… which should probably lead to a punchline about performance art. Insert shaky, hand-held video here.

State of the Arts, the series of talks presented by the Dallas Museum of Art and Art & Seek, hosted four of Dallas’ leading visual arts directors — in particular, the ones who specialize in contemporary art: Michael Corris, art department chair at SMU; Peter Doroshenko, executive director of the Dallas Contemporary; Jeffrey Grove (below), contemporary art curator at the DMA; and Jeremy Strick, director of the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Over on Glasstire, Lucia Simek has already used the term ‘brotherhood’ to describe this group, although judging from the Abstract Study in Blacks and Greys above, I couldn’t help thinking of the darkly-lit, council-of-spies scenes from Tinker Tailor Soldier Curator.

As several of Thursday’s panelists noted, the evening roundtable at the DMA was actually noteworthy for what it said about the level of self-awareness of the local arts scene and its growing maturity. Possible translation: The scene is actually gelling enough that we might talk about it intelligibly. At the same time, we are still far enough away from being London-in-the’90s-fabulous that we could certainly use the time for some reflection about what we need and can hope for. And we’re still not so frantically busy cashing-in that no one had time for it.

Simply put, this kind of panel hadn’t been done before and is actually not often done in other cities. Good sign, bad sign? An occasion for boosterism or self-flagellation? Discuss. Bonus points awarded for use of the phrases “audience engagement” and “actually, I gained some insights.”

KERA’s Jeff Whittington asked the questions in front of — a good sign, here — what was basically a standing-room-only crowd in the DMA’s Horchow Auditorium. Art & Seek will be putting up some rivetingly conventional, non-conceptual videos of the entire session soon. Stay tuned.

But for now, a summary of / response to the cordial but stimulating exchange.

Jeff’s questions progressed from the personal (all of these monochrome characters came to Dallas within the past 2-3 years: What did they think then? What have they learned since? When do they sport a little color?) to the institutional (how does your group fit in this city?). From there, Jeff directed the discussion into the Dallas art scene in general (what is your responsibility to the city, what is the city’s responsibility to artists?) and to the blue sky-future (what do we lack, what do you wish for?)

Jeremy Strick (left) got the first big laugh of the evening when he confessed that a chief organizing principle of the Nasher’s exhibitions is selfish: “We show things I want to see.” So we’ll start the highlight reel with him: In what may be a first for arts journalism in Dallas, Strick gave a shout-out to Christina Rees‘ provocative essays on the visual arts site Glasstire, demonstrating that some people in authority actually read this stuff. Rees’ angry young polemics appeared soon after Strick’s arrival in town and made him think, perhaps misleadingly, that the area was eager for some serious, extended reconsiderations of contemporary art, its place and functions — something he clearly wished for and mostly hasn’t gotten.

In a room full of artists, Strick delivered an easy applause line when he talked about the need to invest in programs and people and not buildings (a sentiment that was echoed later by Corris and other panelists). But it’s worth repeating and underscoring the context of his remark. With Cowboys Stadium having gone to Arlington, and with the AT&T Performing Arts Center’s opening, Strick pointed out that, whether the city was fully aware of it or not, it had clearly placed a very large bet on arts and culture as a key to the future of downtown.

The problem, he went on, is that the city has not really owned up to the consequences of that. He didn’t say this, but I will: It’s been a major pattern in Dallas’ history to go whole-hog on a big gamble, top it off with many hearty back slaps and then trundle off to the casino buffet  – only to be disappointed (or worse, not care) when, unsupported and neglected, our pile of chips proved insufficient. The Kessler City Plan, Fair Park, Farmers Market, CityPlace, various implanted doohickeys like Thanksgiving Square and Exposition Circle: Downtown is dotted with such investments, which people are still trying to link up and make work, for better or worse, and we’re not even talking about the completely misbegotten, off-on-their-own, large-scale ventures like Victory Park. The thing is, the Arts District still isn’t finished, neither is Woodall Rogers Park, and the city is running out of options for Resurrecting Downtown as a living, urban place. The Arts District has to work for that to succeed, and for that, the district needs follow-through on programs.

Perhaps Strick’s most thought-provoking remark had to do with arts education and how a single, galvanizing figure like John Baldessari in southern California can be instrumental in planting the seeds for a vibrant arts scene by attracting and influencing young art students who then establish galleries and collectives and even careers.

This, naturally, swung the interrogation spotlight on to Michael Corris — as Jeff quickly noted — but to SMU’s (and Corris’s) credit, it has made major strides in recent years to open up and get off the campus, to get students engaged with the city and the city engaged with the university. Admittedly, this is made more difficult by SMU’s location in what Corris called a ‘vacuole or organelle.’ That’s perhaps the first time the Park Cities have been referred to as a cellular structure, although ‘vaccum’ was neatly suggested without being embraced. Perhaps Corris was simply avoiding the derisive cliche, ‘the Bubble.’

But Corris (left) corrected Strick when he argued that no one person or department was responsible for LA’s arts scene. In fact, Corris said he dearly wishes for other graduate-level arts programs and colleges to move to the neighborhood and for more cooperative efforts among the ones here. To expand on his point: University jobs are often where many artists and curators make their daily bread (see Baldessari, above, or for that matter, Rees) and these can encourage an interconnected ‘ecology’ of departments, arts groups, think tanks, venues, foundations, etc. This flourishes in Dallas in — surprise! — business, medicine and hi-tech fields much more than it does in the entire academic-fine-arts-humanities area. Because, obviously, there’s more money to be made in the former.

Speaking of Corris, he began by noting that having arrived here, most recently, from the UK, home of emotional reticence (see Tinker Tailor, above), he truly enjoyed North Texans’ spirit of optimism and energy. He was heartily echoed in different ways by Grove and Doroshenko. We should be used to it by now: People love us for our cash and our sunny dispositions. Sigh. No one loves us for our brains.

In any  event, Corris has advocated a get-out-and-do-it-yourself approach with his students, which suits Meadows dean Jose Bowen’s own vision of the future of the arts lying with ‘entrepreneurial’ go-getters. Visual artists, like stage actors, are often freelancers, at the mercy of whatever established groups or outlets are hiring. (Hence, the understandable but highly familiar tone of grievance in some of the audience questions that followed the chat.)

Corris has shown one way to get around the sense of frustration and stalemate by creating his own Free Museum of Dallas, ie., his chairman’s office at SMU, where he presents micro-exhibitions. It is not an ‘alternative space,’ exactly (“because there is no alternative and there is no space”), but it ingeniously, entertainingly intermingles the thoughtful and whimsical. It’s hard to take an office museum seriously, which he doesn’t, entirely (his website’s archive is labeled “The Storage Problem”), yet he certainly does use it as a platform to showcase artists’ works, much like NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, which are also performed and recorded in an office .

In a related vein, Jeff asked Peter Doroshenko about his m.o. at the Dallas Contemporary, which combines a flurry of e-mailed releases, educational lectures, related public events and getting the art and artist physically ‘outside the building.’ Exhibit A: the upcoming show by celebrated LA street artist Shepard Fairey (left), which includes a gallery chat, a book signing, a dance party (which Fairey will DJ) and a city block’s worth of public murals. The Dallas Contemporary’s transformation under Doroshenko has been one of the sizable changes in recent seasons. The DC, Doroshenko said, is now all about “access,” about “getting people to talk about things,” about situating local artists in among national and international artists.

When it came to wish lists, Doroshenko talked about how a hotel-motel bed tax of just a few cents directed toward the arts makes a sizable difference in cities like San Francisco. It’s not so much the size of the budget increase; it’s the fact that such funding is generally outside direct political control. The tax money is designated for this purpose, period, and is not part of the discretionary budget. In short, when a city council is panicked by dire financial forecasts, it can’t automatically rush to slash cultural funding, as they always seem to. This makes the culture-tax money relatively dependable (barring major dips in tourism), which makes planning easier.

Doroshenko’s wish received approving murmurs from the audience; the difficulty is that the opportunity to establish such a culture tax and possible PID (public improvement district) for the arts just came and went. And the Dallas arts scene, typically, wasn’t remotely organized enough to make any real difference. Maybe we’ll get another chance, some day. But you have to convince the Dallas hotel owners that taxing them will actually help their business (more culture, more tourists). As for the group that did get the tax re-directed their way, the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau, it made the case that this wasn’t a win-lose choice between them and the arts. After all, part of their job in selling the city involves promoting Dallas arts events. Except that, when asked for areas of improvement in Dallas, Doroshenko promptly said that whoever was marketing the city wasn’t doing a very good job — and he got nods and grim chuckles of assent.

Other wished-for items included more alternative spaces (Grove), better arts education from grade school upwards (Doroshenko), more artist residencies (Corris), an independent bookstore (Corris — which is a whole other conversation, don’t start me) and the need to re-focus patrons on programs not buildings (Strick).

Given such wishes and given the fact that audience questions never really addressed any of them, my wished-for topics for never-asked questions were two: With all of the talk of alternative spaces and the frustrations artists feel toward both the commercial outlets and the non-profit outlets represented here, what do these leaders feel about the established contemporary-art galleries? What relationship, if any, do they have with individual galleries? ( I’m not pro-gallery, just curious. In an aside, Corris said what we didn’t need were more galleries - why?)

And considering Strick’s remark, it’s fairly well known, I think, that Dallas’ biggest patrons don’t really patronize area artists. Their agents and connections are almost entirely with New York, London and LA. So, if they wished to, how would any of the visual arts leaders try to educate / re-focus the patrons’ support?

Cowboys Stadium has gotten national attention for the contemporary artworks on its walls. Now it’ll have an opera on its video screen. KERA’s Jerome Weeks reports this April, the Dallas Opera will simulcast Mozart’s The Magic Flute — in Cowboys Stadium.

KERA radio report:

Expanded online report:

The Dallas Opera has opened its last two seasons with video simulcasts in the Arts District. On April 28^th, it joins the big leagues. And noooo, the aim is not to make lots of money trying to fill Cowboy Stadium’s 100,000 seats. Keith Cerny is the opera’s general director.

Cerny: “I’ll say right now that we don’t expect to fill the entire stadium.”

For the simulcast on just one of the stadium’s huge, hi-def video screens, the stadium will be set up so that only 7500 seats will be available. Ticketholders will watch a live feed from the Winspear Opera House of that evening’s performance of The Magic Flute.

What’s more, tickets to the stadium simulcast (not the Winspear performance) are free – though they are reserved and can be obtained only through the Dallas Opera’s website. So if they’re free, and if the Dallas Opera has had to reduce its season programs for financial reasons, why are they doing this?

Keith Cerny explains.

Cerny: “Opera simulcasts are not direct, revenue-generating opportunities. It’s a chance for us to introduce people new to opera to what we do and over time, turn them into single-ticket buyers.”

Large-scale simulcasts in sports venues have been done by other opera companies. They’re used, in a way, as a giant marketing effort. The San Francisco Opera has even been able to gain enough new patrons that increased ticket sales have paid for its simulcasts.

