herd (deftly played by John Hawkes) who sets out to transform a junk-filled lot in New York into one of his lush fields of crop art.
Riffing off the abstract art installations introduced in 1960s by artists such as Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria, Herd combined the cerebral genre of conceptual earth art with his downhome upbringing on a Kansas farm to come up with his own take on the earth-shaping art genre.
Herd used plants and field crops which he carefully cultivated to create massive mostly figurative artworks that could really only be seen from the sky.
In an effort to get his work noticed outside his native Kansas - and to start monetizing his efforts — Herd journeyed to Big Apple in 1993 where he proposes to create one of his giant earthworks on property owned by Donald Trump.
After a decade of heated controversy, Trump won the rights to develop a strip of land along Manhattan’s Upper West Side and to appease his opposition, Trump offered to sponsor an art project on the property before construction started.
To win the commission, Herd offers to fund the project himself and just ask Trump for access to the site. But that means Herd must leverage the Kansas home he shares with his wife and child, risking everything for the chance to get his art seen.
Once in New York, Herd finds himself alone in his endeavor. But soon enough a passel of homeless men who live in nearby abandoned train tunnels takes an interest in Herd’s project and eventually becomes his earnest but motley crew of assistants.
A character piece more than anything else, Ordal’s compact film nicely avoids imposing any grandiose summations about Herd or his art work or even the nature of art itself.
Hawkes captures Herd’s unsophisticated yet headstrong character, delivering a convincing portrait of a man somewhat naive but nevertheless fiercly driven whose sheer force of will leads him on.
(Hawkes honed his acting chops right here in Austin’s theater community of the early and mid 1980s, most notably with “In the West” a critically-acclaimed collage of monologues inspired by the Richard Avedon’s photographic portraits of Westerners.)
Ruination may threaten Herd as he forges ahead with his most unlikely New York public art project. But like Voltaire’s Candide, he chooses to simply, and cheerfully, cultivate his own garden.
‘Earthwork’
Written and directed by Chril Ordal
USA, 98 minutes
Screenings: 6:30 p.m. Oct. 25 at Bullock Texas State History Museum, 1800 Congress Ave. 7:15 p.m. Oct. 27, Arbor Cinema, 9828 Great Hills Trail. Q-and-A with the director following each screening.
Image: John Hawkes as artist Stan Herd. Photo by Hometown Collaborations.
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Reunification of altarpiece at Blanton solves a big art mystery
Forget ‘The Da Vinci Code.’ We have our own major art history mystery that was solved right here in Austin.
After spending time with the Blanton Museum of Art’s Suida-Manning Collection, Xavier Salomon, chief curator of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, realized that a small painting by Italian Renaissance master Paolo Veronese was actually the long-missing fragment of a massive altarpiece painting made for a Northern Italian church long-since destroyed.
Now, in a rare reconstruction, all four known pieces of the Petrobelli Altarpiece on view displayed together in one frame, much as if they were a whole again. “Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece” makes its only stop in the United States at the Blanton.
Read more about the discovery.
And on Sunday, Salomon returns to the Blanton to relate the story of his discovery.
Xavier Salomon, chief curator of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, discusses the journey of the`Petrobelli Altarpiece’ through history
2 p.m. Oct. 25
Cost: Free with museum admission ($3-$7)
www.blantonmuseum.org
Image: Paolo Veronese, ‘Head of Saint Michael,’ the missing fragment of the Petrobelli Altarpiece.
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Bass Concert Hall jumps into Pollstar top ten
The University of Texas’ Bass Concert Hall has been ranked number seven for third quarter ticket sales in Pollstar’s worldwide ranking of top 100 international theater venues.
Pollstar, the trade journal of touring artists, booking agents and performance venues, released its third quarter rankings today. The Bass Concert Hall sold 215,237 tickets between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30 of this year. Pollstar rated the UT venue number 13 at its mid-year ranking.
The recent rankings positions Bass Concert Hall in the company of major venues such as New York’s Radio City Music Hall, Atlanta’s Fox Theatre and Las Vegas’ Coliseum at Ceasars Palace and ahead of regional venues like the Nokia Theatre in Grand Prairie, Texas.
A sold-out three-week run of the Broadway musical ‘Wicked’ is primarily responsible for the jump in tickets sales during the third quarter though other well-selling shows at Bass Concert Hall this year include violinist Itzhak Perman, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, James Taylor and comedy show Flight of the Conchords.
In November, the Bass Concert Hall will be one of only five venues in the United States to host legendary comic artist Robert Crumb who penned well-known characters and series including Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, Joe Blow and Keep on Truckin’.
TOP 10 WORLDWIDE THEATRE VENUES BY THIRD QUARTER TICKETS SALES
1. Auditorio Nacional, Mexico City — 859,534
2. Fox Theatre, Atlanta — 418,958
3. Colosseum At Caesars Palace, Las Vegas —408,192
4. Auditorio Telmex, Guadalajara — 287,585
5. Radio City Music Hall, New York — 270,883
6. Benedum Center, Pittsburgh — 258,295
7. Bass Concert Hall, Austin — 215,237
8. Nokia Theatre At Grand Prairie, Grand Prairie, Texas — 212,434
9. Beacon Theatre, New York —204,559
10. Paramount Theatre, Seattle — 199,748
Source: Pollstar
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Review: ‘Spring Awakening’
There is a certain irony to the bright red “Mature Themes” warning on posters for the musical “Spring Awakening,” since the show illustrates how restricting knowledge about sexuality becomes dangerous for a group of adolescents in late nineteenth century Germany.
In Tuesday’s show at the Texas Performing Arts Center at the University of Texas, the national tour’s cast of “Spring Awakening” plumbed the depths of teenagers’ anger at adult-imposed conservatism. When the show turned from anger to wretched sorrow, a blanketing silence spread across Bass Concert Hall’s audience.
