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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2010 > April
April 2010
Fusebox 2010: Review of ‘Under Polaris’
‘Under Polaris,’ the multi-media romp by LA-based creative collective Cloud Eye Control now at Salvage Vanguard Theater as part of the Fusebox Festival, may not be especially deep. But the hour-long rock opera cum live video animation is fun to watch.
The story charts the trail of female scientist who has distilled the perfect seed — the seed to the Tree of Life which preserves all earthly creation. And to preserve that seed she embarks on a trip to the North Pole where presumably it can be frozen, a hedge against apocalyptic destruction.
That’s a bit a self-serious. But nothing else about ‘Under Polaris’ really is. In fact, that pseudo cautionary tale — and epic tale that goes nowhere — just seems like a framework on which the creative collaborators pin their multi-media antics.
Three musicians keep a charging soundtrack going as Anna Oxygen, playing the scientist (and the piece’s chief composer), sings moody rock arias as she journeys north, encountering a bear, a caribou and a musk ox, each animal played out as large-sized, clever shadow puppetry.
Perhaps most beguiling about “Under Polaris” is the combination of computer-generated visuals and animation writ that are on rumpus room theatricals. Miwa Matreyek’s video animations effect oceans and iceberg filled polar-scapes all while projected on simple scrims and curtains. Images of giant icicles and even the scientist’s canoe are projected onto simply cutout forms craft store signboard that manually slipped on and offstage by the stage crew.
“Under Polaris” is digital media meets do-it-yourself theater with a live rock score — it’s just minus the meaningful meaning.
The show repeats tonight and Saturday at 7 p.m. See www.fuseboxfestival.com.
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Free music, on the roof
Line Upon Line percussion ensemble is taking to the roof for a free concert Saturday night.
Beginning at 8 p.m. the adventuresome bunch will stake out their myriad instruments — marimbas, vibraphones, crotales — on the fourth floor deck of UT’s Art Building at 23rd and San Jacinto streets which offers a great view of downtown Austin.
The program? Music by well-known contributors to the percussion canon — David Lang’s ‘The Anvil Chorus’ and Iannis Xenakis’ ‘Okho’ — along with a few new ‘compositions by Austin young composers. And Toru Takemitsu’s 1981 piece Rain Tree’ is scored for three musicians and lighting effects.
Watch out, grackles!
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Fusebox 2010: John Kelly, the original
Long before ‘performance’ became the au courant buzz word of the art world, long before the throngs of arty trend-followers (re)discovered the wonder of witnessing something live, momentary and in person — Art Basel Miami Beach hipsters, I’m looking at you — there was John Kelly.
Rather appropriately, Kelly refers to himself as an ‘aesthetic octopus,’ which is a lot more apt, and playful, than ‘boundary-defying performance artist’ or whatever.
Kelly performs ‘Paved Paradise Redux,’ a re-staging of his critically-acclaimed solo show about folk superstar Joni Mitchell, tonight through Sunday in three performances at the Long Center as a part of the Fusebox Festival.
Kelly is a performer not to be missed. Haunting, charming, mesmerizing, Kelly’s been hailed by critics as one of the “most interesting artists alive.”
Read our Q-and-A with Kelly.
Trained as a ballet dancer — and also a trapeze artist, singer, actor, mime and visual artist — Kelly started doing solo shows in the early 1980s at now-storied New York night spots such as the Pyramid Club, the Mudd Club and Danceteria. Among his myriad awards are several Obies, a Guggenheim fellowship and the Rome Prize from American Academy In Rome.
Driving everything this ‘aesthetic octopus’ creates is a consideration of portraiture and self-portraiture. On stage, Kelly’s portrayed artists Egon Schiele, Antonin Artaud and Caravaggio. He’s also portrayed Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
The visual output of Kelly’s continuing artistic adventures occupied a solo show New York gallery Alexander Gray last summer.
Image: John Kelly, ‘Egon,’ 2005. Ink on panel. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates.
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Houses, naturally
Austin-based architects Arthur Andersson and Chris Wise might be best known in their hometown right now for the soon-to-open W Hotel and new Austin City Limits venue on Block 21 downtown.
But the pair also have left their mark around the country with sensitively designed houses featuring forms often derived from American vernacular design. New from Princeton Architectural Press, `Natural Houses: The Residential Architecture of Andersson-Wise’ features plans and exquisite photographs of seven of the design pair’s regionally appropriate houses such as the Stone Creek Camp in Big Fork, Montana, that sports two-foot walls made of cordwood and a grass, pictured on the book’s cover.
Both architects will be on hand for a book-signing Sunday 3 p.m. BookPeople, 603 N. Lamar Blvd.
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Fusebox 2010: Review of ‘Comme Toujours’
The spirit of exploration at the heart of disciplinary-crossing art making — blending dance and theatere or visual arts and music — can be an interesting, but messy affair.
Big Dance Theater’s “Comme Toujours Here I Stand” proves boundary crossing can also be slick, without sacrificing complexity. There’s no better place to ponder such gradations of performance approaches than the Fusebox Festival, which presented New York-based Big Dance Theater’s popular work Tuesday at the Long Center. New York critics hailed “Comme Toujours” as the most compelling example of the company’s work, and Tuesday’s performance demonstrated a stunning, unsettling sophistication in a range of vocabularies.
Since founding Big Dance Theater in 1991, co-directors Annie-B Parsons and Paul Lazar have always purposefully straddled the line between dance and theatre. “Comme Toujours” riffs on Agnes Varda’s 1962 French New Wave film “Cleo de 5 a 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7),” which follows a pop singer through two hours as she awaits biopsy results. Big Dance Theater combines the film’s plot and making of the movie to comment on the diva’s brush with mortality as both a moment filled with everyday occurrences as well as deep sorrow and fear. The mix of songs, dance and dialogue exchanges result in a very funny piece whose final moments have a gut-punching beauty that brilliantly sidesteps sentimentality.
“Comme Toujours” refuses to ever locate the story in one place or time. Dressed in black suits, the cast’s men constantly re-configure the space to shift the action between a movie set and the fictional pop star’s life. The men roll several rectangular cloth pieces, which sometimes serve as walls to frame vignettes performed by the cast’s women, sometimes to serve as screens for Jeff Larsons’ atmospheric videos. Molly Hickok is a most convincing, yet sympathetic diva. She combines an extravagance of gesture with a slightly flat affect, allowing her to read sometimes as pouting and other times as sad. Claudia Stephen’s costume design and Joanne Howard’s set enhance Hickok’s excess. As the show progresses, it seems almost as if Hickok gives birth to yards of white fur that cover more and more of the set and the characters’ props. One cannot help but notice how she changes the spaces she inhabits. She is funny, and she is overwhelming.
To some degree, all of the performers traffic in the same paradox of largesse and flatness that Hickok wields most extravagantly. Everyone in the cast plays a variety of roles, but the style suggests it’s never that important who the character is — a whiny girl involved in a series of melodramatic fights with an over-the-phone boyfriend or a macho male lover.
The acting style and insertions of quirky dance numbers keep the characters just beyond the audience’s grasp. The performers are in such control of their choices and the work overall has a sense of careful construction, creating an amazing world to enter, but never to be understood.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
Photo by Mike van Sleen.
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Fusebox 2010: A cancellation, a few more critics pix
Unfortunatley, ‘So Much to Go Crazy,’ a performance piece by Sibyl Kempson and Mike Iverson scheduled to by a part of the Fusebox Festival, has been cancelled. Festival organizers didn’t offer a reason.
There’s still plenty to see, though. Here’s a few of our pix:
‘Under Polaris’
Cloud Eye Control, rhe collaborative Los Angeles performance combines imaginative interactive media, live theater and electronic music to tell the story of a journey across a vast arctic expanse in order to preserve a seed containing the wealth of all human history.
7 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road. $12-$20.
‘Low Lives 2.’
Now in its second year, Low Lives is a one-night annual exhibit of live performance-based works that are transmitted via the Internet and projected in real time at numerous arts venues throughout the U.S. Just what exactly does happen when performance is conveyed, blurred and reconfigured through online broadcasting networks? These networks provide a new alternative and efficient medium for presenting and viewing performances. Or do they?
Catch ‘Low Lives’ in person or watch the live online stream at www.ustream.tv/channel/low-lives-2
7 to 10 p.m. Friday. Co-Lab Space, 613 Allen St. Free.
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Review: Golden Hornet Project presents Tosca String Quartet
While so much of the traditional world of classical music in the country ossifies, we’re lucky in Austin to have a tribe of busy, younger praticioners that keep things moving forward.
Among them is the Golden Hornet Project, the indie alt classic music presenters, along with its two artistic directors, composers Graham Reynolds and Peter Stopschinski.
Monday night, at the groovy Alamo Ritz, Golden Hornet staged what is now becoming a programming fixture for the group: An evening of new chamber works played by the always engaging Tosca String Quartet, played in two shows, an even meant to over lap with the Fusebox Festival.
The Alamo makes for an inventive venue for this now-annual concert — there’s plenty to play with, for one thing. Video design by Lee Webster made for real-time live shots of the ensemble writ large on the screen right behind the musicians. It’s just enough of a visual touch to add interest without distracting.
Monday’s program featured ome 12 short compositions by six tunesmiths with about half by Reynolds and Stopschinski — a good thing since both turned in the most musically strong of the dozen new pieces.
Reynolds can’t get the music of Duke Ellington out of his head (he hasn’t for several years now), and Monday night he treated with several of his variations on well-known Ellington melodies — some delightfully unrecognizable as Ellington in origin.
Stopschinski delighted most with his ‘Techno Courante’ for quartet and a percussive sound track, a wonderfully re-imagined riff on a Bach melody.
The layered arpeggios of Christopher Cox’s nicely conceived ‘Pentimento’ arched up, building in a fugue-like fashion, before ending lyrically.
But other pieces on the program, disappointed.
Will Taylor’s ‘Woody’s Green’ was a suitable enough jazz/blues tune exercised for string quartet but otherwise covered no new ground.
And the show’s VIP — Vampire Weekend leadman Rostam Batmanglij — brought out three short pieces that were less considered compositions of any depth and more pop music stuffed with mood and simply arranged for string quartet. (It didn’t help that on one piece Batmanglij’s own acoustic guitar accompaniment fell apart in his hands when he couldn’t keep rhythm.)
Still, it was hard not to notice that some in the audience were clearly brought by the pull of an international pop star. What they got along with that was some new music for a string quartet. And they didn’t seem to mind. And that was a good thing.
Photo by Rino Pizzi Art Photography.
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Review: Austin Lyric Opera’s ‘Hansel and Gretel’
Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” is most often regarded as a children’s opera. And well, it was, sort of, when it was premiered in 1893.
