In March, Texas Performing Arts and Fusebox created a new programming partnership to bring a slate of fresh and unexpected creative performances to the Austin community. The partnership begins in Texas Performing Arts’ 2023-24 season, which will feature several collaborative performances throughout the fall, winter and spring. In addition, the 2024 Fusebox Festival includes a series of performances produced by Texas Performing Arts.
“We are thrilled to embark on this new partnership with Fusebox,” said Bob Bursey, executive and artistic director of Texas Performing Arts. “It will allow us to combine forces to create more adventurous art experiences in Austin and support artists making daring, imaginative and inspiring work.”
The partnership features vivid live performances that span music, theatre, dance and film—reflecting the boundary-less, unique experiences Texas Performing Arts and Fusebox have created through past collaborations such as Robin Frohardt’s critically acclaimed The Plastic Bag Store (2021).
The connection initially grew out of a collaboration between the two organizations that helped to establish Texas Performing Arts’ resident artist program developed during the pandemic—a vital resource that provides funding, stage time and technical and administrative support to artists. This new fusion expands that work beyond campus while also offering new opportunities for UT Austin students to engage with Fusebox through internships, artist connections and coursework.
The initial slate of programming includes:
Love in Exile (Sept. 29): Grammy Award-winning vocalist Arooj Aftab makes her Austin debut with the Love in Exile Trio, featuring two of her most trusted collaborators: polymath pianist Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily. Transforming sound into sculpture, the trio creates lush, haunting collaborative soundscapes of meditation and yearning.
Tremble Staves (Oct. 13): In a collaboration between The Living Earth Show (guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson) and 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning Navajo composer Raven Chacon, this challenging site-specific work is a wordless water opera synthesizing mixed media installation, manipulation of natural light, sound and theatrical performance commenting on the urgent but approaching crisis of water shortage. The work will be performed on the grounds of Laguna Gloria in conjunction with The Contemporary Austin’s exhibition This Land.
FOOD (Jan. 31 – Feb. 3): In a Texas premiere, an intimate dinner party performance of smell, taste and touch, FOOD offers a meditation on the ways and whys of eating. The audience gathers around a white linen-covered dining table, engaging with one another and their empty plates in an immersive, constantly transforming performance. Sounds, scents and tactile elements shape a conversation about personal memories, consumption and the evolution of food production over generations. FOOD is the third work in a trilogy by renowned clown and devotee of the “sublime ridiculous” Geoff Sobelle.
32 Sounds—A Film by Sam Green (April 10): An immersive documentary and profound sensory experience from Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Sam Green (The Weather Underground) that explores the elemental phenomenon of sound. The film weaves 32 specific audio recordings into a cinematic meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us. 32 Sounds redefines the experience of a sound bath, creating a mesmerizing and engulfing evening.
Cultural Exchange Rate (April 10–14): In this interactive live art project, artist Tania El Khoury shares her family memoirs of life in a border village between Lebanon and Syria—an experience marked by war survival, valueless currency collection, brief migration to Mexico and a river that disregards colonial and national borders. The audience is invited to immerse themselves into one family’s secret boxes to explore sounds, images and textures of traces of more than a century of border crossings.
Radioactive Practice (April 12–14): Award-winning choreographer Abby Zbikowski and crew have created a genre-bending work that brings together a mosaic group of dancers to redefine purpose for themselves as they labor their way through complex, demanding and often perplexing physicality to confront expectations and dive into the unknown head-on. Utilizing their skills through practices in different movement traditions including hip-hop, postmodern dance, contemporary African forms, tap, swimming, soccer and martial arts, the cast draws from an arsenal of physical possibility to shatter assumptions of established forms and test the group’s own physical and mental limits.
The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body (April 12–14): As a resident artist for 2023-24, UT Professor Lisa B. Thompson will develop her latest project The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body — a meditation on the experience of aging as a Black woman in the U.S. Part performance art, health fair and group research project, this piece explores Black women’s health disparities and the toll that reality takes on the psyche.