Following the path charted by rock musicals like “Rent,” “Spring Awakening” mixes high velocity rock and almost sappy emo music by pop star Duncan Sheik. Steven Sater’s book and lyrics, based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play of the same title, vacillates between celebrating the pleasure of screaming four-letter words in public places and critiquing the dismissal of children and adolescents as sentient, sexual beings. The show’s teenage characters often relish doing what is forbidden, but social strictures often mean they make these choices without full knowledge of the consequences.
The show asks much of relatively young actors, which could be a recipe for disaster given touring shows often uneven casts. But this ensemble stands up well against the Broadway version. As the central couple, Melchior and Wendla, Jake Epstein and Christy Altomare, give subtle performances. They approach Bill T. Jones’ choreography, a simple repetitive series of hand gestures, with smart shifts of character. When Wendla first does the tiny dance, standing on a chair at the musical’s beginning, Altomare manages to make it look as though someone else’s hands eerily caress her. At the height of his second act frustration, Epstein pulls off a similar, but differently inflected, sense of disembodiment. His hands furiously move across his body as though threatening to tear him apart.
Melchior and Wendla’s relationship, a friendship turned sexual, creates the musical’s through line, even as it explodes the show. In workshop versions of “Spring Awakening,” the creative team positioned the teens’ sex act as rape, but like the Broadway show, the touring version leaves their onstage copulation ambiguous around the question of consent. The directorial choice makes Wendla an ignorant bystander to her own sexuality. As the show progresses the one-time girl leader becomes another body to be shuffled about by adults. Yet Altamore’s piercing, sorrowful voice seems a reminder of the person within the body that becomes little more than a shameful symbol.
As the musical’s second couple, the bumbling Moritz (Taylor Trensch) and bohemian Ilse (Steffi D), depict teens pushed to society’s margins: Moritz because he fails in school and Else because she has to flee her father’s violent grip. As Moritz, Trensch is agonizingly sad, although his choice to make less of Moritz’s earlier comedic charm flattens the character’s emotional journey.
Although “Spring Awakening’s” controversy is usually tied to its frank look at adolescent sexuality, its greatest musical innovation might be its anchor in anger. Although the show closes with the unnecessary sappy “Purple Summer,” otherwise the ensemble comes together mainly to stomp their feet and scream—not sing major chords and hold hands. The show argues that singing together can do more than make us feel good. Sometimes it can unleash fury fueled by oppressive social mores. ‘Spring Awakening’ continues through Oct. 25. www.texasperformingarts.org
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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Austin’s acting A-list stars in ‘Holy Hell’
Need money for your community church to survive? Why not make a horror film? The film industry is, after all, where the big bucks are, right?
That’s the hairbrained plan hatched by congregants of the money-challenged Church on Peachtree in “Holy Hell,” the quirky satire by Austinites Rafael Antonio Ruiz and Lowell Bartholomee getting its Austin premiere as part of the Austin Film Festival.
However, when a reactionary Christian organization — Fight4Right — gets wind of the Peachtree project, production on the horror flick is besieged with protests while the mild-mannered yet sincerely devout congregants, led by the noble if naïve Pastor Lane (Ken Edwards) and tense, angry Deacon Pardo (Kenneth Wayne Bradley) are subjected to a negative media blitz.
Isn’t honest faith and a desire to lead a faith-filled life enough these days? Apparently, not for the Church on Peachtree.
The negative news siege culminates when Pastor Lane is ripped to shreds on a talk show by British author and vociferous atheist Christopher Hitchens, (A close friend of the film’s executive producer, Jeff Scheftel, Hitchens actually wrote his own lines for debate.)
All kinds of sacred cows are skewered by Ruiz and Bartholomee in “Holy Hell” - the bizarre contradictions of organized religion, the absurdities of the film industry and the conflict-hungry, spectacle-obsessed media.
If “Holy Hell” is a little rough around the edges when it comes to production values (well, it was made for considerably less than $100,000, producers report), the literally dozens of A-list Austin actors unleash their considerable talents to great affect (Austin theater aficiandos will have fun actor-spotting; Austin residents will recognize local spots where the movie was shot).
Nuanced performances — even in the smaller roles — bring both a smart panache and a sweet sincerity to the over-the-top plot in a script that is nicely written by Ruiz and Bartholomee.
‘Holy Hell’
Written by Rafael Antonio Ruiz and Lowell Bartholomee. Directed by Rafael Antonio Ruiz.
USA: 97 minutes
Screenings: 7 p.m. Oct. 22 and Oct. 28. Rollins Theatre, Long Center, 701 W. Riverside Dr.
Image: Kenneth Wayne Bradley stars in “Holy Hell.”
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Damian Priour’s first 30 years of sculpture
A fifth-generation Texan, artist Damian Priour has always looked to the landscape of the Texas Gulf Coast for inspiration. His palette? Fossilized limestone and blue and green glass from which, over three decades, he’s crafted abstract sculpture both monumental and miniature.
‘Water Sparks,’ the current retrospective at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum, features 50 of Priour’s sculptures, both indoor and outdoor pieces, ranging from maquettes for his monumental architectural work to smaller ‘Primitive Pets’ and ‘Rusted Bolt’ series to several of the miniature chairs that were a part of his recent ‘Texas Chair Project’ which was on exhibit at the Austin Museum of Art.
‘WaterSparks’ was organized by Galveston Art Center curator Clint Willour and scheduled to open in Galveston this fall until — perhaps in a bit of odd Texas Gulf Coast fate — Hurricane Ike last year forced the Art Center to close for repairs. The exhibit will finally travel to Galveston in January. Until then, we have it here in Austin.
Priour gives a talk about his work Thursday night at 6:30 p.m.
‘Water Sparks: The First 30 Years of Sculpture; A Damian Priour Retrospective.’
