Houston Lifestyles & Homes March 2010
performing arts in the houston area
Apollo Dancer Connor Walsh
AMERICAN AT HEART
Houston Ballet, March 11, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21
Houston Ballet presents American at Heart, its winter mixed repertory program featuring three ballets of significance to
American dance.
Fancy Free depicts the adventures of three sailors on shore leave who meet two girls on a
hot summer night in New York City in the 1940s.
A seminal piece in the history of 20th century ballet, Apollo traces the birth of the god of music, poetry and prophecy—and his education through (and flirtation with) the three muses Terpsichore,
Calliope and Polyhymnia.
Christopher Bruce’s comic and moving Hush chronicles the adventures of a family of performers, and is set to a musical
celebration of life
—from youth to old age—by Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin.
Michael Peterson: Evolution/Revolution
Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, March 27 - July 2
Houston Center for Contemporary Craft presents Michael Peterson: Evolution/-Revolution, an exhibition of elegant and bold wood sculptures by the Texas-born artist.
The show will be on view in the small gallery of the Houston Center for
Contemporary Craft from March 27-July 2.
Evolution/Revolution traces the evolution from the artist’s early lathe-turned bowls to his current revolutionary sculptures, which are
devoid of the lathe. Over 30 sculptures, inspired by the geographic environment
of the Pacific Northwest, will be on view.
Turning, carving, sandblasting, bleaching and pigmenting the burl portion of
trees, such as madrone, maple, grass tree, elm and locust.
Michael Peterson’s “Teardrop” Landscape series, 1987. Maple burl, Lathe turned. Collection of Jane and Arthur
Mason.
Theatre Under the Stars,
March 9 - 21
South Pacific swept the 2008 Tony Awards, winning seven honors including Best Musical Revival
and Best Director for Bartlett Sher. This lavish new production features a cast
of 34 and a full orchestra of 26 members
—the largest orchestra of any touring Broadway production.
Set on a tropical island during World War II, the musical tells the sweeping
romantic story of two couples and how their happiness is threatened by the
realities of war and by their own prejudices. For more information, go to
www.tuts.com.
LA BAYADÈRE
Houston Ballet, March 5 - 7
The high point of Houston Ballet’s 40th anniversary season will be a spectacular new production of one of the
great classical works of the 19th century repertoire, featuring choreography by
Stanton Welch and lavish scenery and costumes by celebrated English designer
Peter Farmer.
Set in the Royal India of the past, La Bayadère is a story of eternal love, mystery, fate, vengeance and justice. The ballet
relates the drama of a temple dancer (bayad
ère), Nikiya, who is loved by Solor, a noble warrior. She is also loved by the
High Brahmin, but does not love him in return, as she does Solor.
cirque dreams illumination
Broadway Across America, Through March 7
From the creators of the groundbreaking Broadway hit Cirque Dreams Jungle Fantasy comes an all new journey of nighttime dreamers whose imaginations are ignited
within a landscape of towering buildings and infinite possibilities.
Audiences of all ages will marvel and experience a journey of city dwellers who
reinvent everyday objects, balance beyond belief, delicately dangle from wires,
leap tall buildings and redefine the risks of flight in an array of astounding
occurrences that transform the ordinary into extraordinary.
artemis quartet
Houston Friends of Music, March 9
The Berlin-based Artemis Quartet was founded at the Lubeck Musikhochschule in
1989. With Walter Levin and the Emerson, Juilliard and Alban Berg Quartets as
teachers and mentors, the Artemis quickly gained a reputation as one of the
leading ensembles of their generation.
After winning first prizes at the ARD and Borciani competitions, the Artemis
Quartet chose to immerse themselves in further study with the Alban Berg
Quartet in Vienna. This was followed by a sabbatical at Berlin
’s Wissenschaftskolleg. The Artemis has performed to high acclaim since 2004 at
the Berlin Philharmonic.
Allison Hunter Zoosphere
Diverse Works, March 12 - April 17
Zoosphere is a transcendent, site-specific installation investigating humankind’s relationship to the natural world. In her first-ever immersive video
installation, Hunter upends the power dynamic between the human and non-human
animal within a dark, maze-like environment in which the man and beast
co-mingle.
Drawing on the experience of a visit to the zoo, audiences will travel through a
subdivided series of exhibition galleries filled with life-size projections of
zoo animals devoid of any natural animal sounds (trumpeting elephants, birds in
flight, herding zebras, barking sea lions, etc.). Against the backdrop of a
rapidly shifting ecological landscape in which species across the globe are
threatened with extinction,
Zoosphere reconnects humanity with the beauty and wonder of the animal kingdom.