The composer’s sister penned a kinder and gentler version of the rather grim fairy tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm and then asked her brother to pen some songs. The end result of the two efforts became full-length opera, a hit within the German-speaking world for several decades after its premiere, now a regular Christmas feature.
Though Humperdinck’s version nicefied the rather frightening tale of a witch who devours children, contemporary interpreters can’t resist dousing it with darkness.
Such is the case with the John Conklin-designed 2002 New York City Opera production now getting a decidedly — and unfortunate — underwhelming presentation by Austin Lyric Opera at the Long Center for the Performing Arts.
Re-imagined in 1890s New York, with Hansel and Gretel as two immigrant children who fall victim to a wealthy society woman, this rendition theatrically — at least at first — puts an interesting dark burnish on the fairy tale opera.
Conklin’s fin-de-siecle New York is dark and colorless. The pair of starving children glimpse light and food and family happiness only in striking dreamlike tableaux vivants during Humperdinck’s extended orchestral entr’actes.
But lusterless singing didn’t engender the production with any sophistication. And after two acts, the urbanity of the show conception waned: what remained was a goofing third act that was undeniably a children’s opera.
Strong character acting came from mezzo-soprano Liz Cass, who played the dual role of Gertrude and the Witch, and likewise from soprano Alicia Berneche, who played Gretel. But Adriana Zabala, as Hansel, often couldn’t be heard over the orchestra, and no amount of character acting could overcome that.
ALO resident conductor Richard Buckley once again provided the company with superb orchestral underpinnings. But even his excellent musicianship didn’t supplant the lackluster vocals.
In the end, this “Hansel and Gretel” lacked a ‘happily ever after.’
“Hansel and Gretel” continues 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Friday, 3 p.m. Sunday. www.austinlyricopera.org
Photo by Mark Matson.
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Review: ‘A View from the Bridge’
Bleak yet electrifying, William Bolcom’s operatic version of Arthur Miller’s charged drama ‘A View From the Bridge’ impressed when it debuted in 1999 at Lyric Opera of Chicago.
The opera continues to impress and impact with its a new chamber orchestration which premiered Friday in a superb new production by UT’s Butler School of Music, one of the best the school has presented in recent memory.
All of Bolcom’s nimble stylistic eclecticism — heaped with dashes of American popular song, among many other echoes — is still there, if just in a less sweepingly cinematic fashion than original score for a 100-piece orchestra.
A commission from the Butler School, the smaller orchestration should allow for more universities and regional opera companies to take on this most American of operas. And hopefully it will end up in more repertoire. (Bolcom was on hand for Friday night’s performance before which he was presented with UT’s $25,000 Eddie Medora King Award for musical composition.)
Bolcom’s opera is a faithful adaptation of Miller’s bleak story of Italian immigrants in 1950s Brooklyn and the social, sexual and familial struggles that ensue when two distant cousins arrive from Italy to share the same grimy apartment as a couple and their adult niece. (Miller collaborated on the libretto; The play recently enjoyed a critically-acclaimed Broadway revival.)
Directed by Robert DeSimone and superbly conducted by Jim Lowe, this production artfully stays in period. Richard Isackes brilliant yet economically-designed set used scaffolding to frame action and suggest the gritty Brooklyn neighborhood. An expanse of metal fencing flew up and down, marking when the action was on the street but also brilliantly becomes a jail cell when, Marco, one of the new immigrant cousins, is detained by officials. (Remind you of the border fence between Mexico and Texas anyone?)
Smart acting and deft singing throughout the cast made for a riveting performance. Outstanding as Beatrice, soprano Cristina Caldas mixed theatrical complexity with vocal dazzle. Visiting alum Rubin Casas made a powerful, expressive Eddie. And Icy Simson sang the challenging role of Catherine with aplomb.
UT takes the production to San Antonio this weekend for one show at the Empire Theatre. Lucky Alamo City.
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Fusebox 2010: Daniel Barrow’s ‘Everytime I See Your Picture I Cry’
With a simple overhead projector and hundreds of drawings on mylar transparency, Daniel Barrow charmed with an odd yet compelling tale — a meditation on the desire, and the failure, for true human connection in our very disconnected times.
The Winnipeg-based artist presented his ‘Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry’ — a live manual animation performance — to a sold out house at the Off Center as part of the Fusebox Festival.
Sitting at the overhead projector, Barrow layered the drawings on the projector, manipulating them at time to create a gentle, fluid type of animation. A soundtrack by Amy Linton added to the moodiness.
Along the way, Barrow’s gentle voice spins a quirky, melancholy tale that nevertheless ruminates on the nature of love and art.
Barrow’s is a comic book style tale told in chapters. And while his soft color palette may recall a kind of vintage mid-century illustration, Barrow’s images bear plenty of violence and sheer ugliness — a kind of prism of pathos, loveliness and humor the entire piece presents us with.
Our narrator is a garbage man — a failed art school grad and inviterate collector. Hampered by chronic eye problems his life’s gesamtkunstwerk — which he calls “an art project for everyone” — is to create a phone book that wholly and completely chronicles the lives of those around him. An admirer of quotidian stuff, he assembles his phone book by gathering scraps from the garbage cans he empties every day. He also mines memory, history, framing each subject by tracing their image through a window spying on people rather than connecting.
But the garbage man’s attempt at capturing such portraits leads to their — and ultimately, his — violent demise. Art — believe in it and it can kill, you know.
At times, Barrow’s tale skidded dangerously close to being too precious — the juxtapositions that fed the quirkiness of his story seeming a little too pat.
In the end, though, the essential charm — the ‘handmade and heartfelt-ness’ — of Barrow’s low-tech animation kept preciousness in check.
Tonight, Barrow presents his video-based performance ‘Winnipeg Babysitter’ at 8 p.m. See www.fuseboxfestival.com
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Tonight: Golden Hornet Project alt classical with Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij
Tonight alt-classical initiative Golden Hornet Project presents the Tosca String Quartet playing new compositions by Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, Will Taylor of Strings Attached, Sam Arnold of Opposite Day and Christopher Cox.
Tix are going fast, too. Better get on it.
And yes Vampire Weekend groupies: Batmanglij will be there to accompany Tosca Strings on his new pieces. There will be new works by Golden Hornet founder Graham Reynolds and Peter Stopschinski too.
7 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. Monday, Alamo Ritz. 320 E. Sixth St. $18. www.goldenhornet.org
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Review: ‘The Difficulty of Crossing A Field’
Enigma is layered on enigma in ‘The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,’ the haunting opera cum musical theater work now getting an adventurous production at UT’s B. Iden Payne Theater, deftly directed by Luke Leonard.
Such enigmatic layering extends to the very origins of the piece.
This 75-minute opera by David Lang and Mac Wellman is based on 1888 short story by Ambroise Bierce. In Bierce’s odd tale a wealthy farmer in pre-Civil War Alabama drops from sight one afternoon as he crosses his field. His friends, neighbors, family and slaves have all only glanced away for second. But the plantation owner, Williamson, is gone; so is whatever social and political hierarchy his dominate position held. And because he has no male heir, a court must decide if Williamson is truly gone or not so that his estate can be distributed. The center of a world has suddenly, mysteriously vanished.
Wellman, a convention-defying New York-based playwright, transformed Bierce’s inscrutable yet politically satirical tale into an uncommon play in 1999. Then Lang — the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer whose genre-busting career include founding the new music groundbreaker group Bang On A Can — collaborated with Wellman to create a musical version for the stage which premiered in 2002 and featured the Kronos Quartet.
In Lang and Wellman’s variant — in which arias combine with spoken text — we are presented with several re-tellings of Williamson’s disappearance. A neighbor recants his confused remembrances. Williamson’s wife (a compelling Jennifer Adams) goes mad and takes to the roof, refusing to come down until he returns. Williamson’s daughter (a captivating Haley Hussey) demands to know the “mysteries of Selma, Alabama” — a reference that resonates past the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement.
And throughout a chorus of ghostly slaves echo and add to the alternate versions of Williamson’s mysterious disappearance.
“We are building a nation, we are building an erasure,” characters and chorus repeat.
Indeed what churns throughout the dreamlike episodes — or perhaps they’re really nightmarish — is the question of how America’s history of slavery is dis-remembered.
Leonard and the creative team added visually arrestings layers of odd artifice on this already odd though jewel-like piece. Alison Heryer’s period-inspired costumes symbolically weight the slave characters down with bulbuous, twine-wrapped forms. Actors travel across the stage with highly stylized movements. A magistrate stands on stilts far above everyone else. Hyper bright elongated white neon lights, flank the proscenium and like a Dan Flavin installation turned on and off, flood the audience with light at the beginning and end. We are, after all, a part of this telling of American history.
Lang’s eerie, atmospheric, minimalist-infused score, conducted by Lyn Koenning, wraps the odd scenarios with mystery equal to their telling.
“Something has happened,” one character proclaims. “But I don’t know what.” If Lang and Wellman’s piece only offers more variants on an enigmatic tale of history-making, maybe some enigmas are better just left enigmas.
‘The Difficulty of Crossing a Field’ continues at 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at UT’s B. Iden Payne Theatre. www.texasperformingart.org
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Review: Fusebox 2010 opening night
It is unlikely anyone will ever again stand on the State Capitol front steps and announce, “I’m glad you enjoyed the two-stepping. Make sure to join us just down the street for the free Japanese contemporary dance performance.”
Welcome back, Fusebox Festival! The now six-year old, genre-blurring festival, conceived and curated by Ron Berry — the man behind the microphone —displayed its charm and stunning breadth in the programming for Wednesday’s performances. The opening night of the ten-day festival featured a collaboration between local artists Allison Orr and Graham Reynolds, and, later at the Paramount Theatre, “The Velvet Suite,” conceived and danced by Japanese performer Kaiji Moriyama.
The night began with “T is for: Two Hundred Two-Steppers on the steps of the Texas Capitol,” a creation of Orr, a choreographer; Reynolds, a composer and musician; and a slew of Austin’s best two-steppers and country musicians. Reynolds led the impressive, rather rocking band, through some more usual two-stepping fare, like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” He also threw in a few unusual, fun numbers, including the theme from television’s “Dallas.”
Orr orchestrated her winning formula, bringing excellent amateur social dancers into a concert dance space. They performed everything from the waltz to the polka. The choreography alternated between smaller numbers featuring standout couples and dance-floor filling ensemble numbers. The two-stepping party closed with an all-call, though the performance felt participatory much earlier, starting somewhere around the time several pockets of audience members starting singing along to “ Waltz Across Texas.”
A few blocks away at the Paramoun the scene could not have been more different. Moriyama, whose work was presented with support from testperformancetest and Arthouse, spent a little over an hour moving with extreme precision and a presence so intense he seemed almost furious.
