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Literally Figurative

Solution by Nancy Wozny

Solution: Curated by Janet Phelps
DiverseWorks Arts Space
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Solution, curated by Janet Phelps and now showing at DiverseWorks, presents seven approaches to the concept of progress. Christopher K. Ho takes the slow approach in his Monumental Compost Heap, which is still gathering and decomposing within its neat and formal borders right outside of DiverseWorks. Ho’s dreamy Lesbian Mountains in Love takes progress into geological time as projections of Mount Rainier and El Popo whisper sweet nothings culled from the seven popular romances of Nicholas Sparks.

Michael Waugh takes a more subversive approach with Decline and Fall, which features bear and wolf imagery created from Edward Gibbon’s classic albeit bigoted book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A ferocious grizzly bear and hungry wolf flank either side of a cuddly effeminate bear cub. Decline and Fall marvels in both execution and theory, as text and image vibrate with potent symbolism.

Nina Katchadourian lends the minimalist view with her elegant A Leak in the Feeling, which consists of a water droplet descending a string to a tiny bucket against gentle text concerning her grandparent’s romance. Spare yet powerful, Katchadourian’s work effectively mixes text and straightforward technology to make her point. Jeffrey Gibson goes for trumped-up, glopped-on glamour in his sculptures constructed from dolls, ethnographic masks, mannequin parts and retail trash. The result lies somewhere between natural history museum exhibition and Vegas gift shop. Gibson’s digital paintings mirror the same kind of density but employ Venetian blind like color grids to temper the images.

Jeanine Oleson measures progress by addressing myth, fantasy and ritual in a collection of artifacts from recent performances. She created the world’s largest smudge stick, much of which was used in New York City the day before the 2008 election, an event documented in this exhibition. In Oleson’s recent performance of Enkidu Return A, she donned a costume of recycled furs and sat on a gigantic rock smack dab in Long Island, cleverly mixing the civilized with indigenous.

The plight of trees and the future of Robert Smithson’s iconic land-based work Spiral Jetty, currently under threat by oil companies, interests Joseph Smolinsky. His Tree Turbine re-draws the future with trees doubling as cell towers. It’s going to take a time commitment to figure out what the LA-based collective known as My Barbarian are doing in their video document of Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT): Post-Paradise, Sorry Again, which is culled from workshops based on Fassbinder’s Munich-based Action Theatre and the Living Theater. Edited footage of the workshops reveals the five principles of PoLAAT: estrangement, in-distinction, suspension of beliefs, a mandate to participate and inspirational critique. Much about these retro renegade techniques feels timely right about now in thinking of merging of self with the political. - Nancy Wozny

Mildreds Umbrella Theater

Imagine being an atheist, thinking Darwin was a bit off, and living in Texas. Houston and California-based playwright and screenwriter Tom Vaughan faces the interface between hard science and creationists in his world premiere play, The Third Side, presented by Mildred’s Umbrella Theater Company at DiverseWorks. “It’s a story about a man discovering the difference between doing the right thing and being right,” says Vaughan, who created this play with the company members in mind. Vaughan created a part of Linda, the hardcore Darwinist, specifically for Mildred’s Umbrella artistic director Jennifer Decker. “She knows that compromising the scientific truth is bad for the world in general, and is willing to sacrifice her personal relationships to make sure the truth is upheld,” says Decker. “I’ve researched her field so that I can play her effectively.” This production of The Third Side commemorates the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his work “On the Origin of Species.”
Mildred’s Umbrella presents The Third Side, May 14-30, 8pm, 2009, DiverseWorks, Call 832.418-0973 or visit www.mildredsumbrella.com

