Profile by participating artist Dr. David Glen Robinson: Art Show/Model Show, Paper Chairs at the Off-Shoot, August 29 - September 14, 2013

(www.paperchairs.com)

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


A Participating Artist's Impressions

The artists stood at easels or sat at drawing tables in the well of the theatre, downstage center, or more aptly, house center. The stage was multilevel, rising before us and offering sightlines better than in most figurative art workshops. The lighting on the models was also much better than in any workshop. My choice of oil on canvas as the medium ensured no relaxation on my part. I sweated and labored continually, and my brushes and charcoals hummed throughout the show; I panted through the entire five-minute break the artists were given in the middle of the performance. But my earnest efforts had actually begun before the show, with hauling four loads of art equipment and supplies from my pickup into the theatre. And I thought I had a minimal setup! Lesson: Oil painting never allows a minimal setup.

I was a guest artist for one evening performance of Paper Chairs’ Art Show/Model Show at the Offshoot Theatre in East Austin, where creativity seemsy always to find new and brilliant expression. This show simulated in its setting an art class or workshop, where artists actually strive for, well, something in the realm of figurative art. The workshop setting gave rise to the need for working artists in the show, and so I signed up. But it was the art models/actors who controlled the action and gave all the lines and spoke all the texts in the show. The only artists who spoke were those who did so in projected video interviews on a screen above the stage.

(photo from Paper Chairs)

The art models, you may surmise, showed some attitude, i.e., ‘tude, and with good reason. Artists and art models exist in an archetypical relationship. They have left their traces on Paleolithic cave walls and in every succeeding stage of world art since that time, with the possible exceptions of Hebraic and Islamic art. In all those eras, expression and communication were the province of the artists, while the fully exposed models remained silent, ultimately and ironically invisible in terms of their identities, female or male. The model merely provided a useful form for the visual telling of allegories and mythic adventures. The exception of portrait art proves the rule: there, the dominance of the artist fell away when painting a fully empowered and clothed king, queen or aristocrat as portrait subject, not model. The portrait titles are the names of those depicted.

The models who created Art Show/Model Show raged against all of that. They spoke and the artists remained silent. Art instruction videos contextualized their world, and then the models offered commentary on it all, never more hilariously than when model Kelli Bland walked among the artists in faux art teacher mode giving ironic, almost snide, instructions in how to draw body parts, mostly by making impersonal and insensitive comments about “the model.” (“You can’t see that bone on that model, but it is there under all her fat.”) All models have heard such brutally clinical and basically rude comments in the course of their modeling careers.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Video Promo: Art Show Model Show by Paper Chairs at the Off-Shoot, August 29 - September 14, 2013

paper chairs enthusiastically presents

ART SHOW/MODEL SHOW

a play about art modeling and the creative/human questions found in a figurative drawing session

The show will run at
The Off Shoot. 2211 Hidalgo Street.
Thurs, Fri, and; Sat: Aug 29- Sept 14th
(all shows at 8pm &doors open at 7:30pm.)
Special Sunday Benefit Performance Sept 8th.
(must be 18+ to attend. There will be nudity.) 

 
Tickets on sliding scale, $15-$30 plus fees via






or for more details please see www.paperchairs.com

ART SHOW/MODEL SHOW is a multi-media performance that has been in development over the past year, earning a listing as one of the “Six stops to make your 2012 East Austin Studio Tour extra special” from Austin Chronicle’s Robert Faires and running a workshop performance in FronteraFest’s Mi Casa es su Teatro. Devised by performers who work as models in Austin’s visual arts community, this collaborative performance is also an exploration in documentary theatre, with interviews of local artists and models as well as live drawing and painting. It will also include a gallery show, curated by the Austin artists who hire these models.

ART SHOW/MODEL SHOW aspires to be: an honest representation of this (usually) very private world, a life drawing session, a living gallery, an exercise in perspective and time, a conversation about the purpose of art in society, and an intimate look at the singular relationship between the artist and model in the creative process. 