Of course, any free event is easier – when you have the support of the stadium owner.

Cerny: “We have been very pleased with the support we’ve had for this event from the Jones family. They are providing the facility for us at a very deeply discounted rate.”

The operatically long press release follows.

THE DALLAS OPERA, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH COWBOYS STADIUM, PROUDLY ANNOUNCES A LANDMARK PUBLIC EVENT: DALLAS OPERA’S 2012 COWBOYS STADIUM SIMULCAST!

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MOZART’S THE MAGIC FLUTE LIVE!

SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 2012 at 7:30 PM

STADIUM DOORS OPEN AT 6:00 PM

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FREE SEATING, FREE PARKING, PAID CONCESSIONS, FREE TICKETS AVAILABLE THROUGH TDO WEBSITE DALLASOPERA.ORG/COWBOYS

ARLINGTON, TX, JANUARY 26, 2012 – The Dallas Opera, in partnership with Cowboys Stadium, is extremely proud to announce the first classical music simulcast ever conducted in a North Texas sports venue.  The announcement was made earlier today by representatives of both organizations—Dallas Opera General Director and CEO Keith Cerny and Charlotte Jones Anderson, Executive Vice-President Brand Management/President of Charities—following a meeting of Dallas Opera Board held on-site at the stadium.

Gene Jones (the wife of Dallas Cowboys Owner, President and General Manager Jerry Jones), whose vision led to the Stadium’s museum-quality collection of contemporary art, was on-hand to welcome guests and attending media.  Setting the stage for today’s announcement, Ms. Jones explained, “Sports and art are not typically thought of as belonging together.  Yet sporting events and great art do something similar—they get people talking.”

The Dallas Opera’s 2012 Cowboys Stadium Simulcast of Mozart’s THE MAGIC FLUTE will take place on Saturday, April 28, 2012 at 7:30 PM (doors open at 6:00 PM) at the high-tech home of the Dallas Cowboys at One Legends Way in Arlington, Texas.  Patrons will be able to enjoy a complete, unabridged live performance on the world’s largest high-definition video board structure, comprised of four massive viewing screens (the largest, 72 feet tall and 160 feet wide) suspended directly above the playing field.

Seating will be reserved and free tickets can be obtained through the Dallas Opera website, effective immediately, at www.dallasopera.org/cowboys.

“We are excited to partner with the Dallas Opera on such a distinctive event,” said Dallas Cowboys Executive Vice President of Brand Management Charlotte Anderson.  “Our organization admires and respects The Dallas Opera’s original thinking and stewardship in making a ground-breaking event like this a reality.  We truly value the importance of the arts in our community, and we hope that this first-of-its-kind opera broadcast gives us a way of sharing our love of the arts with a new audience at Cowboys Stadium.”

“One of the goals of the Dallas Opera is to bring great singing and world-class theater to the widest possible audience,” explains Dallas Opera General Director and CEO Keith Cerny.  “As part of our commitment to expanding our community outreach we are thrilled to announce an unprecedented, ‘game-changing’ collaboration with the Cowboys organization.  Let me also say that the Dallas Opera is especially grateful for the generous support of the Jones Family, encouraging our efforts to create one of the most unique and memorable events in the history of this opera company.

“I hope that the centralized location of Cowboys Stadium will draw music and theater lovers from all across North Texas to this free simulcast of Mozart’s action-packed masterpiece,” Mr. Cerny adds, “especially those who, for a variety of reasons, have perceived opera as an intimidating or challenging art form, rather than the fantastic entertainment experience it is.”

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THE MAGIC FLUTE will star soprano Ava Pine, the Dallas Opera’s very first Resident Young Artist, in the role of Pamina—one of her personal favorites.  Ms. Pine, a Baroque specialist with a tremendous local fan base, made her Dallas Opera debut as Anna in our 2006 production of Nabucco, and has appeared on our stage in numerous roles including Adele in Die Fledermaus, Zozo in The Merry Widow, Elvira in L’italiana in Algeri, the Slave in Salome and, most recently, as one of three featured artists in the Dallas Opera’s Family Concert, performed in the Winspear last November.

Wherever she goes, Ms. Pine makes the critics struggle for superlatives.  Of her 2008 role debut as Adele, Dallas Morning News Classical Music Critic Scott Cantrell wrote: “She can sparkle through coloratura, but also radiate lower-register warmth.  And she’s no less dazzling an actress, dancing, flirting and pretty much tying everyone around her little finger.”

Earlier this season, Ms. Pine appeared with the DSO in Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2 conducted by Jaap van Zweden, Bach cantatas with the New Jersey Symphony, and Handel’s Messiah with Boston Baroque and Duke University.  She also made her role debut as Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro at Opera Colorado and sang the title role in Handel’s Theodora at the University of North Texas with Dallas Opera Music Director Graeme Jenkins conducting.

Ava Pine’s performance is made possible with support from The Charron and Peter Denker Rising Stars Endowment Fund.

Alongside Ms. Pine, the Dallas Opera has cast celebrated tenor Shawn Mathey as Tamino.  “He is simply one of the finest Mozartean tenors in the world,” explains Artistic Director Jonathan Pell “and we have spent years trying to tempt him to come to Dallas for his long-awaited debut on our stage.  I think audiences will find him absolutely thrilling, from his first note to his last.”

Mr. Mathey’s 2011-12 Season engagements have included debuts with San Francisco Opera as Don Ottavio and with Rome’s Teatro dell’Opera as Lysander in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  He is also slated to record Bruckner’s Mass No. 3 in F minor with Marek Janowski conducting the Orchestre de la Suisse Romand.  Praised by Lawrence A. Johnson of Chicago Classical Review for “displaying a honeyed tenor and proving both ardent and amusing,” Mr. Mathey is in tremendous demand overseas (Germany, Switzerland, France, Austria, Italy, and Sweden) as well as at opera companies across the U.S.

Bass-baritone Patrick Carfizzi, a comic genius who nearly galloped away with the Dallas Opera’s final production in the Music Hall, The Italian Girl in Algiers, returns in the role of the original Birdman, Papageno, Tamino’s love-sick companion.  The multifaceted Mr. Carfizzi’s recent engagements include Paolo in Simon Boccanegra with San Francisco Opera, Brander in Le damnation de Faust (Berlioz) at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Nourabad in Les pêcheurs de perles for Seattle Opera, Dr. Bartolo in Il barbiere di Siviglia for the Canadian Opera Company, and additional roles at the Met including Schaunard in La bohème, the Mandarin in Turandot, Masetto in Don Giovanni, Haly in L’italiana in Algeri and Peter Quince in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Slovakian soprano L’ubica Vargicová, praised by the international media for her remarkable technique, her glittering high notes, and her commanding stage presence has made the Queen of the Night a signature role since her operatic debut while still a student in Bratislava, and she has left audiences gasping around the world.  The New York Times wrote of her Metropolitan Opera debut in this role, that Ms. Vargicová “dispatched the Queen of the Night’s devilish coloratura with fearless attack, bright tone, and impressive accuracy.”  That she is breathtakingly beautiful is merely the icing on the cake; it is her artistry in the coloratura repertoire that has enabled her to earn rave reviews as Lucia di Lammermoor, Ophelia, Amina in Bellini’s La sonnambula, and Marie in La Fille du régiment opposite Juan Diego Flórez.  She has appeared in prestigious venues from Carnegie Hall to Japan’s finest concert halls, in the wake of her dazzling 2003 Salzburg Festival debut as Olympia in Les Contes d’Hoffmann (a landmark production staged by David McVicar and conducted by Kent Nagano).

Bass Raymond Aceto, the chilling Sparafucile in the Dallas Opera’s acclaimed 2011 production of Rigoletto, has appeared in more than a dozen productions with TDO since his 1995 debut as Monterone, portraying a host of unforgettable characters from Leporello in Don Giovanni (2003), Colline in La bohème (1999), and Fafner in Siegfried (2000) to Lodovico in the Dallas Opera’s 2009 inaugural production in the Winspear Opera House: Verdi’s Otello.

Opera News reported in November 2008 “The American bass has a magnificently warm, round and full voice coupled to a compelling stage presence.”  He was also identified as one of the “world class” artists in the Dallas Opera’s cast of Rigoletto (Opera Warhorses) and his performance was termed “a rare treat.”

Engagements this season have included the roles of Banquo in Macbeth at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and Timur in Turandot for San Francisco Opera.  This summer, after appearing as Sarastro in our production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Mr. Aceto will portray the cruel Baron Scarpia in the Santa Fe Opera Festival production of Tosca.

Bass Kevin J. Langan, who has sung numerous roles with the Dallas Opera, will appear in the role of The Speaker.  He was recently described as “the complete package: vibrant, ringing tone, polished phrasing, incisive diction and convincing, unfussy acting” (MusicalCriticism.com).

Mr. Langan has nearly 1300 performances to his credit and a vast repertoire (more than 80 roles from the early Baroque through the 20^th century) that has made him a leading bass for San Francisco Opera for three decades.  Recently, he became the first artist in SFO history to sing 300 performances in leading roles.  Mr. Langan has also been a leading bass for Lyric Opera of Chicago for the past eleven years, in addition to fourteen seasons—and 165 performances—at Santa Fe.  It was at Sante Fe Opera that he created the role of Henry Mosher in the 1996 world premiere of Tobias Picker’s Emmeline, broadcast on PBS.

A native of New York City, Mr. Langan’s talents can be enjoyed on numerous opera DVD releases.  His orchestral appearances have ranged from the Cincinnati May Festival as Rocco in Fidelio under Music Director James Conlon, The Caramoor Festival as Rocco in Leonore under John Nelson, The Pittsburgh Symphony in Mahler’s Das Klagende Lied, and the Chicago Symphony in Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass (both under Michael Tilson Thomas).  Other appearances include Trulove in The Rake’s Progress with The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra under Edo de Waart, and Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with The National Symphony in Washington.

Tenor David Cangelosi, one of the most consistently insightful opera artist bloggers in cyberspace, will sing the role of Monostatos.  Heaped with critical plaudits for his contributions to the success of the recent San Francisco Ring Cycle, Heard and Seen International declared him: “…possibly the greatest Mime ever.  Nobody has ever been more effective or as amusing as David Cangelosi…he made every minute of this often annoying role a total pleasure.”  He most recently appeared with the Dallas Opera in our monumental, widely acclaimed 2011 production of Boris Godunov.  Prior to the role of Shuisky, Mr. Cangelosi made a memorable marriage broker in TDO’s revival of the Francesca Zambello production of Madama Butterfly that closed the 2010 Season.

David Cangelosi has firmly established himself as an artist who combines both excellent singing and winning characterizations with opera companies and symphony orchestras, worldwide.  In 2004, Mr. Cangelosi made his Metropolitan Opera debut as Mime in Das Rheingold, conducted by James Levine, and returned in recent seasons for performances of Incredibile in Andrea Chenier, Tinca in Il tabarro, and the dual role of Nathanael/Spalanzani in Les Contes d’Hoffmann.  Other roles at the Metropolitan Opera have included Basilio (The Marriage of Figaro), Goro (Madama Butterfly), and Spoletta (Tosca).