Marie by Clare Croft

MARIE
Houston Ballet

Ballet came back to its home in the French court in Houston Ballet’s new ballet “Marie,” which ran at the Wortham Center. Created by company artistic director Stanton Welch, “Marie” followed France’s famous queen from adolescence in Austria, through her ostentatious reign at Versailles, to her grisly death.
The ballet did an excellent job of developing character and a sense of place through movement. At court and in dance, how one moves determines the person one becomes. “Marie” opens as Hapsburg Empress Marie Therese (Katherine Precourt) demonstrated how a queen carries herself. Marie (Melody Herrera) must hold her chin high and twirl her wrists with delicate strength. Herrera’s Marie grows into the royal posture despite a difficult marriage, lost love, and a terrible death. This evening’s first act might be the only ballet dedicated to impotence. New husband, the eventual King Louis XVI (Ian Casady), eschews his bedroom responsibilities, facing unending taunting. Women let their fans droop when he walks by.
The crowd of courtiers facilitates one of Welch’s well-crafted staging of large groups. The courtiers’ shadows loom as the couple finally consummates their marriage, an almost violent act that quickly, somewhat unbelievably, resolves into tenderness.
Marie’s true love is saved for Swedish Count Fersen (Connor Walsh). Herrera and Walsh continue to become two of Houston’s finest dancers, even if their partnering is sometimes awkward here. Their relationship develops amidst the frivolity of Marie’s court, and then simmers with sadness as a revolutionary mob imprisons the royal family. The angry crowd lacks character nuance (and should not have brown-face makeup), but skill with large groups fields a rich, kinetic force.
For a ballet about an opulent historical moment, Kandis Cook’s sets and costumes were surprisingly minimal. The color palette shifted from the lush gold of the Austrian court to the soft blues the queen favored to the to Easter-egg pinks and yellows for Versailles’ parties. Finally the stage went blood red, contrasting with a royal family in dishwater gray.
Perhaps the most effective aspect of the ballet’s design came as bookends. In the opening scene a huge, gilded frame hung above the Hapsburgs, waiting to be filled. When Antoinette’s daughter returned to Austria, having escaped the rest of her family’s fate, she saw the frame again, now inhabited. Marie walked through Versailles, holding her chin high and raising her arm with a flourish. – Clare Croft

Les Miserables- By John DeMers

LES MISERABLES
Theatre Under The Stars

The few, the proud – that’s the club TUTS joined when it became one of the only independent theater companies in the world to secure the rights to the blockbuster “Les Miserables.” What’s that? You’ve seen the show several times already? Of course you have. But those were official touring companies that steered 100% true to the, well, considering the show is about a revolution, party line. TUTS was one of the first troupes allowed to create its own version. And while this one will hardly displace the original in any of our minds, it made us stop and think about all that had seemed written in stone.
“Les Miserables’ is essentially an opera disguised as a Broadway show, both in the fact that it is “sung through” without spoken dialogue and also, less objectively, because it deals with more and different and stronger emotions than the typical TUTS song-and-dance fest. Life, death, guilt, forgiveness, duty, idealism, self-sacrifice, romantic love and what its first creator, Victor Hugo, would have surely called Christian charity – all these are set on stage for us to feel by composer Claude-Michel Schonberg and librettist Alain Boublil. And the package that has become known as “Les Mis” since its Paris debut in 1980 and been performed in 21 languages around the world generally delivers.
Surely the biggest TUTS departure from “official” touring productions that many have seen or will see was the stage design by Matthew Kinley. Indeed, few sets in history have become as familiar and beloved as the “revolving barricade” in “Les Mis,” dark pieces that move, turn, grind, connect and disconnect before our eyes in ways that evoke the heartless motion of fate. Kinley opted instead for projections of somber paintings, most by Hugo himself, some combined with etchings and even photos of 19th- century Paris, where the story takes place. This approach is unlikely to supplant the original, but it did make audiences familiar with the musical (some have seen it 20, 30 or more times, in New York, London and elsewhere) stop going through the motions and experience it fresh again.
As the mammoth figures at the core of the complicated plot, two Robs (Evan and Hunt) shined as Jean Valjean and his relentless police pursuer Inspector Javert. Evan seemed to have some struggles with top notes on opening night, especially the falsetto sections presented as prayer, but entirely carried off the characterization as one of theater’s most layered figures. Valjean is one of the few characters in a musical who actually do what all are supposed to do: evolve, ponder and decide things by way of song, rather than singing about what they just decided. And Andrea Rivette, Sarah Shaninian and Leah Horowitz dazzled as the show’s three heartbreaking young women, Fantine, Eponine and Cosette. – John DeMers

Henrique Oliveira:Tapumes by Garland Fielder

Henrique Oliveira: Tapumes
Rice University Art Gallery
Through May 9
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The title of Henrique Oliveira’s installation wonder at Rice Gallery is Tapumes, a Portuguese term that roughly translates as ”enclosure” or “fencing.” This is somewhat paradoxical in that the impressively swirling and shape-shifting ensemble is anything but confining. Although the original source material was inspired from temporary construction site partitions ubiquitously concocted in and about the artist’s native Sao Paulo, the title conveys little of the creative freedom the artist derives from it. Standing in the presence of the work, one marvels at the organic quality of the bent and stained veneer that takes on a semblance of scar tissue—an apt metaphor for a strategy Oliveira has made his own.

