The Who perform “Pinball Wizard” fromTommy, live on the Isle of Wight.
Guest blogger Gail Sachson owns Ask Me About Art. She is vice-chair of the Cultural Affairs Commission, a Public Art Committee member and the Office of Cultural Affairs Liaison to the Dallas Theater Center Board of Directors.
The best theater in town this week was not listed in any guide or reviewed by any critic. It was last Tuesday afternoon when Kevin Moriarty, the still new, still energetic artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center, held the first rehearsal for The Who’s Tommy, the first show of the DTC season (August 27-September 21).
Encircled by rows of local and not-so-local dancers, singers, musicians and crew, Moriarty was the best warm-up act a show could have (although even he had trouble warming up the Kalita Humphreys — why can’t we get the AC fixed?)
Like Tommy – the first album to be billed as a “rock opera” — Moriarty exuded the power of “a time bomb waiting to explode”- explode excitement, that is. His motivating, madcap story of how he found the Who filled the black and barren stage with the energy of a rock musical. He was a zany stand-up. An audacious, uncensored club act. He created a rapport with the young performers.
The DTC website warns of Tommy’s “loud rock and roll.” Moriarty promises that. He also promises that Tommy won’t be Rodgers and Hammerstein. Tommy, he says, will be rebellious, angry and muscular. With its stage set of steel staircases and water crossings, you should be prepared to take a journey. A spiritual journey , which will stir your soul, transcend the evils of the world and take you to a better place.
Broadway musical version — with Tony Award-winning sets by Dallasite John Arnone.
Art isn’t just what hangs in museums and galleries or what sells for millions in international auctions. As that art has become literally bigger in size and pricier, Internet-age counter-movements of small, affordable, personalized (and sometimes mass-produced) works have cropped up. The line between artist and appreciator has blurred in the process.
Etsy Dallas, an online co-op of 150-plus local artists, is one example of the do-it-yourself movement. The group recently hosted its first art barbecue.
Now, on Aug. 17 at Continental Lofts in Deep Ellum, The Dallas Craft Mafiabrings on The Show Pony Show will feature the work of many locals, including some from Etsy, in an indie-craft show.
Note: this post was modified on Aug. 14 to clarify that Etsy Dallas, while participating, is not the organizer of Show Pony Show.
Stone, Brolin and the filmmaking team believe they are crafting a biography so honest that loyal Republicans and the Bushes themselves might see it. Given Stone’s filmmaking history [including such films as Nixon, JFK and The People v. Larry Flynt], coupled with a sneak peek at an early “W.” screenplay draft, that prediction looks like wishful thinking.
Speaking of real estate news (see “SCADs” below) …
Late last year — after 16 years of wandering around to different performance spaces in Fort Worth — Stage West came back to its long-time home at 821 W. Vickery. The company left the old warehouse because the reconstruction of I-30 had made it perilous for theatergoers to get there. But the I-30 re-routing is done, large portions of downtown Fort Worth are racing to redevelop — so Stage West raised a quarter of a million dollars to renovate the space and moved in with a revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings. It’s hard for an arts organization to build a stable audience without a permanent home, so it was little short of miraculous that Stage West managed to survive — let alone that it returned in suchcomfy shape.
It was just a brief announcement in the business section of the Fort Worth Star Telegram yesterday, but Stage West has now passed another milestone: They’ve bought the building.
Actually, Stage West board members formed a limited partnership with another tenant, and together, they’ve bought the warehouse and the building next door, currently housing a construction company. This way, the Stage West staff gets to avoid the leaky-roof-and-city-taxes headaches of being the actual owner — problems that dogged the company in the ’90s when it found a home in the old TCU movie theater on University Drive. After 10 years, those problems led the theater to sell the building and continue the hejira that has led them, full circle, back to West Vickery.
The irony is that Stage West’s current show is an extended run of Noises Off . Michael Frayn’s farce, as you no doubt remember, concerns a dysfunctional theater troupe that falls apart at the seams during the run of a stage farce.
The bottom item in Steve Brown’s business column in the Dallas Morning Newson July 18 announced that “the Savannah College of Art and Design has considered the vacant West End Marketplace and an adjoining building for the site of a new downtown Dallas campus.”
Here’s hoping it happens. It could be a huge addition to Dallas’ cultural community, to the downtown scene. Certainly, it’d be the best thing to hit those old bricks since … the Old Spaghetti Warehouse?
For those who don’t know,SCAD is a hot, private fine arts college these days. My daughter seriously considered applying there, and we looked into it.
