Gesel Mason, Charles O. Anderson, Frank Wo/Man Collective, and Rudy Ramirez
This year, Texas Performing Arts partnered with Fusebox Festival to create a new production residency program that aims to give financial and practical assistance to local preforming artists. Bob Bursey, the executive director of Texas Performing Arts, says the idea was both idealistic and pragmatic.
“The idealistic piece [of the program] is that for independent performing artists in our country, it’s a huge, huge struggle to get new work made,” Bursey says. “So we wanted to speak to that. And then at the same time, due to the pandemic, our stages are dark here at the TPA. Bass Concert Hall, the McCullough Theatre, and our rehearsal studios that would normally be engaged in presenting artists from around the world – those spaces are fallow. And we have staff who are really hungry to continue to contribute to artistic process and creative research. So we wanted to bring those two things together th
Courtesy of The Frank Wo / Men Collective
Listen: Stemmed from the seeds of childhood magic, there exist five rooms, each a distinct familiar-but-not-quite home environment that possesses its own features and surprise tricks. Five live kiddadult characters inhabit these personalized rooms, and the audience has the ability to observe them through 11 potential camera views, eventually channel-changing as they wish.
OK, we get it: This is a new one of those livestreamed virtual things that, thanks to COVID-19, we ve been seeing so much of lately. But, citizen,
but: This particular online event, K ! :D D: Ö, is a co-presentation from big-time culturemongers Texas Performing Arts and Fusebox Festival; it s a result of TPA s multipartite residency program for Austin-based performing artists; and (here s the best part) it features Frank Wo/Men Collective.