Embracing the New: Texas Performing Arts’ New Season

Audra McDonald has been a leading light of Broadway for three decades, and the José Limón Dance Company has enriched the modern-dance world for more than twice as long. But Austin audiences haven’t laid eyes on either of them in years.

The wait will soon end. Texas Performing Arts has lined up McDonald (Jan. 17) and the Limón company (March 24) as two of its headline guests of its coming season.

“One of our jobs at Texas Performing Arts is to understand what the gaps are in Austin’s artistic landscape,” says Bob Bursey, the group’s executive director.

“Austin is a city that has been growing in its cultural significance, (but) we have a lot of catching up to do. There are important American artists and ensembles…where there have been big gaps in them coming to Austin—10, 12, 14, 16 years between appearances. We’re really working to make sure that our audiences have an opportunity to experience them on a more regular basis.”

Jazz lovers will rediscover a celebrated artist of the past when the Branford Marsalis Quartet and singer Dianne Reeves mark the centennial of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane (Oct. 6). The concert will harken back to a rare example of Coltrane collaborating with a singer: his 1963 album with Johnny Hartman, a disc now enshrined in the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Austin will get a fresh take on Shakespeare when Actors from the London Stage returns to town (Nov. 19-20). The troupe has condensed Much Ado About Nothing into a vehicle for five multitasking performers plus the simplest suggestions of costumes and sets (Nov. 19-20).

“They do a fantastic job of distilling Shakespeare’s work down to the bare essentials, and it allows you to hear the text as it was originally intended,” Bursey says. “In Shakespeare’s time, they didn’t have spectacular production values and all of the technologies and amenities of modern theater. I really appreciate the way that an ensemble like Actors from the London Stage keeps the tradition of his work alive and makes it very relevant to today’s audiences.”

Texas Performing Arts is a branch of the University of Texas at Austin, which has just given Bursey the additional title of vice provost of the arts, aimed at furthering the arts’ impact on the campus and beyond. As part of a leading research university, Bursey says, TPA’s role naturally includes embracing the new and innovative. In tandem with the city’s Fusebox festival, the group will stage the world premiere of a new work it co-commissioned from theater artist Suzanne Bocanegra, a Houston native and UT Austin alumna.

Motherhood, An Artist Lecture (Nov. 6-7) will marshal the same theatrical device as Bocanegra’s Honor, An Artist Lecture, which TPA presented in 2025. Beginning in the guise of an art-history talk, it will branch out into a mix of personal reminiscence, storytelling, musings on society and more. Bocanegra’s look at motherhood will gain an additional layer from the fact that the performer at center stage, Judah Lang, is her son.

As a viewer of one of Bocanegra’s so-called lectures, “you think you’re coming into something that might sound academic or even boring,” Bursey says. “But she turns that format on its head and draws on memoir and cultural analysis and art history, and creates these very entertaining and funny and often deeply moving portraits around her themes.”

Illusionist Scott Silven stars in The Lost Things, (Sept. 25-26) which goes beyond magic to become “a real work of theater,” Bursey says. “It tells you a heartwarming story about things and people and ideas that we might lose and then rediscover over time.”

There’s still more variety: In another payoff after years of trying, Bursey says, Texas Performing Arts will bring back “a real crowd-pleaser,” Japan’s taiko drumming ensemble Kodo (Feb. 18). Belgium’s Rosas Dance Company will flesh out Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons with choreography by its founder, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and Moroccan Radouan Mriziga (April 29-30).

And the Terrence McNally Festival (Jan. 29-31) will pay tribute to a much-lauded playwright who discovered writing as a teenager in Corpus Christi. The late McNally’s charitable foundation spearheads the weekend, which will center on readings of five new works by budding playwrights. The festival, Bursey says, represents “a wonderful example of how they’re building upon the legacy of a significant artist to create opportunities for others who are coming up.”

—STEVEN BROWN