Which is why I know: One reason SCAD has such a rep among small fine arts colleges is that since its start in 1978, it has been involved with renovating and preserving Savannah’s historic buildings. The Georgia town has become a trendy tourist spot for its many antebellum and Victorian restorations, and SCAD’s downtown campus now consists of 60 of those buildings, including several on the old town square, many bought when they were thoroughly derelict. So SCAD’s interest in the West End Marketplace makes sense.
The college is practically a one-stop arts scene: It has 10 galleries, owns two historic theaters, runs its own week-long film festival, hosts a sidewalk arts festival. Notable grads include soul singer India.Arie, graphic novelists the Luna Brothers and Rene Perez, lead singer for the hip hop-reggaeton band, Calle 13.
You get the picture: It’s the grown-up, college-age version of Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School. Imagine a piece of that next door to the Arts District.
As Manny mentioned, this weekend marked the first of five presentations in a series of video and new media art presented by the Video Association of Dallas at Conduit Gallery. The good news: If you missed Saturday’s opening reception at Conduit Gallery, you can still catch the installations, which will be on display this week. More good news: There are four more weekends of receptions, talks and new work.
Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 13 was the star of this week’s show. Barney’s best known for his Cremaster cycle of videos, and, in the pop culture world, his relationship with Bjork. Drawing Restraint 13 is less fantastical, if equally open to interpretation: Barney appears as Gen. Douglas MacArthur, “branding” a series of his own drawings. I missed co-curator Carolyn Sortor’s talk on the piece, but she provides a helpful overview on her blog. Barney’s site, too, gives more on Drawing Restraint, but doesn’t include this part of the series.
Other highlights:
The Torcito Project. Artist Marcin Romocki transforms photos of faces into percussion pieces by creating bitmaps of them played through the old Mac program Virtual Drummer.
RMB City - A SecondLife City Planning by China Tracy. China Tracy/Cao Fei is creating a development/film/piece in the virtual reality game Second Life. I’m not sure I’d want to live in this world of floating pandas and shooting flames, but an on-line auction going on in London during the exhibit indicates that I may be one of the few.
In the New York Times Book Review, Rachel Donadio’s column on author tours confirmed something I’ve argued for several years — that the rise of literary series such as Arts & Letters Live has been, in part, due to the lack of sufficient (and sufficiently big-name) promotional visits in other venues, particularly bookstore chains. In response, publishers have developed their own speakers bureaus to handle (that is, organize and promote) non-bookstore engagements — authors giving motivational addresses to business conferences, for instance, or even appearing at a socialite’s birthday party.
As one can imagine, novelists are at a disadvantage here, especially non-big-name authors. Fiction generally doesn’t translate into easily digestible office truisms, and if the author isn’t already a bestseller or prize-winner, who wants to hear from him? Throughout the column, non-fiction writers tend to be more in-demand and fare better in the world of hawking books and hawking themselves. Typically, perhaps, Lawrence Wright, the Austin-based journalist, author of The Looming Tower, talks about turning a tour to Cairo into some helpful fact-finding.
Novelist David Leavitt, on the other hand, got booked in Milan as the opening act for Jethro Tull.
With the Amazon Wish List, I was vaguely aware that one can store the data for varioius desired items at the online retailer. But I was fuzzy on the fact that the list can be public. Anyone can log in and find out your heart’s desires.
So imagine my surprise in learning that Archinect has compiled a list of notable listers — a list of famous (and not-so-famous) architects’ and artists’ gift registries.
On the list, you can get glimpses of artists’ bookshelves and CD collections, a look into their personal tastes. What pop artist Ed Ruscha wants is a CD compiled by Hunter S. Thompson that’s no longer in print. Architect Rem Koolhaas — when he isn’t designing buildings like the Wyly Theater — is a Trekkie. DJ Spooky hankers for the DVD of the 1973 espionage-and-black-revolution thriller, The Spook Who Sat By the Door.
That last one is so perfect, you can’t help but laugh — and then wonder whether someone has created a few of these lists as tongue-in-cheek jokes. For instance, novelist Kathy Acker has been dead for 11 years. But she still has a brief but appropriate Amazon wish list. The status of other lists are more tantalizingly uncertain. Take Kara Walker’s list. The artist behind the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s current, must-see, incendiary exhibition of nightmarish-erotic-funny-angry silhouettes wants . . .
Alexandra and Robert Switala, a brother and sister violin-viola duo from Grapevine, will appear Sunday on From the Top, the NPR/PBS program about young musicians performing at Carnegia Hall. They’ll play Johan Halvorsen’s jumpin’ Passacaglia on a theme from Handel for violin and viola. Their playing the final variation, back to back — so they can’t get any visual cues from each other — is a bit of a feat. Both Robbie and Allie study with Jan Mark Sloman, associate principal concertmaster with the DSO, and Allie will play with the Fort Worth Symphony this fall.
