Last April, as the evening weekend revelries began at Fusebox, Austin’s annual cross-disciplinary arts festival, performer Joseph Keckler took the stage at Al Volta’s Midnight Bar.
Zack Ingram wasn’t entirely optimistic in spring, when he applied for the inaugural Tito’s Prize, a collaboration between Big Medium and Tito’s Handmade Vodka to help develop an Austin-based artist’s career.
As a curmudgeonly connoisseur of holiday performing arts, I’m always on the lookout for the innovative, quirky or simply new shows to devour like Christmas candy each most-wonderful-time-of-the-year
Shakespeare, politics, glam rock: these are not terms we often put together, if ever, yet this month, Austin’s Hidden Room theater company plans to merge the three into a rocking trio for a production of the Bard’s glorious history play Henry IV, through Oct. 1 at York Rite Masonic Hall.
“Keep Austin weird,” the bumper-sticker admonition goes, but German filmmaker John Bock—the latest of many European artists to take a cinematic crack at Texas, has envisioned a weirder Austin in Dead + Juicy, an exhibition combining an “uncanny musical” with an installation of transformed versions of the film’s props and sets.
“We always felt that this was a clubhouse for a group of friends who felt like we were a little bit off,” he said. “We still feel a little off and we still want to be that clubhouse, that space for people like us who feel a little off. We have to find another way to do that now.”
City as the “common denominator” is the main consideration of DATA CITY, an international UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) exhibition of new media installations by artists from members of the organization’s Creative Cities Network (UCCN). Austin artist and designer Clay Odom has been invited to represent the Texas state capital.