The holidays are no excuse to slow down your art-going, especially since this season seems to have a bounty of new productions, along with the old standards.
Leave it to Austin’s maverick troupe, the Rude Mechs, to tackle Shakespeare’s “problem plays.” Even the Bard’s esteemed canon contains a few duds, and in the new bi-annual series, Fixing Shakespeare, the Rude Mechs attempt to slice and dice these plays into more contemporary, and perhaps more palatable, shows.
It’s a new era for the Houston Symphony. When Maestro Andrés Orozoco-Estrada mounts the podium this month to conduct a program featuring music by Sergei Rachmaninov,
Artists are leaving Texas, and for good reason. Touring equals two important things for the state's performing artists: unprecedented exposure and a chance to get off the island. An invitation to perform on the road carries with it a certain cachet, elevating an artist’s hometown reputation and expectations.
The audience for NobleMotion’s Collide experiences a tender moment in the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts’ Zilkha Hall before the show even begins. The curtain is raised and the dancers and Austin-based rock band My Education are visible for all to see. The dancers mark the evening’s work while My Education runs through their set.
With 13 curators and about 70 artists, the TX 13 Group Survey Exhibition is a cacophony of sounds, images and styles that tries for the first time to jam all the artists selected in a statewide open call for the Texas Biennial into a single space — the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum.
For lovers of Shakespeare and Molière, Ibsen and Chekhov, Miller and Williams, declaring our time a new Golden Age of the playwright might seem delusional, or at best, a flourish of hyperbole from some theater’s marketing department. But if you ask the artistic directors of some of the most respected ensembles in Texas, they’ll assure you such claims are hardly ridiculous.