Accompanied onstage by violinist Koichiro Muroya, Moriyama slunk about the stage as his arms ripped with such liquidity he seemed almost to have no elbows. Most of his movements were relatively slow, often ending in a quick unfurl of his long, red hair. He danced bare-chested, making mesmerizing jabs and balloons with his rib cage and stomach muscles.
Ever so slowly, a glowing red orb descended from the ceiling. Like a bush of fiery thorns, it initially seemed destined to crush him, but then Moriyama finally settled down next to it, perhaps entranced, but not vanquished. Someone who moves with such stunning qualities as Moriyama could not be stamped out. Too much had been unleashed.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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At Fusebox Festival, John Kelly reprises - and updates - his 1997 show about folk music superstar Joni Mitchell More on the Fusebox Festival Follow @artsinaustin on Twitter
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Take that Eyjafjallajokull!
A few days ago it looked like British performance duo Action Hero was stuck in Britain, unable to come to Austin for the Fusebox Fest. The pair were some of the many travelers affected by the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull and its globe-spreading dust.
But Fusebox organizers have just announced that Action Hero’s Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse have boarded a plane are on their way to Austin. You can catch their participatory performance ‘A Western’ — a valentine to Texas — Friday and Saturday night at the historic Victory Grill.
Take that Eyjafjallajokull!
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How to get an audience for experimental art
Want to know how to get an audience for experimental performance art, something like, say, ‘The Velvet Suite,’ the arresting solo work by Japanese dancer Kaiji Moriyama?
Well, you can erase the final barrier — ticket price — and let everyone in for free. And if you do that, they will come as evidence by the full house last night at the Paramount Theatre.
Thanks to testperformancetest, an initiative started by arts patron Julie Thornton, an estimated audience of more than 1,000 people turned out to see ‘Velvet Suite’ last night, the opening night of the Fusebox performance art festival. And you have the chance to see the show again tonight at 8 p.m., for free of course.
Click here to make your reservation for free admission.
Granted, not all arts groups can offer free admission. Ticket monies are a valued source of revenue for non-profits. That’s why Thornton’s testperformancetest’s sponsorship for free performances is so welcome — and bold, like a little challenge to everyone to ‘go ahead, experience something new.’
More than 1,000 took that challenge last night.
Testperformancetest is also sponsoring, as part of Fusebox, the Montreal-based dance group GravelWorks at the Off Center Friday and Saturday night. We’ve heard both free shows are reserved-up, but check the Fusebox site to see if there’s a waiting list. (The crazy awesome Gravel dancers took over — and tore up — the dance floor at the Fusebox after-party.)
Dance on — it’s free.
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Austin arts groups receive 16 NEA grants, $684,500
Austin Chamber Music Center, theater collective the Rude Mechs, contemporary arts center Arthouse and the Austin Classical Guitar Society are among the 16 Austin arts groups and institutions that have received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts in the latest round of funding from the federal agency.
Texas Folklife Resources received a total of $91,000 in two separate grants. The University of Texas received $25,000 to support a Young Professional String Quartet in Residence program that will be dedicated to playing music by American composers. Grammy-nominated choir Conspirare was granted $22,500 to support a recording of African American spirituals. Zach Theatre received $35,000 to produce Mary Zimmerman’s ‘Metamorphoses.’ KLRU gets $25,000 to support ‘In Context.TV,’ its nationally distributed program on the arts. Austin School of Film received $37,000 to fund its Center for Young Cinema Program.
Austin received a total of $684,500. Texas received a total of 51 grants and $2,452,500.
In this round of funding, the NEA is distributing $97,632,100 through 1,323 grants nationwide. See the full announcement here.
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Fusebox 2010 starts Texas style
What better way to start an alt, indie performance arts festival in Texas than with a little mass two-stepping at the Texas Capitol?
Well, that’s the way we do it in Austin.
The Fusebox Festival kicked off in a grand way last night when two of Austin’s creative bright lights — choreographer Allison Orr and composer Graham Reynolds — teamed up to present ‘T is for Two Hundred Two-Steppers on the Steps of the Texas Capitol.’ Reynolds led a 15-piece western swing band featuring Dale Watson. Orr coordinated about 30 social-dancing couples who, after a few dances, dragged the crowd into the action.
Yee haw, y’all! THIS is performance art!
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This weekend, Austin’s a three opera town
If Austin arts landscape weren’t already crazy busy right with the Fusebox Festival, among other events, this weekend Austin is a three opera town.
In addition to Austin Lyric Opera’s production of ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ UT is opening Bolcom’s ‘A View from the Bridge’ and Lang’s ‘The Difficulty of Crossing A Field.’
Both Bolcom and Land are in town for the opening night of their respective operas — which both are on Friday. (Planning anyone?) We’d like to think that if Englegert Humberdinck were still alive, he might be here for ‘Hansel and Gretel.’
‘A View from the Bridge’
Composer William Bolcom originally wrote ‘A View From the Bridge’ — based on Arthur Miller’s tragic play about 1950s immigrant life in New York — for a lavish 100-piece orchestra. With a libretto by Miller, the opera saw several extravagant productions including New York’s Metropolitan Opera. But its orchestra demands limited the opera companies that could present it. Now, thanks to a grant from San Antonio Tobin Foundation, the University of Texas’ Butler School of Music commissioned Bolcom for a chamber orchestration of the work. Stars bass Rubin Casas, a UT alum whose work with the Metropolitan Opera has made him one of opera’s brightest new stars. 7:30 p.m. Friday and Sunday. McCullough Theatre, UT campus. $10-$20 www.texasperformingarts.org
‘The Difficulty of Crossing A Field’
Based on Ambrose Bierce’s enigmatic 500-word story of the same name, Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer David Lang and playwright Mac Wellman blend opera and edgy theater in a one-act stage work. In the pre-Civil War south, a wealthy farmer mysteriously disappears from sight one sunny afternoon as he crosses a field in full view of family, his neighbors and his slaves. Everyone has his or her view of what the disappearance means, but the more the witnesses try to recount the disappearance, the more elusive it becomes. A UT Department of Theatre and Dance production. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. Show continues through May 1. B. Iden Payne Theater, UT campus. $15-$20. www.texasperformingarts.org
‘Hansel and Gretel’
Austin Lyric Opera presents a critically acclaimed production of the German opera that sets the familiar Grimm’s fairy tale in fin-de-siècle New York, where Hansel and Gretel are immigrant children who get lost in Central Park and the evil witch is a rich matron who eats children. 7:30 p.m. April 23, April 28, April 30; 3 p.m. May 2. Long Center, 711 W. Riverside Drive. $29-$133. www.austinlyricopera.org
Photo: ‘The Difficulty of Crossing A Field.’ Photo by J Elissa Marshall.
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Review: ‘In the Heights’
The title of “In the Heights” references the Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, but the title could just as well describe the musical’s constantly soaring music and dance numbers and its insistent optimism.
Even as the neighborhood faces the economic realities of gentrification, the musical pulses with warmth. “In the Heights” national touring production, which opened Tuesday at UT’s Bass Concert Hall, has much to offer—a full slate of well-sung musical numbers, laugh-out-loud jokes and a fantastic cast.
“In the Heights,” with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a book by Quiara Alegria Hudes, offers immense pleasure. The musical’s happy tone is almost bizarre since many of its stories are quite sad. It takes a magic solution — a winning lottery ticket — to offer main character Usnavi (Kyle Beltran) a path out of economic ruin. The bodega owner struggles to avoid the fate that befalls the businesses around him: accepting low-ball offers from real estate developers or moving to the Bronx to avoid escalating rent.
Nina (Arielle Jacobs), who returned home after feeling like an outsider at Stanford, agrees to return to school — a choice facilitated by her father’s sale of the family business. But it seems unclear as to whose desire Nina’s return fulfills, hers or her parents, and whether the isolation she felt among Stanford’s rich, white culture will ever lessen.
Whatever the realities of the neighborhood’s future might be, all of the characters celebrate how the place and its people have offered a sense of being at home. To be at home in “In the Heights” means to experience — anticipate even — the familiar. When Nina’s parents invite friends over to welcome Nina back, Nina’s mother, Camila (Natalie Toro) luxuriates in getting to dance to her favorite part of an old record: a scratch that makes one rhythm repeat over and over again. Afterwards, she notes that the scratch on the record is the best part, and as he arrives Usnavi asks, “Did we miss the scratch on the record?” Home may be imperfect, but the familiarity of even its failings produces a common bond. Only Nina’s father’s treatment of Benny, his African American employee and Nina’s love interest, tests the boundaries of the musical’s community.
The repeated emphasis on similarity bringing people together is most interesting in contrast to the musical’s movement and music vocabulary. The opening noise of “In the Heights” is that of a radio blaring as a dial is turning, producing a collage of musical varieties from salsa to hip hop. In interviews about the show, creator Miranda has named the radio moment as a metaphor for how his concept for the musical as a collage of the diversity of an urban Latino neighborhood. “In the Heights” absolutely creates a vision of diverse vibrancy, thanks to Thomas Kail’s direction and Andy Blakenbuehler’s choreography. The staging and dancing produce a kinetically driven, never static picture of urban life. Anna Louizos’s set beautifully emphasizes stoops and fire escapes, a feature that points to how semi-public spaces become stages for relationship building in cityscapes.
The layers of “In the Heights” necessitate a cast that can take on a great deal, from a range of dance styles to heavy, but quick language. As Usnavi, Kyle Beltran is excellent in more traditional song and in Usnavi’s quick flip rap. Beltran embodies the musical’s immense likeability, and the bounce in his step seems well paired with the musical’s optimism.
As Usnavi’s young cousin Sonny, Shaun Taylor-Corbett is hilarious. He delivers what could be mere one-liners with an attention to detail in acting and physicality that make Sonny one of the show’s greatest delights. Jacobs, as Nina, and Sabina Sloan as Usnavi’s love interest Vanessa, deliver solid performances in somewhat underdeveloped roles. In a show of many big money musical numbers (maybe too many), Toro, as Camila, and Isabel Santiago as salon owner Daniela most fully assume center stage for their songs, “Enough” and “Carnaval del Barrio” respectively.
‘In the Heights’ 8 p.m. through Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Sunday Bass Concert Hall, 2300 Robert Dedman Dr. www.texas
performingarts.org
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
Photo by Joan Marcus.
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So much for ‘Dust Storm’
What looked to be a compelling site-specific installation by Austin artist Jeff Williams has been cancelled before it even opened.
Williams, a UT art professor, planned to transform 13,0000-square-feet of long-empty ground floor space at 400 W. Cesar Chavez St. into a Texas landscape within walls. Since the space has never been built out and occupied — even though the building, which is now home to Silicon Labs, was built in 2000. Hence it still has a dirt floor.
