If you want to show off the place where you work on your art, send us an e-mail to artandseek@kera.org.
Artists of every kind are encouraged to submit. My friend Aileen McDermott is a tap dancer, and she wanted to practice in her tiny apartment, so she dragged me to Home Depot, bought a giant piece of tap-friendly wood, threw it in the back of my transmission-challenged Ford Ranger and then planted it on her living room floor. Boom - creation of a dance studio. I’ll beg her for a picture, but the moral of the story is: We Want To See Where You Do Your Thing.
And if you are interested in sprucing up your current spot or designing your dream space, La Reunion TX and the Dallas Museum of Art are partnering on project called Make Space for Art. Artists of all media are encourage to participate.
The president of Americans for the Arts and the CEO of the Houston Arts Alliance make the case for the arts in Houston as an “economic powerhouse.”
But a Houston TV reporter goes undercover and finds a lack of oversight — from the Houston Arts Alliance — for how city tax money has been spent on particular art projects. He also finds it has helped fund artworks to foster “lesbian puppet tourism” among other things.
Meanwhile, the salaries for stage actors in Seattle (and, one assumes, in Texas, too) have remained flat for 15 years, while many theater companies, in that time, have expanded staff, facilities and fundraising. One well-established actor’s decision to leave town inspired Mike Daisey’s now-famous stage monologue/diatribe, How Theater Failed America.
This Friday and Saturday, Contemporary Dance/Fort Worth will premiere a new work — one that involves dancing slowly across the 300-foot-long Small Exhibits Building at the Will Rogers Auditorium, all to an original score by Austin composer William Meadows.
Sounds appealingly Robert Wilson-Philip Glass-ish, doesn’t it? Hope so. Even the fact that the Small Exhibits Building is better known as the Poultry Barn adds a feel of ‘well, that’s certainly getting outside the usual, boring performance locations, you think?”
The fact is, while strolling around various metroplex spots, I’ve often wondered what a performance work or big musical dance number would do to the place. When I mention this idea to people, their immediate response is to offer ‘out in beautiful nature’ suggestions like, say, the Spillway at White Rock or some other pretty outdoor locale.
Me, I think of more urban locations, places where you could really look for distinctive “found” advantages of sightlines, landscape views, gritty exclusivity, acoustics, location sensibility, whatever. Spots such as: [Read more →]
About 40 people shuffled into the C3 Theater for a video overview of the competition and its driving force, the North Texas arts residency La Reunion TX. Then the DMA’s Nicole Stutzman led the group into the Center’s Tech Lab. Design materials of every kind were available inside the lab, including decidedly low-tech paper and pencils. Nicole encouraged participants towardGoogle Sketc and will conduct workshops for that software on Nov. 13 and Dec. 11 during C3’s Open Lab nights.
Tyler Fields in the Tech Lab
“This is not as intimidating as I thought it would be,” said Tyler Fields, above, on his first attempt at Google Sketch-Up. Tyler’s art is software design, so his goal was to fit three team members - a designer, a developer and an idea man (which is Tyler) into that 16 by 16 foot space. “You don’t move until you’re sitting in each other’s laps.”
One of the great losses in North Texas arts came two years ago when Fort Worth’s Bruce Wood Dance Company folded after a decade of homegrown modern choreography that traveled the world. Fallen Angel, written, produced, directed and edited by first-time Cowtown filmmaker Mark Whittier for $2,000, takes us backstage as the company prepares for the end of what would be its last full season.
The 15-minute documentary, screening at 5:15 p.m. Saturday at the Angelika, touches on the financial woes sweeping American dance companies. As it was, Wood was working with an annual budget of less than $500,000. But the film’s real accomplishment is in explaining — and more importantly showing — why the struggles were worth it. The exquisite photography of such masterpieces as “Dust, Texas,” “Follow Me” (commissioned by the U.S. Army!) and “Rhapsody in Blue” is a reminder of what Wood pulled off.
In talking about the differences between pleasing his audience and pandering to it, he says, “They want something remarkable to happen.” It usually did.
Fallen Angel plays as part of the compilation “Dance,” which also includes Dallas video production whiz Ben Britt’s humorous Hot Wheels, four minutes of his better half, Carolyn Sortor, wheeling around in what looks like a walker against a variety of still backdrops. It’s goofy fun.
