Highlights: Fusebox Festival April 21-May 2 (Austin, Texas)

Fusebox is an annual contemporary art and performance festival that takes place in Austin, TX each April. This year’s dates are April 21 – May 2. The Fusebox Festival presents contemporary art and performance that spans form and geography. The festival acts as a catalyst for new ideas, new artistic models, new languages and approaches to help us better fully engage with the issues and questions that define and inspire us as artists and audiences.

DANIEL BARROW

Winnipeg-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, he has created and adapted comic book narratives to “manual” forms of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors.

LUKE SAVISKY

Luke Savisky’s multi-media performances have transformed natural and architectural settings worldwide for audiences from 1 to 50,000, exploring the limits of visual media through the use of manual film montage, mobile projection, kinetic sculpture, 3D projection surfaces, live music, choreography and performers in unique and unlikely environments. His work includes I/Tx (The I/Eye of Texas), an interactive projection of viewer’s eyes onto an 85ft water tower in downtown Austin, TX and a twenty story 35mm live architectural film montage interacting with building climbers for First Night Austin. Savisky was chosen as official media artist for the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including: The Texas Filmmakers Production Fund, the Austin Film Society’s 1st D. Montgomery Award, and the 2007 Austin Table of Critics Award for Best Individual Project. Savisky was also nominated for the first Arthouse Texas Prize and the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Grant.

KAIJI MORIYAMA

Kaiji Moriyama first began his career with a musical theater company in Japan, and moved to the world of professional choreography. He has worked with a number of leading contemporary dance companies and innovative Japanese choreographers such as Kota Yamazaki, Yukio Ueshima, and Aki Nagatani.

Frédérick Gravel

In its current “temporarily final” (according to Gravel) guise, GravelWorks is a showcase of moods, humour, bodies, musical colours, short dances, pop songs, personalities and friendly impertinence. Presented in “best of ” concert form, the elastic temporality of this piece (begun in 2006), has undergone a number of variations depending on the number of artists involved and the arrangement of the stand-alone pieces as an ensemble. Whether the long or the short version, it has attracted audiences at Studio 303, Performance Mix in Soho, Tangente and The Art(prononcez dehors) during the first OFF.T.A event. Constructed like a Moebius strip, it takes the spetator on a journey between the inside and the outside of the spectacle, or, as Gravel himself suggests, from the head to the heart to the genitals, in whichever order you wish.