Texas Performing Arts continues to build on its artist-in-residence program, which the venue launched in 2020 to give local artists space and support to make work while the venue was closed to audiences during the pandemic.
This year, Texas Performing Arts welcomed playwright and director Virginia Grise, internationally renowned and Austin-based choreographer Deborah Hay and interdisciplinary artist Kenyon Adams for residencies.
Virginia Grise
In October, Grise and her collaborator, Martha Gonzalez, spent one week in residence developing their latest project Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind, a music-driven performance based on Helena María Viramontes’ 2007 novel Their Dogs Came with Them. The novel centers on Latina women in Los Angeles during the 1960s as freeways divided and splintered longstanding communities.
Grise, who lives in Cedar Park, and Gonzalez have been developing this work with the help of prisoners in a women’s prison in Arizona, and a first iteration of the work was performed under an interstate highway in Tucson. The performance was slated to move to Los Angeles when the pandemic hit, and Texas Performance Arts stepped in to support the piece.
“I wanted to help develop this performance in particular because of both its form and content,” Texas Performing Arts Executive Director Bob Bursey told the Austin American-Statesman. “It’s an unconventional collaboration between a playwright and a musician. The story that they’re telling is relevant to Austin and the current debate about Interstate 35.”
For their Austin residency and lecture performance, Grise and Gonzalez shared a collection of songs they’ve been creating for a concept album. While the duo was in residence, Gonzalez was named as a 2022 MacArthur fellow, an award widely known as the “genius grant.”
Deborah Hay
In January, Texas Performing Arts hosted Hay and Swedish contemporary dance company Cullberg for two sold-out performances. Based in Austin since 1976, Hay recently established her archive at UT’s Harry Ransom Center, a major destination for the study of dance, theatre and film. She continues to create new work and evolve her practice at 80 years old.
In the first performance, Cullberg staged Hay’s rarely performed 2004 work The Match. Later that evening, Hay staged a rare solo performance in addition to the U.S. premiere of her new solo piece Horse, the solos, a work that she completed during the pandemic in McCullough Theatre. Both performances included discussions and interviews with Hay and Cullberg about their creative process in developing these works.
After the performances in Austin, the work opened in New York to strong critical reviews. Horse, the Solos was nominated for three New York Dance and Performance Awards (The Bessies), New York City’s premier dance awards honoring outstanding creative work in the field.
Hay was nominated in the Outstanding Choreographer/Creator category, the ensemble was nominated in the Outstanding Performer category, and Graham Reynolds was nominated for Outstanding Sound Design or Musical Composition.
Kenyon Adams
An interdisciplinary artist and creative director, Adams seeks to reclaim or expand embodied ways of knowing, toward imagining and constructing sustainable futures. He is developing Compline, a ritual performance work with a vocal ensemble inspired by the “night prayer” from the early Christian church.
Adams’ residency is scheduled for August, when he will workshop Compline Noir: a ritual of healing and satisfaction, the third installation in the artist’s ritual trilogy, WATCHNIGHT: WE ARE ALMOST TO OUR DESTINATION. Set in the near dark, the piece is a sonic and sensory experience that invites the audience to seek a fulsome solitude, at once alone and together, in the intimate, music-filled and silent moments created by the artist. The piece delivers a distinct and unexpected culmination to the artist’s yearslong work with the trilogy.
Compline Noir will include design elements from Department of Theatre and Dance faculty members David Arevalo and Kate Freer.