Taking the long unfinished dusty space as artistic fodder, Williams conceived a durational piece that, through fans and blowers, created a 30-minute dust storm inside. Viewers were to watch ‘Dust Storm’ from the sidewalk outside.
But it’s past tense now. After a test run, building managers told Williams that dust seeped through cracks and into neighboring spaces. And so, ‘Dust Storm’ was shut down.
‘Dust Storm’ looked to be an interesting comment on the state of downtown development, gentrification vs. nature and more. And it was planned under the auspices of Art Alliance Austin’s Art Week Austin, a part of ‘One Swallow Doesn’t Make a Summer, an ambitious set of temporary installations that indie curators Claire Ruud and Rachel Cook organized.
Williams was on hand last night for the opening of ‘One Swallow.’ He managed to document the one time that ‘Dust Storm’ blew through and made a poster of the photos which is being distributed free during the remainder of ‘One Swallow.’
The singular ‘Dust Storm’ happening.
All that now remains of ‘Dust Storm.’
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Icelandic volcano impacts Fusebox Festival
Call it the volcanic dust felt ‘round the world.
British performance duo Action Hero was set to bring their piece ‘A Western’ to Austin as part of the Fusebox Festival this weekend. But pair are just two of hundreds of thousands of passengers affected by the Icelandic volcano and its globe-spreading dust that shut down European airports for six days causing massive travel problems.
But there’s no air travel action for Action Hero now: The two are stuck in the U.K.
The irony? ‘A Western’ was all about Texas.
Here’s some of what the pair posted on their travel demise.
“Despite never having set foot in the U.S., let alone Texas we made a show about Westerns, or rather, a show about the memory of an imagined Western… The first word of the piece is “Texas”. Every time we perform the piece it’s in Texas (where else could it be?!), so we wondered what would happen when we did it in Texas for real… It seems ironic that we were/are so close to performing in Houston and Austin, but we can’t quite make it over.”
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Last chance: On Sunday, ‘Desire’ ends
One the smarter thematic exhibits we’ve seen in a while, ‘Desire,’ closes this Sunday the Blanton Museum of Art.
Organized by Annette Carlozzi, deputy director of the Blanton, the exhibit takes a wide look at what desire means to an impressive array of intermational contemporary artists. Featuring work in all media, it’s a show not to missed.
Image: Marilyn Minter, ‘Crystal Swallow,’ 2006. Enamel on metal. Promised gift of Jeanne and Michael Klein, Blanton Museum of Art.
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Sometimes, it takes a knitter…
Let’s face it: Public art is problematic. There’s some pretty awful stuff out there — some pretty ill-conceived stuff too.
That’s certainly true of ‘Moments,’ the piece by architect Carl Trominski that went up along the underpass at the 300 block Lamar Boulevard where the busy street dips below some railroad tracks. Commissioned by the city of Austin’s Art in Public Places program in 2003, ‘Moments’ is a series of 21 blue wordless, numberless signs afixed at regular intervals along both sides of the underpass.
‘Moments’ cost the city $45,000, with monies coming from the hotel and motel taxes. And since its installation, it seems that most people who have encountered it don’t know what it is or think it’s just some kind of odd signage. In fact, here at the newspaper we regularly get calls and emails asking what the heck the thing is.
What it is at best is under-developed and short on artistic concept. It misses the mark, big time. ‘Moments’ fails to be a moment.
Isn’t it wonderful then that artist Magda Sayeg has chosen to ‘yarn bomb’ it with one of her knitted pieces of ‘yarn graffiti.’
The founder of Knitta Please, Sayeg began deploying yarn bombs around Houston in 2005, a reaction to the city’s often inhuman urban landscape. My favorite was one I encountered wrapped around support pole on a Hwy. 59 overpass.
The yarn bombs are also a part of greater trend of younger artists who chose to embrace traditional craft-making as their medium, bringing new life and appreciation to formerly ‘domestic hobbies.’ Jenny Hart, an Austin artist whose main medium is embroidery is another such artist.
With Trominski’s permission, Sayeg’s covered ‘Moments’ with her knitted treasures, using wild, vivid patterns reminiscent of 1970s homemade afghans.
Sayeg’s project is a commission from the non-profit support organization Art Alliance Austin as part of Art Week Austin. It’ll come down after the events end on Sunday.
Still, soometimes, all it takes is a knitter to fix public art gone bad.
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Go ahead — surf YouTube. It’s for art’s sake
The Fusebox Festival is all about openness — it’s about creating an open-ended dialogue between artistic media, between audience and artist. And it’s about investigating an open-source manner of gathering raw artistic material.
As intellectually interesting as these concerns are, the Fusebox artists share a sense of fun. Hence this charming call for participation — listed below — that comes from the Fusebox folks.
Specifically, the Vancouver-based Theater Replacement collective want your favorite YouTube videos — or moreover, the comments posted to those videos. They’ll use the text of those comments for their performance piece ‘WeeTube’ which will be performed April 30 and May 1.
See below.
Here’s a YouTube video that went insanely viral.
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From the Fusebox coordinators:
Theater Replacement’s ‘WeeTube’ uses YouTube videos and their publicly posted comments as the text for the performers.
Send us links to your favorite YouTube videos that have the funniest or most interesting comments for these artists to use in their piece. Theater Replacement likes to make the comments they use personal by using videos that the locals watch or things that have gone viral in the Austin area, so send us those links!
You can post links in the comments of this blog or our Facebook page. You can also send them to patti@fuseboxfestival.com. We will collect your links and send them to the artists.
Then be sure to check out WeeTube by Theater Replacement April 30 & May 1- http://www.fuseboxfestival.com/events/details/118-weetube
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Review: ‘La Serva Padrona’
La Follia Austin Baroque took a bold step this weekend staging a production of ‘La Serva Padrona,’ a comic operetta by Giovanni Pergolesi.
After all, the longtime period music chamber music group doesn’t have much experience staging operas. And if sometimes that lack of experience showed around the edges on Friday at the First Presbyterian Church, the first of two performances, in the end the utterly charming nature of Pergolesi’s goofball of a piece and some engaging singing made La Follia’s bold step a pleasure.
Hardly a part of any standard opera repertoire, ‘La Serva Padrona’ was originally presented in 1733 as an intermezzo for Pergolesi’s longer opera ‘Il Priogioniero Superbo’ which never exactly became a hit, thus shunting ‘La Serva’ to obscurity for a while before the short piece piece finally got its much deserved solo recognition.
And the operetta is a charmer alright.
Serpina (soprano Gitanjali Mathur) is a spit fire, a cunning young maid to an Italian nobleman, Uberto (Steven Olivares) who desires more from life. So she conspires a way — through the not too unexpected devices of disguise and simple chicanery — to trick Uberto into marrying her and thus making her the mistress of his estate.
With Mathur and Olivares in period Baroque costumes, the action all took place on a small stage backed by drapes — a simple set not without its slightly amateurish look. English supertitles were projected top the right of the stage on the back wall of the church sanctuary. To the left of the stage sat the eight-piece period instrument baroque orchestra lead by La Follia artistic director and harpsichordist Keith Womer.
A regular with Grammy-nominated choir Conspirare, Mathur — while she doesn’t have a big voice — has a sweet clear tone that’s full of delightful color. And humor. Mathur is a natural — and convincing — comedic actress who is a delight to watch. Olivares, too, showed his comedic acting chops, along with good tone that got stronger and more colorful as the operetta progressed.
Though ‘La Serva Padrona’ is a short two acts no more than 45 or 50 minutes, it was nevertheless presented with an intermission. And the second act was proceeded by Pergolesi’s Flute Concerto in G Major, featuring soloist Marcus McGuff.
It was a clever thought to insert an intermezzo piece into a operetta that was itself created as an intermezzo. But the intermission stole energy from Pergolesi’s frothy folly that took the case and ensemble a while to regain after the Concerto.
Still, La Follia earned a tip of the hat for sticking a toe in the opera arena.
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Review: ‘Our Town’ at Zach Theatre
As Emily Webb, one of the main characters in “Our Town,” revisits a day in her past, she woefully marvels at how human beings are blind to the everyday. “All of that was going on,” she says, “and we never even noticed.”
The fleeting pace of life (and the importance of paying attention to each moment while living it) is at the heart of Thornton Wilder’s classic play “Our Town.” The show is hot again, popping up at theatres across the country, from a popular off-Broadway production to one at the University of Texas to the bold new version currently playing at Zach Theatre.
“Our Town” follows the citizens of Grover’s Corners—a fictional small town in New Hampshire in the early twentieth century—as they live their daily lives, fall in love and marry, and eventually pass on. At the center of the action is the courtship between teenagers Emily Webb (Jordan McRae) and George Gibbs (Michael Amendola). A wise and humorous Stage Manager (Jaston Williams) guides the audience through the town’s stories.
In Zach Theatre’s energetic version, director Dave Steakley visually re-imagines the play as taking place in contemporary Austin. The play’s visual design is stunning, as is the lighting by Jason Amato. Some of the Austin touches include members of an actual church choir in East Austin playing the town’s choir, and Willie Nelson tunes drifting in and out.
In another creative twist, to celebrate the marriage of Emily and George, the audience moves to the Nowlin Studio for a site-specific experience that truly feels like a wedding. Turquoise curtains are draped across the walls and dozens of white lanterns hang from the ceiling. A lively reception follows, complete with free wedding cake for all the guests.
But while the visuals suggest today’s Austin, the language of the play still refers to the Grover’s Corners of the past. At times, this choice highlights the specificity of the play’s actual time period while also suggesting that its themes translate into contemporary time and place. At other times, it feels a tiny bit jarring.
The actors approach their roles with gusto. Michael Amendola perfectly captures the earnest exuberance of youth. His sweet, slightly dorky portrayal of George is endearing. Jordan McRae imbues Emily with energy and natural goodwill.
Zach Theatre’s production of “Our Town” is creative and fun, and once again Steakley does an admirable job of connecting theatre to the local community. Sometimes though, the play seems overproduced. There are moments when all the bells and whistles distract from the poetry of Wilder’s language.
“Our Town” is popular again partly because it emphasizes the importance of human connection, which many Americans are focusing on in hard times. Zach Theatre’s production is at its best when it slows down and embraces the simplicity of the play’s message.
‘Our Town’ continues through May 23, Wednesday-Saturday at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Zach’s Kleberg Stage, 1510 Toomey Rd. Tickets $20-$40. www.zachtheatre.org
Claire Canavan is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
Photo by Kirk R. Tuck.
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Long Center announces 2010-2011 season
Broadway greats Tommy Tune and Liza Minnelli are just two of the acts that will be coming to the Long Center for the Performing Arts as part of its 2010-2011 season.
Also on the roster are comedy troupe the Capitol Steps, Tango Buenos Aires, the Vienna Boys Choir, Cirque Dreams Illumination and Blue Man Group.
