Five Recommended Arts Events In Austin This Weekend

No, really, step away from that screen, citizen, just for an afternoon or a night or two. The internets will still be there, waiting, when you get back – and you’ll return with a wealth of *gasp* experience and *blink* new memories. We mean, look:

Silent, cunning, not exiled: The Back Pack

1) A person might move from Austin to Montana in order to become, say, a dental floss tycoon. But when four people move from Montana to Austin and pretty much conquer every FronteraFest they perform in, year after year, with their silent and always clever and sometimes brilliant combinations of clowning, dance, puppetry, shadow work, animation, and foley – that’s when they become known to audiences as The Back Pack. Now the popular troupe has a venue of their own, and their latest show, Upstaged – family-friendly, but for grownups the way Warner Bros cartoons used to be – opens this weekend. We suggest getting tickets while you can.

2) The world of high fashion can be so big-money hifalutin’ that a person could get a nosebleed just thinking about it. Other times, the business of creating sartorial wonderment at the intersection of glamour and practicality is something that comes from, what do they call it, the underground? The streets? You know – that milieu of educated professionals who are nevertheless all about galvanizing the local scene with the DIY and the subversion of established hierarchies and, and, and just making clothes that are, after all, pretty fucking awesome. Cue this recommendation for Diptych II, the runway-show-and-party happening at Austin School of Film on Saturday.

3) People who think they’d enjoy modern dance productions a whole lot more if only the choreographed movements were generally more, ah, percussive? Those people are gonna be head over heels for Tapestry Dance Company’s April Fools showcase of tap dance, served up all vaudeville style (and with live music) at the Long Center this weekend.

4) Everyone’s about to overdose on visual art, probably, what with the annual West Austin Studio Tour starting up a week from now. So why not grab some comic relief before then – especially when it’s comic relief spiked by the conjuring skills and arch antics of recently honored magician Ray Anderson at Esther’s Follies this weekend, where the political lampooning and musical sketches are as fresh as the POTUS is fatuous.

5) You know that there are a lot of writers in this town, right? You know that UT’s excellent Michener Center is only, like, the weaponized portion of the scene, right? Here’s a chance to meet and mingle with some of the local best – the writers, the editors, the magazine makers, the people who work in words for their daily bread or just for the everloving joy of it – at Saturday’s New Fiction Confab and Austin Lit Fair at the gorgeous Central Library.