Devised by: Kelli Bland, Meghan Morongova, Michelle Keffer, Jorge Sermini and Jen Brown Directed by: Kelli Bland, Meghan Morongova Assistant Director: Rachel Dendy Technical Director/Design By: Steven Shirey Video by: Eric Graham, Tag Simler, Eliot Haynes Features interviews and work of: Jennifer Balkan, Eve Larson, Dave Larson, Chris Chappell, David Ohlerking, Karen Maness, Matt Stavsrowsky, Pablo Taboada, George Anderson, Steve Dubov, Heather Tolleson, and more!

ART SHOW/MODEL SHOW, Paper Chairs at the Off-Shoot, August 29 - September 14, 2013

[click logo above to visit paper chairs on Facebook; click HERE for website -- www.paperchairs.com]

presents

Art Show/Model Show
August 29 - September 14, 2013

 

at the Off-Shoot, 2211-A Hidalgo Street, near E. 7th Street and Robert Martinez (behind Joe's Bakery - don't park there; they tow!) 

ART SHOW/MODEL SHOW is a multi-media, interactive performance experiment undergoing creation by Kelli Bland, Meghan Adriel Dwyer, Michelle Keffer, Jorge Sermini and Elizabeth Doss based on our experiences as art models. The piece will investigate three folds of art modeling that interest us: the physical experience, the contemporary and historical context, and the queries we encounter in the discipline. Paper Chairs is excited to present our most fruitful findings at the end of summer 2013!

ART SHOW/MODEL SHOW aspires to be these things: a living gallery, a life drawing session, a voyeuristic experiment, a lesson in drawing and art history, a conversation about the purpose of art in society, and an intimate look at the relationship between the artist and model in figurative art.

This collaborative performance will include live drawing and painting by local Austin artists. Alongside the composition of timed poses and staged scenes will be sensorial stimulation, including documentary-style footage and sound bites pieced together from interviews with local artists and models, as well as live drawing projections. It will also include a gallery show, curated by the Austin artists who hire us, and will be presented, or rather, categorized by each model, so that the audience can see the varied and unique perceptions of each individual person

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

ART SHOW/MODEL SHOW, Paper Chairs at the Off-Shoot, August 29 - September 14, 2013

[click logo above to visit paper chairs on Facebook; click HERE for website -- www.paperchairs.com]

presents
Art Show/Model Show

August 29 - September 14
at the The Off-Shoot, 2211-A Hidalgo Street, near E. 7th Street and Robert Martinez (behind Joe's Bakery) 

paper chairs’ upcoming multi-media performance that will explore the usually private experience of art-modeling and the human & artistic queries that are encountered through the discipline. Created by Kelli Bland, Meghan Morongova, Michelle Keffer, Jorge Sermini and Jen Brown, ART SHOW/MODEL SHOW is based on their experiences as art models as well as interviews with local visual artists and other art models in the Austin community.

ART SHOW/MODEL SHOW aspires to be these things: an experiment in documentary theatre, a living art gallery, a life drawing session, a voyeuristic adventure, an exploration of figurative art in the context of both art history and contemporary times, an honest conversation on body image, and an intimate look at the relationship between the artist and inspiration in the creative process. This collaborative performance will include live drawing and painting by local Austin artists.

paper chairs is excited to present this new devised work at at the OffShoot Aug. 29 through September 14th. Stay tuned to paper chairs’ Facebook and website for more details as we get closer to the production! 