‘Cowboy Noises,’ a play written by and staring “Greater Tuna” originator Jaston Williams, will start the Long Center’s off-Broadway season of plays.
And Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel will present his original musical “A Ride With Bob: The Bob Willis Musical.”
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One swallow + two curious curators =
Sometimes, it just takes a pair curious curators — and one symbolic swallow — to give Austin an intriguing art happenings and installations that will sprout across a spot of downtown Austin beginning next week.
Rachel Cook and Claire Ruud teamed up to organize the multi-part project called ‘One Swallow Doesn’t Make a Summer’ that will occupy sites around the Second Street District and Republic Square Park.
The title — and curatorial inspiration — comes from a speech given a decade ago by then Austin Mayor Kirk Watson. At the time, Austin was just beginning an aggressive chain of urban development that has since resulted in former warehouses and parking lots being replaced by sleek New Urbanism-style tree-lined streets and trendy shops and condos. And Austin even got a new architecturally adventurous City Hall.
But, as Watson cautioned years ago, “One swallow doesn’t make a summer, and not even a dozen [development] projects makes a great downtown.”
Of course now, after a burst of economic development brought an initial flood of high-end shops and hip restaurants, the current economic crisis has put a hold on all that growth and put the kibosh on lots of enterprises. Storefronts are now empty, condos remain un-bought and many high-rise projects have been nixed altogether, including a proposed new Austin Museum of Art that would have shared a prominent block to the south of Republic Square Park.
Downtown Austin is back to being pock-marked with open and empty buildings and spaces.
But thanks to Cook and Ruud — who have started their own curatorial initiative called, charmingly, Cook & Ruud — the next month or so will see some fresh creative art energy filling up those empty downtown spaces.
(Ruud is the longtime wrangler at indie arts space Fluent-Collab and the editor of online journal Might Be Good. Cook brings a long list of credits as a writer, curator and artist.)
Cook and Ruud intend for the installations and happenings to jump-start downtown denizens and everyone who visits downtown to re-consider the urban landscape and the arts within our new economic realities. S think about taking a lunchtime walking tour of the installations or hitting other events and happening.
It’s all a part of Art Alliance Austin’s Art Week Austin which starts next week. Click here for a schedule.
‘One Swallow Doesn’t Make a Summer’
April 20 - May 28
Installation locations: 210 Guadalupe, 416 W. Cesar Chavez St., 117 Lavaca St., 233 W. Second St. and Republic Square Parkmap
Curator’s walking tours at 12:30 p.m. Wednesdays and at 12:30 and 3 p.m. Saturdays through May. 26.
Preview Party
6:30 to 10 p.m. Tuesday. All installation locations will be open.
‘The Album is Dead’
7 to 10 p.m. Tuesday
Republic Square Park
Artisit collective Circulatory System will bring its bus-as-exhibition-space and park it at Republic Square Park to present a new project by Austin’s Monofonus Press that features the videos of 12 artists from Austin and New York. Also on the performance art line-up: Michael Merck’s “Typewriter Chorus,” What’s Tappening and Doug Ferguson (of Over The Hill) with live projections by Austin Video Bee.
‘The Perfect Recipe: Bake Sale Tea Party’
10 a.m. to 3 p.m. April 23
Republic Square Park
Remember that bumper sticker that reads ‘Wouldn’t it be great if our schools had all the money they need, and the Army had to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber?’ Well — perhaps appropriately given the funding crisis the arts face in the Great Recession — Paul Druecke’s project is a bake sale to raise money to endow three fellowship awards. The goal is to raise $1,000 that will then be invested back into the community through three fellowships that recognize individuals for their significant cultural contribution to Austin. Sweet.
‘Dust Storm (Night)’
8:30 p.m. Saturdays through May 22
416 W. Cesar Chavez St.
Jeff Williams transforms an empty 13,000-square-foot first floor space in the Silicon Labs building into a temporary self-contained dust storm. Viewers can watch the 30-minute event from the sidewalk outside. It’s a little piece of wild nature stuck inside an empty retail space.
Caption: Jeff Williams, ‘Dust Storm (Night),’ 2010. Dirt floor, objects found on-site, work lights, fans, blowers. Courtesy the artist.
‘One Swallow Doesn’t Make a Summer’ is organized by Cook & Ruud and Art Alliance Austin with the support of the 2ND Street District, AMLI, Downtown Austin Alliance, Downtown Austin Neighborhood Association, Fluent~Collaborative and Mike Chesser.
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Fusebox: John Kelly reprises, and updates, his 1997 show about folk music superstar Joni Mitchell
Nobody does Joni Mitchell songs like Joni Mitchell - except for maybe John Kelly. The two-time Obie Award and Bessie Award winner has taken on the personas of many artistic figures - Egon Schiele, Caravaggio, Antonin Artaud - in a career that’s spanned three decades. Originally trained as a dancer with American Ballet Theatre - and also trained as a visual artist at Parsons School of Design - Kelly’s solo performance career began in New York’s East Village clubs in the early 1980s. Since then, his genre-busting performances around the world have come to embody the kind of transmedia art leading the charge of today’s creative scene.
Still, his 1997 show ‘Paved Paradise’ about the superstar folk singer has become his best-known piece. Kelly will bring his reincarnation of ‘Paved Paradise’- ‘Paved Paradise Redux,’ a collection of 16 of Mitchell’s songs and words crafted into a music concert done in drag - to Austin as part of the Fusebox Festival.
Recently, Kelly spoke about his return to his favorite dulcimer-strumming, blond-haired folkie.
Austin American-Statesman: Many of your works explicitly engage with artists - Viennese painter Egon Schiele, theater director Antonin Artaud, and, most famously Joni Mitchell. What draws you to explore artists’ biographies as well as their artwork?
John Kelly: You discover an artist’s work, and you fall in love with their work. I want to take it to the next step and inhabit their psyche - both understand what they do more and, in the process, also express myself.
As part of reimagining this show, you’ve added some of Mitchell’s more recent recordings. What’s an example of a song you’ve added, and why did you add it?
Her later work in particular is about observing the world. ‘Shine’ (from the 2007 album of the same name) is really a litany of observations and maybe complaints as well. It’s not hopeless. It’s not bitter. But it is alarming. It’s about being a witness to something that’s alarming.
Besides recognizing Mitchell’s ongoing career, why did you want to return to ‘Paved Paradise?’
This piece has remained a blessing and a bit of an albatross for me. It’s the only piece that I’ve made that really intersects with popular culture. It also becomes all about the drag, instead of the acting. I know there’s a whole history to drag performance that I completely respect, but I come at it from role playing and wanting to make a character.
How has the increasing presence of male-to-female drag performance in mainstream popular culture changed how people receive you as Joni Mitchell?
There’s a cackle factor when I do the show. If people cackle too much - if they think it’s another clownish drag performance, then I play it by ear and really try to thwart their laughter. I’ll walk offstage, or I’ll stare at the floor for 40 seconds. The silence takes it back into the character and includes an amount of menace.
If the Mitchell piece and drag performance has become something of a box you get put in sometimes, why did you want to return to drag?
Drag can be and is often performance art, but people get stuck on the gender thing and that can be a hurdle, but it’s also interesting. The impulse to blur genders or inhabit the other gender is interesting. … What better way to deal with that than to put on a pair of high heels … and be the baddest boy you can be?
Your onstage combinations of visual art, music, dance and theatre make a festival like Fusebox, with its interest in blurring genres, a perfect fit for your work. Why are you drawn to combining so many artistic disciplines?
I think of myself as a multimedia artist. I call myself the ‘aesthetic octopus.’ It comes from a famous picture of (surrealist artist Jean) Cocteau with 12 arms coming out of his body - one with a paintbrush, another with a pen, etc. I’m not content to be one thing.
‘Paved Paradise Redux’
When: 9 p.m. April 30-May 1, 2 p.m. May 2
www.fuseboxfestival.org
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Fusebox: Kaiji Moriyama, free shows at the Paramount April 21-22
One of Japan’s foremost contemporary dancers Kaiji Moriyama combines the grace and technique of ballet with the precision of butoh dance for an emotionally charged, visually stunning solo performance, ‘The Velvet Suite.’
‘The Velvet Suite’ was originally created to fit the theme of ‘Body and Eros’ for the 2007 Venice Biennale. It features Moriyama’s magnetic, compelling movement as he is by violinist Koichiro Muroya.
Moriyama first began his career with a musical theater company in Japan, and moved to the world of professional choreography. He has worked with a number of leading contemporary dance companies and innovative Japanese choreographers such as Kota Yamazaki, Yukio Ueshima, and Aki Nagatani. Kaiji is style has been likened to a sword, tearing through space with a smoothness and sensitivity which crosses over generational boundaries. In January 2005, his U.S. solo debut “katana”(sword) was reviewed by Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times as “a dance of amazing concentration by an amazing dancer”.
‘The Velvet Suite’ plays two nights as part of the Fusebox Festival. And thanks to sponsorship by testperformancetest — an endowment started by arts patron Julie Thornton to bring international performance art to Austin — the shows are free.
You will need to RSVP to reserve a seat though.
Click here for the April 21 show and here for the show on April 22.
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‘In the Heights’ helps change Latino change ways of portraying Latinos on stage | At Fusebox Festival, John Kelly reprises - and updates - his 1997 show about folk music superstar Joni Mitchell More on the Fusebox Festival Follow @artsinaustin on Twitter
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Two UT art profs among Guggenheim Fellowship recipeients
Two UT art profs are among the 180 recipients of the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowships. This year’s roster of artists, scientists and scholars were chosen from a group of some 3,000 applicants
Troy Brauntuch and Lawrence McFarland are among the 22 recipients in the fine arts category.
