| Announcement of Fusebox Festival 2010 Line-up |
| Written by Sean French | |
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Around forty artists/groups and over 450 individual artists will participate in the 7th Annual Fusebox Festival including Big Dance Theater, John Kelly, Luke Savisky, Greg Brooker, Theater Replacement, Rude Mechs, Daniel Barrow, Kristen Kosmas, Action Hero, Phil Soltanoff, Kaiji Moriyama, Frederick Gravel, Allison Orr, Graham Reynolds, Mike Smith, Wura Ogunji, Heloise Gold, Okay Mountain, and Rubber Rep, among others hailing from Japan to London to Austin.
By design, the festival is a catalyst for interaction between live performance, visual art, installation, theater, dance and music, spanning a myriad of venues throughout the city including The steps of the State Capitol Building, the historic Paramount, Austin Museum of Art, The Long Center for the Performing Arts, Off Center, Salvage Vanguard, Okay Mountain, MASS Gallery, U.S. Art Authority, to name a few.
Artistic director Ron Berry started Fusebox out of a need for more dynamic cross-disciplinary programming presented in Austin. The intention was to create a multi-track experience of new forms and ideas, a home for artistic risk-taking and experimentation. Additionally, Fusebox began as a platform for national and international audiences to experience Austin's burgeoning performance/art scenes, and regional audiences a chance to engage with cutting-edge artists from around the globe.
Over the past six years, Fusebox Festival has created a hub of idea sharing and discovery for some of the most innovative and forward-thinking artists working today. Previous artists include: Forced Entertainment, Tim Etchells, Deborah Hay, Pierre Rigal, Miguel Gutierrez, Rotozaza, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Rude Mechanicals, tEEth, Reggie Watts, the Debate Society, HIJACK, LeeSaar, Phil Soltanoff, Kalup Linzy, Emily Johnson, and many more.
This year, Fusebox Festival is proudly announcing a partnership with Texas Performing Arts (formerly the University of Texas Performing Arts Center) to expand and deepen the presentation of international, cutting-edge music, theatre, dance, and conversation taking place in and about Austin. The collaboration is designed to cultivate innovative artistic experiences and to bridge various art forms, audiences, and geography.
"Texas Performing Arts is proud to launch this unprecedented partnership with Austin¹s most progressive performing arts festival. As partners in the pursuit of the most innovative arts work available, we can help sustain and develop the creative capital that has become one of Austin¹s most enduring brands," noted Kathy Panoff, Director of Texas Performing Arts.
Texas Performing Arts joins other 2010 Fusebox Festival partners including ABPorter.org, testPerformancetest, Arthouse, AMOA, L-Style/G-Style, Okay Mountain, Rampant Arts, Rude Mechs, Salvage Vanguard, and Thinkwell.
More about the 2010 Artists (there will be a handful of key additions in the coming weeks, stay tuned):
Action Hero, Bristol, http://www.actionhero.org.uk/awestern/ (A Western--performance) A Western is a performance for a bar. Within the space we locate our valley, our saloon, our empty street. We find our audience and together we make A Western. A Western collides the immediacy and intimacy of live performance with the epic emotional experience of the cinematic blockbuster, a celebration of a failure to capture the true size and majesty of the Wild West. It is an experiment with the relationship between an audience and an event, a re-imaginging of everyday landscapes that helps uncover the beauty that already exists in the actual environments we inhabit.
"Resolutely off-kilter but entirely accessible...brilliant." -- Metro
Daniel Barrow, Winnipeg, http://www.danielbarrow.com/index.swf.htm (Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry--animation/performance) Awarded the 2008 Images Prize at its premiere, Daniel Barrow's newest "manual animation" combines overhead projection with video, music, and live narration to tell the story of a garbage man with a vision to create an independent phone book chronicling the lives of each person in his city.
“…see this and prepare for revelation. Barrow is fluid and holds perfect time…It is a bizarre live experience, unlike any I’ve seen, unlikely to be forgotten any time soon." Caitlin McCarthy, Willamette Week
Big Dance Theater, New York City, http://www.bigdancetheater.org/ (Comme Toujours Here I Stand--Dance/Theater) Comme Toujours Here I Stand re-invents Agnes Varda's classic New Wave film, CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 for the stage. Shot in Paris in 1961, the film tracks the early evening hours in the life of a marginally talented pop singer, as she waits to hear if she has terminal cancer. The Company uses the script as a found object to create an intimate portrait of a woman shadowed by death, while still caught up in the breezy pleasures of the day: shopping, visiting, strolling. The piece serves also as a critique of the flexible and facile nature of the medium of film, when set against the hand made qualities of live dance and theater.
