Austin Arts Happenings Online: A Chronicle Round-up for Your Quarantined Exploration

So many Austinites doing live shows (or even something resembling what we’d call live shows) online now, it makes an isolated heart proud; it allows a person to take a brief downhome break from this waiting-waiting-waiting mess we’re in.

Note: We’re rounding up a general trove of Arts options for you here – comedy, theatre, classical, visual arts – your Chronicle online live-music coverage is over here, yo – and we’ll be updating this post regularly, to give you a wider perspective of the changing scene.

---

You want some COMEDY? Stand-up, improv, even socially distant sketch, and so on? Look:

ColdTowne Theatre, those bright cut-ups on Airport Boulevard, the ones who escaped Hurricane Katrina back in the day to find refuge and set up a comedy shop here in the ATX, they’ve got a growing schedule of livestreamed shenanigans going on for your entertainment – Victrola Comedy Simulations is set for Mon., March 23, 8pm on Twitch – and you can find it right here.

We already hipped you to the virtual goings-on from the PGraph improv troupe and friends, remember? But will that intrepid foursome be doing more shows soon? Yes, they tell us, and this is where you’ll find them online.

“Just wanted to check in and let you know WE DID IT!” says Valerie Lopez of Comedy Wham, whose stand-up showcase we wrote of earlier. “There were no technology fails," she tells us. "And, while we had one comic with TV credits, the majority of comics were able to perform to an audience of hundreds! And we've raised I think over $200 for the comics to share – so a little impact in their lives. We've got people reaching out about how they can do it, comics asking to be on the next show, too. We were planning on doing this weekly, but we may have to scale up to twice a week.”

---

Got a craving for some live CLASSICAL music, no matter how much you may also enjoy metal or rockabilly or dubstep or blue-green jazz? See here:

Austin Opera doesn’t care how many lovely fat ladies may be singing somewhere, it ain’t over for them online – AO has launched a new weekly series, Inside Indy Terrace, featuring a new live performance each week (Fridays, 3pm) from their storied rehearsal studio. You may have already missed the first episode, with Metropolitan Opera Competition-winning soprano Elena Villalón (and Nyle Matsuoka on piano), sure … but they’ve got that performance recorded and available on Vimeo now. And they’ll be presenting the whole ongoing series that way, too.

That amazing Michelle Schumann and the Austin Chamber Music Center are currently “exploring alternative ways to deliver you chamber music content” but, in the meantime, they’re supercharging their social media outlets with videos of previously recorded concerts.

---

And, behold: The pixelated curtain continues to rise on digital THEATRE and cultural celebrations from The Vortex, with live shows – Rudy Ramirez doing Astrology Personality Readings, Eva McQuade’s Ask Tia Chancla – and video rebroadcasts of some of the company’s fiercest plays – by Reina Hardy, ethos, Kirk Smith, and others – and live musical performances from Content Love Knowles, Jade and the Foxtones, and more. Especially recommended: Drunk Steel Magnolias, with that stalwart Ramirez, Andreá Smith, and Jen Jennings (Sat., March 28). Check 'em out here.

---

And of course the internets are filled with GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS from all over the world. But right now, housebound & missing the ‘hood, we’re totally loving the local and feasting our eyes on:

Sarah Sudhoff’s delicate and techno-eerie data visualizations in "Point of Origin" at grayDUCK gallery; Ellen Heck’s Form and Function – a study of portraiture, symbolism, and topology inspired by William Adolphe Bouguereau’s Broken Pitcher – at Wally Workman Gallery; the stunning balance of textures, shapes, and atmospheres that comprise "Back to the World", the two-artist show by Christian De Dier and William Wahlgren at Davis Gallery; the brilliant array of rock & roll photography among the world-class holdings of Modern Rocks Gallery; and if you truly want your mind blown by what physical realism a single human can accomplish with innumerable pigments and a painstaking brush, then just a glimpse of that Ian Ingram’s relentless macro-lens self-portraiture will do your sensorium up right.

---

And here's hoping that'll hold you, citizen, maybe take a bit of the edge off your local-arts jones until at least Thursday – when we'll bring you a whole new batch of what's going on in the Austin arts online.