Abby Koenig

CORE Performance Company at The Dan Flavin Installation

Dan Flavin, the minimalist artist best known for his work with fluorescent light, is quoted with saying that "light" is "as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find." In many ways dance is also as plain and direct an art as you can find. Whatever meaning the choreographer may have intended, in the end it is purely visceral. The viewer is watching bodies move, just like watching a light glow.

Last night, CORE Performance Company performed a piece inspired by Flavin's work inside the Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall. The piece, titled above and below, was choreographed by CORE's Artistic Director, Sue Schrodeder, and featured nine dancers who became a living component of the Flavin installation.

The dancers entered the room from either side of the space, moving slowly. Both men and women were dressed in varying pastels with seemingly random white thick elastic bands tied around their legs and mid-sections. If you can picture a dystopian insane asylum, you can get a mental image.

CORE getting all up in people's grill.

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Mid Main, you can take the metro there

Updated with the name of artist David A. Feil.

If you haven't been over to the new/old happening area of Main Street, the first Thursday of each month is the time to go. Last night the block of Main between the 3600 and 3700, which calls itself Mid Main, had its monthly first Thursday and it was a rocking time.

Each first Thursday the shops and bars along Mid Main open their doors and their taps and invite people to come out and have a good time. In addition to art, music and various free libations, the proprietors along the block donate 5 percent of the evening's proceeds to a chosen donation. Last night the non-profit being supported was the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts.

There were a number of bands and DJs hitting up the various venues; DJ Flash Gordon was at Sig's Lagoon, Nick Gaitan and the Umbrellaman were over at the Big Top and Los Guerreros De La Musica took over the Continental Club. But the highlight of the evening was the UH Marching Band, which came in on the metro, brass a blazing as they strutted in an organized fashion down the platform into the crowd.

There was a new addition to the shopping on Main. The Tinderbox, a not-yet opened craft, art and jewelry shop, made its mini-debut last night. The shop, which will actually open some time next month, is the idea of Ren Mitchell and her sister who were looking for a place to showcase Houston artists' wares.

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JT Haberstaat taking the stage at Mangos

Mixing punk rock and comedy may not seem like a sane idea, but if you were at Mango's last night, then you know that it is. The Montrose club played host to "Bukowski Lives! A Night of Drunken Headliners!" which was an exclusive four show comedy tour that only came through the great state of Texas. The tour is an off-shoot of sorts to the Altercation Punk Comedy Tour, which is the brainchild of JT Haberstaat, who currently hails from Austin. Haberstaat brought some friends along for this tour, including Jay Whitecotton, Ian Stewart and John Tole, who's done quite a bit of national comedy including Howard Stern.

What makes a comedy show punk rock? "It's more of an attitude," says Haberstaat. Haberstaat grew up on punk rock music and the DIY sensibility and has transformed much of that into his approach to comedy. The Altercation Punk Comedy Tour only goes to small punk rock clubs. If the Comedians of Comedy tour started the idea of playing untraditional comedy venues, Altercation is its bad-ass little cousin; they hit up Mango's not the Verizon Theater. "The first year booking was terrible," Haberstaat recalls, "but the next year was awesome." Once clubs got "it," they wanted more.

John Tole, who headlined the show, comes from a similar background as Haberstaat in terms of the music listened to and the scene he hung around. "Punk rock was about tearing down the system when I was a kid," says Tole. And his approach to comedy is about tearing down as well but now with jokes. Tole explains that with comedy the comedian has a different impact on people than say a preacher, but there is a similarity. The comedian can share a message while being entertaining. Fight the man, just do it with a good joke.

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Photos by Pete Vonder Haar

The Chieftains with the Houston Symphony
Jones Hall
February 15, 2013

When your band's been around for half a century, you could probably be forgiven for reliving past glory and staying safely within the established confines of whatever envelope you've developed for yourself. Just don't tell that to the Chieftains, who celebrated their 50th anniversary last year by releasing an album (Voice of Ages) and now embarking on a 28-city tour.

That kind of longevity also brings a certain amount of respect from your peers (or so you'd hope), and any Chieftains show is likely to be loaded with special appearances and surprises. That was certainly the case Friday night at Jones Hall, where the Chieftains were joined by the Houston Symphony and several guests, providing a satisfying mix of Irish tradition and classical sensibility.

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With the help of a friend who works in local promotions and film screenings, I was a seat filler recently at the WWE Raw event at Toyota Center. You could say that for a few hours that I (and my ass) worked for World Wrestling Entertainment, and all I had to do was fill a few seats in range of TV cameras while fans got up to pee, buy their merch, or buy a beer.

Monday's Raw also marked the 20th anniversary of the weekly wrestling event. With the anniversary came special guests like Ric Flair ("WOOOOOOOOOOOOO") and Mick Foley. I hadn't watched wrestling for more than five minutes here, so everyone was new to me. Sadly, Stone Cold Steve Austin did not make an appearance, even though it was widely-rumored this past week.