Oliveira has transformed the back wall of the installation-only gallery at Rice into a massive high-relief sculpture that viscerally swirls and undulates into searing protrusions. Initially, the artist lays the planks of veneer out into the gallery space in groups to be tinted with pastel stains that still reveal much of the wood’s grain. Then a backing substructure is improvised onto the wall, bending and contorting wood so that its flatness is all but forgotten. Oliveira then “paints” the final strips of wood onto the piece—a method derived from his background in abstract painting.

Despite the shear heaviness of the work’s presence, creative energy abounds in the Oliveira’s use of flow and rhythm. There is a freshness to the installation. Phoenix like, the wood that was once used to present interlopers from trespassing onto a restricted site now stokes the imagination into surrealistic daydreams. One is inspired to crawl up into the work, interacting with the tilts and turns of the wooden streams of color that now demarcate a shift between creative illusion and work-a-day detritus.

Rice Gallery | 713-348-6069 | ricegallery.org

Garland Fielder

OPERA IN THE HEIGHTS-John DeMers

FALSTAFF
Opera in the Heights

It is undeniably a sign of some maturity for a small opera company to take on Verdi’s final opera, a comic work whose challenges sometimes seem as gargantuan as its anti-hero’s much-discussed waistline. Based rather expertly on not one but two Shakespeare plays, the opera has a larger number of solo roles than the typical two or four, and they all interact a lot more too – the whole thing at times seeming a witty conversation upon which we’re allowed to eavesdrop.
Of itself, the story is familiar – perhaps, in life, a tad too familiar: an older, unattractive fat man who thinks he’s God’s gift to women, a great seducer, whom the latest women to catch his eye decide to whittle down to size. Falstaff absolutely has to have a really strong central performance (we fondly remember Bryn Terfel at HGO a few years back); and despite the lack of an HGO-sized artist’s budget, Opera in the Heights served up a prime Falstaff in basso buffo Jason Budd.
Particularly in the intimacy of Lambert Hall, which seems to get nicer every time we go there, Budd’s comic acting made us care about Falstaff, not just about seeing him get his comeuppance. If his long, thick sideburns made him look a little like Fat Elvis, a bizarre association to be sure, his mugging also had an innocence that reminded of Charlie Chaplin or Harpo Marx. Harpo especially seemed a role model, considering his wide-eyed devotion to the chase as well. Budd’s voice blew out the back wall of the theater whenever he wanted it to, but also contained impressive softness, plus the lightness of occasional falsetto self-mockery. This was Budd’s OH debut, and we hope the company will find ways to bring him back.
“Falstaff” is, in some ways, a tale of four women, as it’s their surprisingly (by today’s standards) good-natured conspiracy that makes us have a plot in the first place. Through most of the early going, Crystallia Spilianaki as Alice Ford and Dawn Padula as Meg Page gathered the limelight, but later on it was it was Alyssa Bowlby as Nannetta. By the time we reach Act III, we may not really want an entire aria sung by someone pretending to be someone else in the woods, but Bowlby sang that aria beautifully – and earned one of the evening’s most heartfelt “Bravas.” Nancy Markeloff gave an endearing turn as Mistress Quickly, the show’s go-between “Friar Lawrence in a dress.”
The stage direction by Matthew Ozawa made expert use of the space. Sets by Nick Bakaysa and costumes by Dena Scheh were rather minimal, as budget no doubt tends to make them at Opera in the Heights. But one thing that’s never shortchanged here is musicianship in the orchestra, working with accuracy and verve under the baton of OH maestro William Weibel. The players may be fewer than we are used to, but after attending 10 or more OH productions over several seasons, we’ve never been anything but amazed at the quality and quantity of sound this little orchestra puts out. – John DeMers

