Loop38 and Texas New Music Ensemble Stir up Houston’s Contemporary Music Scene
A pair of excellent new music concerts on the Houston calendar this month illuminated the distinct yet overlapping currents that shape the body of contemporary music.
Texas Lens: Ian Casady’s 20 years at Houston Ballet
Houston Ballet Principal Ian Casady will be honored for his twenty spectacular years with the company during the Margaret Alkek Williams Jubilee of Dance on Nov. 30 at the Wortham Center.
Life, Death and Healing: Hyde Park Theatre Partners with Catastrophic Theatre for Will Eno’s Wakey, Wakey
In Obie Award-winning playwright Will Eno’s latest work, Wakey, Wakey, the endearingly befuddled Guy takes the audience along on a somewhat bumbling memorial journey through his life on the way to his death.
Avant Chamber Ballet’s Musical Season
Avant Chamber Ballet opens its seventh season with an ambitious collaboration with the Verdigris Ensemble for a stunning production of The Little Match Girl Passion, David Lang’s haunting choral adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, “The Little Match Girl.”
Invoking the Body: Jasper Johns at Menil Drawing Institute
On view through Jan. 27, The Condition of Being Here at the newly-inaugurated Menil Drawing Institute (MDI) in Houston includes a selection of Jasper Johns’s drawings dating from 1954 to 2016, many of which get at the fragility of the body and its musings.
Dialogues Between Art and Music/Soundings: New Music at the Nasher
Listen to music in a roomful of visual art, and your eyes and ears may pick up parallels thanks to sheer serendipity.
Art for All at Austin’s SAGE Studio
Even though Katie Stahl enjoyed painting when she was growing up, she earned her college degree in psychology. Later, a friend’s suggestion led her to visit Creativity Explored, a San Francisco art center with a special mission: helping people with developmental disabilities become working artists.
Tap Dance for the 21st Century: Michelle Dorrance brings artistry, collaboration, and innovation to Texas
Michelle Dorrance’s no-holds-barred approach to tap dancing has endeared her to audiences and presenters throughout her career as a solo artist.
Directing in Texas: Matt Hune
When Matt Hune, artistic director of Houston’s Rec Room Arts, talks about his role as a theater director, he speaks of perspective, space, color and texture, words that seem more the purview of the visual artist than the vocabulary of someone audiences might imagine as that mysterious person behind the scenes bossing about all the actors.
Texas Lens: Artwork is Work
One recent Friday evening, my kitchen was filled with artists. Drinking, commiserating, and laughing, we all compared gigs.
REVIEW: The Nature of Arp at Nasher Sculpture Center
At Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center through Jan. 6, The Nature of Arp considers Jean (Hans) Arp’s diverse production through his processes, linking them to the processes of the natural world.
Under a Sister’s Shadow: Ida O’Keeffe at DMA
Being a sister is complicated.
In 1961, the year Ida O’Keeffe died, her sister wrote, “In some odd way, it is a wasted life.”
That sister, Georgia, would be the one the world remembered.