“This production from Lyric Opera of Chicago,” says Dallas Opera Artistic Director Jonathan Pell “is the most magical Magic Flute I’ve ever experienced.  It’s been revived there, time and again, because it’s so immensely popular but it’s a production that could never have been done in our previous performance venue.

“Our move to the Winspear Opera House has finally made it possible to bring this incredibly charming, classic, August Everding production to Dallas and we’ve gone out of our way to stack-the-deck with the addition of a delightful cast.”

Mozart’s 1791 masterpiece is one of the greatest comic operas of all time, made all the more interesting by the poignant—even disturbing—moments endured by the lead characters, as they attempt to earn their “happy ending.”

The Magic Flute comes by its zany plot honestly, having been inspired not only by 18^th century Masonic practices, but by literature reflecting several different traditions.  Among these is the 1731 Viennese essay (supposedly translated from an ancient Greek source) about an Egyptian prince named “Sethos” who is called upon to endure an initiation by the four elements: fire, water, earth and air.  He is also forced to battle a giant serpent.

The Magic Flute also contains hints of an Arthurian Romance from the late Middle Ages, in which the hero is discovered and aided by three mysterious ladies.  Later in the tale, the hero encounters a curious character covered in animal skins that bears more than a passing resemblance to this opera’s famously endearing birdman, Papageno.

The music, on the other hand, couldn’t be more polished or more focused.  Reflecting the highest ideals of the Age of Enlightenment and filled with wit, warmth, and genuine humanity, The Magic Flute continues to bewitch audiences with its variety of perfectly expressed musical moods—from utterly comic to soaring and sublime.

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Soprano Angela Mannino will make her Dallas Opera debut in the role of Papagena, and the Three Ladies will be sung by soprano Caitlin Lynch, mezzo-soprano Lauren McNeese, and mezzo-soprano Maya Lahyani in their company debuts.

Resident Young Artist Aaron Blake will return to the Dallas Opera stage in the dual role of Second Priest and First Man in Armor.  Bass Darren K. Stokes will sing the role of the Second Man in Armor.

The simulcast performance will be conducted at the Winspear Opera House by the Dallas Opera’s Mrs. Eugene McDermott Music Director Graeme Jenkins, who most recently raised the baton on our season opening production of Lucia di Lammermoor.

Maestro Jenkins drew tremendous praise for the work that brought our 2010-2011 Season to a close: Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov.  According to Dallas Morning News Classical Music Critic Scott Cantrell, it was “a triumph for any opera house, anywhere.”

Jenkins has conducted more than a hundred different operas from Australia to Amsterdam to Vienna, and has served as music director for this company since 1994.

This production will be staged by Matthew Lata, making his TDO debut.

Mr. Lata has staged more than a hundred productions with leading opera companies throughout the U.S.  He began his career as a director on the staff of the Lyric Opera of Chicago for five seasons. During that time he directed revivals and special productions for the Lyric Opera of Chicago Center for American Artists.  Mr. Lata served as an apprentice with Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Frank Corsaro and Lotfi Mansouri under the auspices of the National Opera Institute, and as production stage manager and assistant director for a number of theaters, prior to joining the staff in Chicago.

He has been a script consultant for various theaters, including the New Playwright’s Theater in Washington and the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, in addition to regularly staging works for Lyric Opera of Chicago, Hawaii Opera Theatre, and Florida Grand Opera.  Mr. Lata also directed the world premiere of Anton Coppola’s Sacco and Vanzetti to international acclaim at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and staged New York City Opera’s National Tour of La Fille du régiment.

He has taught at the University of Missouri/Kansas City and guested at Northwestern and Yale.  Currently, he serves as Director of Opera at Florida State University.  Mr. Lata is married to the noted mezzo-soprano Phyllis Pancella.

Scenic design for The Magic Flute is by Jörg Zimmermann in his company debut, with costumes designed by Renata Kalanke.

Lighting design will be by Duane Schuler, with wig and make-up designs by David Zimmerman.

Chorus preparation will be by Dallas Opera Chorus Master Alexander Rom and Children’s Chorus Master Melinda Cotton.

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Single tickets for the remaining mainstage productions of the Dallas Opera’s “Tragic Obsessions” Season are on sale now, starting at just $25, through the Dallas Opera Ticket Services Office at 214.443.1000 or online at www.dallasopera.org.  Student Rush best-available tickets can be purchased at the lobby box office for $25 (one per valid Student I.D.) ninety minutes prior to each performance.

FLEX Subscriptions for the opera lovers in your life secures seats for all spring mainstage productions: Tristan & Isolde, La traviata, and The Magic Flute.  It also gives you the first chance to obtain one or more of the limited number of tickets available to see the Dallas Opera’s new production of a haunting1980 chamber opera: The Lighthouse by Peter Maxwell Davies.  Marking the operatic debut of director Kevin Moriarty, Artistic Director of the Dallas Theater Center, this work will play to intimate audiences in the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre across the street from the Winspear.

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EVENTS AND GUEST ARTISTS SUBJECT TO CHANGE

THE DALLAS OPERA GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES

THE TEXAS INSTRUMENTS FOUNDATION,

PRESENTER OF THE 2011-2012 SEASON

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE “TRAGIC OBSESSIONS” SEASON

IS CONVENIENTLY AVAILABLE ONLINE, 24/7

VISIT WWW.DALLASOPERA.ORG

• KERA radio story:

• Expanded online story:

The Dallas Symphony has solved its immediate cash-flow problem. The symphony’s projections were that sometime in late January or early February, it was going to max out its line of credit of eight million dollars. The orchestra was using that credit to cover everyday operational expenses. Because of the recession, the DSO has been selling, on average, only 65 percent of its seats, and donations were not coming in that had been promised. As a result, the symphony has run multi-million dollar deficits this season and the past two seasons.

So the emergency call went out, and an ‘action plan’ was announced that involved programming cuts. But within 90 days, the orchestra needed at least 5 million dollars just to continue this season.

David Hyslop is the orchestra’s interim president.

Hyslop: “That has happened. We got the cash through, we’re OK on the line of credit and all of that. But we don’t want to pull any punches. That only takes care of the cash needs until we get into early fall, and the challenges are still immense.”

The symphony has been basking in Jaap van Zweden’s conductor of the year award given by the journal Musical America. Van Zweden will be honored Thursday with a proclamation from Mayor Mike Rawlings. But the DSO has also had to cut and consolidate performances next season – the better to reflect audience demand. And the musicians’ union has agreed to extend a wage freeze for the fifth year.

Hyslop says the new challenge is to retire the symphony’s deficit.

Hyslop: “Everybody’s put some skin in the game. The orchestra’s done their bit, the staff’s done their bit. We’ve made cuts in the season. And now we will see if the community will come forward. The crux of the matter still is we still are going to need to raise 15 million dollars.”

Hyslop says retiring the deficit this way will take two to three years.

From such stage plays as Twelve Angry Men and The Crucible, we know how courtroom dramas work. But in his review, KERA’s Jerome Weeks says Stage West is presenting something of a courtroom comedy – a comedy about philosophy, no less.

• Dallas Morning News review (pay wall)

• Front Row review

• TheaterJones review

• Pegasus News review

• Fort Worth Star-Telegram review

• Dallas Observer review

• Critical Rant review

• KERA radio review:

• Expanded online review:

There’s actually no such thing as a ‘comedy of ideas.’ All comedies have ideas. It’s just that the ideas in some comedies are no-brainers. Thinking of fooling around with the maid when your wife might come home? That’s a bad idea. Marriage for this other loving couple? Obviously, that’s a good idea.

What sets New Jerusalem apart is that it’s a play about ideas. Playwright David Ives is best known for punching up old musical comedies and for the short comic gems in All in the Timing. But as funny as New Jerusalem often is, it takes ideas seriously. Ives even lets the 17^th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza explain his thinking at length. That may sound daunting, but it can actually be tremendously compelling — especially when Spinoza’s life is at stake.

We really don’t know much about why in 1656 in Amsterdam, the Jewish congregation sought to ban the young Spinoza for heresy. But it’s easy enough to surmise – as Ives does. Spinoza was probably already conjecturing how God and the universe are one. This makes God more an impersonal force, more like the God of science than the God of Moses. Or Spinoza was already speculating in public that such a universe would leave little room for free will. At times, even as he holds up rationalism as his great guide, Spinoza can sound like an atheist, a pantheist or a determinist.

Or he can just be confusing, especially to the average 1656 mind. In New Jerusalem, the Jewish council interrogates him and his girlfriend Clara (Barrett Nash) and rummages through his letters — all in an effort to understand his provocative beliefs.

Ben Israel (Michael Corolla): “Atheism appears to be completely incomprehensible.”

Van Valkenburgh (Russell Dean Schultz): “Haven’t you heard his slippery answers?”

Ben Israel (Michael Corolla): “You can’t prosecute a person for being slippery. You’d decimate the population.” [Laughter]

But in addition to fleshing out Spinoza’s fateful cross-examination, Ives has raised the stakes considerably. Historically, Amsterdam’s Jews had fled the Spanish Inquisition. The Dutch Protestants let them stay – with restrictions, including the fact that they officially remained non-citizens. But Spinoza’s freethinking has alarmed the conservative Christians. They demand the Jews silence him or all the Jews may suffer. Ironically, having fled the Inquisition, the Jews are forced to set up their own ecclesiastical tribunal.

With New Jerusalem, David Ives brings his humor into the world of such courtroom dramas as Inherit the Wind – a world where ideas have painful consequences. But there are also overtones of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the entire issue of whether Jews should assimilate or accommodate to survive when faced with oppression (Anne Frank, after all — currently being portrayed on stage at the WaterTower Theatre – was rounded up in Amsterdam).

Ives even has Spinoza fling the loaded term ‘collaborator’ at his accusers — which, Anne Frank or not, is a bit much. This was the ‘Golden Age’ for the Netherlands — the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, the Dutch East India Company and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology. Amsterdam was known for its religious tolerance — of Jews and Huguenots. Even with restrictions, the city wasn’t close to being Nazi Germany.

But I suspect Ives has ramped up the stakes like this, not so much to invoke the Final Solution. Rather, Spinoza’s plight also echoes political conflicts closer to home, ones in America involving religious wars, conservative Christians and our own use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’

In particular, Spinoza’s interrogation is painful for Rabbi Mortera. His feelings are complicated not just because Spinoza was his beloved, prize pupil. Mortera also helped broker the Jews’ accommodation with Amsterdam.

Rabbi Mortera (Jim Covault): “Will you insult the God of Israel to my face? Do you realize what you stand to lose here today? Your family? Your business, your home – “

Baruch Spinoza (Garrett Storms): “In truth, I don’t possess them. I have been lent them to enjoy. “

Mortera: “You dare to be glib?”