Easily the most prominent seat filler was Kramer in that episode of Seinfeld when he filled seats for celebs at the Tony Awards. This episode also featured Raquel Welch beating up Elaine.

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Photo by Abby Koenig

The First Folk Market at AvantGarden

This Sunday marked the first Folk Market at AvantGarden, which will be a monthly event held on the third Sunday of each month. The Folk Market is the brain child of Brittany Bly who also created Pop Shop Houston. Each month, Bly will coordinate with 20 or so vendors to bring their goods to the parking lot of the Westheimer bar and art venue.

Bly, who is a crafter herself, wanted to make sure that The Folk Market matched the DIY sensibility of Pop Shop. All vendors must be indies, meaning no chains stores. While the inaugural Folk Market was comprised of sellers specifically from Houston and the surrounding areas, Bly isn't making that a requirement.

"Out of towners are welcome," Bly says, "they just have to be independent sellers."

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Photos by Carla Soriano

At the Menil Collection's 25th anniversary party, DJ Kalkutta's high energy set the tone for the night

And check out our slideshow of the entire weekend's activities.

With all its accolades, it's hard to believe that the Menil Collection is only 25 years old. In its short lifetime, the Renzo Piano designed building has deservedly received high praise, international recognition, and "iconic" status for the building itself and the impressive collection of art it houses: thousands of pieces that span centuries and styles, and include some of the most famous artists' work -- from Picasso to Dali to Warhol to Pollock to Rauschenberg to Magritte.

This past weekend, the Menil Collection celebrated its 25th anniversary with three events: a seated dinner entitled "A Celebration in Blue" on Friday, a French-inspired party called Bleu Électrique on Saturday, and a performance by Phillip Glass on Sunday. I only had the good fortune of attending the Bleu Électrique fête.

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Photo by David Bullanday Photography

The Setup
On November 9 and 10, Revolve Dance Company takes over Barnevelder Theater to present its fall concert Nexus, a collection of new pieces imagined by a variety of choreographers, including its co-directors and founding members.

The Execution
The pieces comprising Nexus were an eclectic bunch, spanning a variety of genres and themes. While they did not deliberately share a narrative, these pieces aligned themselves in order of increasing sophistication in movement quality and staging.

The first piece, "Let's Go for a Ride," was energetic on the surface, as women in brightly colored flapper dresses took turns seducing (man)nequins on roller skates to the tune of a pop song laced with Andrews Sisters riffs. Beyond its novelty, however, it felt somewhat underdeveloped. The movement held extremely tightly to the music, feeling more like a direct translation than an interpretation. Orders of solos and movement phrases became quickly predictable, and the dancers threw a number of smiles at the audience which, while cute at first, came across as needy by the end of the piece.

An issue that arose in "Ride" and also in the third piece, "Sound of Silence," was the sheer number of dancers on stage. It should be noted that managing 12 dancers on stage in an intimate venue is no small feat. If there is no focal point, unison movement can look very blurry, and if spacings are not exaggerated, the density of dancers on stage can appear to remain the same throughout the piece. In both of these works, there were times when the movement and staging may have been crisper on three or four dancers instead of a dozen.

That said, there are also incredibly powerful and sophisticated ways to use 12 dancers on stage, and these are what Revolve spent the last two-thirds of the show exploring to remarkable ends.

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Louie Palu

At various points during this embittered election, talks of the events in the Middle East came up. Did we accomplish anything? Has anything changed from the time we entered upon their foreign soil? Opinions run wild and tend to polarize on either side of the political spectrum, but the one thing that both parties tend to do is champion the soldier. They are placed on hero levels, but rarely are they given names, emotions or recognition of their lives when they are not being "a soldier." Soldier, At Ease, the new exhibit at the Houston Center for Photography, aims to change this.

Soldier, At Ease, which opened last night, is a collection of three bodies of work by photojournalists Tim Hetherington, Louie Palu and Erin Trieb. Each of the artists has captured rare moments where soldiers aren't acting like soldiers, but rather they are acting like human beings.

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Photo by Deen van Meer

Peter Lockyer as Jean Valjean in Les Miserables

Check out our interview with Andrew Varela who plays Inspector Javert.

The set-up:
In this 25th anniversary touring production presented by Gexa Energy Broadway, the blockbuster pop opera by Claude-Michel Schönberg (music), Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel (original French text), Herbert Kretzmer (English lyrics), James Fenton (additional material), along with the invaluable physical mise en scéne devised by original directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird, remains an epic theatrical achievement.

Like the gargantuan Victor Hugo novel from which it has been wily adapted, the show explodes with grand emotions and elemental forces writ large: Selfless Love, Indomitable Courage, Utopian Commitment, Social Inequality, Venal Opportunism, Youthful Folly, Heavenly Redemption. It is as rich and affecting a theatrical experience as you could wish.

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