6:30. p.m. Thursday
Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum, 605 Robert E. Lee Road
www.umlaufsculpture.org
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Roger Shimomura @ the Blanton
Since the 1960s, Japanese American artist Roger Shimomura has probed the socio-political issues surrounding the Asian American experience by combining images from both American and Japanese culture.
Shimomura presents a tangled aesthetic landscape that through its jumble actually reveals much about a conflicting cultural situation. Superman meets geisha and classic cartoon characters clash with traditional Japanese figures in the artist’s layered prints and paintings.
Shimomura gives a talk on his work as part of the Lectures in Art and Diaspora: Asian In America series.
5 p.m. Tuesday
Auditorium, Blanton Museum of Art, Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. and Congress Ave.
Free
www.blantonmuseum.org
Image: ‘After the Movies, No. 1,’ 1993. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 56 inches, diptych
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B. Iden Payne Awards winners
The Greater Austin Cultural Alliance — formerly known as the Austin Circle of Theatres — has awarded its B. Iden Payne Awards for 2008-2009. The awards are given to the local Austin theater community. Voting is open to members of Austin Circle of Theatres.
See the results here.
The awards are named for B. Iden Payne, an English actor who, on his retirement from the staged, landed at the University of Texas where he had a lasting effect on the then-nascent theater program and on Austin’s theater community.
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Zach Theatre unveils designs for new venue
Zach Theatre will release designs today for a sleek 430-seat theater that will be surrounded by a tree-filled plaza and grounds. Slipped onto Zach’s site at South Lamar Boulevard and West Riverside Drive, the new building promises to help establish an arts park on Lady Bird Lake.
“Along with the Long Center, we’re bookending a stretch along the south shore of Lady Bird Lake,” said Zach Managing Director Elisbeth Challener. “Our new theater is not just a great story for the development of Austin’s arts during these times, but it’s also a great story about downtown Austin and the future of (the lakeside) park.”
And despite the recession, Zach leaders say, they have raised $16 million toward their $20 million goal and are primed to see their new building — the third stage on Zach Theatre’s campus —become a reality. The recession also is expected to help reduce construction costs.
“We’re bucking a trend,” said Tom Terkel, chairman of the Zach capital campaign. “We’ve had our best fundraising year in our history.”
A year ago, arts patrons James Armstrong and Bill Dickson each donated $1 million. Terkel said an additional $3 million has been raised in the past 12 months. Zach also has $10 million in city bond money, part of the 2006 voter-approved bond package, and $1 million left from a 1985 bond package.
Although a construction schedule has not been finalized, Terkel said the goal is to break ground in 2010 and open by 2012.
The new theater will join Zach’s existing 200-seat Kleberg Stage and the 130-seat Whisenhunt Stage to provide the organization with more facilities for larger productions. Once the new venue is built, the Whisenhunt will be devoted to the Zach’s youth theater programs.
The venue was designed by Austin architect Arthur Andersson of Andersson-Wise Architects, designers of the Block 21 mixed-use project downtown, which includes a hotel and a venue for KLRU’s “Austin City Limits.”
Andersson’s design calls for a clean, modern form clad in a combination of bluish-gray brick and cement composite panels. A two-story glass lobby will front the 29,000-square-foot building, which will face west onto a tree-filled plaza that will be able to accommodate gatherings of up to 600 people. Andersson said landscape plans call for 80 trees to be added to the site, which is now an expanse of sun-beaten lawn little used by visitors to the adjacent hike-and-bike trail.
The stage will be 80 feet wide, more than twice the width of the Kleberg Stage, the larger of Zach’s two stages. Though the new theater will have double the number of seats of the Kleberg, seating will be arranged on a somewhat steep angle, decreasing the distance between each seat and the stage.
Andersson said the building will have environmentally sensitive materials and landscaping designed to capture rainwater.
Andersson estimated that construction expenses were down about 10 to 15 percent from when the project was first imagined more than a year ago, allowing for more design leeway within the $15.3 million construction budget.
Just as it will act as an architectural bookend to the Long Center, Zach’s new theater will add to the cultural cooperation between the two civic arts centers. In 1999, former Dell Computer Corp. executive Mort Topfer and his late wife, Angela, donated $5 million to the Long Center for the Performing Arts. An 800-seat theater there was to be named in their honor, but when plans for the Long Center were scaled down from three to two theaters, the Topfers agreed to have their donation folded into the Long Center’s general campaign.
But now, in an agreement between Long Center and Zach officials, the new Zach theater will be named for Topfer and his current wife, Bobbi. Like Zach, the Long Center is a private nonprofit operating on city-owned property.
“This project and collaboration is, in our eyes, the arts story in Austin over the past year,” the Topfers said in a statement. “We are so proud to have our name associated with the Zach brand and artistic integrity.”
Among those who have anted up since the Topfers signaled their approval of the Zach honor are Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long, the couple whose $20 million solidified the effort to build the performing arts center that now bears their name. The Longs donated $250,000 to the Zach capital campaign.
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Free. Music. Sunday.
We love recession-friendly arts programming.
Programming like the free concert by the Santiago-Salomon Duo, 3 p.m. Sunday at Mexic-Arte Museum, 419 Congress Ave.
The Austin Chamber Music Center is hosting the Oaxaca-based pair of musicians for a concert.
Violinist Ana Patricia Santiago and pianist Carlos R. Salomon have carved our a repertoire for themselves that blends classical music with the traditional music of Mexico and Latin America. For Sunday’s program, the duo will play many of Salomon’s own compositions.
A complimentary reception featuring Mexican-desserts reception will follow the concert. See www.austinchambermusic.org for more information.
Here’s something of what you can expect:
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Review: ‘Erin Curtis — Perspective Threshold’
Everything about Erin Curtis’ solo show, ‘Perspective Threshold,’ now at Women & Their Work, is joyfully subversive.
Getting the boot? Two maxims of high modernism: ‘less is more’ and ‘ornament is crime.’
‘Says who?’ Curtis’ work declares.