"Deeply brilliant ...people need to see this amazing company.” The New York Times
Greg Brooker, Los Angeles (Texan--Poetry) Texan is a site- specific poem constructed of text, paper, 1 million newspapers, a crop duster, a taxicab, the geographical expanse of the state of Texas and twin brothers. The poem’s ending will reside in the twin brothers’ bodies for 7 years and then disappear.
Gregory Brooker is a poet and screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in Verse, Denver Quarterly, LIT, The Iowa Review, An Apparent Event: A Second Story Books Anthology and other publications. In 2006 he was a poetry fellow at The MacDowell Colony.
Heloise Gold, Austin, http://www.deeplistening.org/heloise/about.html (TBD--dance/performance)
“Gold’s work is an exquisite mélange of gleeful humor, captivating images and finely etched movement detail, all eliciting a meditative dream state if you can stop laughing enough.” --The Austin Chronicle
The Grouped'ArtGravelArtGroup (GAG), Montreal (Gravel Works--dance/music/performance) GravelWorks is live music and choreography. It is a showcase of moods, humour, bodies, pop songs, personalities and friendly impertinence. This is the full version of a piece begun in 2006. Cultivating paradox and irony in nonchalant fashion, the mastermind and clear-headed commentator Frédérick Gravel turns the presentation upside down to reveal the “traceability” of the artistic process. In league with the audience, he thumbs his nose at the avant-garde and the exclusive preserves of the elite. In an offhand way, he takes popular culture and establishment culture out of their assigned roles and brings them together, top to bottom and bottom to top. The Grouped'ArtGravelArtGroup (GAG) is a variable collective of multi-talented artists who work together to “create extensively, try prolifically, persist enormously” and have fun while doing so. In intelligent fashion
John Kelly http://web.mac.com/johnkellyperformance/Site/home.html (Paved Paradise Redux: The Art of Joni Mitchell--performance/music) After an eight-year absence, two-time Obie Award winning artist John Kelly once again inhabits the persona of Joni Mitchell in an entirely new evening of songs and stories.
"There's drag and then there's transformation through spiritual osmosis, and that's what John Kelly accomplishes with this tribute... Magnificent." -- The New York Times
Kristen Kosmas with Physical Plant, New York City and Austin (This From Cloudland--performance) Thirty-five hundred feet directly below the world's only known micro-nation, two young lovers are holding themselves hostage while someone falls off a high wire and someone else has their head stuck in the mouth of a bear. Kristen Kosmas's latest text-for-speaking, This From Cloudland is a tender onslaught of stories that touch, about placement, displacement, and replacement. Featuring NY writer/performer Kristen Kosmas with Katie Pearl and Steve Moore (of Austin’s Physical Plant Theater) as the Spooler of Thread, the Innocent Bystander, the Assembler of Envelopes, and Everybody Else in this benevolent labyrinth where everyone's looking for the words for everything.
Kristen Kosmas is a playwright and performer. She has had plays commissioned by Performance Space 122 (NYC), Seattle University's SITE Specific, Dixon Place (NYC), and New City Theater.
Physical Plant is one of Austin’s seminal alternative theater companies. Founded in 1993 by Steve Moore, Daniel Aukin, and Mike Martin, Physical Plant has produced finely detailed award-winning shows such as Kindermann Depiction, Fatigue, Not Clown, and Anna Bella Eema. Now helmed by Katie Pearl with Steve Moore as back up, Physical Plant will rouse from its current slumbers to bring Kristen Kosmas’ newest dream to life.
Kaiji Moriyama, Tokyo (The Velvet Suite--dance/performance/music) The US Premiere by one of Japan's most acclaimed contemporary dancers. The Velvet Suite, was created to fit the theme of last year’s Venice Biennale: “Body and Eros.”
With music by Yasuhiro Kasamatsu, who is known for writing music for productions by renowned stage director Yukio Ninagawa, The Velvet Suite sees Moriyama joined onstage by violinist Koichiro Muroya on a set that features objects—a heart, a uterus and a spherical ball made with over 1,000 red flowers—made by Moriyama himself.
Okay Mountain, Austin, http://www.okaymountain.com/ (TBD--visual art/installation)
Wura Ogunji, Austin, (one hundred black women, one hundred actions--performance/video) one hundred black women, one hundred actions' is a performance of critical actions, gestures and movements from 100 black women around the world--performed in east Austin, projected live in west Austin.
