critical analysis of visual & performing arts
Review: Assistance
IMAGE ABOVE: Adam Gibbsm, Lindsay Ehrhardt, and Rebekah Stevens Gibbs in Assistance. Photo by Pin Lim. Black...
Reviews
The Darkness of Light
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.
Peter and the Starcatcher
If the title character of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan existed before the beloved story begins, he might have been a nameless boy in the bowels of a boat caught in the crossfire of warring pirates. That’s the story of Peter and the Starcatcher, a winsome play touring the country and still enjoying a successful run on Broadway.
Michael Blair & Angel Fernandez: New Work
Over the years a few things happen when you write about local art— the most basic being that you become familiar with local work (and occasionally with the artists who make it).
Summer Rites at Freneticore
In what other season would you see sparkling fringe, bright pink hoop skirts, and male feet and svelte legs in point shoes skimming across the floor?
Review: Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon is the most over-hyped Broadway musical of the last decade. But no doubt you’ll still be laughing about it to your friends long after the touring musical leaves Texas.
The Real Thing Main Street Theater
“Loving and being loved is unliterary,” says Annie in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, on stage right now at Main Street Theater
Review: The Aliens
In the Horse Head Theatre Company production of The Aliens, two men of wasted talent, who are likely...
Natasha Bowdoin: In the Garden
There are various kinds of fabrics and fabrications, health from metaphoric to material, structural to ideological, social to...
Majority Rules: A Decade of Contemporary Art Acquisitions
At first glance, order the McNay Art Museum’s Majority Rules: A Decade of Contemporary Art Acquisitions reads merely...
FotoFest Discoveries
There was only one other person in the exhibition space with me, but she was otherwise occupied. Talking in hushed tones on her phone, she scribbled away in her date book. Technically, we were in the lobby of an office building, so her behavior wasn’t out of order. Have public lobbies become the only private spaces skyscrapers have to offer? Judging by the amount of people I saw pacing behind the temporary gallery walls, I would have to say yes.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: WITNESS
“Welcome to Historic Braddock,” a black-and-white photograph greets visitors near the title wall to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston exhibition, LaToya Ruby Frazier: WITNESS. The gelatin silver print presents a straightforward, close-up view of the friendly advertisement printed on what appears to be the temporary wooden fencing one might see surrounding a construction site or abandoned property. The bold lettering stands out against a black background, and hovers over the white silhouette of a skyline – Braddock’s, one would assume.