And while modernist architectural icons figure as the subjects of her paintings — Eero Saarinen’s 1955 General Motors Technical Center, for example — Curtis eschews the restrained modernist palette and goes for crazy, intense colors, her use of acrylic paint adding to the artificiality of the hues.
Curtis’ paintings are giddy critiques. Yes, there’s a cool modernist building somewhere in each of these paintings. But those buildings are not entirely legible, drowned out by a riot of ornament. Planes of busy patterning and vivid decoration — historically dismissed as characteristics of folk art or traditional women’s art — disrupt the cool logic of three-point perspective. Nothing is fixed in place here and everything, especially the pictorial plane, is up for negotiation.
In one of the best recent uses of the sometimes awkward Women and Their Work gallery, Curtis moves her colorful critiques off the wall. Photographs of lush, green foliage are printed on immense swatches of billboard plastic fabric and draped overhead at the entrance to and in one corner of the exhibit. Nature — the plastic kind, that is — threatens to take over here.
And a playhouse-scale facade of a modernist house seems to bust out of one wall and invade several yards into the gallery. Step over the house’s threshold and inside you’ll see fake shadows painted on the interior wall, while cut-outs of Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Barcelona chairs occupy the mini room. Nothing real in here.
Outside the mini house, a pair of mini pool chairs surround a mini pool of flat blue sheet plastic. The mini chairs have an ideal view of a mini billboard that sports ‘Perspectivism,’ a cityscape writ in Curtis’ mishmash of flat planes and shapes that have been jiggered with a festive frenzy of stripes, flowers, diamonds and other patterns and thrown out of axonometric perspective.
Exuberant illusion undermines any expectations of order in Curtis’ universe.
So much for cool logic.
‘Erin Curtis: Perspective Threshold’
Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca St.
10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays through Nov. 18
www.womenandtheirwork.org
Image: ‘Backwaters’ Erin Curtis
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Weekend Arts Pix
‘Viola By Choice: Bach to the Classics.’
Named Outstanding Chamber Music Ensemble last year by the Austin Critics’ Table, Viola by Choice has seen its founder, Aurelien Petillot, relocate out of Austin recently. But the irrepressible violist is back to make good on the concerts he promised Austin before he left.
‘Bach to the Classics’ features arias and duets by Bach, a prelude by Mozart in the style of Bach, Mozart’s transcription of a Bach fugue, Mozart’s effervescent duet in G Major for violin and viola and two early Beethoven works. Soprano Elizabeth Petillot — named Outstanding Vocalist last year and Aurelien’s wife — is featured.
8 p.m. Friday. St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, 1500 N. Loop 360 (Capital of Texas Highway). $15 ($12 seniors, $8 students). www.violabychoice.org
‘Merge.’
The Fusebox Festival — Austin’s ever-growing convergence of international performance-based art — is six months away. But that isn’t stopping Fusebox organizers from starting the arty party with a sneak peek at what Fusebox 2010 will offer. Music by Graham Reynolds and Golden Arm Trio. Spinning by DJ Johnny Bravvo. Video art screenings and art on display from Shawn Camp, Brandon Gonzalez, Adreon Henry, Michael Merck and Hank Waddell.
8 p.m. to midnight. 1500 Summit St. Free. www.fuseboxfestival.com
Image: Aurelien Petillot
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Dial ‘O’ for opera tonight
Austin Lyric Opera general director Kevin Patterson wants to talk to you.
Tonight, from 7 to 7:30 p.m. Patterson is holding an live interactive phone chat with anyone who wants to dial in.
Patterson’s up for talking about ALO’s upcoming season which opens Nov. 7 with ‘La Boheme.’ And he promises to reveal what makes this production of ever-popular Puccini’s romantic tragedy — ‘La Boheme’ inspired ‘Rent’ — a must-see. Patterson also promises to reveal ‘five Incredible secrets no one knows about this season.’
Dial 512-501-4531 and enter the conference ID code 865962#.
Go to the live Web cast page for more info. And you can submit questions now.
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Meet ‘Herb & Dorothy’ tonight at 9 p.m. on PBS
Now, that the recession has taken the frenzy out of the over-heated — and over-hyped — art market, a new documentary ‘Herb & Dorothy,’ on PBS tonight, reminds us of a couple who, without any independent financial means of their, amassed one of the most impressive collections of art simply driven by their passion.
Beginning in the early 1960s Herb Vogel, a high-school dropout and aspiring artist worked as a postal clerk, and his wife Dorothy, a reference librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library, filled their modest one-bedroom Manhattan apartment with the art they loved — chiefly work by minimalist and conceptual artists who at the time were just emerging and mostly unknown.
The Vogels devoted all of Herb’s salary to acquisitions and lived modestly off of Dorothy’s librarian salary. They had two rules: the piece had to be affordable and it had to fit their tiny apartment
Their first purchase? A small, table-top sculpture by John Chamberlain.
‘Herb & Dorothy’ broadcasts tonight at 9 p.m. on PBS. The hour-long film, by Megumi Sasaki, is kicks off the Independent Lens series, a weekly anthology of new documentaries.
Not only did they become regular fixtures on the New York art scene, the Vogels befriended with many artists including Sol LeWitt, Chuck Close, Richard Tuttle and Robert and Sylvia Mangold.
While ‘Herb and Dorothy’ doesn’t unearth a deep portrait of the couple, it does serve up a glimpse of the Vogel’s and their singular style: They once agreed to take care of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s cat for a summer in exchange for art from Christo.
The Vogels collected more than 4,700 works of art and in the early 1990s moved their entire collection to the National Museum of Art — the first museum they had visited together on their honeymoon in 1962.
With the Vogel collection so large, the couple and the National Museum hatched a creative way to share. Some 50 museums — one in state — would each receive 50 works of art from the Vogel collection with the proviso that the entire gift be exhibited together once within five years and that if it were deaccessioned, it had to be done only as a whole.