Also on Saturday, at noon, University of North Texas grad student Scott Thurman’s 14-minute Smokeytakes us into the life of a shy, humble Elvis impersonator. City worker by day, hip shaker by night, Smokey Binion Jr. plies his pantomime in the small Panhandle town of Stinnett with low-key dignity. Quoting the King, he says, “An image is a hard thing to live up to.”
Smokey screens as part of the “Folks Like Us” compilation, which also includes Flower Mound filmmaker Omar Milano’s short doc A Tale for Shmuli, about an engaged couple fighting breast cancer.
Meanwhile, Gordon K. Smith’s Science Gone Wild! screens at 11:15 Thursday night. Smith, a Dallas actor, filmmaker, film researcher and host of “It Came From Dallas,” looks at the 1950s birth of science fiction films. He organizes wonderfully wacky clips into witty categories like “Space Travel for Dummies” and “When Seafood Goes Bad.”
“You mean if I went there, I wouldn’t weigh anything?” a woman asks in Project Moonbase (1953) after a scientist describes the properties of a space station. Featuring primitive robots, “guided meteors and deadly rays,” Science Gone Wild! takes the viewer back to a simpler time of conflict and paranoia.
Here’s an overview of the Dallas Video Festival, which runs tonight through Sunday.
Images courtesy Dallas Video Festival and Bruce Wood Dance Company
The Texas Ballet Theatre has managed to raise only $1.4 million of the needed $2 million to go ahead with its full season. But the company opened its performance of Mozart Requiem Friday at Bass Hall in Fort Worth. Margart Putnam in the Morning News called the work “heartbreaking,” while Punch Shaw in the Star Telegram felt the real tragedy was the lack of a sellout crowd to appreciate it.
The Dallas Center for the Performing Arts announced today that CEO Bill Lively will transition into a new role — president of the Center’s Endowment Trust. The move, effective Jan. 1, will keep Lively as the Center’s chief fundraiser while allowing for a to-be-named CEO to take over the day-to-day operation of the Center. That hire is obviously going to be a big one, as the new CEO will have a lot of say into the Center’s direction going forward. DCPA says that it has hired an executive search firm to interview candidates.
UPDATE: It should be noted that the driver of the action here is Lively being named the full-time president and CEO of the Super Bowl XLV host committee. You can read more about that appointment here.
With the Impressionists at the Kimbell and all the King Tut hooplah taking over the Dallas Museum of Art, you might not have noticed that the other blockbuster exhibition in the area — and one that’s just a leettle more contemporary and risk-taking than the other two — closes this weekend. It’s your last chance to see Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Here Walker is, talking about some of her 2004 installation, Fibbergibbet and Mumbo Jumbo, work she did while an artist-in-residence at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. It’s some of her most consciously “theatrical” art about slavery and the pop culture imagery of African-Americans - using, as it does, stage sets, shadow puppets, projections, paintings and videos of her own performances.
… it’s the one we’ve had since 9/11. So says Michael Boehm in the Los Angeles Times.
What many of them called “the perfect storm” hit in 2001. The tech-bubble burst, the World Trade Center was attacked, and economic recession ensued, discouraging donors and ticket buyers, curtailing government grants and leading to layoffs, cancellations, deferred expansion plans and downsized theatrical seasons and productions.
Charitable gifts to the arts rebounded with the stock market, but in many cases attendance did not, as the public’s fascination with the Internet and home electronics accelerated.
The bottom line is that worries never left, experts say, so arts decision-makers didn’t need the current financial crisis to snap them to attention. There has been an ongoing urgency to face the new music and dance — not the old-fashioned waltz but steps unimagined before Necessity called.
And in a passage relevant to the current troubles of the Texas Ballet Theatre, Boehm adds:
Dance, in fact, is the canary in the coal mine. During the 1990s, says John Munger, research director for the national service organization Dance/USA, it was typical for no more than six to 10 of the 80 or so companies with budgets over $1 million to cut spending in any given year. Since 2001, at least 20 a year and as many as 44 have been compelled to downsize.
