Articulations
Owing to budget woes in the College of Fine Arts, the UT PAC Prop Shop is closed for business, and local choreographers and dance companies earn national awards and international gigs.
By Robert Faires, Fri., Aug. 8, 2003
No Props for UT (or From It)
Strike one more resource in the ongoing battle by Austin performing arts groups to create maximum theatre on minimum budgets: The Prop Shop at the UT Performing Arts Center is closed for business. For years, local designers, theatre companies, high school drama departments, and others were able to rent furniture, props, and all manner of items that had been acquired or constructed for university productions. The situation enabled the College of Fine Arts to make back a little of the money it had spent on these objects (which then ended up in storage awaiting possible use in future UT shows), but more importantly, it allowed community artists to procure for their productions frequently elaborate and finely crafted pieces that they could never have afforded to create or purchase on their own. Recently, though, the College of Fine Arts found itself facing the same fiscal crises afflicting everyone else and had to make cuts somewhere. The Prop Shop got the axe, and its two props masters, James Cameron and George Wenning, were fired. The move drew impassioned letters from Zachary Scott Theatre Center Managing Director Ann Ciccolella, award-winning set designer Christopher McCollum, and Different Stages Artistic Director Norman Blumensaadt, among others, all making the case that dozens of organizations large and small, and countless productions had benefited from this service, and that its discontinuation would further injure arts groups already gravely wounded by the current economic distress. Their pleas reached Dean Robert Freeman while he was on vacation, but he drafted a response in which he pointed out that the college was forced to slice almost $1 million out of its budget this year. "The annual budget [for the Prop Shop] amounted to $45,000 for which, in 2002-03, outside rental income provided for a bit more than $4,000. The closing of the shop was not directed from the top down but rather, following extensive consultation with departmental faculty and staff, as among the educationally least painful ways of preserving our principal priorities." Translation: You have my regrets, but you're still not getting our props. A sad thing.
Artistic Achievements
Congratulations to Austin Arts Hall of Famer Deborah Hay on being chosen as one of six artists-in-residence at the Joyce Theater in New York City next season. During her residency, she will choreograph a new work for a select group of seven highly experienced dancer/performers, who will perform the dance publicly at St. Marks Church, then go back to the studio and rework the dance into seven different solo dances, each one unique to the individual dancer's personal and artistic background in dance. Hay will teach a four-week workshop for the greater New York dance community based on different experiments inherent in the original septet.
Congratulations also to Ballet East Dance Company on having its Dare to Dance community outreach program be selected by the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities as "one of the top after-school ... programs in the country." This is the second year in a row the program has been recognized as a semifinalist for the prestigious Coming Up Taller Award. For more information, contact Rodolfo Mendez at 385-2838.
Area choreographers have also been hitting the road this summer. Kathy Dunn Hamrick is one of 13 U.S. choreographers selected to participate in the Fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists in Toronto this week. Her company will perform Woman Smiling, a quartet set to the music of Astor Piazzolla, Aug. 5, 7, and 9 at the Winchester Street Theatre. En route to Toronto, the company stopped in Chicago to present two performances at Belle Plaine Studio. Meanwhile, Allison Orr, the artist who set dances on firefighters and on visually impaired performers and their guide dogs (the Austin Critics Table Award-winning Sextet), has been off in Venice choreographing a dance for gondoliers. Orr spent last summer in Venice doing research for the dance, meeting and interviewing gondoliers and even taking rowing lessons. She returned this spring to teach the dance to her performers and they presented The Gondola Project July 11 and 12 along the Canale Della Misericordia. And Tapestry Dance Company followed its Soul to Sole Festival in June with a gig in Spain.