To chose the 50 museums for The Vogel 50x50 project, the Vogels used a range of personal criteria. Here in the Lone Star State, the Blanton Museum of Art earned the mantel as the UT museum had in 1997 hosted an exhibit of Vogel’s collection — well, just a part of it, that is.
The Blanton received its ‘Vogel 50x50’ collection this summer.
Image: ‘Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe,’ Richard Pettibone. Acrylic and silkscreen, 1973.
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New Wittliff Gallery shines light on writers, photographers
After 12 months and a remodel costing about $1 million, the Wittliff Gallery at Texas State University-San Marcos is re-opening this weekend. The remodeling effort nearly doubles the gallery space for the rare books and special collections libraryto 4,000-square-feet. Included are a new main gallery and four smaller galleries.
To kick off its re-opening, the Wittliff is hosting exhibits that play to its strenghts: American writers and Southwestern and Mexican photographers.
American-Statesman writer Charles Ealy previews ”The Lightning Field: Mapping the Creative Process’ with a focus on the just-opened archive of writer Cormac McCarthy. Plunging into the manuscripts, Ealy finds the author of ‘No Country for Old Men’ and ‘All the Pretty Horses,’ to be a “punctuation-averse, word-combining” writer.
Also on view are two exhibits by much-liked photographer Keith Carter, ‘A Certain Alchemy’ and ‘Fireflies.’
‘Nueva Luz’ features new additions to the photography collections with 40 images by ManuelAÁlvarez Bravo, Marco Antonio Cruz, Graciela Iturbide, Robb Kendrick, Tina Modotti and Fernando Edward Weston.
All exhibit run through March 13, 2010. Admission is free. The Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, seventh floor, Texas State University, San Marcos. www.thewittliffcollections.txstate.edu
Image: Marco Antonio Cruz. Untitled [Holy Week Ceremony]. 1985. Silver gelatin print.
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Review: ‘Evil Dead, The Musical’
Move over “Rocky Horror.” “Evil Dead, The Musical” has come to town.
The campy musical, based on the 1981 film of the same name, opened Friday at Salvage Vanguard Theatre under the direction of Michael McKelvey. The sold-out show had opening night issues: malfunctioning microphones made some of the songs unintelligible over the live band. But even with the gaps, the show clipped along hilariously.
Like the movie, “Evil Dead The Musical,” follows five Michigan State college students as they try to make it through a night at a remote cabin surrounded by woods possessed by demon spirits.
Unlike the movie, “Evil Dead The Musical” parodies horror movie conventions, using goofy songs, one-liners, and physical gags to make fun of the characters’ misfortunes and idiotic choices. Somehow singing the ridiculous dialogue so familiar from horror movies transforms scenarios like deserted homes with only one escape routs and middle-of-the-night solo journeys into unknown woods into comedy.
Committed performances keep the constant humor fresh. David Gallagher plays the story’s hero Ash with over-the-top earnestness in even the most ridiculous predicaments. As Ash’s friends, Christopher Skillern, Kelly Bales, and Macey Mayfield played their characters’ stereotypes, frat boys and ditzy blondes, with laugh-grabbing excess. As Ash’s little sister Cheryl, Corley Pillsbury has a strong presence, even though her early zombie turn relegates her to performing most of the evening from underneath the stage. You can’t hide a good actor or a little sister gone zombie in the cellar forever.
Ginger Morris’s choreography brought the group together into odd, funny pairings, particularly in Ash and Scott’s tango “What the …?.”
The show is a whole lot of fun and looked to be even more entertaining for those brave enough to sit in the audience’s splatter section, where the show’s many gallons of fake blood first squirted, and then rained down from the stage.
‘Evil Dead, The Musical’ continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 5 p.m. Sundays through Oct. 31. Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road, $12-$22 www.salvagevanguard.com
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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Review: Conspirare ‘A Time for Life’
“Remember” the chorus breathed at the end of Robert Kyr’s ‘A Time for Life,’ a 90-minute piece for eight voices and a string trio.
Friday’s presentation at St. Louis Catholic Church was the second of four Conspirare performances of Kyr’s oratorio (it was premiered in 2007 by Portland, Oregon’s Cappella Romana).
Kyr plucked from myriad texts for his elegiac libretto. Native American prayers, Orthodox Church writings, portions of the Old Testament - it was all mixed together in an invocation for humankind to renew its commitment to the care of the planet.
Likewise, Kyr layered modalities that hinted at non-Western musical traditions as well as those from earlier eras of Western music in stunning blend. Wafts of medieval chants mixed with complex canons and contrapuntal harmonies or tender moments of sheer lyricism.
Conspirare director Craig Hella Johnson collaborated with Kyr (the composer was in town and offered pre-performance talks at each show) to stage ‘A Time for Life’ in the active manor Kyr intended. Tenor David Farwig walked slowly down the center aisle to the stage as the music began, pleading with us in quiet song to recall how the planet is dying. The other singers joined from the outer aisles before talking their places in front.
Farwig’s clear and present tenor commanded in his many prominent moments. Soprano Abigail Lennox deftly combined luscious tone with captivating drama.
The oratorio journeyed from dark and almost woeful to deeply thoughtful to an almost - though not entirely - celebratory end.
The Farwig proceed down the aisle followed be the remainder of the singers.
“Remember” they told us.
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Recent arts coverage:
Beili Liu beguiles in a solo exhibit | An art history mystery solved: The Petrobelli Altarpiece | Cormac McCarthy’s writing process comes alive in archives | Follow @artsinaustin on Twitter
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The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, Epilogue
In 1998, shortly after gay university students Matthew Shepard was murdered in Laramie, Wyo., the Tectonic Theater Project created a somewhat documentary-style play based on more than 200 interviews with Shepard’s friends and Laramie locals.
Shephaed was kidnapped, robbed, pistol-whipped and left for dead tied to a fence on a lonely stretch of road in Wyoming. He died five days after his attack.