Spinoza: “Maybe the question isn’t what I stand to lose, but what you do.”

That’s Jim Covault playing Mortera. Covault is a dry, reserved actor, but underplaying Mortera’s anguish only makes it resonate more. Covault’s one of the best things in the Stage West production — the play practically becomes Mortera’s tragedy. In contrast to such subtlety, there’s Russell Dean Schultz’ stern Van Valkenburgh, the Christian city official who sees himself as the voice of reason, even as he forces the synagogue into a double bind. Bellowing, almost by definition, is a one-note affair.

As for the central role of Spinoza, Garret Storms has the energy and focused will of Tom Cruise. But all that grinning charm can get annoying. True, Ives’ Spinoza doesn’t seem too overly concerned about what may happen to him (at least, not as concerned as his friends seem to be). But Storms plays him as more the brash, radical firebrand, uncaring about what his iconoclasm might bring down on everyone’s head. He’s less the modest Spinoza who loved Clara, a Christian woman he knew he could never marry, and who spent the rest of his life grinding lenses.

For the Stage West production, Jim Covault has provided a striking, simple set design for the synagogue’s meeting room, one that amplifies the play’s relevance. It looks like a Pottery Barn floor display. Overall, directed by Jerry Russell, this New Jerusalem is sharp, clean and powerful. Even if you know what happened historically, the play’s interrogation — its arguments over faith and philosophy –  can be gripping.

And rather contemporary.

This week, both the Dallas Opera and the Fort Worth Opera announced projects involving brand-new works. works. KERA’s Jerome Weeks reports they both involve generating future operas – in different ways.

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The Fort Worth Opera has begun an innovative new annual program called “Frontiers.” Up to eight new submitted compositions will be chosen blind by a panel of judges. The composers will get to hear excerpts from their works-in-progress performed in piano recitals by the festival’s singers. No other company has a showcase for unproduced operas quite like this. Word has gone viral through the classical music community.

Darren Woods (above, left) is general director of the Fort Worth Opera.

Woods: “When we started running the idea around composers in New York, I would say, ‘Would this be something that would be a game-changer? And always the answer would be, ‘Ohmigod, yes.’ “

The performances will be free to the public. Woods says public response is a vital part of the creative process.

Woods: “You can’t treat a new opera like broccoli: ‘Eat it, it’s good for you.’ You really have to make a commitment to it. So we think that this is just the next stage in our evolution.”

The Fort Worth company already stages new and contemporary works in its main season. This May, it’ll be composer Jake Heggie’s chamber opera Three Decembers. This will be the fourth staging of a work by Heggie in North Texas.

Now there’ll be a fifth one because the Dallas Opera has given Heggie (above, center) a new commission. Two years ago, the highlight of the company’s first season in the Winspear Opera House was the world premiere of Heggie’s Moby-Dick. It received national acclaim. The Dallas Opera hopes those results might repeat. The company will open its 2015 season with a world premiere by Heggie and Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally (above, right) — the two were the creative team behind Dead Man Walking and would have collaborated on Moby-Dick but McNally fell ill and Gene Scheer took over the book-writing.

Great Scott, as their new opera is titled, is based on an original story by McNally. It concerns a famous American singer, Arden Scott, who returns home to star in a new production of a forgotten operatic masterpiece. Great Scott will feature celebrated, Grammy-nominated mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato in her North Texas debut. And it will be led by the rising young conductor Evan Rogister.

Wait, there’s more. There’s a sixth Heggie work still to come. The University of North Texas has commissioned the composer for his very first symphony. It will premiere next year.  The San Francisco-based Heggie says the Texas enthusiasm for his work has been a happy surprise.

Hegggie: “It does feel like that I kind of have a second creative home.”

Photo outfront by Luke McKenzie of soprano Patricia Racette in recital, Dallas Opera.

It’s an arts problem.

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It’s been like a revolving door all over North Texas. This is only a partial list (in no particular order) of area arts groups that have had to hire a new CEO or managing director the past two years. Or are still looking for one. There’s also a notable contrast with many of the previous generation of arts managers who often served for two or even three decades.

• The Kimbell Art Museum – Eric McCauley Lee became director two years ago, but deputy director Malcolm Warner just left to run the Laguna Art Museum.

• Dallas Opera – Keith Cerny became general director last year after the infamously brief employment and departure of George Steel for the New York City Opera. But then this year, music director Graeme Jenkins announced he’s stepping down after 17 years.

• The Van Cliburn Foundation – David Chambless Worters served only six months as president and CEO before resigning in June. The foundation is currently looking for someone to fill the position that Richard Rodzinski held for 23 years.

• Turtle Creek Chorale – Artistic director Jonathan Palant resigned in August after four years, a replacement is being sought. David Fisher became executive director. Previously, Timothy Seelig ran the chorale for 20 years; he now heads up the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus.

• The Amon Carter Museum – Andrew Walker is the new director; Ron Tyler retired after serving at the Carter in various positions for 21 years.

• The Dallas Museum of Art – Maxwell Anderson starts this month as director after Bonnie Pitman stepped down for health reasons.

• The Dallas Theater Center – Heather Kitchen became managing director this year, after Mark Hadley stepped down, having held the position for 10 years.

• The AT&T Performing Arts Center – Mark Weinstein became president and CEO after Mark Nerenhausen was forced out last year.

• Dallas Film Society – Lee Papert, is the new president and CEO.

• Latino Cultural Center - Benjamin Espino was appointed general manager

• Fort Worth Symphony – Amy Adkins, president and CEO, replaced Ann Koonsman, who retired July 31. Koonsman had been the orchestra’s CEO for 30 years.

The local group that’s struggled the most with finding a director is the Dallas Symphony. The DSO is facing a fundraising crunch this month as it tries to keep from hitting its credit limit of $8 million. This effort is complicated by the orchestra’s search for its third executive director in three years.

Greg Hustis (left) is the principal horn player for the DSO.

“For us, there’s a sense that we have all these fantastic pieces in place. We have a great conductor and a great hall. And we simply need somebody to help with both tactics and long-term strategy — where the orchestra is going and how it’s going to get there.”

The widespread lack of capable arts managers has affected even the highest levels of the industry. The New York Philharmonic hunted for an executive director for well over a year. To be sure, the Philharmonic has its headaches — for one thing, like the DSO, it’s run multi-million-dollar deficits in recent years. But this is the New York Philharmonic, America’s oldest and most prestigious orchestra — and it finally found a new director. In Australia. After it was turned down by nearly half-a-dozen other candidates.

An arts group can function on autopilot without someone officially running the business side — for awhile. Tickets are sold, shows go on. But decisions eventually have to be made that only a manager can make.

Hustis: “It’s everything from what kind of guest artists can we have to can we commission important works? Are we going to tour, what are we going to do about recording? All these things have to be coordinated.”

Mark Weinstein is the new head of the AT&T Performing Arts Center. He calls the arts executive a translator. She takes the artistic director’s dream – does he want to start a new play series? – and figures out how to do it financially. Then she gets board members behind it because they have to raise the money.

But the manager translates the other way as well, trying to get the artistic side to understand the market and organizational side.

Weinstein: “Some of the greatest artistic heads of companies, they basically fail because they have a flurry of activity but someone has to figure out how to fit that into the normal capabilities of an organization. Our jobs are to smooth out the cycles so that there is constant growth. And so that when you get hit by a recession, you can glide through it instead of going bankrupt.”

Top arts management jobs like Weinstein’s pay well. So they should attract a bevvy of candidates. But arts organizations have reported getting dozens of applicants for artistic director, conductor or curator — while barely scraping together a handful for executive director.

And that’s at the top of the profession. Jose Bowen says one reason the pickings remain thin is that the starting jobs for arts management graduates generally don’t pay well. And the punishing costs of college don’t help, either. Bowen is dean of SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts. It’s one of the few that offers a double master’s degree in arts management – in the arts and business administration.

Bowen: “Our students graduate and are immediately faced with a choice. Come work for Goldman and make more money or go work for a nonprofit and make less money. And when you have loans, right out of school? That’s a hard choice to make.”

There’s also the issue of metrics. Commercial success is easy enough to measure for a typical CEO: profits, return on investment, stock prices, market share. For an arts group, though, what’s the yardstick for success? And how is the managing director responsible for it?

The seats may be full, the subscription numbers strong, the debt low, the endowment fat and happy. Yet arts groups are non-profits — like schools, hospitals and churches — precisely because they are tasked with doing the unprofitable, the worthwhile-but-not-easily-measured: inspiring people, enlightening them, breaking their hearts, beguiling them.

Which means any arts administrator’s effectiveness in keeping the place afloat financially may mean relatively little to the larger goal of bettering a community. It certainly helps if an organization survives to expand, to learn, to try more ambitious projects. But snoozy mediocrities thrive, as well. The rewards, then, even for an arts executive, remain intangible — and therefore not easily defined, grasped, pointed to, cashed in on. People go into the arts — even on the business side — for just those intangible rewards: for aesthetic and creative satisfaction, to be around creative people, to take part in something grander, more edifying than the manufacture of plastic buffalo humps (the phrase is Donald Barthelme’s).

But today, arts executives are also facing unprecedented challenges – from the recession, from new technology. Of course, the same is true for business leaders in many fields. But the arts exec has to adapt and survive – with the limited resources of a non-profit.

Bowen: “The cultural and business climate has radically changed. There’s more competition for eyeballs, there’s more competition for entertainment. And so the traditional arts aren’t going to be able to do business as usual any longer.”

It’s not simply that the business model of non-profits is being battered or upgraded. The arts themselves are deeply ingrained in our human psyche, they’re ancient in their origins, going back to cave paintings and shaman rituals by the fire.

But how we actually attend the arts today – from parking to tickets to seating – all of that is based on 19^th-century practices (often German ones): standing ovations, filling programs with essays as if they were textbooks, remaining respectfully silent during symphony concerts and museum tours — as if they were high Masses, dressing up to go to the theater, treating arts facilities as if they were churches or castles.

Good or bad, relevant to younger audiences or not, much of the ticketing-to-parking-to-seating issues are the domain of the managing director. So any need for innovation in these areas makes his job even more important.

He’s the one who’ll have to manage the changes.

Background music: Excerpts from the DSO’s recording of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Orchestral Suite No. 4 (“Mozartiana”), Jaap van Zweden conducting

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Artes de la Rosa is Fort Worth’s Latino cultural center; it’s housed in the Rose Marine, a renovated old movie house that’s on the National Register of Historic Places. When Adam Adolfo was hired to run it last year, he declared he’d bring theater back to the Rose. Teatro de la Rosa, Fort Worth’s only Hispanic theater company, had folded two years earlier.

So in addition to the Rose’s nationally recognized educational program, film screenings and festivals, Adolfo has been presenting Latino theater. But it’s Latino theater with some twists.

