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.
Texas is having an Alice boom with Ballet Austin performing Septime Weber’s Alice on May 12-14 at The Long Center and Texas Ballet Theater performing Stevenson’s Alice, May 19-21 at Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, and June 2-4 at Winspear Opera House in Dallas.
Iberian monophony, Notre Dame polyphony, Medieval mystery plays, Renaissance madrigals, Baroque operas, French virelai, Spanish villancico, Italian frottola, Scottish ballades, Sephardic love songs, and much more—early music encompasses a dazzling wealth of forms and styles.
Exploring the aesthetics of self-destruction, Lionel Maunz uses cast iron, concrete, and steel to create dystopian figurative sculptures—surprisingly organic forms that appear distorted by dismemberment and decay.