‘The Laramie Project,’ became a landmark play as call-to-action against hate crimes and as a meaningful means to explore how our contemporary culture literally explains itself in the first-person.
Now, with ‘The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, Epilogue’ the playwrights explore how the town of Laramie has changed — or not — and how the murder continues to reverberate in the community. Tectonic Theatre artistic director Moises Kauffman and his colleagues conducted the interviews just last month.
Monday, on the eleventh anniversary of Shepard’s death, more than 140 theaters around the will perform “10 Years Later, Epilogue” while others will Web cast a performance from Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in New York where Glenn Close will host a pre- and post-show discussion with Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, participating.
Here in Austin, Zach Theatre, which staged ‘The Laramie Project’ in 2002 in its Central Texas premiere, will offer a staged reading of “10 Years Later, Epilogue” along with a live Web cast of the Lincoln Center pre- and post-show discussions. The Zach event is a fundraiser for Out Youth Austin.
And the University of Texas’ department of theater and dance will offer two staged readings along with the Lincoln Center Web cast.
The national ‘Laramie Project’ event has good news to dovetail with. On Thursday, after several attempts over the years, the U.S. House of Representative voted to expand the definition of violent federal hate crimes to those committed because of a victim’s sexual orientation. The bill — known as the Matthew Shepard Act — will now go to the Senate for a vote before it can become law
‘The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, Epilogue’
7 p.m. Monday. Kleberg Stage, $20. Proceeds benefit Out Youth Austin. 476-0541. www.zachscott.com
7 and 9 p.m. Monday. Lab Theatre, Winship Building, 23rd and San Jacinto streest. Free. www.finearts.utexas.edu/tad
Image: Martin Burke in the 2002 Zach Theatre production of ‘The Laramie Project.’ Photo by Kirk R. Tuck.
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‘Contemporary Culture’ says it all
Personally, I like the title of current show at Lora Reynolds Gallery, ‘Contemporary Culture.’
When fussy, self-consciously clever titles burden so many exhibitions (do they emphasize burdensome titles in curator school nowadays?), directness is refreshing.
‘Contemporary Culture’ features contemporary artists whose work roots through contemporary events and culture. Artists represented are Conrad Bakker, Colby Bird, Graham Dolphin, Mads Lynnerup, Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, Richard Patterson, Peter Sarkisian, Jim Torok and Kehinde Wiley.
An opening reception for the exhibit from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday night will feature Bird — who was born in Austin — talking about his work at 7 p.m.
Also in attendance is Bakker who has beguiled Austin audiences since Reynolds brought the work of the Chicago-based artist to town a few years ago. Bakker’s work has since been acquired by the Blanton Museum of Art.
‘Contemporary Culture’ continues through Oct. 31. Lora Reynolds Gallery, 360 Nueces St. www.lorareynold.com
Image:
Conrad Bakker
Untitled Project: BACK ISSUES [Artforum International, Summer 1969][Stonewall Riots, New York City, June 28, 1969] , 2009
Oil on carved wood
10-5/8 x 10-5/8 x 3/8 inches
Courtesy Lora Reynolds Gallery
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Can’t make it the White House? Try the Blanton
Can’t snag an invite to the private areas of the White House where the Obamas have installed 45 works of art, a list of which was announced earlier this week?
Try the Blanton Museum of Art.
Though the Obamas culled their selections from national museums in Washington — including the Smithsonian, the Hirschorn and the National Gallery of Art — work by some of the same artists selected by the first family can be seen here in Austin at the Blanton Museum of Art. With a collection strong in contemporary and modern American art, the Blanton has works by Jasper Johns, Susan Rothenberg, Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn and Edward Ruscha, all of whom are represented now at the White House.
If they’re any indication of cultural taste, the art that the Obamas chose — with consultation from White House curator William Allman — suggest a fairly more broad-ranging taste for art then we’ve seen in administrations past. The Obamas certainly seem to have a penchant for abstract modern and contemporary paintings.
On view now with the Blanton’s permanent collection ‘America/Americas’ exhibit are a sculpture by Louise Nevelson, “Dawn’s Presence - Two Columns,” and an untitled 1943 painting by American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko.
The Obamas also chose a painting by New York-based African American artist Glenn Ligon, whose conceptual works probe the contemporary African American experience. At the Blanton, you can take in Ligon’s “Untitled (Hands/Stranger in the Village #1),” in which silkcreened text from James Baldwin’s 1955 essay on racial discrimination, “Stranger in the Village,” is covered in coal dust, its message obscured as if to suggest that the essay’s meaning has been lost or forgotten over time.
Ligon told the Associate Press,that it was “intensely flattering” for the Obamas to want his painting to hang in their private spaces.
Blanton Museum of Art, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Congress Avenue. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays. $3-$7, free Thursdays. www.blantonmuseum.org
Image:
Louise Nevelson
Dawn’s Presence - Two Columns, 1969-1975
Painted Wood
116 x 67 x 31 in.
Purchase as a gift in memory of Laura Lee Scurlock Blanton by her children, 2005
Blanton Museum of Art
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Recent arts coverage:
Beili Liu beguiles in a solo exhibit | An art history mystery solved: The Petrobelli Altarpiece | Conspirare sings of environment reconciliation | Follow @artsinaustin on Twitter
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The Obamas bring modern, abstract art to the White House
The art world is buzzing after the release yesterday of the 45 works art President and Mrs. Obama chose for display in the private quarters of the White House.
Modern abstraction, contemporary African-American artists, Native American Indian pottery and even some 19th-century patent models are among the things the first family chose. It’s a selection that shows a surprising range and a considered approach.
Among the artists chosen by Obamas is Alma Thomas, an under-recognized African-American expressionist painter based in Washington D.C. Here’s a complete list of work borrowed from national museums in Washington by the Obamas:
On display in the East Wing:
Alma Thomas’ “Watusi (Hard Edge)” from the Hirshhorn (right).