Michelle Ellsworth-by Nancy Wozny

THE OBJECTIFICATION OF THINGS
Michelle Ellsworth, DiverseWorks

Michelle Ellsworth puts the fun back in modern dance. Oh, and there was science too in her newest  romp-o-rama The Objectification of Things at DiverseWorks.
At the center of Ellsworth’s wackola world was a hamburger, which she painstakingly unwrapped, unzipped, and other assorted acts of revealing. When she took out the hammer to crack open a clay pot, things really got cooking. Ellsworth enlisted the object in question, a.k.a. the hamburger, to cover all kinds of topics, such as sex, torture, climate change for a few. She hit her stride during a show stopping danceologue, delivered in perfect iambic rhythm, which merged Shakespeare, Woody Allen, and postmodern dance.
Based at the University of Colorado, where she teaches dance, Ellsworth dwells in merging movement, text, film, hilarious stage antics and social commentary, in one hilarious package that manages to keep the audience engaged throughout. Her stage persona bounced from dark priestess of planet burger to neurotic evangelist for climate science. “I just want to give carbon a little shout out,” she quipped. As with many of her works, high tech mixed with low tech. Sleek visuals by Michael Theodore and Rick Silva created a striking contrast with the homemade and rather primitive looking props, such as the all-purpose box, which served as a storage unit, puppet theater and burger coffin.
Ellsworth was flanked on either side by two sleek and black-wigged dancers, Erika Randall and Jessica Meeker, who served as trusted Vanna White-like assistants. They danced, sang, played guitar and performed various busy work to pull the whole production off with deadpan humor. The piece built to fever pitch when the dear old burger died, or got slaughtered to be exact, and Ellsworth traipsed through Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ seven stages of grief. When the wheels of blame came out, Ellsworth let loose her verbal virtuosity as she reeled off oodles of lectures depending upon the luck of the spin.
The girl knows her science. Ellsworth cleverly placed a real climate scientist in the audience to zap her with a shock, thanks to a handy dog collar, if she got anything wrong. It all sounds pretty nutty, but Ellsworthian logic knows no boundary. - Nancy Wozny

Anthony Thompson Shumate

Anthony Thompson Shumate: Novus Ordo Seclorum
Barbara Davis Gallery
May 15 – 27
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You’ve seen the quip on the back of our money your entire life, yet you may not know that Novus Ordo Seclorum means “New Order of the Ages.” Countless creepy conspiracies have no doubt germinated from such cryptic missives and Anthony Thompson Shumate ups the ante with his mixed media show of the same name at Barbara Davis Gallery in May. With his latest exhibition, Shumate, an accomplished fine artist and designer, visages a currency for the coming North American Union. He has created a body of work that explores coin minting and paper currencies as well as the image vocabulary associated with such financial subtleties. The body of work includes the entire collection of a currency as a proof set from one cent Amero (the American version of the Euro) to the $500 Amero bill. Given the current state of the markets, perhaps Shumate is more prescient in divining a new currency than we’d like to admit. Be sure to get a glimpse of the new world order through this talented artist’s eyes. The opening reception will be held Friday, May 22nd from 6:30-8:30 p.m.

www.barbaradavisgallery.com | 4411 Montrose Blvd. | tel. 713-520-9200

ARS LYRICA

SCARLATTI BY ARS LYRICA
It’s the start of new era for Houston early music ensemble Ars Lyrica, now being featured in the group’s first CD recorded the Naxos classical label. The recording focuses on works by often-overlooked Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti, with period-instrument performances of his Euridice dall’Inferno and his La concettione della Beata Vergine. With the CD, Ars Lyrica contributes to Scarlatti’s ongoing rediscovery as a peer of such Baroque masters as Handel and Vivaldi. Joining the Ars Lyrica musicians for these pieces are soprano Melissa Givens, countertenor Gerrod Pagenkopf, tenor Joseph Gaines and bass Timonthy Jones. The Naxos CD is available wherever classical music is sold, including at Ars Lyrica concerts and online at www.arslyricahouston.org and www.classicsonline.com.