El Anatsui
Rice University Art Gallery, Through March 14
Rice University Art Gallery has commissioned a site-specific installation by El
Anatsui, one of the foremost contemporary artists of his generation. Anatsui,
who has been called
“a master of material transformation,” is known for turning the detritus of everyday life into works of stunning
beauty and power.
A native of Ghana and resident of Nigeria since 1975, El Anatsui has
experimented throughout the years in a variety of media including wood,
ceramics and paint. Although he was a respected teacher and artist in Africa
for more than 30 years, he was little known internationally until 10 years ago
when he began creating dazzling suspended sculptures made from liquor bottle
tops and metal foil collars from the bottle necks.
Speech and Debate
Stages Repertory Theatre, March 17 - April 11
Teen misfits Solomon, Diwata and Howie discover each other online and build a
tentative alliance in the form of their high school
’s first speech and debate team in the production Speech and Debate. Now they just have to decide which of their pressing personal issues will make
for the best performance.
This winning, fiercely funny dark comedy is part Breakfast Club, part Arthur Miller, and was hailed in its 2007 off-Broadway run as a brilliant
look at the modern teenager.
Steven Isserlis: The Romantic Cello
Da Camera of Houston, March 26
Acclaimed worldwide as one of the leading cellists of his time, Steven Isserlis
makes his Houston recital debut in a dramatic program evoking 100 years of
romantic music on March 26 at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts.
From 19th-century Romantics Chopin and Schumann—whose bicentennials Da Camera celebrates this season—to the 20th-century American composer Samuel Barber, born 100 years ago, hear
the passionate Romantic spirit masterfully expressed within the classical
sonata form.
prendergast in italy
Museum Fine Arts Houston, Through May 9
This exhibition brings together for the first time the unparalleled bodies of
work that American Impressionist Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924) produced
during two trips to Italy. For Prendergast, Venice provided a spectacle of
color and pattern that he transformed into stunning and bold modernist
interpretations, catapulting him into the front ranks of American artists.
Prendergast in Italy features approximately 70 watercolors, plus monotypes and related oils,
sketchbooks, letters and Japanese prints drawn from a number of public and
private collections, as well as from the Williams College Museum of Art and
Terra Foundation of American Art. For more information, go to
www.mfah.org.
Landscapes: A Photography Exhibit
by Houston and Texas Artists
Houston Center for Photography,
Through April 16
Houston Center for Photography, Houston Arts Alliance, and the City of Houston
Mayor
´s Office of Cultural Affairs present Landscapes: A Photography Exhibit by Houston and Texas Artists. The nine individuals featured in this photographic exhibition at City Hall
draw inspiration from the natural environment to make images.
Varied in their approaches to their subject, each has a sensitivity towards the
Earth and endeavors to capture glimpses of unfettered landscape in Texas and
surrounding states. The featured artists are: Kevin Bassler, Chuy Benitez,
Bevin Bering, Peter Thomson Brown, Shelley Calton, Mike Marvins, Teresa
Munisteri, Angilee Wilkerson and Paul Zeigler.
The Book of Memory
Holocaust Museum Houston, Through April 25
The Holocaust Museum Houston has collaborated with the Consulate General of
Mexico in presenting samples of the work by artist Bela Gold in
The Book of Memory exhibit. For several years, Gold’s work has been a reflection of the complexity of contemporary culture. Her work
is defined by a contrast between beauty and cultural references; in her case,
the Holocaust. She puts this conflict on display in all her pieces, which offer
evidence of our own ambivalence toward the beauty of artistic expression and
the social impact it creates. Gold offers a sample book of the various graphics
techniques depicting a variety of metal etchings, photoengraved-intaglio,
engraved-intaglio, laser engraving, graphite on stone, silkscreen and graphite
drawing on stone, and digital embroidery on cloth.
Maurizio Cattelan
The Menil Collection, Through Aug. 15
Contemporary Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) is known for his witty
embrace of semantic shifts that result from imaginative plays with materials,
objects and actions. In his work, contradictions in the space between what the
artist describes as softness and perversity wage a sarcastic critique on
political power structures, from notions of nationalism or the authorities of
organized religion to the conceit of the museum and art history.
The exhibition focuses on recent large-scale works that premiered in Europe in
2007, and features sculptures that range in tone from the melancholic and
politically contentious to the decidedly irreverent.
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