For one thing, he started a series of  classic American plays in revival — partly, he laughingly admits, because of an old grudge. In high school he wasn’t cast in a production of Death of a Salesman, even though, the director said, Adolfo had aced the audition. But he would have been the only Hispanic in the Loman family. He didn’t fit.

So at the Rose, Adolfo is reviving American classics with Latino casts. More importantly, he argues that great American dramas are often family dramas – and very relevant to Hispanics. At the Rose, the Southern clan in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the Italian-Americans in Arthur Miller’s View from a Bridge were troubled Latino families. Whether the drama was about a patriarchal legacy and repressed homosexuality or it was about an illegal immigrant and incestuous complications, it didn’t take much, Adolfo argues, to make the play work for the Rose’s North Side community.

Adolfo: “We didn’t want to change what it was. We just wanted to reinvent it for Latino eyes.”

But this spring, Adolfo has a far more unusual revival planned. It’s a tango chamber opera. [music of ‘Yo soy Maria” begins under]

Adolfo: “Maria de Buenos Aires! My baby! The cornerstone of our theater season.”

Created in 1968, Maria de Buenos Aires is the only opera by Astor Piazzolla, the great master of tango nuevo (left). Piazzolla brought jazz and modern dissonance to the traditional tango. Maria is popular in Latin America but has rarely been staged in the US — perhaps that’s because it’s the surreal story of a prostitute who’s murdered for the love of tango. She becomes a ghost. Piazzolla called the show his tango operita (“little opera”), and it’s more like a song cycle with narration and staging. It has puppets and circus performers, and it’s narrated – by a goblin.

But there’s also that music and the dancing.

Adolfo: “It has glimpses of Moulin Rouge, of Cabaret, of Carmen. It is this celebration of tango music as seduction.”

Maria de Buenos Aires, which will be staged in May, will demonstrate how far-reaching and ambitious Adolfo’s Latino theater can be. The tango, after all, is not from Mexico. It’s from Argentina.

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Ben Fountain may be the most acclaimed short-story writer to come out of Texas since Donald Barthelme. In 2006, Fountain’s debut short-story collection - Brief Encounters with Che Guevara – earned raves and a slew of awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award, a Barnes & Noble Discover Award and two Pushcart Prizes.

Two years later, Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, wrote a feature in The New Yorker about the popular tradition of the young genius artist, a Wolfgang Mozart or Orson Welles. But, Gladwell argued, there’s a lesser-known, just as old tradition of the ‘late bloomer,’ an artist finding his mark later in life, geniuses like Miguel Cervantes and Joseph Conrad. Gladwell’s Exhibit A for this phenomenon was Fountain. Fountain quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988, quit being a lawyer entirely, stayed at home and labored over his ironic short stories about hapless Americans abroad until he finally became a literary star – at age 48.

So naturally, one month after Gladwell’s story appeared, Fountain’s writing goes and hits a wall. His publisher rejects the novel he’d sweated over for years. Fountain knew The Texas Itch wasn’t his best work, but still –

Fountain: “It’s like, genius, my ass [laughs]. I mean, one month you have this nice article in The New Yorker about you and the next month, reality rears its ugly head.”

It’s any artist’s nightmare — working for years on a project that goes nowhere. But Fountain says his success with Brief Encounters didn’t make writing any easier (“I’d gotten Zen about it”). Failure wasn’t going to stop him, either. He simply put The Texas Itch aside and turned to an idea he’d been toying with ever since he sat through the entire Dallas Cowboys’ Thanksgiving game in 2004 — aided by a three-martini haze. He discovered why people often gather together to watch professional football: What actually happens on TV can be incredibly boring. George Will’s famous observation that football combines American culture’s two worst features — violence and committee meetings — didn’t take into account two other features: TV commercials and endless, microscopic, broadcast analysis.

And, of course, Will didn’t address the wondrous exotica of the halftime show, a PG-rated Las Vegas extravaganza for middle America (no slot machines or topless showgirls but lots of bumping-and-grinding dancers and ginned-up team spirit). Normally, one might be able to enjoy a typically over-the-top set by Destiny’s Child — who played Texas Stadium that day in 2004 complete with drill teams, drumlines, disco lights and ROTC squads.

But Fountain notes that George Bush had just been re-elected, an event the author had a hard time fathoming since it came in the midst of an increasingly divisive and unpopular war, a war instigated by what already were plainly false assumptions and cooked information. So at Texas Stadium, all of the splashy entertainment, media-news attention and big-league sports seemed like so much feverish, sideshow distraction.

But there, on the field, amid the hooplah, was a squad of tanned, lean soldiers. Fountain spotted them because they were dressed in desert fatigues, clearly recent arrivals from our Iraq battlefields. And in contrast to all the gleaming precision around them, they were stumbling around, laughing, possibly even drunk.

Fountain: “In other words, they don’t give a damn. They’d been through something nobody else out there has. What would it do to your mind, to have gone to Iraq and then come back and be thrust into this huge fantasy?”

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk follows such a group, Bravo Squad, sent on a whirlwind “Victory Tour” by President Bush to reinvigorate our flagging support for his administration’s war. The squad had become American heroes after a Fox News video of a brutal ambush they were in went viral — a firefight against a larger force that left one of their number dead and a second grieviously wounded. The squad members are in Dallas on  tour — the last day before they’re shipped back to Iraq — having to meet and greet, pose for the cameras with owners, players and cheerleaders.

Warfare, football,Texas and big-money politics: Fountain is aware his targets may not be that new; it’s what he does with them that keeps them from being caricatures. The cheerleaders aren’t bimbos, the billionaire Swift Boater (who could that be, Mr. Pickens?) actually speaks some wisdom, the Hollywood producer isn’t a lying sack. Meanwhile, Billy wrestles with confusions over faith, love and duty.

Plus, Fountain is knowledgeable (and funny) with this territory. In his portrait of our late, generally unlamented Texas Stadium, he actually pulls out a three-page showcase on the splendors of the Cowboys’ equipment room. Honestly. And a whole chapter devoted to the intricate, kung-fu-ing, high-kicking razzle dazzle of the halftime pyrotechnics. Practically flow-charts the thing. The whole halftime feels stupid and impressive, beautiful and utterly banal — ‘just another normal day in America,’ as Billy’s sergeant says.

Still, Fountain’s well aware Billy Lynn will not be popular with many in Dallas. Or America. Certainly not with Jerry Jones. The book can be scalding — precisely because it’s knowledgeable and funny.

Fountain: “I take the gloves off. But you know there’s a point where hypocrisy slides over into schizophrenia, and I think we see instances of that everyday in America — and especially in this city.”

Billy Lynn comes out in May. Rights to the novel have already been sold to seven countries. And HarperCollins, the publisher, just increased the first print run from 50,000 copies to 75,000.

A vote of confidence in Ben Fountain’s first novel.

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The next few weeks should be memorable for Maxwell Anderson. He’ll be starting as the Dallas Museum of Art’s new director, and three weeks later, his new book, The Quality Instinct, will be released.

Anderson edited his previous book, The Wired Museum in 1997. It made him an early leader in the field, an advocate for redefining museums digitally, for getting their collections online — at a time when many barely had a web presence and some weren’t sure they ever should have one (museums protect unique, costly objects — why should they hand out images of them to everyone?). Anderson practiced what he preached when he became director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2006. Among his other achievements at the IMA (adding $30 million to the museum’s endowment, opening a 600-seat theater, launching a 100-acre art-and-nature park), he got national attention when he put IMA policies and (some of its) financial data on the web — an unprecedented act of transparency in a field known for its secrecy and discretion. He also created a separate website, Art Babble, that specializes in videos about artists’ work and artists at work.

The DMA has been an online innovator as well, and Anderson now considers the digital age more or less a battle won.

Anderson: “For me, online is really a form of conversation. And it’s part of the future of every art museum, including Dallas’s.”

For his new book, The Quality Instinct: Seeing Art Through a Museum Director’s Eyes (left), Anderson turned instead to the past, to an idea that many consider old-hat: the connoisseur.

Anderson: “Connoisseurship has to do with training the eye to see in works of art something that might not be immediately obvious – to see the quality and character of works of art as material objects.”

His book is partly a guide for anyone who wants to take the time to look at artworks; it’s also a personal memoir about how he learned to do just that, how he could examine an ancient Roman bust and almost immediately realize there was something “off” about it. Anderson is the grandson of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Maxwell Anderson (below), best known, perhaps, as the author of The Bad Seed, Anne of a Thousand Days and the “musical tragedy,” Lost in the Stars, with composer Kurt Weill. He is the son of Quentin Anderson, a Columbia University professor and  senior fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities. At 24, the future museum director was the youngest Harvard student to earn a doctorate in art history — and he’s been knighted by both France and Italy.

Not exactly a typical middle-class life. Even so, Anderson wants to rescue the idea of the connoisseur from the old trappings of upper-class privilege, from the art-market focus on price and profit and from the critical theorists, who dumped the connoisseur as a period fossil. Critical theory is concerned with sexual-racial-social-political contexts, with power relationships. To the theorists, judgments about an artwork’s quality — ranking it on some grand scale of greatness and relevance — these are just traditional modes of, well, class privilege. But by using his own life and career as examples, Anderson hopes to sidestep all that to convey the benefits of direct encounters with art objects.

Anderson: “I hoped that I could demystify a little bit the process of acquiring that expertise and make it less this unreachable mountain and more something which touches the expertise that people have about all kinds of things, whether it’s gardening — or NASCAR.”

Anderson maintains that truly seeing an artwork is a skill anyone can acquire.

On the other hand, running the DMA probably isn’t. Anderson will begin testing that particular skill set January 9th.

Sweet Tornado airs tonight, Monday Dec. 19, at 10 p.m. on KERA. We’re reposting this piece Jerome Weeks wrote on what would be Jones’ 100th birthday.

Sweet Tornado was the unexpected and happy by-product of — of all things — a theater critics convention.

Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and the American Theater is the 2006 TV documentary about the Texas theater pioneer, Margaret Virginia Jones. It’s being re-broadcast by KERA next Monday, Dec. 19,  in honor of Jones’ 100th birthday (which is actually today, December 12th). The documentary, narrated by Marcia Gay Harden, features Judith Ivey as Margo — and includes interviews with playwrights Horton Foote and Jerome Lawrence, actor Ray Walston and, um, well, me.

Kay Cattarulla, the founder of Arts & Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art, helped produce, direct and write the documentary — the first time she’d ever done any of those things for television, so it’s quite remarkable (she worked with Rob Tranchin on producing and directing). Kay was inspired by a visit to the Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park in 1995.  The American Theater Critics Association was in town for its annual conference. As the then-theater critic for the Dallas Morning News, I’d invited the group and arranged the convention — including a panel discussion about Margo Jones at the Magnolia Lounge, the building where Jones started the American resident theater movement in 1947. Originally built as a ‘comfort facility’ for the Texas Centennial in 1936, the tiny art-deco-ish building had fallen into disrepair when Jones transformed it into her trailblazing Theatre ‘47 — eventually helping launch the careers of Tennessee Williams and William Inge and staging the world premiere of Inherit the  Wind, the anti-fundamentalist drama that had been turned down by Broadway producers as too controversial to stage yet Jones managed it here in Texas.