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Circus Girl by Rocky Hopson, Hat Tree Theatricals at the Museum of Human Achievement, June 6 - 16, 2013

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


Circus Girl, written by Rocky Hopson, is a coming-of-age play like few others. Set in the 1890s in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains, the play proceeds initially like the adventures of one of many “Little Nells” of the dime novels of that time. If those stories had finished with any of the realism and hard times of that age depicted in this play, very few “Little Nells” would have survived to tell the tale. 'Circus Girl' is the name given to a very young orphan by her circus family; the circus travels, but then settles in Kansas City when the owner buys a theatre for a home base. All dreams are shattered when the Panic of 1893 causes a riotous run on America’s banks. The bank forecloses on the circus’s theatre loan; the performers and owner lose everything, and Circus Girl is cast loose in depressed America with absolutely nothing.
The first point of appreciation of the play is the beauty that's presented on stage against the background of decay. The costumes are at times truly sumptuous and approach period accuracy, at least as far as I could evaluate. The sweetness of many of the characters also provided a sometimes-relieving contrast with the corruption surrounding them. Impressive, too, were the patterns of overwrought oratorical gestures presented in the monologues. These gestural systems were taught formally in that era.
Dawn Youngs was notable for her adept use of this style in her role as a suffrage reformer and traveling lecturer. Old photographs of the era were projected; particularly enjoyable were the many pictures of the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Early films of circus acts were a treat shown as a pre-show; they were, of course, a couple of decades out-of-period, but who cares.

Setting in the American Midwest of the 1890s and later was a fascinating choice by playwright Rocky Hopson. The period is called the Gilded Age for its optimism and immense growth economically, politically and socially. It was also the nadir of monopolistic capitalism. 

The Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which we take for granted today, had been enacted in 1890, and its reforms were just taking hold by the time of the Panic of 1893, that giant jolt to the system, as Circus Girl starts. Labor unions were organizing and starting their struggles; Upton Sinclair’s pivotal reform novel The Jungle would not be published until 1906. The gold and silver mines in the Rockies were playing out.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .

CIRCUS GIRL by Rocky Hopson, Hat Tree Theatricals at the Museum of Human Achievement, June 6 - 16, 2013

Hat Tree Theatricals
presents

 

Circus Girl
by Rocky Hopson
June 6th - 16th, Thursdays-Sundays at 7:30
at The Museum of Human Achievement. (located across from The Blue Genie)
Thursdays are pay-what-you-wish and there will be ASL interpretation on Thursday, June 13th.

Purchase tickets here: http://thehattreetheatricals.com/

Circus Girl takes you on a journey through America during the 1890s—from Kansas City to Chicago to Denver. It is the story of Circus Girl, a young performer who has lived in the circus or vaudeville her entire life. She knows very little about the outside world, and suddenly has to fend for herself in rapidly changing and precarious surroundings.
Much like our present decade, the 1890s were a time of exciting innovation as well as economic crisis and uncertainty: New technologies like the recording of sound and film changed the way people perceived the world and themselves in it. The Chicago World's Fair took place in 1893 and was considered the biggest event in human history.
On the flip side of that was the Panic of 1893. The railroads had overbuilt and went bankrupt. The banks closed. The country was in chaos. —Amidst this upheaval Circus Girl is out of a job and left alone. She has to adjust to her new environment or be sucked into the harsh reality of a country in turmoil. Through the eyes of Circus Girl this challenging new play shows an epic struggle between fantasy and reality that also reflects the problems and turmoils we face in 2013.


Circus Girl is written and directed by Rocky Hopson, starring Kim Adams, Jen Brown, Dallas Tate, Zac Crofford, Dawn Youngs, Judd Farias, Kelly Hasandras and Michelle Keffer and designed by Monica Gibson, Jamie Urban, Ia Enstera, Steven Shirey, and Lee Webster.

The Hat Tree Theatricals is Rocky Hopson and Michelle Keffer.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Funding Appeal at Kickstarter: Circus Girl by Hat Tree Theatricals, deadline of May 11

The Third New Russian Drama Festival and Two One-Acts by Yury Klavdiev, Breaking String Theatre Company, February 6 - 16

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


The third annual New Russian Drama Festival in Austin, organized and hosted by Breaking String Theatre Company and its artistic director, Graham Schmidt, offered a full weekend of theatre to Austin, with impressive guests, panel discussions, staged readings, a musical program and full stage presentations of two world-class one-act plays by the preeminent contemporary playwright Yury Klavdiev. My first and 
last impressions are that Austin is fortunate indeed simply to have access to such theatrical and artistic enrichment in the course a single weekend.

