Articulations
Tapestry wants you to see its show .com for free, and Scott Swanson wants you to find the arts on your TV, through his show Scene After Dark.
By Robert Faires, Fri., Nov. 9, 2001
Free Tapestry!
This weekend, Tapestry Dance Company remounts .com, its delightful peep inside the life of a high tech firm and the hearts of the people who work there, and the company is graciously offering scores of complimentary tickets to the Austin community for all four performances: Friday & Saturday, 8pm, Sunday, 2 & 7pm, at the State Theater, 719 Congress. This particular Tapestry program is deliciously inventive, speaking directly to our uplinked, downloaded, around-the-clock online lives via an office setting that Artistic Director Acia Gray and the gang exploit for humorous effect, with choreographed rolling chairs, syncopated percussive office supplies, balletic water-cooler romances, white-suited clean room sweepers, and a frenzied rhythm tap finish-the-project all-nighter. Plus, there's a striking series of dances with the cast in superhero costumes representing such Internet staples as MSN, Napster, and Windows. The Tapestry dancers return to this summer success on a high from their effervescent season opener, JASS, wherein they took the liberating rhythms of jazz as a launching point for an program of sensuous and exhilarating movement. In many ways, JASS captured the essence of the company: breaking free of the strictures of traditional dance to play with the form itself, to create something new and original, and finding in that new creation an exuberant joy. Tapestry, like jazz, is all about sweet release and you get caught up in the freedom of it. If you've yet to discover this ebullient, singularly Austin dance company, this is the weekend to do it. Call 469-SHOW.
Art TV
Television coverage of the Austin arts scene is typically spotty at best, but someone is trying to change that. Scott Swanson, who theatergoers may remember as Riff Raff in the Zachary Scott Theatre Center's Rocky Horror Show, has launched a new weekly show interviewing the actors, artists, singers, musicians, bands, chefs, dancers, choreographers, directors, tech crews, and other artists that, as Swanson puts it, "make our city so immensely cool to live in." The show is called Scene After Dark, and the third episode airs on Time Warner cable channel 77 this Sunday, November 11, at 2am and again at 1pm. The episode includes interviews with local artist Chad Joseph Brown, actors Meredith McCall and Gerard Lebeda from Zach's production of Little Shop of Horrors, and Roger Myers, professor of viola in the UT School of Music.
