The plays of UTD performance studies professor Thomas Riccio aren’t easy to follow. They’re not supposed to be. Riccio comes from a long line of contemporary writers — Harold Pinter to Erik Ehn, Richard Foreman to John O’Keefe — whose surreal approach avoids, or at least subverts, the conventions of linear storytelling.

Some People, the latest in his “Simulations” series, is another dollop of domestic disarray. A stranger enters the suburban home of a nuclear family and begins filming and narrating the stresses in their lives. Frank (Brad Hennigan) is addicted to television, his wife Morgan (Lori McCarty) to shopping. The consumer products she obsessively arranges speak to her.

The interloper (Mason York) projects a videotaped dream of Frank’s boyhood taunters and current neighbors criticizing him. Before the 90-minute show is over, the family’s Uncle Bill (Alex Nestor) emerges from a closet where he has been trapped since a game of hide-and-seek 18 years earlier. The air is thick with paranoia and panic.

Some People holds a funhouse mirror up to modern society. Vulgarity serves Riccio’s avant-garde vision as high seriousness mingles with crude nonsense. The production by Project X: Theatre for the Out of the Loop Festival at WaterTower Theatre is a multimedia affair that zips from one absurd moment to the next.

There’s a kind of resolution at the end of the play, but it’s the least satisfying part. If you can just sit back and enjoy the strangeness, if you don’t need to know what happened and why, Some People pays off in other ways.

Check out Lawson Taitte’s review in The Dallas Morning News.

Some People runs at 8 tonight and 2 p.m. Saturday at WaterTower Theatre in Addison and March 27-April 11 at the Green Zone.

Image courtesy WaterTower Theatre and Project X: Theatre.

THE LINE TO END ALL LINES: There are few certainties when attending SXSW, but one of them is waiting in a massively long line to get your badge. This is my fourth tour of duty here, and it’s the same every year — a long line snaking around the first floor of the Ausin Convention Center.

The thing that has changed this year is that it seems that the iPhone has reached critical mass with the SXSW crowd. What used to be a series of random interactions between similarly stranded people has turned into a series of folks checking their e-mail, surfing the Web, etc. Sort of takes the “interactive” out of the SXSW Interactive Conference.

But I’m not here to complain. In fact, there are a lot of new things to be excited about at this year’s festival. For one, a new shuttle bus will connect the convention center with the major theaters – the Paramount on Congress and the Alamo Draft House on South Lamar. That’s a major plus for moviegoers, as that frantic search for parking before your screening has been eliminated.

Another step up is the Internet access in the convention center. In years past, it was always ironic, I thought, that one of the largest collection of high-tech people in the world was subject to the world’s slowest Internet connection. I always imagined a hamster trying to run a little bit faster each time I clicked on a new Web page. Things seem to be going much faster this year, which means I’ll be able to send stuff to the blog more quickly I hope.

So in summary:  Line to pick up badge – still slow. Connection to the Net – now fast.

Kieron Norfield (left), Andy Woodrow (center) and Matthew Squirrell traveled from Norwich, UK, to attend the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin

Friday officially kicks off the SXSW Interactive Festival, and no amount of rain or cold wind can keep hundreds of tech-savvy, Twittering (or “Tweeting”) folks like myself  from converging on the Austin Convention Center this morning.

Whether you’re a self-professed newbie looking to baby-step into the interactive world, or a professional scouring for the latest advances in technology and web design, there’s a panel discussion for you here.

As an interactive content producer  for KERA.org, I’m hoping to learn more about advances in Web design. But to satisfy my personal interests, I’m definitely checking out the latest in gaming at ScreenBurn, which SXSW describes as “taking the conference to the next level in terms of bringing together new media, music, film and the exploding world of video games.”

And let’s not forget an important aspect of the Interactive conference: the nightly, industry parties where professionals unwind after the day’s events.

“I’m looking to see what new technologies are out there, but I’m mostly excited about the parties,” said Andy Woodrow, A Web developer for a large insurance company in England. “Of course, the parties.”

Others are keeping the current economic crisis front of  mind. For former Dallas resident Enrico De Leon, a technical media specialist for a pharmaceuticals company in Austin, it’s important to see what interactive professionals are doing with the Web to maximize profits for their companies.

“We want to make our Web site more than just an online catalog,” De Leon said. “This is definitely the place to learn how.”

Keep checking back with Art&Seek all weekend for more updates from the Interactive Festival.

Though Thursday’s schedule of 28 performers at NX35 was relatively underwhelming as a whole (and the biggest name, notoriously wonky but entertaining Texas troubador James McMurtry, canceled at Dan’s Silverleaf), there were significant standouts.

Chief among them was Dead Twins, a Dallas-based power-rock act comprised of brothers Gabe and Nick Cardinale that already overflowed with presence as a duo. Its recent gestation during the past month into a quartet, made complete by the addition of rhythm guitarist and ex-Feds lynchpin Matt Wright, has launched Dead Twins into stratospheric realms, both in potential and power. Its set at Andy’s was unignorable. It may very well already be the area’s top hard-rock act (which, incidentally and arguably, was a tag claimed by the now-defunct Feds).