The core of the festival is the full staging of the Klavdiev works I Am the Machine Gunner and Martial Arts. They are well-matched and exemplary of new Russian drama. At one of the talkback sessions, an audience member asked translator John Freedman what characterized contemporary Russian drama. Freedman’s an intellectual, an observer, and a practitioner who could have offered a long-winded literary exposition, but his initial response was terse and to the point: “Violence.” Since the fall of the U.S.S.R. Russian playwrights have focused not on politics but on the dark side of capitalism and its new avenues for crime. Panel discussants detailed diametrically opposed political views of producing playwrights, usually by categorizing them as pro or con on President Putin’s policies.

I am the Machine Gunner led the evening’s program. Actor Joey Hood performed it as a solo, although the later panel discussion informed us that elsewhere it had been staged for two actors and even nine actors. In Austin it was Hood alone, shifting throughout the forty-minute performance between two characters: a contemporary street criminal and his grandfather, a combat veteran of World War II. I Am the Machine Gunner was more than just overwhelming.

Translator Freedman told us that among contemporary Russian playwrights, Klavdiev is foremost for taking an “in your face” approach. Blood, death and the f-word filled the air, nowhere more climactically than when Hood stood far downstage center and opened the mind of the machine gunner in a delirium of killing the leaves on the trees, shooting down the moon, filling the blue sky with black bullet holes and finally, finally ending the pain by destroying the earth.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Video by Robert Moncrief for Strike, a double bill by Yury Klavdiev, Breaking String Theatre Company at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, February 7 - 16, 2013

Robert Moncrief's video of Joey Hood, Molly Karrasch and Kaci Beeler of









talking about 

STRIKE:

MARTIAL ARTS and I AM THE MACHINE GUNNER

by Yury Klavdiev

presented February 7 - 16, 2013 at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd. (click for map) in conjunction with the third New Russian Drama Festival.

 

Click for additional information at AustinLiveTheatre.com

Can Can, A 1940's Style Floor Show, The Exchange Artists at Palm Door, November 13 and 15

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

I picked my way through the new development and blocked streets of downtown Austin to find this new bar I’d never heard of, the Palm Door. After hiking blocks, I saw it—it was the building formerly occupied by City Grille, once the best seafood restaurant in Austin. The address is 401 Sabine Street, immediately across the street east of the convention center. I want everyone to find it more easily than I did because the Exchange Artists’ performance there is well worth it.

The show is Can Can: A 1940s Floor Show. It's a composite of 1940s musical theatre and movie song and dance routines, finished with Romulus Linney’s exquisite one-act play Can Can. The play is a history of two relationships right after VE day.
The evening of performance is the second in a series of plays in bars mounted by Exchange Artists, one of the most creative groups in the Austin theatre community. They recently staged The Man Who Planted Trees in Sparky Park in central Austin. Surely one of their most notable traits is their seemingly unflagging ability to produce laudable productions in non-traditional performance spaces. And they do it in very short turnaround time—in this case within two months.

The lead producer this time was Bridget Farr, and Katie Richter directed the show. There I was, sitting in a room that looked like an old 1940s barracks with its open ceiling, expecting light entertainment, and suddenly I received a knock-down, lights-out stage dance performance by triple-threat performers Michelle Keffer, Bridget Farr, Cassie Stewart and Will Brittain. They were led by the terrific Jonathan Itchon, a recent B. Iden Payne nominee. Sing (like the Andrews Sisters), dance, act—this group can do it all.

And guiding us through it all was Emcee Noel Gaulin, with his two-day turnaround from Paper Chairs’ Boom for Real (likewise Michelle Keffer). Gaulin’s surprise was a stand-up routine that was a knock-off of 70s comic Andy Kaufman. Gaulin gave us a very close approach to Kaufman, and it gave the audience that queasy, I-don’t-know-if-I-like-this feeling and several icky question marks in the mind about the performer’s mental health. Pay special attention to the punch line “I got vaccinated.”