Displayed in the Obamas’ personal living quarters
From the National Gallery of Art:
George Catlin’s “A Crow Chief at His Toilette,”
“Camanchees Lancing a Buffalo Bull,” “Mired Buffalo and Wolves,” “Cheyenne Village,” “Grizzly Bears Attacking Buffalo,” “Game of the Arrow-Mandan,” “A Foot War Party in Council-Mandan,” “Ball-Play Dance-Choctaw,” “Buffalo Chase, with Accidents,” “Catlin and Indian Attacking Buffalo,” “K’nisteneux Indians Attacking Two Grizzly Bears”
Edward Corbett’s “Washington, D.C. November 1963 III”
Richard Diebenkorn’s “Berkeley, No. 52”
Sam Francis’s “White Line”
Winslow Homer’s “Sunset”
Jasper Johns’ “Numerals, 0 through 9”
Giorgio Morandi, two paintings called “Still Life”
Louise Nevelson’s model for “Sky Covenant” sculpture
Susan Rothenberg’s “Butterfly”
Mark Rothko’s “Red Band”
Edward Ruscha’s “I Think I’ll …”
Leon Polk Smith’s “Stretch of Black III”
Unknown artist: “Chief Jumper of the Seminoles”
From the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden:
Josef Albers’ “Homage to the Square: Elected II,”
“Homage to the Square: Midday,” “Study for Homage to the Square: Nacre”
Edgar Degas’ “Dancer Putting on Stocking,” “The Bow.”
Nicolas De Stael’s “Nice.”
Glenn Ligon’s “Black Like Me No. 2.”
Alma Thomas’ “Sky Light.”
From the Smithsonian American Art Museum:
William H. Johnson’s “Booker T. Washington Legend,” “Children Dance,” “Flower to Teacher,” “Folk Family.”
On display in the West Wing
In the Oval Office from the Museum of the American Indian: vase by Lucy M. Lewis (Acoma Pueblo), jar by Steve S. (Iroquois), jar by Maria Poveka Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo), the bottle “Intertwining Scrolls” by Jeri Redcorn (Caddo).
In the Oval Office from the National Museum of American History: Samuel F. B. Morse’s 1849 telegraph register patent model, John A. Peer’s 1874 gear-cutting machine patent model, Henry Williams’ 1877 feathering paddle-wheel (for steamboats) patent model.
In the Cabinet Room from the Harry S. Truman Library, Frank O. Salisbury’s “President Harry S. Truman.”
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‘Hi, How Are You Are You?’ artist Daniel Johnston gets an iPhone app
In a case of technology imitating art, the bipolar singer-songwriter and artist Daniel Johnston — legendary in Austin for, among other creations, his ‘Hi, How Are You?’ mural near the UT campus — now has a iPhone app that’s been created based on music and visual art.
Johnston’s quirky cartoon creatures inhabit a virtual world — the game is actually called ‘Hi, How Are You?’ — and as a player sets out to battle the devil-as-frog enemy, Johnston’s quirky folk music plays.
Read American-Statesman tech culture writer Omar Gallaga’s blog note on the game.
‘Hi, How Are You?’ was developed by Austin-based game creators Peter Franco and Steve Broumly of DrFunFun.
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Wednesday: It’s arts and crafts night on PBS
Need some free recession-ready arts programming?
Wednesday, it’s arts and crafts night on PBS with the premiere of two series, ‘Art:21: Art in the Twenty-First Century’ and ‘Craft in America.’ And Tuesday you can preview an episode of ‘Art 21’ for free at Arthouse at 6 p.m.
‘Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century,’ a four-part series
9 p.m. Wednesdays, Oct. 7-28
PBS
‘Craft in America: Origins and Process’
7 p.m. tonight
PBS
‘Program Three: Transformations,’ a screening and discussion
When: 6 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Arthouse, 700 Congress Ave.
Cost: Free
Information: 453-5312, www.arthousetexas.org
Perhaps what makes ‘Art:21’ the documentary series about contemporary visual art, such a pleasure is its directness.
No voiceovers or talking head experts interfere with the Peabody Award-winning series, which begins its fifth season Wednesday. Instead, artists speak directly and do so from their studios or homes or wherever they happen to be making art. And that gives “Art: 21” a certain intimacy and accessibility that’s not always the case with the contemporary art world that love to throw an impenetrable wall between it and an audience.
Each one-hour episode is organized around a theme. This season it’s “Compassion,” “Fantasy,” “Transformation” and “Systems”. But don’t let those organizing rubrics cloud your viewing too much.
More importantly, backgrounds and influences are learned and the series gives a peek into how an artist makes choices about what he or she creates - or doesn’t create — reveals much more.
This season we see South African artist William Kentridge apply his hand-drawn animation techniques to his first-ever design for an opera set. Provocateur Jeff Koons reveals the factory-style art-making method he uses employing a plethora of assistants. Cindy Sherman continues to morph into other characters for her photographs, but takes things to a new tragic level. And Chinese artist Cao Fei speaks through her virtual reality avatar.
Getting a glimpse the artists at work, making creative choices and speaking frankly makes “Art21” like a casual, friendly encounter with some of the most innovate and original thinkers of our times.
Image: Yinka Shonibare MBE. ‘How to Blow up Two Heads at Once (Ladies),’ 2006. © Yinka Shonibare, MBE, courtesy the artist, James Cohan Gallery, New York
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‘Marjorie Moore: Labyrinth’
Austin artist Marjorie Moore has always blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction, truth and imagination, the past and the present, the natural world and the supernatural imagination.
Now, in an exhibit at Texas State University-San Marcos, Moore riffs on the long history of scientific and botanical illustration with a series of multimedia drawings.
For centuries artists sought to define, categorize and organize the natural world through meticulous drawings. After all, if humankind could identify everything in the wild, then the wild wouldn’t be so wild - and dangerous. Hence, nature drawing became one of the longest threads in the history of art and the history of science, always entwining the two.