Allison Orr & Graham Reynolds, Austin http://www.forkliftdanceworks.org/; http://www.grahamreynolds.com/ (Untitled--Dance/Music) These pillars of the Austin art scene join forces to kick off the festival on the steps of the capitol, with hundreds of two-steppers and a Texas-sized country swing band that will make your heart pound.
Rubber Rep, Austin, http://rubberrep.org/ (First Name Last Name--performance) The sound of a vent. The taste of a mouth. The touch of a stranger's hands. [FIRST NAME LAST NAME] is a theatrical exploration of one person's life told purely through the physical sensations that person has experienced. In this initial phase of development, Rubber Repertory will begin by selecting a person to serve as the subject of the show. They will conduct interviews during the Fusebox Festival, and select one of the participants to make the piece about.
Rude Mechanicals, Austin, http://www.rudemechs.com/ Since 1995, Rude Mechs has used performance to explore collectivity, collaboration, and community. The result is a mercurial slate of 22 original theatrical productions ranging from Low-Fi, Agit-Prop, Lec-Dems to Multi-Media, Romantic-Era, Closet Dramas.
Named one of three companies in the country “making theatre that matters”
Luke Savisky, Austin, http://www.lukesavisky.com/ (Stepchild--video installation) Award winning local video/film artist unleashes a new project on the steps of the City Hall. He will also be in residency at the Austin Museum of Art for the duration of the festival.
Mike Smith & Jay Sanders (Untitled--video) Erectheum Sanders and Smith come together once again but this time doing their own things investigating the myths behind the Greek Fraternity system and the mysteries surrounding these sacred fraternal organizations.
Using sound, text and of course Greek letters, the collaborators will transform Testsite into a new chapter of the national order of the Pan Hellenic Society. Fuji, Sammies and all the Sigma Chi brothers will surely take note of the new house near to the UT campus.
Stephan Hillerbrand, Mary Magsamen, and Kirk Lynn (Houston/Austin) Blender Love is a modern day séance for broken electronic devices using interactive performance and live cinema.
Blender Love evaluates the ecology and psychology of technology by creating a live séance to extract memories from beloved obsolete technologies from toasters to iPods. Through a series of structured séances, artists Hillerbrand + Magsamen and playwright Kirk Lynn, invite the general public to bring their broken or malfunctioning items to Fusebox Festival. Stephan, Mary and Kirk will prepare the participants for their experience by asking them to fill out an information sheet about their technology. This information will be used to cull images for a live video feed that decodes and projects the technology’s aura onto a video screen. The psychic will be an experimental element that may or may not provide otherworldly interaction with the object and its aura. A pile of equipment from participants will amass throughout the performance and recycled at the end.
Phil Soltanoff, New York City, http://www.philsoltanoff.org/ (LA Party--performance/video) A fanatical vegan slides off the wagon one night, falling head-first into a wild L.A. bender. The story narrated by David Barlow collides with live video in which six performers produce a compelling composite human being. A charming soupçon from the celebrated Phil Soltanoff whose collaborations with France's CIE 111 have produced playful meldings of theatre, visual art, dance and new cirque.
SODALITAS, Austin, TX This Austin based visual art collective (Jana Swec, Joseph Phillips and Shea Little) will lead a series of walks through Austin. The project is based on the idea of a Dérive or Flâneur, both terms loosely refer to a drifting or strolling through an environment to experience the sociological, anthropological, literary, historical and geographical relationships between the individual and their city. During Fusebox Sodalitas will take a walk, and they encourage participation from anyone interested in joining them. The group will document their walk with photography, video, audio, mapping and collecting objects found along the way. The documentation of this walk will be displayed at the Big Medium
Theater Replacement, Vancouver, http://www.theatrereplacement.org/ (WeeTube--Performance/video) Created and performed by James Long and Maiko Bae Yamamoto, WeeTube is a durational, installation-based and site-responsive performance for an intimate audience. The performers watch YouTube videos with audience members and then perform the publicly posted comments in a variety of dramatic settings. These comments have been prerecorded into the performer’s iPods and they speak the text as they hear it.
“First baffling and then hilarious, each of these scenes offers dialogue revealing the intimate inanity of a world where people communicate through the ether in meaningless jabber. I have seen the future, and it is a LOL funny freak show.” —Vancouver Sun
“It is amazing how people in the supposed anonymity of virtual space employ insult, racisms and worse. With WeeTube Theater Replacement expertly reveals an alternate world and how it’s language is formed.” —Nachtkritk.de, Germany |
AUSTIN, Texas