If all this wasn’t enough, the Tapestry, Too dance troupe performed classic period tap dance numbers. They are the adult student company of Tapestry Dance. They gave us the virtuoso performance of continuing to perform well when the soundtrack music unexpectedly quit. They did well, but paid in performance stress for the inevitable quirks and kinks presented by a non-traditional venue.

Exchange Artists remains true to its huge creative energies, and everything it produces offers beautiful gifts to its audiences. Performers Bridget Farr, Michelle Keffer, Noel Gaulin and Jonathan Itchon seem to hone their talents continually, and they certainly deserve greater attention and higher paychecks. I’ve singled out these few, but all the performers lit up from within when they hit the stage. It is satisfying to see people following their bliss.

Promoting and building the performance communities in Austin is one of my commitments, as it is for AustinLiveTheatre.com. And Exchange Artists is one of about a half-dozen small companies I follow that are exceptionally deserving of growth and greater attention within the community. Much of their work is of short duration and in venues somewhat harder to find than the average theatre. But their ticket prices, for their greater effort in production and your greater effort in finding them, are no higher than anybody else’s. A percentage of their ticket revenue always goes to charity. For slightly more than the price of a movie ticket you can receive much more in art and entertainment. Exchange Artists—remember the name, seek them out; the rewards are huge.

Upcoming: A Behanding in Spokane by Martin McDonagh, Hyde Park Theatre, April 28 - May 28

Received directly:

Hyde Park Theatre

presents

the Austin premiere of

Martin McDonagh’s

directed by Ken Webster

Featuring Aaron Alexander, Michelle Keffer, Mical Trejo, and Ken Webster

April 28 – May 28

Thursdays – Saturdays at 8 p.m.

Hyde Park Theatre 511 W. 43rd Street at Guadalupe (click for map)

Tickets $19 and $17 Fridays and Saturdays. Pay-What-You-Can Thursdays

Final weekend tickets are $21 and $19

Charge tickets online at www.hydeparktheatre.org or call 479-PLAY (7529).

Hyde Park Theatre continues its love affair with the black comedies of the brilliant young Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, this time with McDonagh's first play set in America, the savagely funny A Behanding in Spokane. The New York Times called the play “perfect, demented, ecstatic, and imaginative.” “Wildly entertaining…truly explosive,” said The Daily News. The Wall Street Journal said, “You’ll spend 90 minutes laughing nonstop.“

In Behanding, Carmichael's 37-year search for his missing left hand brings him to a small-town hotel where he encounters a bizarre hotel clerk and a small-time con-artist couple who claim to have the hand.

Austin critics called HPT's 2008 production of McDonagh's The Lonesome West "witty, engaging, intense, and wickedly funny" and "utterly hilarious." HPT's 2007 production of McDonagh's The Pillowman sold out every performance during an unprecedented three extensions; Austin critics called it "utterly compelling," "an excellent production of an immensely challenging and strikingly brilliant play," and "one fascinating, entertaining night of theatre that we can't recommend highly enough." Those productions were also directed by Ken Webster.

McDonagh won an Academy Award for Best Short Film for Six Shooter and an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for In Bruges.

Flying by Olga Mukhina, Breaking String Theatre at the Off Center, January 28 - February 19

ALT's first take, for NowPlayingAustin's "A-Team":

Olga Mukhina’s Flying is a fast, dangerous and exhilarating ride.

Graham Schmidt and Breaking String Theatre put audiences up close to the beautiful youth of post-Soviet Russia in this 2004 piece. Olga Mukhin Qa one of those who originated the “New Drama” that came raging into Russia's mid-1990’s. It plays until February 19 at the Off Center, 2211-A Hidalgo Street (behind Joe’s Bakery on 7^th Street).