For “Labyrinth,” Moore tapped Texas State University’s entomology collection as a point of origin to create her own version of a wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonder, the 19th-century precursor to today’s modern museum. Wunderkammers were part scientific display and part circus sideshow. And in Moore’s wunderkammer, categories are questioned, and the boundaries between science, popular culture and art are eroded.
Is this today’s natural world we’re looking at in Moore’s work, or is this some imagined future of plant and animal life? Moore combines found vintage scientific and storybook images with her collection of toys and nature specimens to produce a blended narrative of the past and the future of the natural world.
‘Marjorie Moore: Labyrinth’
When: 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays-Friday, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through Oct. 22
Where: Gallery II, Mitte Art Building, Sessom and Comanche streets, Texas State University, San Marcos
Free
Image: ‘Pond Collection #15’
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More live music without the mud
Yes, you can enjoy live music in Austin without destroying the lawn at Zilker Park. (See “ACL grounds to remain closed until end of month.”)
On Wednesday, two of Austin’s busiest virtuosos — pianist Anton Nel and cellist Bion Tsang — team up for concert of sonatas by Barber, Prokoviev and Grieg.
The concert by pair of UT music professors is a t 7:30 p.m. in Bates Recital Hall. Tickets are $10 ($5 for students).
The concert will also be Web cast live. Log on to www.music.utexas.edu a few minutes before the concert begins to catch the live stream.
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Live music without the mud
Not into rolling in the mud in Zilker Park to see live music?
This Saturday, Austin Classical Guitar Society brings virtuoso Kazuhito Yamashita to town for a rare concert.
Yamashita rose to international prominence when he performed phenomenal feats on the solo classical guitar including Dvorak’s ‘New World Symphony’ and Musorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition.’ He recorded and toured extensively with flute giant James Galway and has enjoyed the distinction of being Japan’s most celebrated classical guitarist. Though a legendary performer, Yamashita makes trips to North America with extreme rarity.
For Saturday’s concert, Yamashita will play Sonata No.1 for solo guitar “The Blue Flower,” by Keiko Fujiie. He’ll also play his arrangements for Bach’s Cello Suite No.1, BWV 1007 and Bach’s Violin Sonata No.2 BWV 1003.
8 p.m. Saturday. Northwest Hills United Methodist Church, 7050 Village Center Dr., Tickets: $35-$60. www.AustinClassicalGuitar.org
Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 6 in D Major, BWV 1012: I. Prelude by Johann Sebastian Bach. Arranged by Kazuhito Yamashita. Guitar : Kazuhito Yamashita. Live at Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, Tokyo, Japan. May 20, 2000
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Review: Ballet Austin
As the Austin City Limits Festival celebrated nineties bands like Pearl Jam in Zilker Park, down the road at the Long Center Ballet Austin also celebrated the nineties this weekend—the 1890s. Friday night the company proved its classical chops in “Swan Lake’s” second act, based on Russian greats Maurius Petipa and Lev Ivanov’s 1895 choreography, and artistic director Stephen Mills’ newest creation “The Firebird.”
In both ballets, the company’s women proved that to excel in classical ballet is to be able to transform into something more than human. As swan leader Odette, Ashley Lynn Gilfix remade her arms into delicate wings. Dancing the ballet’s central pas de deux, with Frank Shott as Prince Siegfried, Gilfix met the challenge, but both dancers seemed uncharacteristically anxious.
“Swan Lake’s” precise and demanding choreography leaves no place to hide less-than-stellar technique, and the corps dancing demands absolute unison movement. Ballet Austin’s sixteen swans performed with amazing synchronicity—quite a feat since the orchestra and dancers seemed like they were still testing out one another’s musicalities. The swans’ crispness made them seem worthy adversaries to evil sorcerer Von Rothbart (Christopher Swaim). As they battled him in the final moment, they seemed like a corps of swans who just might win.
“Swan Lake” and “Firebird” made an interesting program, in part because Mills’ striking use of asymmetry in “Firebird” sharply contrasted with Petipa and Ivanov’s absolute symmetry.
As the title character, Aara Krumpe was stunning. She has a perceptive ability to create angles with her body. Her chin has just the right thrust. Her eyes have just the right sharpness. As evil magician Kastchei, Edward Carr also made the most of the choreography’s clever shapes. Evil villains and beautiful birds: they are ballet’s winning combination no matter the century.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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Recent arts coverage:
Beili Liu beguiles in a solo exhibit | An art history mystery solved: The Petrobelli Altarpiece | Be a part of art history | Follow @artsinaustin on Twitter
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Meanwhile, not at ACL
Not going to Austin City Limits this weekend? There’s plenty of ‘other’ music and arts going in town.
At the Long Center tonight through Sunday, Ballet Austin is staging Stephen Mills’ new choreography of ‘Firebird, offering a 21st-century take on a century-old dance to music of Igor Stravinsky. Read more about it here.
Here’s a rare video of the 82-year-old Stravinksy himself conducting the finale to his ‘Firebird Suite.
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National Arts Journalism Summit live streaming
This is a live stream of the National Arts Journalism Summit held at USC Annenberg School of Communication, Oct. 2.
Live video by Ustream
A live chat with summit observers and panelists.
Twitter chatter on the summit. Use #artsj09 to get in on the conversation.
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National Arts Journalism Summit live streamed here Friday
The first National Arts Journalism Summit happens tomorrow at USC Annenberg School of Communication. Up for discussion are new models for economically sustainable online arts coverage.
Though it’s a live event held in Los Angeles, the summit is also conceived as a virtual affair. Tune in to this blog Friday, Oct. 2 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. CST and you can watch the live webcast of the summit as well as follow along with the Twitter chatting and live chat.
To read more about the summit go to najp.org/summit/about. Follow the summit on Twitter at @artsj09 and use #artsj09 for the discussion.
