Opportunity: Set Designer/Artist for The Relentless Pursuit of Ice by Max Langert, Punchkin Repertory, Austin

CALL FOR DESIGNERS AND ARTISTS!

Want to join a fun, creative, and collaborative team? We are currently looking for creative people to join our team as Set, Prop, Lighting, Sound, Costume Designer. If you are skilled at one or more of those areas, contact us!We need creative, flexible designers and artists who want to showcase their talents. Please email your resumé to info@punchkin.org

Punchkin Rep will be producing a new play by Austin playwright Max Langert, The Relentless Pursuit of Ice, for FronteraFest 2014! We are pleased to welcome Kyle Zamcheck to our team as our director for our upcoming production!

The Relentless Pursuit Of Ice is set in the impending desolate future, where we focus on a couple. We follow their daily life of enduring the never ending, increasingly miserable hot sun. With the weather getting hotter, and more unbearable, a special delivery is brought to their door. Choices must be made. Will this new adventure tear them apart, or bring them together?

Typical designer responsibilities include: Collaborate with director and interpret script to visualize set and sound; order/locate materials for production of set; conceptualize, create and craft sets while working alongside production team; produce plans, drawings and models of sets; prepare estimates of set costs; liaise with directors, producers, costume designers and lighting/sound staff, etc.; manage set budget; attend rehearsals as needed; analyze stage entrances and exits to ensure set is situated properly; demonstrate set abilities to crew members, including actors; ensure stage is properly broken down and disposed of after use; costume and prop design.

Key skills: ability to demonstrate genuine interest in, knowledge or experience of visual arts, and theatre is essential; teamwork ; enthusiasm; determination; perseverance; imaginative/artistic adaptability; working well under pressure; good spatial awareness; technical skills.

If interested, please message our Facebook page, www.facebook.com/PunchkinRepertoryTheatre, or e-mail info@punchkin.org, to set up an interview. For more info about Punchkin Rep, go to our website, www.punchkin.org.

Punchkin Rep is a sponsored project of Austin Creative Alliance and is supported in part by the City of Austin Cultural Arts Division.

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 . . . .

Robert Faires on Calling a Thing by its Name, Austin Chronicle, July 25, 2013

From Robert Faires' column All Over Creation, some lexical advice: what kind of town is Austin, anyway?

 

 

All Over Creation: What Do You Mean?

Shaking up the lexicon once in a while is necessary if we want to be clear

by Robert Faires

[ . . . . ] Robert Lynch, president and CEO of the national advocacy group Americans for the Arts, in his speech on cultural tourism at the Marchesa last Thursday[, . . . .] related an anecdote about meeting a couple of folks in an airport, and Austin came up. "Oh, we love Austin," they told him. "Great," he said. "When you're there, do you ever do anything related to the arts?" "No," they replied. "We never do the arts, because we're too busy doing music." 

Rimshot.

Sure, we know what those people meant, but it still points to this divide that persists between anything artistic in popular culture and what are called traditional fine-art disciplines, as if all those sounds being cranked out at clubs and concert halls every night couldn't be part of the arts. Naw, that stuff is church; what bands play is fun. If you want to know why I and a number of other advocates for arts and culture have been ramming the word "creative" down your throat as a surrogate for "artist" of late, that's the reason. After 30 years of culture wars in which the arts have been demonized as elitist and offensive, "artist" is too charged a term to be effective in most public discourse.

"Creative" as a noun – and sorry, lexicon cops, I gotta break the law on this one – not only dispenses with all that baggage, it's more reflective of our contemporary attitude toward who's engaged in artistic pursuits. It encompasses filmmakers, designers, craftspeople, chefs, knitters, mixologists, architects, slam poets, programmers, and, yes, singer-songwriters, as well as painters, playwrights, dancers, and classical musicians. 

What all these very different kinds of people do is creative, and these days they're much more likely to do it with one another – collaborating across discipline and form – than the artists of days past. If we want people in this city or elsewhere to gain a new appreciation for the expansiveness and pervasiveness of the arts in modern society and their profound impact in every corner of our culture – education, productivity, mental well-being, the economy, human values, entertainment – it behooves us to speak in terms that make our meaning as clear as possible. Sometimes that means setting aside favored words of old, words that in a sense point backward, in favor of words that are free of the barnacles of bad experiences and controversy, that can be heard without assumption, without prejudice, and point a way forward.

Read full text at the Austin Chronicle. . . .

Upcoming: 'Inside Theatre' Experience with Amparo Garcia-Crow, July 29 - August 6

Received directly:

Hi Michael,

We've seen your website about theater in Austin and think that you may be interested in an event we are promoting on 1000passions.com. We are a new website where people can buy unique personal experiences providing behind the scenes access to the worlds of art, crafts, music, food, film, sports, theater and nature.

We're launching our site with an amazing Inside Theater event in Austin Texas, with acclaimed writer/director Amparo Garcia Crow. This is a private group experience in which one can observe and participate in the creation of an original theatrical piece. You can read more about this experience at http://bit.ly/q7JkWR.

Please feel free to share this opportunity with your audience, and stay in touch for many more exciting experiences in Austin!

The 1000passions team
1000passions.com


Inside Theater: One Person Show
Observe the process of how a theatrical piece is conceived, step by step, by spending the day with acclaimed writer and director Amparo Garcia-Crow. You’ll have the chance to witness a work in development, with the unique opportunity of being able to contribute to its creation.

Amparo has been developing a series of interactive one woman shows starring Aralyn Hughes, iconic artist and performer, documenting Aralyn’s life and work over the course of a year. The current show is called The Moving Brunch, and you’re invited in on the fun. As part of your experience, you’ll spend the day with the director and actor as they rehearse, taking on an active role if you desire by giving feedback and interacting with the show and its content. You’ll then return to see the show performed live (August 7th), and possibly participate as well, if your interaction proved integral to the material. Plans are being made to turn the series into a documentary film.

Join us for this unique chance to see how a show is brought to life, and experience cutting edge theater from the inside!

Amparo Garcia-Crow is an award winning, multi-disciplinary artist who acts, sings, directs and writes plays, screenplays and songs. Her half hour film, “Loaves and Fishes” (which she also stars in) aired on the PBS series “Territories”, after premiering at SXSW Film Festival and the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival. As an actress Amparo has performed at the Kennedy Center and other regional theaters in the Southwest. As a director, she has received the prestigious NEA/TCG Director’s Fellowship and has worked on new play development at various theaters including the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. A collection of her work “Between Misery and the Sun: The South Texas Plays” was published by No Passport Press in February 2009.

Price: $475 for a group of up to 3 people. Duration 5 hours. Price includes organic lunch and snacks, as well as a ticket to the performance.