Even more than all that, Jones championed a decentralized American theater, a theater free of the commercial (and parochial) constraints of New York and Broadway. She encouraged theaters in towns across the United States to start producing original work on their own and not depend on tours. She argued this should be done professional actors and directors supported in the community,  and her guidebook on how to do all that, Theatre in the Round, became what’s been called “the Bible” of the American resident theater movement (although the movement didn’t really take off until the ’60s when the Ford Foundation began giving grants to fledgling stage companies around the country). Jones was a big proponent of the theater-in-the-round staging (like Theatre Three’s configuration) because it saved on a show’s production costs, notably sets. What such a show lost in Broadway splendor, it gained in tangible immediacy.

For the assembled theater critics, all of this meant that a visit to Jones’ former theater was an important pilgrimage (it’s always a bit of a shock to see how small her theater-in-the-round actually was at the Magnolia. And the roof leaked).  The conference panel discussion included Helen Sheehy, Jones’ biographer, author of Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones. As for what Kay Cattarulla was doing there, she came to the panel because she was curious about this Dallas woman she’d never heard of — and learned just what the ‘Texas Tornado” had accomplished.

Jones had a spirit like an evangelist preacher (her fundraising pleas to audiences were dubbed her “Come to Jesus” speech). Fortunately, when it came to  impressing Dallas donors, she also had some ’street cred’ as a theater producer, educator and director. She’d worked with Hallie Flanagan at the Federal Theatre Project (part of the New Deal’s Works Project Administration), she’d toured the world studying theater (including Stanislavsky’s famous Moscow Art Theatre) taught at UT-Austin and had even co-directed Williams’ Glass Menagerie on Broadway. Along the way, she’d cultivated actors (including Walston and Jack Warden) and crucial theater critics whom she turned into boosters (Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, John Rosenfield of the Dallas Morning News). As a result, she inspired not just Dallas audiences — Nina Vance, the founder of Houston’s Alley Theatre, was one of her proteges. It certainly didn’t hurt that, in person, Jones could be a force of nature.

Yet she was also an early model for the dilemma many women would face only after feminism took hold in the ’70s and ’80s: Her professional success only seemed to guarantee personal anguish when it came to her private life with men. She was a hard-living, hard-partying Texas woman who died unexpectedly in 1955 — from the intake of carbon tetrachloride while she was in her apartment at the Stoneleigh Hotel. The accident came on the heels of a wretched, drunken, romantic break-up (watch Sweet  Tornado to learn what happened — the entire event is like some gothic scene from a Williams drama). After her death, with the eventual dissolution of her theater and its replacement by the Dallas Theater Center in 1960, her accomplishments were more or less forgotten. It wasn’t until Joseph Ziegler’s book, Regional Theatre:  The Revolutionary Stage, came out in 1973 that Jones’ place in American stage history was re-affirmed.

Today, there’s a Margo Jones Theater at SMU, and a Margo Jones Auditorium at TWU (she graduated from the school when it was still the Girls’ Industrial College). Her theater’s old space, the Magnolia Lounge, is now home to Nouveau 47 Theatre, named for her original company, and there’s the local theater blog named for her, theaterjones.com.  Ohio State University presents the Margo Jones Award (as part of the Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute) — its winners have included Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman.

And there’s Sweet Tornado.

Ever stop at one of those ‘gravitational mystery spots’? Those roadside attractions that often tout how, only in this precise location, can water run uphill and vertical lines hang at screwy angles? Visited one in upstate Michigan when I was a kid. They’re often found in such out-of-the-way places with a barn or shack-like structure you enter to experience the local geological or supernatural anomaly that somehow lets you violate the laws of physics.

Los Angeles-based artist Julian Hoeber has created ‘Demon Hill,’ a freestanding installation that’s based on the architectural principles underlying what are actually simple illusions. Prepare to be amazed! Or at least fascinated – and wised up.

More significant than their country of origin is the challenging nature of their work. Once again, Meadows School of the Arts dean Jose Bowen and the Meadows judges are trying to push Dallasites past the mainstream and conventional, represented by the comfort zone of our leading performing-arts groups, the Dallas Symphony, Dallas Opera, the Texas Ballet Theatre and the Dallas Theater Center. Previous winners of the Meadows Prize have included new-music ensemble eighth blackbird, the innovative arts-production team Creative Time and Chinese dancer-designer-choregrapher, Shen Wei (who will be arriving for his residency soon — creating a work with students for their Spring Dance concert).

Although still not as well-known in America as his playwright-compatriots, Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson, Walsh is already the author of some 20 plays, including  Disco Pigs, Chatroom and The Walworth Farce (the last one the New York Times called “a galloping gothic comedy … a Hibernian Three Stooges routine, directed by a drunken Dadaist.”)  Walsh is the co-author of the film Hunger, with director Steve McQueen, about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, and he’s currently represented off-Broadway with both Misterman, starring Cillian Murphy (best known  as the Scarecrow in The Dark Knight) and Once, an acclaimed musical adaptation of the independent film of the same name about a busker and an immigrant falling in love on the streets of Dublin. Once is headed for Broadway next year. Walsh has also written film adaptations of his plays, Disco Pigs (starring Cillian Murphy) and Chatroom. Earlier this year, Washington’s Studio Theatre held New Ireland: An Enda Walsh Festival.

Keegan-Dolan is the founder-director-choreographer of Dublin’s  Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, called “one of the most daring and highly original dance theatre companies in the world” by the London Times. He has made a name for himself with dancework that is often irreverent, violent, sexually explicit and homoerotic; it’s also known for combining narrative and movement with spoken word and song.  Before establishing Fabulous Beast in Dublin in the late ’90s, Keegan-Dolan worked in London as a movement director on prestigious opera productions. Two years ago, his work was nominated for an Olivier Award; he radically re-invented Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in a co-production with the English National Opera.  His choreography can be seen in the 2008 film version of the Stravinsky opera, The Rake’s Progress, and earlier this year, he collaborated with folk-rock musician Liam Ó Maonlaí in adapting his 2005 solo album, Rian, to the stage. (The image outfront is from Rian.)

In return for accepting the $25,000 Meadows Prize, each winner has to reside in Dallas for one to two months. They’ll work with SMU students and local arts groups, teaching classes or performing. And they must leave what’s termed a ‘lasting legacy,’ meaning generally a new work of art.

The full press release follows:

SMU’S MEADOWS SCHOOL OF THE ARTS ANNOUNCES RECIPIENTS OF THIRD ANNUAL MEADOWS PRIZE

DALLAS (SMU) — The Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University has selected two Irish artists – choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan and playwright and screenwriter Enda Walsh – as the recipients of the third annual Meadows Prize arts residency.

Dublin native Michael Keegan-Dolan has been widely referred to as “the most unique choreographic voice to have emerged from Ireland in the last half century.” He is co-founder and artistic director of Dublin’s Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, an award-winning company launched in 1997. He has written, directed, choreographed and co-produced critically acclaimed works with Fabulous Beast that combine the visual element of dance with the narrative power of theatre. His choreographic works have been produced at prestigious venues throughout Europe and the U.S., including the Royal Opera House in London, Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, and the Houston Grand Opera.

Enda Walsh, also a Dublin native, achieved prominence when he won two prestigious playwriting awards in 1997, the George Devine Award and the Stewart Parker Award, with his play Disco Pigs, a story of an obsessive teen relationship that ends in tragedy. He has since written numerous other award-winning plays, including The Walworth Farce and The New Electric Ballroom, and has been named by the Guardian as “one of the most dazzling wordsmiths of contemporary theatre.” Walsh is also a successful screenwriter; his 2008 biopic, Hunger, told the story of the final days of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands and won a host of awards, including the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Walsh currently lives in London.

The pair will be in residency at SMU at the same time in fall 2012 for four weeks. They will collaborate with SMU theatre and dance students to create a new dance/theatre piece tentatively slated for a major European festival in 2013. The piece also will receive public workshop performances in Dallas during their residency.

“Michael and Enda were nominated separately by two individuals, but we subsequently learned that not only have they known each other for more than 20 years, they were looking for an opportunity to collaborate on a large project,” said José Bowen, dean of the Meadows School. “They are both daring artists with compatible aesthetics, and it seemed a perfect opportunity for our students and for Dallas.”

Inaugurated in October 2009, the Meadows Prize is presented each fall to up to two pioneering artists. It includes support for a four-to-eight-week residency in Dallas, in addition to a $25,000 stipend. In return, recipients are expected to interact in a substantive way with Meadows students and collaborating arts organizations, and to leave a lasting legacy in Dallas, such as a work of art that remains in the community, a composition or piece of dramatic writing that would be performed locally, or a new way of teaching in a particular discipline.

Bios of Michael Keegan-Dolan and Enda Walsh, and additional background on the Meadows Prize, follow.

MICHAEL KEEGAN-DOLAN

Born in Dublin, Michael Keegan-Dolan is considered one of Ireland’s most talented, challenging and innovative choreographers, recognized for his ability to fuse the visual immediacy of dance with the narrative strength of theatre.  He is co-founder and artistic director of Dublin’s Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, an award-winning company launched in 1997. Fabulous Beast creates productions that have their roots in Ireland and Irish experience, but deal with universal and often controversial issues in modern society, making them accessible and challenging entertainment for a large audience.

With Fabulous Beast, Keegan-Dolan has created such works as Sunday Lunch (1997), Fragile (1999), The Flowerbed (2000), Giselle (2003), The Bull (2005), James Son of James (2007), and The Rite of Spring (2009), a co-production with English National Opera.

Giselle, The Bull and The Rite of Spring were all nominated for Olivier Awards (the British equivalent of the Tony Awards), and The Bull won the U.K. Critics’ Circle Award for Best Modern Choreography in 2008. That year Keegan-Dolan and Fabulous Beast also received a nomination for the 2009 Europe Prize New Theatrical Realities, the first Irish company ever to be nominated for the prestigious award. Fabulous Beast also won the Judges’ Special Award in the Irish Times Theatre Awards in 2003.

Keegan-Dolan’s other choreographic work includes productions of Ariodante, Manon and Alcina at the English National Opera; The Rake’s Progress (La Monnaie, Royal Opera House Covent Garden); Faust and Macbeth (Royal Opera House); The Duchess of Malfi, Carousel and The Oedipus Plays (National Theatre, London); Idomeneo (De Vlaamse Opera); The Love for Three Oranges (Cologne Opera); Pique Dame and Ariodante (Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich); and Ariodante and Manon (Houston Grand Opera). Michael Keegan-Dolan and Fabulous Beast have been artistic associates of London’s Barbican Centre – a U.K. counterpart to New York’s Lincoln Center – since 2007.

