Highlights: Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX, US)

Mission:
Fusebox champions innovative works of art across a variety of different mediums. The festival acts as a catalyst for new ideas, new artistic models, and approaches to help us engage with the issues and questions that define contemporary life.

Core Values:
CONVERSATION Creating new avenues of conversation.
INNOVATION Presenting contemporary works and programs that challenge, re-invent and push us forward.
EDUCATION Furthering our understanding of the contemporary arts through a series of dynamic panel discussions, brunches, informal chats, writings, interviews and intensive workshops led by master instructors.
ARTIST SUPPORT Providing resources, equipment, and money for the creation of new works and improved sustainability/quality of life for artists.
COLLABORATION Establishing new creative partnerships between artists, organizations, and business.

Vision:
Fusebox is an idea engine. A space where artists and audiences can take risks, ask questions and explore ideas together, break rules, and blur boundaries. It is a platform for visionary works, unabashed play, and new ways of engaging with our world.

Highlights:

HOME MADE
tEEth
April 21 – April 23
9:00 pm – 10:00 pm
The Long Center for the Performing Arts

tEEth presents Home Made, a daring new performance that examines the awkwardness of human beauty and the struggles of intimate negotiation. A male and female duo (Noel Plemmons and Keely McIntyre) are accompanied by male and female live vocalists (Luke Matter and Cali Ricks), interweaving music and movement. Angelle Hebert’s distinctive choreography pushes gestural dance to its limits while Phillip Kraft’s original score is both hypnotic and lyrical. Playfulness becomes manipulation and exploration shades into aggression as Home Made explores the delicate balance between tenderness and hostility.

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DISCUSSING ART IN THE 21ST CENTURY_ A MIXED MEDIA PRESENTATION OF IMAGE DEMARCATIONS VIA…
Phil Soltanoff
April 28 – April 30
9:00 pm – 10:00 pm
The Vortex

Featured as part of MACHINE SHOP (Fusebox’s residency program).

PANEL DISCUSSION is both our subject and object. Meaning, how can we engage in a healthy, down-to-earth, discussion about art. And how can that discussion be a platform to consider alternative performance strategies. In this case, I’ve been toying with other ways, D.I.Y. ways, to make video a vibrant part of live performance. Video is tricky–it’s deeply seductive and impressive–and passive at the same time. How do we liven up this relationship. How do we parnter with video rather than admire it? And what can it do to text? We’ve constructed a kind of “video puppetry” in which people and video interact with each other in a rather vulnerable way. It becomes a negotiation between people and technology, played out in real time with an audience. PANEL DISCUSSION is also a first step. Can the format of the ubiquitous panel become a platform for a future performance? Fusebox Artistic Director, Ron Berry, and I are taking the concept of “video puppetry” a step further next year and we want to workshop the idea of the panel discussion as a theatrical form. Thanks for being part of the process!

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LET US THINK OF THESE THINGS ALWAYS. LET US SPEAK OF THEM NEVER.
Every House Has A Door
April 21 – April 23
8:00 pm – 9:30 pm
Salvage Vanguard Theater

Under the direction of Lin Hixson, artists Selma Banich and Mislav Cavajda from Zagreb, and Chicagoans Stephen Fiehn of Cupola Bobber and Matthew Goulish, propose an encounter between Croatia and the US through responses to an unlikely, “equidistant” third entity, Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Yugoslavian responses to Bergman, derived from the work of Dusan Makavejev (Sweet Movie), and American responses to Bergman (and Makavejev) extracted from philosopher Stanley Cavell, provide the foundation for a theatrical work that engages in the histories of utopianism and revulsion/revolt in an unjust world. Film becomes a basis for choreography, a catalogue of abandoned practices offers a degree of humor, and theater frames an encounter of difference in the delicacy of the present.

The creation of this performance has been supported by a grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding. It is a co-production with OOUR and Centre for Drama Art with further support from the City Office for Culture Zagreb, The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, ekscene platform in collaboration with CeKaO “Zagreb”, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and FACE Croatia.

Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never. is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund/Forth Fund Project co-commissioned by Performance Space 122 in partnership with Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,Fusebox Festival and NPN. The Creation Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). The Forth Fund is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

View the full list of artists and works at the Fusebox Festival Website.