That set wasn’t the highlight, however. That honor went to the tongue-in-somewhere hilarity of Boyfriends, Inc., a part-comedic, part-progressive improv hip hop act comprised of Denton’s Astronautalis and Miami’s Bleubird. The premise: two tourmates who are together so much on the road that they’ve, well, learned to take care of each other – and there’s no shame in it. “On the road, sometimes you just got to take a bath with your man,” Astronautalis rapped in day-glo shorts and a black tank; Bleubird’s matching getup included a Jazzercise tank). “It saves water. We’re so green, we’re clean.” OK, maybe not clean. But funny. Really funny.

The Christian Science Monitor takes a look at the NEA report that CultureGrrl did earlier (sparking a little discussion here). According to the NEA:

Artists are now unemployed at about twice the rate of other professional workers. Approximately 129,000 artists were out of work nationwide in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the report – up 63 percent from the same period in 2007. The NEA estimated that the figures might have been worse had thousands of artists not left the workforce due to retirement, a desire to pursue outside opportunities, or general discouragement. And the forecast for the next few years is no brighter….

“There’s a reason for the severity of these numbers,” Mr. Iyengar said, referring to the NEA report as a whole. “Artists are entrepreneurs in terms of their employment character. They’re the equivalent of small businesses – they require a lot more investment up front. They’re already in a pretty precarious situation. And in a market like this, artists are really hit pretty hard.

Given such a situation, this next bit is a trifle weird: Read More »

KERA radio story:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Expanded online story:

With a camera and a computer, you can post a homemade video to YouTube. But where do aspiring auteurs learn the skills to actually call themselves filmmakers? For a group of students in Birdville ISD, the answer is: high school.

The students in Birdville ISD’s Media Tech program weren’t all budding Spielbergs when they walked in the door.

Philip Wilmut is a senior in the program

WILMUT: “I hadn’t really had any film background at all. I was always interested in computers, but I just needed a credit. And I figured out this is what I want to do with my life.”

Of course, some students already knew they wanted to make movies.

Garrett Sullivan is also a senior in the program.

SULLIVAN: “I’ve wanted to be a filmmaker since I was a little kid. Filmmaking just fascinates me – just to be able to take people on an adventure.”

The South by Southwest Film Festival begins today in Austin. Films from Birdville are regularly picked for the festival’s Texas High School shorts program. And this year, five films from Birdville made it into the student showcase, a record for a single school district.

The subjects of these shorts run the gamut. Garrett’s film, Fatal Fortune Cookie, tells the story of a fortune cookie with an ominous message.

Meanwhile, Philip and co-director Adrian Scarborough focus on an archaeological dig that awakens a long lost creature.

The class will travel to Austin to attend the festival and mingle with professional filmmakers this weekend. Seeing their movies on the big screen is the reward for months of hard work says their teacher, Karen Seimears.

SEIMEARS: “South by Southwest is the big draw for the class. We start talking about that from the first day of the year. Just because Hollywood comes to Austin. Hollywood’s here in Texas. It’s one thing for me to tell the students the type of passion and dedication they need to make a film and it’s another for Robert Rodriguez to tell them.”

Seimears came to the program in 2001 after spending eight years working on campaign films for politicians.

She teaches the Media Tech class in a retro-fitted choir room. The students dial up their videos from their personal Apple laptops for their classmates to critique.

The district began providing the computers two years ago through a deal with Apple. Since then, Seimears says productivity has skyrocketed.

SEIMEARS: “They’re going to open up a laptop and play with different programs where they won’t necessarily read a textbook because they’re bored.”

Among the programs they are free to explore is Final Cut Pro, the industry standard for video editing. Birdville is home to the only Apple Authorized Training Center for high school students in the country.

Any student may sign up for the class. Those who complete the Media Tech program will be certified in Final Cut Pro and leave with a skill others won’t acquire until college.

SEIMEARS: “You have a lot of people with a four-year degree who can’t do anything. And what’s amazing is that we’re giving kids the tools that they need while they’re still in high school to be absolutely employable. And not just that, but when they go into college, to be at the head of their class.”

That’s an advantage that’s not lost on the students, including Garrett.

SULLIVAN: “The fact that I grew up in this area and just so happened to go to this school is pretty fortunate. We have all this equipment, and Apple funds our program and our teacher is very experienced as well, so that helps. It shows through our videos.”

On Sunday, the larger film community will see those videos and understand why this Tarrant County suburb has become a hub of Texas student filmmaking. Below are some more of the Birdville Media Tech program’s SXSW films.

Be sure to check the Art&Seek blog all weekend for live coverage of the festival.

Zach, by Whitney Steele:

Performance Evaluation, by Breannah Gibson

Puppy Love, by Joseph Walsh

A NEW HOF CLASS: Larry Hagman, SMU grad Powers Boothe, Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke and Billy Bob Thornton were all inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame last night in a ceremony in Austin. While the event was designed to honor its newest members, it didn’t take long for the talk to turn to film incentives for the state.

Joe O’Connell reports on GuideLive.com that Hagman played up his J.R. image by parading around the Capitol this week, handing out $10,000 bills with his face on them.