Keegan-Dolan’s newest work, Rian, a collaboration with musician Liam Ó Maonlaí, was performed in October in the U.K. to critical acclaim, and is expected to tour internationally in 2012. The production takes its title from Ó Maonlaí’s 2005 solo album Rian, which means “mark” or “trace” in Irish. Rian explores the tension and harmony between Irish traditional music and modern dance and was created as a response to “the current seismic changes in Irish society.” Keegan-Dolan is also directing a production of Julius Caesar for the English National Opera in 2012 and has several other projects in the works.

For more information visit http://www.fabulousbeast.net/site.html.

ENDA WALSH

Enda Walsh is an Irish playwright born in Dublin and currently living in London. Having written for the Dublin Youth Theatre, he moved to Cork where he wrote Fishy Tales for the Graffiti Theatre Company, followed by Ginger Ale Boy for Corcadorca Theatre Company. His main breakthrough came with the production of his play Disco Pigs in collaboration with director Pat Kiernan of Corcadorca. The play won three awards, including the Stewart Parker and George Devine Awards in 1997, and was made into a film, for which he wrote the screenplay, in 2001.

Productions of his plays at the Edinburgh Festival have won four Edinburgh Fringe First Awards, two Critic’s Awards and a Herald Archangel Award (2008). His numerous other honors include an Abbey Theatre Writer in Association Award in 2006 and, for a production of New Electric Ballroom at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, an Obie Award in 2010. His plays, notably Disco Pigs, Bedbound, Small Things, Chatroom, New Electric Ballroom and The Walworth Farce, have been translated into more than 20 languages and have had productions throughout Europe and in Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. He has written two radio plays, with Four Big Days in the Life of Dessie Banks for RTÉ winning the IPA Radio Drama Award and The Monotonous Life of Little Miss P for the BBC commended at the Gran Prix Berlin. His commissioned work includes plays for Paines Plough in London, the Druid Theatre in Galway, the Kammerspiele in Munich and the Royal National’s Connections Project in London. He co-wrote the screenplay of Hunger, which was directed by Steve McQueen and stars Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker who starved himself to death in protest over British rule. Hunger won 33 awards worldwide, including the Caméra d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival, Best Film Award from the Evening Standard British Film Awards 2009 and Heartbeat Award at the Dinard International Film Festival, and a nomination for Best British Film at the British Academy Film Awards. Walsh wrote an adaptation of his play Chatroom for a film directed by Hideo Nakata, which was selected for the Un Certain Regard section at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. He is currently under commission for two films: an adaptation of the children’s story ,em>Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson, and Into That Darkness, the story of Franz Stangl, SS commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka concentration camps. Earlier this fall, Walsh participated in the Bush Theatre of London’s 2011 project Sixty-Six Books, for which he wrote a piece based upon a chapter of the King James Bible.

Walsh has three plays being performed in New York and Chicago in early December.  Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago opened his latest play, Penelope, inspired by The Odyssey and Homer’s tale of the doomed suitors wooing Odysseus’s wife, on December 1. An acclaimed revival of his early play, Misterman, began at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn on Nov. 30, starring Cillian Murphy (Batman Begins, Inception, In Time). His musical adaptation of the Oscar-winning film Once is being performed Off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop and is universally expected to transfer to Broadway in early 2012.

PREVIOUS MEADOWS PRIZE WINNERS

The first two winners of the Meadows Prize, announced in October 2009, were Grammy-winning contemporary music ensemble eighth blackbird and New York-based public arts organization Creative Time. Eighth blackbird’s residency focused on developing new curriculum to help musicians become more entrepreneurial and engaged in their own career plans.  It became part of a new Meadows School initiative that included the launch of the nation’s first minor in arts entrepreneurship.  Creative Time’s residency took the form of three visits to Dallas to meet with a wide range of members of the art community, including artists, collectors, gallery and museum executives, critics, government officials, educators and others. It culminated in spring 2011 with a report in which Creative Time presented their recommendations for growing and nurturing the arts in Dallas.

The second two winners, announced in December 2010, were playwright and performer Will Power and choreographer Shen Wei, artistic director of New York-based Shen Wei Dance Arts. Power’s work in Dallas is a partnership between the Meadows School and the Dallas Theater Center. For his SMU residency in fall 2011, Power and a group of theatre students created a new play, Alice Underground, which was presented at the Meadows School in October. In addition, Power will return to Dallas in December 2011 to begin writing and developing a new theatre piece intended for production at the Dallas Theater Center, possibly in their 2012-13 season.

Shen Wei’s residency in Dallas will take place over winter-spring 2012. It will include a new work choreographed for SMU dance students, to be presented at their 2012 Spring Dance Concert.

ABOUT THE MEADOWS PRIZE

The Meadows Prize replaced the Meadows Award, which was given annually from 1981 to 2003 to honor the accomplishments of an artist at the pinnacle of a distinguished career.   Meadows Prize recipients must be pioneering artists and scholars with an emerging international profile, active in a discipline represented by one of the academic units within the Meadows School: advertising, art, art history, arts administration, cinema-television, corporate communications, dance, journalism, music and theatre.

The Meadows Prize is sponsored by the Meadows School and The Meadows Foundation.

“It’s like being in a band.”

That was Bradly Brown at one point during All Together Now, Tuesday’s panel about artistic teamwork held at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts. He compared the cooperation it takes to get something off the ground like Homecoming, the new art collective he’s co-founded, with the ordinary give-and-take of  two-guitars-drums-and-keyboards.

Self-evident, no? But perhaps that’s because almost no art form other than the visual arts would hold a public discussion about — a public discussion encouraging — collective efforts, ongoing projects (art works, galleries, series, programs) involving an entire group of artists in the planning and execution. The other arts wouldn’t need to. The very nature of most theater, dance, music and filmmaking projects requires cooperation. The artists are trained for it. Any actor who doesn’t get along with his fellow actors, any dancer who cannot channel her own  ego into the larger effort (Black Swan notwithstanding) would soon find there’s little work being offered. If anything, a theater or dance panel on this topic would address collaboration between established troupes.

But visual artists — and to much the same degree, poets and novelists — are admired as soloists, embodiments of individual inspiration and self-reliance. Consequently, on Tuesday many of the questions from Contemporary curator and moderator Christina Rees and from the audience of 40 or so  revolved around, essentially, how does this work? And why does this work? Why do it? How are ego differences resolved? Who gets to join? And, my own materialistic offering: How does the money — if any — get divvied up?

The answers from Brown — plus Nathan Green of the Austin-based Okay Mountain, Subtext co-founder Alison Hearst and the mysterious M from the Denton art collective, Good/Bad — were, more or less: We do it because we want to work with friends, with artists who inspire us (or in the case of M, work with people who are smarter than he is, thus learning from them and making him look good). The notion of an artists’ collective as a kind of semi-organized hanging out that eventually leads to Something Fun was re-iterated in different forms, particularly in the idea of the Event. The speakers generally favored gallery openings more memorable than the usual Gallo-chugging and wandering among the white walls. The Event, then, is one direct reward of collective action: Bands get hired, lightshows designed, participatory actions organized, fun is had.

The origins of Okay Mountain reflect another, obvious advantage of group efforts: More people can get more done. The Mountaineers were ten UT art-school friends who each chipped in $100 per month. “You can do a lot with $1000 a month,” Green said — including renting and refurbishing a gallery space, which is how Okay Mountain started (and part of what it still does). Speaking of money and chipping in, Brown revealed that much of his job involved fundraising — and that Homecoming was partially financed through Kickstarter, the online, small-donations, funding platform.

It’s this do-it-yourself impulse (or actually, this necessity) that Richard Patterson picked up on. Patterson is Dallas’ own Young British Artist — one of the 16 Goldsmith College students who, in 1988, joined Damien Hirst in the exhibition in London’s Docklands that launched a thousand international careers (OK, maybe a dozen). Patterson’s inclusion in the Fort Worth panel was a little odd in that the YBAs were never a collective. Patterson, in fact, has dismissed them as not even managing to constitute a ‘movement’ (“‘The YBA thing has to rank as the silliest of all names. Certainly not a movement.”)

But many of the YBAs did try to give each other a leg up. Which was Patterson’s point. Texas is almost the opposite of London in that there’s relatively little, long-established ‘ art industry infrastructure’ here. Our big cities are far enough apart that fame in one town means little in the next town. And the metroplex is scattered enough on its own to frustrate group efforts or the kind of critical mass needed to get sumpin’ started. So we’re  isolated out on the prairie — with no easy ticket to ride to New York or LA.

To be sure, there are museums, galleries and wealthy collectors here, but the wealthiest ones rarely look at local artists. The Nasher collection, the Rachofsky House, the Roses and Hoffmans: These aren’t really known for buying works by North Texans (unless his name is Robert Rauschenberg).

So if you’re a visual artist in North Texas, what can you do? Nothing and everything. “The machine is broken,” moderator Rees repeatedly declared.  She means the gallery-show-leading-to-media-fame-and-bigger-gallery-plus-agent-and-rich-patron-and-investiture-in-museums machine. Whether such a deus ex machina ever really worked in North Texas isn’t the issue. Rees has spent several years arguing that our vacuum is an opportunity (and this panel was aimed at encouraging allies). If there’s very little here, then we’re free to start something, anything — an appeal that North Texas has actually held for many artists (actors, directors, musicians) over the years. We get to build from scratch. We don’t have to fight the Powers-That-Be (who would they be? The Morning News doesn’t even have a full-time art critic). We don’t have to calibrate works or shows with the single aim of wowing just the right critic, curator or collector. There aren’t any here that can really provide that ticket to New York (or if they are here, they’re not buying tickets). So why bother? Do it to please yourself, do it to experiment with venues and methods and statements you never had the chance to try.

OK. All well and good. To summarize: In this environment, the appeal and purpose of an artists’ collective is a) you work with people you like, b) happy hour at the Event, c) it may inspire you to do work you might not have done otherwise and d) you create works, get a gallery show or stage an event (and maybe get some attention) that you also might not have done otherwise.

The question that no one asked, and which I admit didn’t occur to me until I was driving home, is: If we grant all of this, then what? What’s next? Previous art ‘movements’ or schools often defined and grouped themselves against some established institution, taste, monopoly or distribution system. Perhaps this is what lay behind Patterson’s question about whether any of these local collectives have ever set out to do something outrageous. Defining themselves against something is often the only thread that really tied together these artists at all: Impressionists against the Academy and the Salon, Cubism against the conventions of representational art, Dadaists against reason and the entire inherited culture of the West, modernism against neo-classicism, and so on. Even the YBAs, to varying degrees, wanted to overturn business-as-usual (and replace it, in some instances, with their just-as-cynical business as usual).

This is not meant as criticism — I’m truly curious.  As indicated, a collective can be its own reward, and that may be more than enough. But in North Texas, if we don’t have those prevailing institutions, that coercive establishment, what is the endgame here?