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Weekend Arts Pix
‘Our Town’
Zach Theatre artistic director Dave Steakley re-imagines Thornton Wilder’s heartfelt drama about a prototypical American town and its archetypical characters. Jaston Williams — star and co-creator of the ‘Greater Tuna’ series — plays the role of the Stage Manager who leads the audience through the landscape of Grover’s Corner. For the wedding scene in Act II, the action will locate to a studio next to Zach’s Kleberg’s stage where the audience plays the wedding guests. And, yes, wedding cake will be served. 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays through May 23. Zach Theatre, West Riverside Drive and South Lamar Boulevard. $20-$50. www.zachtheatre.org
Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610
UT Chamber Singers — accompanied by internationally acclaimed period wind ensemble The Whole Noyse — take on Monteverdi’s monumental masterpiece. 7:30 p.m. Friday. Bates Recital Hall, UT campus. $5-$10 www.music.utexas.edu
‘Sweet Land of Liberty’
Canadian-born pianist Michelle Schumann, a longtime innovative leader on Austin’s classical music scene, celebrates her long-anticipated United States citizenship with a program of maverick American piano trios: Amy Beach’s Piano Trio Opus 150, Paul Schoenfiled’s Café Music and Mark O’Connor’s Poets and Prophets. 7:30 p.m. Saturday. First Unitarian Church, 4700 Grover Ave. $10-$25. www.austinchambermusic.org
‘La Serva Padrona’
La Follia Austin Baroque presemts a fully-staged production of Pergolesi’s comic operatta ‘La Serva Padrona.’ Features soprano Gitanjali Mathur and bass-baritone Steven Olivares. 8 p.m. Saturday. Ducloux Hall, Austin Lyric Opera, 901 Barton Springs Road. www.lafollia.org
‘El Channel’
Award-winning comedy troupe Latino Comedy Project — known for their skewering of politics and pop culture alike — reprises their recent hit show about a very dysfunctional television station whose studio straddles the Texas-Mexico border. 6 and 8 p.m. Sunday. Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Road. Admission is pay-what-you-wish. www.lcp.org
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Countdown to Fusebox 2010: A week from today, Austin will explode
Fittingly, this year’s Fusebox Festival starts off with an event that symbolizes the 12-day convergence of performance and multimedia art.
At 6:30 p.m. next Wednesday, April 21, the public is invited to assemble on the steps of the Capitol. Stubb’s will provide free barbecue. A 15-piece Texas swing orchestra led by alt classical musician Graham Reynolds will feature vocalists Dale Watson and Christina Marrs, former Gilley’s bandleader Billy Dee and pedal steel player Ricky Davis.
And then, under the direction of celebrated, edgy choreographer Allison Orr, a 30-minute performance by a couple of dozen skilled two-steppers will gradually morph into the ‘All-Step’ with the audience invited to join in.
Inclusive, open-ended, a mix of high art and local culture, a crowd-sourced performance, the event - ‘T is For: Two-Hundred Two-Steppers on the Steps of the Texas Capitol’ - is how Fusebox founder and artistic director Ron Berry sees the whole festival.
‘Participation, openness is woven into the fabric of our lives nowadays,’ Berry says. ‘And a lot of the artists (in Fusebox) let you in on their secret - they openly address the artifice that’s a part of their art.’
The festival line-up is long and tempting. Plot your course at www.fuseboxfestival.org.
You can see our Fusebox Festival 2010 coverage at www.austin360.com/arts. And throughout the festival we’ll be posting reviews, scene reports and anything else that strikes our fancy on this blog.
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Blanton Museum to participate in ‘Slow Art Day’
Time for everyone to chill. After all, who doesn’t need an antidote to our hyper-speed lifestyle?
On Saturday, try slow art. Arts institutions in more than 45 cities around the world are participating in Slow Art Day 2010.
Here in Austin, the Blanton Museum of Art will be our host for ‘Slow Art Day’ this Saturday beginning at 11 a.m.
Like the slow food philosophy, slow art believers advocates taking time with the art-viewing experience. You’d think in the post-blockbuster exhibit era — with more people going to museums than ever before — we’d be better trained at looking at art. But no. Most people run through exhibits too fast.
On Saturday, participants will be given a list of 10 works of art — see the list below — to view for up to 10 minutes each. Then the group will meet for a discussion over lunch in the Blanton Cafe.
The cost is museum admission ($3-$9; free to those with a UT ID), plus the cost of the lunch of your choice at the Blanton Cafe. See www.blantonmusum.org.
- Eve Sussman, The Kiss, 2006 (From the Desire exhibition)
- Glenn Ligon, Lest We Forget, 1998 (From the Desire exhibition)
- Manuel Álvarez Bravo, The Crouched Ones, 1934 (From the Alvarez Bravo exhibition)
- Kerry James Marshall, Black Painting, 2003-2006
- Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Synchromy in Purple Minor, 1918
- George Sugerman, Two in One, 1966
- Vernon Fisher, Evidence of Houdini’s Return, 1994
- Sinibaldo Scorza, Orpheus Charming Beasts, c. 1615
- Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Storyteller, mid 1770s
- Marcantonio Raimondi, Galatea
Images: Top: Stanton Macdonald-Wright, ‘Synchromy in Purple Minor,’ 1918. Bottom: George Sugerman, ‘Two in One,’ 1966. Courtesy Blanton Museum of Art.
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UT’s Texas Performing Arts announces 2010-2011 season
Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, pianist Emanuel Ax, the National Theatre of Scotland and L.A. Theatre Works are just some of the acts coming to Austin via the University of Texas’ Texas Performing Arts for the 2010-2011 season, officials announced Tuesday night.
Also on the season lineup is the Ornette Coleman Quartet, famed chamber orchestra the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, an evening with food writer Michael Pollan and the last ever tour of the renowned modern troupe, Merce Cunningham Dance.
New music fans have plenty of temptations. Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche will perform with the ultimate al classical group Bang on a Can All-Stars. Indie chamber ensemble Eighth Blackbird will present ‘Slide,’ an unconventional work of musical theater that has the ensemble taking on onstage roles along with a pair of actors. Pioneering composer and video artist Jean Piche brings his multi-media work to Austin. So will composer John Zorn when the Miro Quartet and percussionist Colin Currie performs his work in March.
Perhaps the biggest news though is that TPA is extending its reach by collaborating with several Austin arts organizations, bringing them on as co-sponsors of certain shows. Austin Classical Guitar Society, the Fusebox Festival and the Long Center — which is hosting one next season’s touring Broadway shows — are co-sponsors of several events throughout the season. And that’s wonderful to see that kind of town-and-gown collaboration.
See www.texasperformingarts.org for complete information.
‘Slide’ with Eighth Blackbird, Rinde Eckert and Steve Mackey.
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Review: ‘Keeping Track’
Janet does not like that feeling that she has lost control of her own home, her husband and the swirl events that make up her modern life as a modern wife.
But control is the last thing Janet gains in “Keeping Track,” Erica Saenz’s heart-warming comedy now getting its premiere at Salvage Vanguard Theater in a Teatro Vivo production.
Saenz, a founding member of the ground-breaking Austin sketch comedy troupe the Latino Comedy Project, trains her considerable comedic talents on an upwardly-mobile Latino family for her first full-length play.
Janet (Karen Alvarado) likes things her way and that means an organized house for just her and her husband, Albert (Rick Olmos), a successful attorney. But nothing has been organized since Albert’s widowed mother Carolina (JoJanie Segura) has moved in, Carolina is omnipresent and messy: Albert and Janet have no privacy and Janet’s tidy housekeeping gets thrown outta whack.
But Albert loves his mother’s traditional cooking over his wife’s health-conscious fare. So does the couple’s extended family who regularly assemble for a regular Sunday dinner: Janet’s half-brother Jack (Matt Sadler) and his wife Melinda (Matinique Duchene) and Yolie (played by the irrepressibly funny Saenz herself), a forever single family friend.
So when Janet declares at Sunday dinner that she wants her mother-in-law out of her house and into a retirement home, she’s met with resounding opposition from everyone at the table. And what’s worse, Janet wants Carolina to go to a home where she’ll be implanted with a micro-chip, allowing Albert and Janet to track her from the comfort of their own home.
That situation sets off an hysterical series of situations and interactions within the circle of family and friends.
With considerable playwriting panache, Saenz weaves a charming portrait of contemporary life where technological advances are often many steps ahead of our emotional, psychological and interpersonal capabilities. Baby monitors, cell phones, micro-chipped elder parents. What does that do to boundaries between family members?
Ultimately, Saenz is examining the seismic shifts within a traditional close-knit Latino family that finds its closeness challenged by modern — and independent — lives. And she does so with kindness, not judgement nor hamfisted politics.
Saenz herself is a bit a show-stealer as the wise-cracking, irreverent Yolie. Though like any good ensemble sit-com — which “Keeping Track” bears plenty of resemblance, in a good way — the funniest moments come when the cast clicks together in an energetic way. If the energy slagged at moments at Saturday night;s show, it may have been just a temporary snag in the ‘je ne sais quoi’ element that comedy relies on.
Still, with “Keeping Track” Saenz delivers a delightful, humor-filled take on the modern family.
“Keeping Track” continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays through April 25. Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road. $13-$16 (Thursdays pay-what-you-wish). www.teatrovivo.org
Image: Karen Alvarado as Janet (left) and Erica Saenz as Yolie (center). Photo by Alberto Jimenez; courtesy Teatro Vivo
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Composer David Lang all over Austin this spring
It’s a veritable David Lang mini-festival this spring with work by the contemporary composer presented by several different groups.
Tonight, in a free concert, the always-engaging UT Percussion Ensemble, led by Thomas Burritt, performs Lang’s “so called laws of nature,” Can’t make the concert in person? It’ll web cast live. See www.music.utexas.edu for info.
Lang’s referred to ‘so called,’ which is performed on a variety of invented percussion instruments ‘as close to becoming a scientist as I will ever get.’
Lang will be in Austin later this month when UT’s Dept. of Theatre and Dance present his chamber opera “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” based a short story by Ambrose Bierce, about southern farmer in the pre-Civil War south who purportedly vanished while walking across a field. The UT production runs April 23-May 2.
Then come May 7-9, five-time Grammy-nominated choir Conspirare will perform Lang’s haunting oratorio, ‘The Little Match Girl Passion,’ for which the composer received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. See www.conspirare.org.
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Saturday, artist David Ellis talks
Artist David Ellis has been busy at work here in Austin lately.
Earlier this year, the Brooklyn based artist received a commission to create an original video that will premiere at the opening of the UT’s new Visual Arts Center which opens in September. The center occupies the space inside the Art Building that was formerly the home — way back when — to the Blanton Museum of Art.
Whatever Ellis creates at the VAC, it’s likely to be one of the livelier pieces of public art on the UT campus.
On Saturday Ellis — whose merges painting and filmmaking to create innovative pop culture infused motion paintings — will give an informal talk about his work. The event is free.
4 p.m. Saturday. Co-Lab, 613 Allen Street.
Image: Wall painting at galerie du jour, Paris, France. Courtesy www.davidellis.org.
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Review: ‘Body Awareness’ at Hyde Park Theatre
Just a reminder everyone: The folks at the fictional New England Shirley State University in Annie Baker’s smart comedy “Body Awareness,” now getting a delightful spin at Hyde Park Theatre, are not celebrating Eating Disorders Week, though that’s what the calendar says.
No, Phyllis, a painfully politically correct lesbian psychology professor, has renamed the occasion Body Awareness Week. And if all goes according to her plans, the students and faculty will think meaningful — and politically correct — thoughts about gender and body politics.
But of course, nothing goes as planned.
Yet, rather than belittle her characters for their overzealous philosophizing, Baker crafts a gentle comedy that leaves even the most ardent. humorless feminist with dignity in tact.
