Art Travels I
Summer has become a busy time for Austin artists, not just in terms of the local scene — which is plenty busy — but in terms of the national scene. More and more of our playwrights, performers, dancers, and comics are finding opportunities to get out of town and be creative elsewhere, and my e-mail in box has been flooded with cyber-postcards from local artists on the move. Here’s a sampling:
This spring, accomplished choreographer Deborah Hay was approached by dance legend Mikhail Baryshnikov about creating a work for his White Oak Dance Company. Hay spent three weeks in June with the company in New York, teaching White Oak dancers the sextet Whizz and Baryshnikov himself Single Duet, a dance for Hay to perform with the ballet great. This past weekend, August 3-6, the two dances were premiered at Princeton University’s McCarter Theatre as part of Past/Forward, a program showcasing work of the pioneering Judson Dance Theatre choreographers, of which Hay was a member. Come October, White Oak will begin a national tour with Hay’s dances included.
It’s been an especially active summer for Austin’s dramatists and companies developing their work. Remembrance Through the Performing Arts, which develops and showcases new plays, saw one of the plays it developed open to a packed house Off Broadway in July. The Flame Keeper is a drama by Amos Kamil set in the “ashes of postwar Berlin,” and the production at the 47th Street Theatre in New York inspired words of praise from New York Times critic D.J.R. Bruckner. In Austin, meanwhile, the company has been working hard to prep Marla Dean‘s One Shoe Untied, a recent finalist for the National Play Award, for a September run at the Dougherty Arts Center… The writers of Austin Script Works, another local home for playwrights, and their plays have been traveling. Artistic director John Walch was selected as a fellow to the Shenandoah International Playwright’s Retreat, where he’ll continue work on The Dinosaur Within, a play first developed in the Harvest Festival of New American Plays co-produced by the State Theater Company and ASW. In July, Walch got to see his one-act The Rebirth of Beautiful produced by Ground Zero Theatre Company at the Bath House Cultural Center as part of the Festival of Independent Theatres in Dallas. Ground Zero is also set to stage Walch’s award-winning play Craving Gravy, or Love in the Time of Cannibalism, this September. ASW core member Vicki Cheatwood also had a play produced in the festival, her one-act Araby, and she was also the featured playwright in Four Play 2000, a festival at the Quad C Theater in Plano; her short works Touch & Go, Noodling, and Heaven were presented. Also heard in the Metroplex was O.T., the race drama by ASW founding core member Clay Nichols, which received a reading in June at Dallas’ Kitchen Dog Theatre. O.T. was also staged in Chicago in June by Denver’s Horse Chart Theatre for the National New Play Network Conference 2000. Horse Chart then took the show back to its home city for a full run that ended last weekend. ASW associate member Lisa Dillman also had a play up in Chicago; her Detail of a Larger Work opened at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company on May 21.
And that’s not the half of it. More art travels next week.
This article appears in August 11 • 2000.