“You have all these fans here and you’re going to get your money back a hundred times over,” Hagman said at the event, which serves as the unofficial kickoff to the South by Southwest Film Festival.

Check in on Art&Seek all weekend long as I’ll be blogging from the festival.

MEASURING SUCCESS IN THE NEW ECONOMY: If you own a gallery, obviously the primary goal is to make money on the art you sell. That’s how you are able to call yourself a “gallery owner” instead of a “former galler owner.”

But Mike Gerra, who owns art251 in Keller with his wife, Kim, is rethinking how he evaluates the shows in his space. On his always thoughtful blog, he writes that he’s thinking about additional ways to succeed:

“We measure the local ‘art health index’ (AHI). The AHI is a quantitative measure of the following: smiles on the faces of our customers; periods of quiet contemplation looking at new art; sighs of satisfaction from the artist whose work we are featuring for the first time; simultaneous conversations about art; art teachers within the space; average time visitors spend looking at artwork; ratio of small shoe size (kids) to large shoe size (adults); and of course, empty wine glasses and Italian soda bottles.”

Mike says in time he’ll chart the AHI trends in his space and predicts that the news on that front will be good.

RIP, HANK LOCKLIN: Country singer Hank Locklin, who performed with the Grand Ole Opry, died earlier this week at the age of 91. Well before he was a country radio hitmaker, he played guitar as a teenager on the radio. One of the stations he regularly performed on was Dallas’ KRLD.

DENTON – While digesting the schedule for the first day of the NX35 music festival in Denton, it rapidly became plain that tonight’s docket was the weakest of the inaugural event’s four days.

Also plain: that it was by design. Thursday isn’t a critical live-music night in most music towns, much less Denton – and particularly here now as spring break at the University of North Texas begins to wane past halfway. Downtown traffic, both on wheels and on foot, was sparse, and half of the attendees at the fest’s nine active venues tonight were band folk or their hangers on.

Besides: The first day of the first year of any mildly ambitious music showcase is going to sprout slowly, even awkwardly. So details such as tonight’s set-time delays (at least three clubs were behind by a half hour or more), the poor venue map in the otherwise decent fest brochure, and having to swipe IDs and log signatures at most sites were hiccups to be expected and tolerated.

So, too, is the familial vibe that anchors Denton’s music-scene archetype. Loose and experimental bands pour forth from this town because the players talk frequently and openly about being loose and experimental. The long-standing tradition of secret house parties here is Exhibit A for that socially jazzy approach, which with the rise of online social networking and self-directed, grass-roots (or maybe glass-roots, as in the fiberglass optics that allowed broadband internet to explode) music marketing has this music town potentially poised to grow from curiosity to major player in advancing American rock and pop.

I ran into Brave Combo‘s Jeffery Barnes at the Boiler Room just before grrl duo Gun Gun‘s raggedy but promising set of power-puffy riff punk. His NX35-sponsored talk tomorrow with Art&Seek’s own master eclectician Paul Slavens about “Bringin’ the Weird” to music – something that Brave Combo has won Grammys for doing – should be exceedingly piquant in light of something he discovered while reading up on the word ‘weird’.

“Back in the middle ages, its meaning was actually closer to something similar to fate,” he said. “You know the three weird sisters in [Shakespeare's] Macbeth? Seems like they were actually meant to represent the three fates.”

Perhaps NX35, piggybacked as it is to next week’s gigantic, industry-mandated South by Southwest Music Festival and Conference in Austin, is part of Denton’s fate as a music-generating town. After all, much of Austin’s cultural cognoscenti already campaign to keep their city weird – and NX35′s genesis was as an unofficial showcase of Denton bands at SXSW in 2005.

Musically, though, Denton is today’s truly weird Texas town. And the next three days just get better and better in terms of showing that off at NX35.

Margo McCann — who has been doing yeoman’s work, as they say, filling in as the interim managing director — has been confirmed by the board of the Texas Ballet Theater as the company’s new managing director. McCann was a principal dancer with the troupe for 19 years before moving into management. She runs the daily operations of the TBT — having replaced John Toohey, who left last December and is now president of ARTS San Antonio.

The TBT’s next production will be Cleopatra, March 27-29, at Bass Hall.

Normally, the Art&Seek crew takes the weekend off from blogging. But not this weekend. Check back tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday, because we’re fanning out and reporting from points North and South.

We’ll be  at NX35, which, as Jerome Weeks told us this morning, gets underway today.  If you, too, are going to Denton, be sure to check out one of Paul Slavens‘ many scheduled appearances. The host of 90.1 at Night AND the brand new Art&Seek podcast Track by Track will lead a discussion called “Bringing the Weird” Friday afternoon. Saturday at 3, he’ll talk jazz with Harvey Pekar, and Saturday night he’ll play with the Chameleon Chamber Group at Haileys.

I’m looking forward to posting Paul’s next Track by Track podcast Monday – this time he visits with Mara Lee Miller from Bosque Brown … another to check out at NX35.

Stephen Becker is heading to Austin tomorrow for the South by Southwest Film Festival and April Kinser is already on her way down for the interactive conference. Expect lots of news from North Texas filmmakers, gamers and more.