Deftly directed by Ken Webster, the 90-minute “Body Awareness” is set in a fictional bucolic college town that’s all too familiar to Austinites.
When a photographer, Frank Bonitatibus (Kenneth Wayne Bradley), arrives as a guest artist for Body Awareness week, in he drops to stay at the home of Phyllis (Emily Erington), her partner Joyce (Katherine Catmull) and Joyce’s 21-year-old son Jared (Stephen Mercantel), who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome.
But Frank’s photos of nude of women ignite an explosively critical reaction from Phyllis. Never mind that they intrigue Joyce and spur Jared — a self-proclaimed “autodidact” who works at McDonald’s — to confront his girlfriend-less status.
Baker unravels her story from a Monday to a Friday, with Phyllis giving an introduction to each day’s Body Awareness Week activities — short monologues that are satirical enough to stand as their own comedic send up of academia.
The most meaningful action takes place in Phyllis and Joyce’s home though as the couple try to bridge their widely differing opinions of Frank’s nude photography while also trying to deal with Jared’s escalating anxiety over his socially stunted behavior. Jared’s is repeatedly reminded by his mother and Phyllis that a lack of empathy is a key symptom of Asperger’s.
But kindly, Baker unmasks the resistance to empathy that all her characters share. And that gives “Body Awareness” its gentle heart.
A shrewd director of modern comedies, Webster keeps the play’s pacing at a relaxed yet efficient clip, letting the pauses in Baker’s dialogue linger to greater comic effect.
Mercantel stands out as the awkward man-child Jared, gracefully handling his character’s strange ricocheting between clever quip, childish defensiveness and hurtful jabs.
In the end, Jared edges toward exercising empathy, something “Body Awareness’ humorously reminds is sometimes lacking from over-analyzed lives.
“Body Awareness” continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through May 8. Hyde Park Theare, 511 W. 43rd St. www.hydeparktheatre.org
Photo by Bret Brookshire.
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Arthouse’s ‘Five x Seven’ spreads its social wings
Arthouse, the Congress Avenue contemporary art center, is adding a second, recession-friendly event to its super-popular annual ‘Five x Seven’ art fundraiser, the ‘anti-auction’ art sale where people only find out the creator’s identity of the 5-inch by 7-inch mini-artworks after purchase.
For those who can’t make to the May 13 ‘Five by Seven Art SPLURGE,’ there’s now the “Five by Seven Art SOCIAL’ on May 14. Tickets are just $30. And that include music by Balmorhea, food by Frank and drinks.
“Five by Seven Art SOCIAL’ 8 to 11 p.m. Friday The Whitley Building, 301 Brazos St.
‘Five x Seven’ features more than 1,000 5-inch by 7-inch original works of art donated by more than 900 emerging and established artists with strong ties to Arthouse or Texas. Each artwork is only $100.
Some of the participating artists include Sterling Allen (Austin), Faith Gay (Austin), Fritz Haeg (Los Angeles), Annette Lawrence (Denton), Jessica Mallios (Austin), Katrina Moorhead (Houston), Robyn O’Neil (Houston), Dario Robleto (Houston), Allison V. Smith (Dallas), and Terri Thornton (Fort Worth). For full list of participating artists see www.arthousetexas.org.
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Review: ‘City of Angels’
The musical “City of Angels” requires detective skills from everyone, from director to cast to audience. The story within a story structure of the 1989 musical comedy makes the piece a puzzle to produce and understand. For the most part, the current production at St. Edward’s Mary Moody Northen ’s, directed by Michael McKelvey and running at the Mary Moody Theatre until April 18, pieces the jigsaw pieces together with a balance of clarity and intrigue.
“City of Angels,” with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by David Zippel, and book by Larry Gelbart, tells the story of book author come screenwriter Stine (Jamie Goodwin) as he fights the amorality of money-loving Hollywood while transforming his latest novel into a noir film.
The confusing, but also fascinating aspect of the musical is its simultaneous telling of Stine’s story alongside that of his character Detective Stone (David M. Long) and the crimes Stones investigates — a simultaneity that includes Stine and his shallow producer (Jacob Trussell) rewriting Stone’s story as the musical develops. As Goodwin types on a platform above the main action, then throws pages away in disgust, Long robotically walks backward then replays scenes with new dialogue.
Perhaps the most telling inclusion of the rewriting tensions unfolds around the story of Munzo (Jon Wayne Martin), the Latino cop who, in the first telling of Stone’s story, is angered by Stone’s ability to avoid prosecution for murder because he is white. Buddy the producer insists the racial tensions don’t make a compelling movie, and he forces Stine to write a romantic triangle instead.
Until the bit too confusing last scene, McKelvey’s direction and Leilah Stewart’s multi-level scene design keep the multiple stories quite clear, but suitably intertwined. The separation of the action into levels makes the musical’s climax, Stone and Stine’s duet “I’m Nothing Without You” belted from centerstage most powerful—hilariously staged to toy with a musical love song to display the men’s narcissism.
While the bulk of the cast’s women become almost blurry — a swirl of long legs and lingerie — Sarah Burkhalter, doubling as Stine and Stone’s love interests Gabby and Bobbi, and Kimberley Gates, as Stone’s Girl Friday and Stine’s mistress, pull the spotlight back toward the show’s women. As Munoz, Martin had the other strong performance Friday, bringing a rich, but clear voice to the performance as he sang “All You Have to do is Wait.”
‘City of Angels’ continues 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday at Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward’s University, 3001 S. Congress Ave. 448-8484. $15-$20.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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Review: ‘Sleeping Beauty’
Brothers Grimm, move over. There’s a new interpretation of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ on the block — at the Vortex theater through May 2, that is.
And this one — garnished with spectacular costumes, reinvented characters and engaging original songs — is more likely to appeal to the modern crowd.
In 2005, Vortex founder Bonnie Cullum and theater artist Content Love Knowles launched a musical theater version of the well-known fairy tale that garnered sold-out houses. Now, after receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts — the first NEA grant in Vortex’s 22 year history — Cullum and Knowles have significantly revamped their revisionist fairy tale most notably by upping the production values of the sets and costumes and adding new songs and arrangements.
This Sleeping Beauty (aka Princess Briar Rose, played appealingly by Julia Lorenz) is a girl of her own power and decides to live her life in the way she chooses. But even before she appears in Act II of the roughly two hour production, the magical kingdom of Avalia isn’t exactly the Disney-fied place of common imagination. No, it’s a bit political and when the fairy Ixlamere isn’t invited to honor the baby Princess Briar Rose, friction of sort arises.
Knowles, who penned all the music to the sung-through musical, led the four-piece ensemble, gave the story an appealing score that was part cabaret, part honky-tonk, part Tom Waits. And those songs were burnished with some impressive vocal stylings by Lorenz, Jonathan Itchon and Suzanne Balling
Costumes by Pam Fletcher Friday and outrageously creative headpieces by Griffon Ramsey create the show’s visual spectacle. Ramsey uses everything from found objects to plant matter to the usual millinery material to fashion hats that read as sculpture.
Where the re-thinking the classic fairy tale grew cumbersome was the reliance on exposition rather than action to move the story along. And the 24-member, 34-character cast meant sometimes the crowding got intense and cumbersome on the tiny Vortex stage.
Still, it’s an ambitious production and, despite moments of over-wroughtness, ultimately appealing.
‘Sleeping Beauty’ continues 8 p.m. Thurdays-Sundays through May 2. See www.vortexrep.org
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It’s he-ere! Bravo TV launches “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist”
C’mon, we know of all you art aficionados who are dedicated ‘Project Runway’ and ‘Top Chef’ fans.
Now, you can openly embrace your reality TV fixation with ‘Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,’ the latest series from Bravo TV.
The series starts June 9.
The show assembles 14 up-and-coming artists in New York where they will compete for a solo exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and a cash prize of $100,000.
Actress China Chow serves as host.
The regular panel of judges are New York gallery owner Bill Powers; author and art critic of New York Magazine Jerry Saltz; and curator and owner of Salon94 galler, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. Guest judges include Andres Serrano, Richard Phillips and Jon Kessler, among others.
Playing the Tim Gunn role of mentor will be art auctioneer Simon de Pury. Let’s hope de Pury can make it work as well as Gunn.
Here’s a gallery of the artist contestants.
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Saturday at the Blanton: Talking art
The Blanton Museum of Art hosts yet another conversation with smart art world professionals when Cuauhtemoc Medina and Rubén Ortiz-Torres discuss their practices.
The free program is at 2 p.m. 2 p.m. Saturday, April 10, in the Blanton’s auditorium. See www.blantonmuseum.org
Cuauhtemoc Medina is a Mexico City-based researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas at the National University of Mexico. He wa the first associate curator of Latin American Art at London’s Tate Modern.
Ruben Ortiz-Torres, a professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, is a Mexican-born artist who has been living and working in Los Angeles since 1990.
Image: “La Ultima Cena,” from the Mexi-Punx series. By Ruben Ortiz-Torres. From www.rubenortiztorres.org
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Zach Theatre looking of old folks to play dead
Well, this one way to get an extras for your theater production: Bring out your dead!
Zach Theatre is looking for senior citizens to volunteer to play the dead folks in Act III of its upcoming production of “Our Town.”
Presumably no experience — being dead, that is — is necessary.
Here’s a comminque from Zach Theatre’s interim company manager:
- “Zach Theatre is looking for volunteers!
“Dave Steakley, artistic director for ‘Our Town,’ is requesting senior citizen aged folks (primarily men & couples) to be a part of ACT III and play dead people in the graveyard scene at the end of the play each night.
What an opportunity to be on stage at ZACH Theatre and star alongside Jaston Williams (star of ‘Greater Tuna’)! The volunteers wouldn’t have lines but they would have blocking to follow. Mostly they are sitting in a black folding chair and looking forward off into the distance.
At one point in the play they have to stand and move their chairs to the side and be reseated, and then later in the act they put their chair back where it started and sit again and then a couple of pages later they exit with their chair. Each person will need to wear all black—something of their own for this scene. My preference would be to have 5 -10 people who might commit to do it for the whole run. They would just have to be here for the last act of each show. If no one will make a 6 week commitment then I can look at dividing it up into smaller chunks to get this accomplished.”