Heedless, hedonistic and rootless, a gang of six young professionals address one another only by their remarkable nicknames. Snowstorm, Blizzard, Snowflake, Maniac, Orangina and Lenochka strut, talk, preen and play hard. They revolve about one another and thrust themselves through the drab Moscow nights like shooting stars. Director Schmidt, choreographer Adrian Mishler and composer Justin Sherburn give this story a kinetic power that leaves the audience breathless at the end of the first half.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Flying by Olga Mukhina, Breaking String Theatre at the Off Center, January 28 - February 19

Received directly and researched on-line:

i

in association with the Rude Mechanicals proudly presents

the North American premiere of

Flying

by Olga Mukhina
translated by John Freedman

directed by Graham Schmidt

at the Off Center, 2211 Hidalgo Street (click for map)

January 28 - February 19

January 28, 29, 30 (Friday - Saturday; Sunday at 5 p.m.)

February 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (Thursday - Monday)

February 10, 11, 13, 14 (Thursday - Monday)

February 16, 17, 18, 19 (Thursday - Saturday)

Performances at 8 p.m. except for Sunday, January 30

Tickets * $15-25 General Admission

* Mondays (February 7 and 14) are pay-what-you-want industry nights

A group of Russia’s so-called “golden youth,” smart, talented, well-heeled twenty-somethings are heading for disaster. Among them are DJs, VJs, PR agents and on-screen presenters for a hot new youth-oriented Moscow television production company. These people, with hip-sounding names like Snowstorm, Maniac, Snowflake and Orangina, are creating and living the images that will define the future. None wastes much time thinking about why one of their group is repeatedly battered by her husband or why another constantly takes tranquilizers to maintain her cool, collected image. But when an unsullied teenage girl joins their group one day, they are compelled to look beyond the usual limits of their purview. And when Snowstorm is arrested for possession of drugs and Orangina undergoes a religious experience, the insular nature of their world is quickly breached.

Breaking String has been proud to collaborate with playwright Olga Mukhina and critic / translator John Freedman in the development of this production.

The Cast: Jesse Bertron, David Boss, Joey Hood, Michelle Keffer, Adriene Mishler, Michael Plaster, Gricelda Silva, Jacob Trussell, Katie Van Winkle

The Crew: Graham Schmidt (Director), Angelica Mañez (Stage Manager), Adriene Mishler (Director of Movement) Ia Ensterä (Set Designer), Jamie Urban (Costume Designer), Steven Shirey (Lighting Designer), Justin Sherburn (Music and Sound Designer), Eric Johnson (Carpenter / Electrician)

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Lonestar, A Popcorn Throwing Rock Country Musical, Vestige Group at United States Art Authority, November 4 - 21

Wow, guys, this was a mess.

Melodrama meets country rock band and invites beer drinkers to interrupt the whole thing at will with popcorn, catcalls, and even, on one particularly wild night, someone's shoe thrown from the audience.

Dr. Dave my retired college professor friend and I paid for the Wednesday night VIP seats, only there weren't any. We were kindly removed from the high table next to the stage, which turned out to be the location for those long-legged cowgirls, but there was still time to nab our front row seats. We did get our complimentary beer glasses with logo and the two beer tickets each, so we had little cause to complain on that account.

Let's look at a couple of the key elements.

Melodrama: a theatrical art form performed in small towns, church halls, saloons and theatres across the country, particularly but not exclusively in the 19th century. Typically, a simple story with a beleaguered, right-thinking young hero, a virginal heroine with heart of gold regularly threatened by a black-hearted villain with loss of her maidenhead, loss of the family farm, and loss of everything else of value. The playing style is broad. The characters are stereotypes. Frequently, the actors turn to address the audience in character, exaggerating emotions with a complicit wink. Everyone knows that Virtue Will Triumph.

Country Rock: Amplified, very loud guitar-based up-tempo music, featuring a full and active drum set and perhaps an amplified fiddle. Thrumming base guitar is a must. Words and lyrics appear to be optional, because you cannot hear them over the roar of the music, anyway.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .