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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > November > 30
Monday, November 30, 2009
Review: ‘Dickens Unleashed: Improvised Tales of Bleak Victorian England’
That the sprawling Victorian tales of Charles Dickens can make for good improv theater shouldn’t seem all that strange.
After all, Dickens’ tales are filled outsized caricatures and long and winding episodic story lines that are riddled with bizarre and unexpected twists.
Anything can happen, and frequently anything does. Wholly benevolent characters appear out of nowhere to change the course of events. Utterly evil characters appear out of nowhere to change the course of events. Amazingly good luck occurs. Amazingly bad luck occurs.
Indeed, Dickens offers a narrative free-for-all that’s ripe for some fun farce. Fun is what ‘Dickens Unleashed: Improvised Tales of Bleak Victorian England’ is. Running Saturdays through the end of the month at the Hideout Theatre, the show offers a troupe of improv actors in Victorian garb who ask for just one prompt from the audience. And from that spins a 70-minute improvised show that at once plays homage to Dickens’ tales and has utter fun with their maudlin style.
Period costume improv? You bet. And it works. ‘Dickens Unleashed’ is ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ gone mad and goofball.
Smartly, directors Jessica Arjet and Kaci Beeler don’t allow for any cheap anachronisms to filter in to this offbeat Victorian world. No silly iPhone jokes here. Instead, it’s all pocketwatches and stovetop hats, orphans and buckets of coal, silly Cockney accents and lots of British balderdash.
That all makes for some pretty refreshing comedic twists and turns — and plenty of improv challenge for the eight-member troupe (the line-up varies a bit from each performance). Beeler does a particularly sharp turn as the striving orphan girl at the center of the action. And as the narrator/protagonist. Kareem Badr booms the very Dickensian-sounding narrative while sitting at a writer’s desk even if it’s delightfully off-kilter Dickensian narrative.
In a nice gesture, there’s a family-friendly version of the show offered, with a band of “orphans” (studnets from the Hideout’s youth improv classes) offering an opening set.
Yeah, “orphans” — it’s Dickens, you know.
‘Dickens Unleashed: Improvised Tales of Bleak Victorian England’ continues 8 p.m. Saturdays through Dec. 26. Family-friendly show at 6 p.m. on Saturdays. Hideout Theatre, 617 Congress Ave. $11. www.hideoutheatre.com.
Pictured: Kareem Badr and Kaci Beeler.
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AVAA announces inaugural Austin Visual Arts Awards
The Austin Visual Arts Association is hosting its first Visual Art Awards this Friday.
The long-standing arts service organization will hand-out awards in a variety of categories. Winners will be presented with a “Fearing” Award, a bronze metal designed by sculptor Bob Coffee, named after this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award Winner, William Kelly Fearing.
The event is at 7 p.m. Friday, Austin Museum of Art, 823 Congress. Tickets are $25. For information see www.avaaonline.org.
AVAA called on representatives from a dozen organizations and businesses to select the finalists after a nominating committee of 23 organizations, galleries and museums made nominations.
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2009 Award Finalists
- Artist of the Year 2 Dimensional Art: Jennifer Balkan, Shawn Camp, Erin Curtis, Ray Donley, Laurie Frick, Roi James, John Mulvany and Jana Swec
- Artist of the Year 3 Dimensional Art: Beili Liu, Hank Waddell, Catherine Lee, Sunyong Chung, Phillipe Klinefelter and David Everett
- Artist of the Year Photography: Roberto (Bear) Guerra, Barry Stone, Lesley Nowlin, Anna Krachey and Sandy Carson
- Artist of the Year New Media: Sean Gaulager, The Totally Wreck Institute, Michael Smith
- Artist of the Year Early Career: Debra Broz, Alonso Rey Sanchez, Heather Tolleson, Sterling Allen, Nathan Green, Jules Buck Jones and Carlos Rosales-Silva
- Collectors Circle Award: Helmutt Barnett, Damian Priour, Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, Sydney Yeager and Jack White
- Lifetime Achievement: William Kelly Fearing
- Lifetime Achievement In Memoriam: Robert Dale Anderson
- Lifetime Achievement In Memoriam: Michael Frary
- Service to the Arts: TBA
- President’s Award: TBA
- Patron to the Arts: TBA
- The Selection Committee
- Austin Chronicle - Robert Faires
- Austin Museum of Art - Andrea Mellard
- Art Palace - Arturo Palacios
- Art in Public Places - Meggan Crigger
- Austin Arts Commission - Gloria Mata Pennington
- The Blanton Museum of Art - Risa Puleo
- Carver Museum - Bob Jones
- Mexic-Arte Museum- Sylvia Orozco
- Texas Art Collectors of Austin & San Antonio - Carl McQueary
- Texas Society of Sculptors - Nancy Cardozier
- Tribeza magazine - Karen Landa
- Wally Workman Gallery - Wally Workman
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Review: Katie Maratta and Owen McAuley at D. Berman Gallery
Artists Katie Maratta and Owen McAuley share an abiding love and fascination for a sense of place yet take different creative approaches to create their artistic valentines to place.
And yet, on view together currently at D. Berman Gallery, those differing approaches make for a pleasant synergy of comparison and contrast.
The endless expanse of the West Texas landscape inspires Maratta. But forget reverent, colorful homages. Instead the Austin-based Maratta gives quirky graphite drawings all only one inch tall yet some that sprawl four or five feet in length. With meticulous draftsmanship, Maratta renders the stuff of stark rural scenes — barns, highway signs, dust devils, windmills, birds on a power line, endless flat fields — in miniature.
The detail is compelling. And like you do in order to experience the wide open plains, so do you have to travel at length across Maratta’s long drawings in order to see them in their entirety. Diminutive as these landscapes may be, they nevertheless cleverly represent the vast openness of the West Texas plains.
Like Maratta, McAuley also jiggers with preconceived notions of how place is artistically represented. McAuley, who studied at the University of Texas and now lives in New York, focuses on the most quotidian and downright anonymous locations and spaces.
Tire tracks through snow disappear into darkness in one small graphite drawing. A floor lamp barely brightens an almost bare wall in one of McAuley’s darkly luminous oil paintings. In another, a ceiling light casts a glare into the corner of a room while the rest remains dark.
These rooms, those tire tracks, could be anywhere. Or everywhere. Never mind the exact the locale — it’s not important because McAuley delivers the emotional potency of place.
Katie Maratta & Owen McAuley
11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays through Dec. 12
D. Berman Gallery, 1701 Guadalupe St.
www.dbermangallery.com
Images: Detail of ‘Three Silos,’ Pencil and ink on transfer paper. Katie Maratta (top). ‘Untitled.’ 2008. Conte on paper. Owen McAuley (bottom). Courtesy D. Berman Gallery.