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Weekend Arts Pix
TODAY
Gary Carrion-Murayari
In the new millennium, curators are inclined to claim the limelight in the art world right along with the artists. Gary Carrion-Murayari is associate curator of this year’s edition of the Whitney Biennial, the granddaddy — and bellwether — of the now-frequent biennial exhibits of emerging artists. An associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the 29-year-old Carrion-Murayari was recently named one of the New York Times Style Magazine’s ‘Nifty 50.’ Arthouse hosts him for a lecture. 7 p.m. today. Carver Museum and Cultural Center, 1165 Angelina St. Free. www.arthousetexas.org
TODAY THROUGH SATURDAY
‘Body Awareness’
Annie Baker’s odd modern comedy about the problems that erupt when a oh-so politically correct East Coast college launches a campus-wide campaign about body awareness. Directed by Ken Webster; stars Katherine Catmull. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through May 8. Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St. $17-$19. Thursdays are pay-what-you-can. www.hydeparktheatre.org
TODAY THROUGH SUNDAY
‘City of Angels’
Cy Coleman’s and David Zippel’s Tony Award-winning musical follows a frumpy crime novelist who struggles to rework his hard-boiled detective stories to fit the silver screen. A jazz-inspired score melds film noir with 1940s Hollywood glamour. Stars Equity guest artist David M. Long. 7:30 Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays through April 18. Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward’s University, 3001 S. Congress Ave. $18-$20.
SUNDAY
‘Melodies of Isabelle Aboulker’
French composer Aboulker has dedicated her career to continuing the tradition of the 20th-century French art song — a genre that is sometimes romantic and funny, sometimes anxious and edgy, but always captivating. The French American Vocal Academy presents an all-Aboulker program featuring soprano Frédérique Added, tenor William Lewis, soprano Morgan Beckford and baritone Malcolm Cooper. 3 p.m. Sunday. Jessen Auditorium, Rainey Hall, University of Texas, West 21st Street and University Avenue. Free. www.favaopera.org
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Lance Letscher makes a perfect machine
His painstakingly crafted collages of found paper, books and other ephemera have made Austin artist Lance Letscher into a highly-collected national artist.
Now, Letscher re-imagines his collages once more, this time in the form of a children’s book and a new series of art works, both entitled ‘The Perfect Machine’ and both featured now at a new exhibit at D. Berman Gallery.
Letscher will be on hand Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. for the opening reception. And on April 24 at 1 p.m. Letscher will give a gallery talk and conduct a book-signing. ‘The Perfect Machine’ will be formally released by UT Press in September, but you can purchase a copy now at D. Berman Gallery.
The exhibit continues through May 15. www.dbermangallery.com
Movement, mechanics and the essence of locomotion form the genesis of Letscher’s ‘Perfect Machine.’ From a motorcycle to a pair of puppet legs to hand guns, Letscher transforms objects with his meticulous hand and his whimsical eye.
Image: ‘The Perfect Machine,’ mixed media. Courtesy D. Berman Gallery.
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Sometimes a chair is not just a chair
Depending on your take, Roy McMakin is an artist who makes furniture or a designer who makes sculpture. His installations of found furniture led years ago the Seattle-based creator to make functional furniture and, ultimately architecture through his company, Domestic Furniture & Domestic Architecture.
Whatever McMakin makes beguiles whether its functional furniture or art objects. For “In and On” — an exhibit now on view at Lora Reynolds Gallery — McMakin created four art works that painstakingly and seamlessly fuse elements of sculpture and furniture.
McMakin is a minimalist, and a modernist too. And he pays reverence to both aesthetics in “My Slatback Chair with a Pair of Attached Chairs.” Vintage mid-century modern unit seating — the kind of connected vinyl-upholstered seats you’d find in an airport scene on “Mad Men” — conjoins with a slatback chair McMakin’s fashioned from maple and painted bright white. McMakin’s sleek handcrafted chair nuzzles with the slightly worn design object that inspired it.
In McMakin’s hands, a chair literally embodies the chairs that came before it.
The exhibit continues through May 15. Lora Reynolds Gallery, 360 Nueces St. www.lorareynolds.com
Image: Roy McMakin, ‘My Slatback Chair with a pair of Attached Chairs,’ 2010. Found chair and enamel paint on maple. Courtesy Lora Reynolds Gallery.
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UT Law Students for the Arts cosponsors free legal clinic for local artists
Got a legal question? The University of Texas student organization Law Students for the Arts is co-hosting a free legal clinic for local artists this Thursday.
From the UT press release:
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Law Students for the Arts (LSftA), a student group at the University of Texas School of Law, and Texas Accountants and Lawyers for the Arts (TALA), will offer a free legal clinic for low-income artists on Thursday, April 8, from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at the Austin offices of Fulbright & Jaworski LLP, 600 Congress Avenue, Suite 2300.
Volunteer attorneys will provide free legal advice and help on arts-related legal matters to artists, musicians and filmmakers. Topics discussed may include copyright, trademark and contract law.
Although walk-ins are welcome, artists interested in attending the clinic can schedule an appointment by emailing artslawclinic@gmail.com or calling 512-232-1989. Attendees can expect to spend up to 30 minutes receiving advice from an attorney.
Law students will assist artists with completing intake paperwork and by clarifying the legal issues that artists face. Cases not resolved at the clinic will be reviewed to see if further legal services can be provided at no charge.
Eric Leventhal, president of LSftA and a second-year law student said: “As law students, we’re often so immersed in our studies that we lose sight of some of the unbelievable artists living in our city, many of whom could use help navigating legal issues. The clinic is a great way to help artists achieve their dreams just as law school helps us achieve ours.”
Leventhal said the legal clinic is the first one of its kind to be offered. LsftA organized this project in consultation with the School of Law Pro Bono Program, which assists student groups with planning and executing pro bono projects.
LSftA is a registered student organization at the Law School devoted to aiding Austin-area artists and arts organizations and fostering mutually beneficial relationships with pro bono legal referral service groups. Texas Accountants and Lawyers for the Arts has been providing pro bono legal and accounting services to artists and arts nonprofit organizations since 1979.
For questions or to RSVP, please email artslawclinic@gmail.com or call 512-232-1989.
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New American Talent/Dance audience award winners
And now, the crowds have spoken and the audience prizes for Ballet Austin’s ‘New American Talent/Dance’ choreographic competition are:
Dominic Walsh of Houston garnered six wins for $3,000 in prize money plyus $500 for being the overall audience pick. Nelly van Bommell of New York received two wins for $1,000 and KT Nelson of San Francisco netted one win for $500.
Last week, Ballet Austin announced the winners of judges’ prizes.
‘New American Talent/Dance’ brings together three choreographers as chosen by three internationally renowned judges. Choreographers are given a stipend and the opportunity to create new work for the Ballet Austin dancers.
When the new dance works are premiered, each judge had a $5,000 discretionary fund to allocate. And at each performance, the audience could vote for their favorite as well.
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San Antonio’s Museo Alameda gets a bailout
Looks like San Antonio’s Museo Alameda — the nation’s largest Latino museum — is getting a bailout.
An affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has been open for only three years but has suffered from poor attendance and revenue gathering.
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Recent arts coverage
Writing Latino lives: Erica’s Saenz’s new play ‘Keeping Track’ spins comedy around family issues | Soweto Gospel Choir belnd gospel with African roots| Deborah Hay: A prophet of contemporary dance is honored
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Weekend Arts Pix
‘Sleeping Beauty’
Read a Q-and-A with Cullum here.
Anton Nel and Bion Tsang
Regarded soloists and longtime collaborators cellist Bion Tsang and pianist Anton Nel team up to celebrate three anniversaries of beloved composers: Robert Schumann and Frederic Chopin (both born in 1810), and Samuel Barber (born in 1910). The duo will play Schumann’s Students Fantasiestücke, 5 Stücke im Volkston and Adagio and Allegro; Barber’s Sonata for Cello and Piano and Chopin’s Introduction and Polonaise brillante. 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Bates Recital Hall, Music Building, UT campus. $5-$10. www.music.utexas.edu.
‘Connect: Four Short Plays’
After retiring from a career in environmental health, longtime gay political activist Allan Baker turned to playwriting a few years ago. Since then his plays have been netting kudos at indie festivals. Now, Baker brings ‘Click,’ ‘Voices,’ ‘Five Minutes’ and ‘A Midsummer Nights’ Conversation,’ four short plays about negotiating love, family and relationships in the gay community. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays through April 17. Off Center, 2211 Hidalgo St. $15-$30, sliding scale. Thursdays pay-what-you-can. All ticket sales benefit AIDS Service of Austin, OutYouth Austin and the Equality Texas Foundation. www.abbyproductions.com
‘Jan Heaton: Laguna’
Solitary shells, tangled kelp on the shore, water patterns, lush floral masses and details of trees and foliage are the inspiration for Austin artist Jan Heaton’s latest series of luminous, elegant watercolors. Opening: 6 to 8 p.m. Exhibit continues thorugh April 28. Wally Workman Gallery, 1202 W. Sixth St. Free. www.wallyworkman.com.
Photo by Kimberley Mead.
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Theater review: “The Friend of Carlos Monzon”
When Edwin “Bud” Shrake died last May he died writing — he was about 100 pages into a new novel and was working on staging a play with the Austin Film Festival’s Barbara Morgan.
That play, which had a sort of staged reading before an invite-only crowd at the Long Center’s Debra & Kevin Rollins Studio Theater Wednesday night, is about how writing nearly got Shrake killed. “The Friend of Carlos Monzon,” which featured impressive original Spanish guitar music by Ray Benson, film and still images, is based on a writing assignment gone awry: In the ’70s, while writing for Sports Illustrated, Shrake was assigned to cover the Carlos Monzon-Bennie Briscoe middleweight title fight. At the time, communists and terrorists were blowing things up, death squads found good sport in disappearing people by tossing them out of airborne planes and exiled president Juan Peron was on his way back from Spain to make it all better.
One night, while sitting in a bar, Shrake had the misfortune of being swept up in a post-bombing raid, thrown into a secret prison and held incommunicado. No one, not even his editors in New York, knew what had become of him. Prisoners were interrogated and tortured. The unluckiest went skydiving without a chute.
That’s the set-up. Director Jeff Nichols — whose “Shotgun Stories” Roger Ebert named one of the best films of 2008 — had most of the cast sitting in chairs on the stage, with a screen overhead. The simple set and minimal special effects left the cast — some of whom had mere days to prepare — nowhere to hide, but they did great, particularly Ray McKinnon as Bivens, the fictionalized Shrake, who has to convey outrage, terror and bitter humor. The cast also includes hometown boy Austin Nichols, who starred in “John from Cincinnati,” which ran for just one season on HBO. Another native, Gabriel Luna, quite capably plays Monzon. Morgan, who emphasized the show is a work in progress, said that most of the actors flew in Sunday and started rehearsing Monday. Under those circumstances it’s a heroic feat.
There were a couple of technical glitches, maybe a flubbed line or two, but pretty much everybody in the audience was in a forgiving mood, there to celebrate Shrake’s life and accomplishments. A tough crowd it was not, even before Shrake’s son, Ben, offered a warm welcome. If last night proved anything, it was that Shrake was writing as well as he ever was when he passed away, which is the way any writer would want it.