• Dallas Voice story

• Manny Mendoza’s Dallas Morning News story (pay wall)

• TheaterJones story

• Front Row story

• KERA radio story:

• Expanded online story:

[Opening of  “Blue”]

In A Gathering, choreographer Bruce Wood of the Bruce Wood Dance Project (above, with Charles Santos in rehearsal) will premiere three new dances. One is set to the Joni Mitchell song, “Blue.” In a rehearsal studio at Southern Methodist University, three dancers repeatedly lift each other, prop each other up, even as they slide to the floor.

Wood: “The idea is basically about support. It goes back to the day when everybody was just kind of scrambling to help other people out because there was no institutions at that point, there was no recognition this was even happening, there was a lot of discrimination. So it was an all-hands-on-deck kind of thing.”

Wood is talking about the ‘80s, when AIDS ripped through gay communities across the U.S.  The arts were particularly hard-hit. At the time, Wood was a member of the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company.

Wood: “You know, all my friends died. It was just that simple. All the guys that I hung out with that were dancers, they all died within a matter of a couple of years, and all the guys that I hung out with that weren’t dancers, they all died. So … it’s about my memory of them. And what happened.”

It wasn’t simply the death toll that horrified. It was the frightening lack of basic information. There were no blood tests for the HIV virus, no known treatments for AIDS.

Joel Ferrell is artistic associate of the Dallas Theater Center and one of the producers of A Gathering. In the early ‘80s, he was a young actor in New York.

Ferrell: “I certainly remember that five years where, you know, doctors looked at you and said, ‘We don’t have a clue. Good luck.”

The fundraising beneft, A Gathering: The Dallas Arts Community Reflects on 30 Years of AIDS, is not entirely about grief or anger.  But deciding what the one-night-only gala should say was hard, says Charles Santos. He’s the director of TITAS, the music and dance presenter at the AT&T Performing Arts Center. A Gathering was Santos’ idea originally — he conceived it as something of a “deconstructed musical” or “concert musical,” with songs and dances but no sets or staging. Even so, it’s a huge effort — and Santos credits fellow producer Chris Heinbaugh with marshaling the troops. Heinbaugh is external affairs director of the AT&T PAC. The evening they planned covers 30 years, involves some 200 North Texas artists from nearly a dozen organizations — and it had to be planned and implemented in only four months.

Mercifully, Santos had experience assembling AIDS benefits in Austin before this, but he credits Chris Heinbaugh, external affairs director of the PAC, with assembling the troops. All of the artists from area groups, including the Dallas Black Dance Theatre, the Dallas Opera and the SMU Meadows School of the Arts, are donating their efforts equally to four area AIDS organizations: AIDS Arms, AIDS Interfaith Network, AIDS Services of Dallas and Resource Center Dallas.

A Gathering will feature dance performances, solo songs and videos as well as dramatic scenes from such plays as The Normal Heart and Angels in America. But Santos says the backbone of the show is the Turtle Creek Chorale. Over the years, the singing group has lost 180 members to AIDS. The group’s  efforts to deal with its losses were the subject of a 1993 KERA documentary, After Goodbye: An AIDS Story, which aired last week on KERA-TV.

Santos: “I don’t think we all recognize how fabulous the Turtle Creek Chorale is. These guys can sing. That was one of the discussions early on. We all have the ability to call a bunch of superstar names to come in and do this. And then we thought, ‘You know, we don’t need to do that. We have plenty of talent here.”

Eventually, Santos and Ferrell realized how to shape A Gathering. The evening had to encompass death and grief. But it also must touch on the engagement of family and friends, calls to political action, even the development of community and medical responses from scratch.

Ferrell: “We got a little frustrated because there was so much to try to take in, that I finally said, ‘Well, at least in terms of the gay community, two things became clear, one shortly after the other. One, that we had to take care of our own. And the other was — that we had to change the world.’ ”

[end of ‘Blue’]

KERA radio story:

Expanded online story:

Scott Douglas (above) has been a pioneer in noise cancellation – like those noise cancelling headphones you can wear on airplanes to catch some sleep. But the SMU professor of electrical engineering isn’t lecturing about noise at TEDxSMU. He’s talking about how advances in audio technology will affect music creativity and production — and your live concert experience.

Douglas: “What I want to show is that you can take a voice and manipulate it on the fly and basically add chords to it.”

Essentially, he means instant Auto-tuning. Most people know Auto-tune as the digital recording process that makes singers like T-Pain sound like robots.

[clip from T-Pain’s ‘I’m Sprung”]

But Auto-tune was originally developed to repair recorded performances. If a singer is flat or his voice wobbles, the recording can be corrected to sound pitch perfect. Or he can sound like an entire chorus.

At his SMU studio, Douglas sings solo into a mike.

[sings solo]: “My romance – doesn’t need to have a moon in the sky”

Now he sings solo again [sounds of keyboard typing] but sounds like an entire a capella vocal group.

“My romance – doesn’t need a blue lagoon standing by.”

You can see I can add the harmonies immediately.”

Weeks: “You just fired the group.”

Douglas: “Maybe another way to say it is we’ve created potentially 16 groups out of a 16-person a cappella group. Think about how much more music you could create with everyone deciding, ‘Hey, I have a little bit different choice.’”

Like other artistic and technical innovations – like 3D movies – Auto-tuning became popular, became overused, became a commercial gimmick. And it gained many critics. After T-Pain kept Auto-tuning all of his music, rapper JayZ (above) released “DOA – Death of Auto-tune” in 2009.

[from “Death of Auto-tune”: “This is anti-Auto-tune, death of the ringtone, this ain’t for iTunes, this ain’t for singalongs.”

“It’s really the dark side, I think,of technology’s impact on music.”

Preston Jones is pop music critic for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

“What Auto-tune has done has probably made celebrities and semi-celebrities out of people who otherwise might not have gotten a foot in the door in the music business.”

Case in point: what Jones calls the “Ashley Simpson debacle.” Simpson rode her sister Jessica’s singing career into something of a pop success for herself — until on her Saturday Night Live performance in October 2004, her lip-synch track started up before she did — plainly revealing that even in a small, controlled, live performance of a single song, she relied on pre-recorded tracks.

“And that pretty much wrapped up her singing career,” says Jones.

Long before then, the music business had improved the recordings of less-than-stellar vocalists. But now such singers won’t have to hide the fact that in concert they need help to get through simultaneously singing and dancing and playing instruments — and staying in tune. Instead, they can create pristine, studio-quality performances – as they sing.

Put another way, if this software were available then, Ashley Simpson might still have a singing career today.

For Jones and listeners like him, this defeats the purpose of live performance. A concert is not meant to reproduce a studio album, flawless note by flawless note.

Jones: “Which begs the question, Why is anyone there? Because you could get the same impact listening to the album at home on your iPod, it wouldn’t make any difference.”

But for Scott Douglas, this thinking treats live performance as an athletic event. We come to see and hear artists test themselves – to jump higher, run faster. There is a long tradition that demands on-the-spot virtuosity in jazz, blues and gospel. But pop also has a tradition of seemingly effortless polish — think of performers like Mel Torme or Dionne Warwick, performers who never let you see them sweat. Of course, it took them years of sweating to perfect that ability.

Douglas points to another, more recent view of the artist and of musical performance, one that has gained ground as musical production has becoming increasingly sophisticated and reliant on digital prowess.

Douglas: “The concept that musical performance is  a sport is somewhat different from the concept of the artist who says ‘I work in a medium.’ If the understood medium involves technology, then it would seem to me that any manipulation you have would be fair game.”

Douglas sees such artists not as athletes but as masters of technology and media. This is the musical performer as conceptual artist, as producer and sound engineer. And Douglas argues the new audio software that improves performances gives more artists more choices. They can show us the sweat and struggle, or they can give us impeccable perfection.

Douglas: “And so long as the musician is part of that choice, then that’s all part of the art. And the fact that we can do it instantaneously means it can be part of the performance.”

And over the weekend, in the New York Times’ annual roundup of gift box CD sets, critic Jon Pareles includes the CD in his citation of several soul and funk groups:

It’s hard to imagine a high school stage band getting any funkier than the Kashmere Stage Band, from Houston, in its prime. Its director, Conrad O. Johnson, turned eager teenagers into an enthusiastic, disciplined big band. Bubbling, chattering syncopation propelled a tautly coordinated, well-tuned horn section and soloists who could be punchy, psychedelic or boppy. Teenage adrenaline keeps the tempos pumping, and the band also had the advantage of studio stereo recording.

• Dallas Morning News review (pay wall)

• Pegasus News review
  

• FrontRow review

Call it a case of J. D. Salinger Overkill. After he successfully populated his stories with precocious kids, I’ve had trouble believing  such creatures when other authors employs them — not when the fictional teen spouts Grand Metaphors, at any rate. Salinger’s little Zen masters — the surly and the matter-of-fact ones — were marvels, but very few writers have done them credibly since.

In 26 Miles, the moment of disbelief comes early in this 95-minute-long, intermissionless play by Pulitzer finalist Quiara Alegria Hudes, given its area premiere by Kitchen Dog. The opening monologue by the teenage daughter, Olivia, played by Allie Donnelly (above, with Ashley Wood) is about pickpockets and her personal journal, and it’s oddly unconnected to the rest of the play, but we’ll set that aside for now. The moment I’m talking about follows soon after. Beatriz, played by Christina Vela, has picked up daughter Olivia, angrily snatching her away from her re-married ex-husband in Philadelphia because the inconsiderate lunk doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to the girl. She’s been throwing up all night. When it turns out Olivia’s OK, the two head out on the road anyway.

And that’s when Olivia demands that they must go to Yellowstone. Why drive all the way to Wyoming? Because Olivia needs to feel the thunder of buffalo hooves. She has a poster photo of a buffalo in full gallop, all four legs off the ground, and she needs to see and hear them, to see if they can fly or are they grounded and real.

OK. As the destination and the justification for this cross-country, mom-and-daughter, Thelma-and-Louise road trip, this flies about as well as a winged buffalo would. It’s weighted down by the obvious poeticisms, the Important Meaning being conveyed. Olivia could just have declared, “Let’s all go look for America – or unicorns or something,” but in either case, one stops thinking of her as a 15-year-old and more as an authorial indulgence and stand-in.

It’s a pity because Hudes actually has a knack for unfolding complex and touching human interactions. Beatriz’ ex-husband (Wood) and her current husband (Chris Carlos) are more sympathetic and detailed than just your Typically Doggie and Unreliable Men. Wood even makes the ex seem well-meaning even as he’s been clueless and cruel. Similarly, Beatriz herself begins as another Latina hydrogen bomb — screaming in rage when she isn’t suspicious and bullying (she demands Olivia prove she’s not pregnant — remember the night of vomiting?). But Beatriz is mad for good reason: She lost custody of Olivia eight years earlier in a nasty divorce. And the opportunity to repair their bond is one she simply can’t let go now.

It also needs to be said: The volcanic Vela may be the sexiest angry woman on a North Texas stage. She’s scary but she seems to relish the sheer sensuality and clarity of rage. Yet there’s an openness and comic fearlessness here: All that fury can wash right out of her and the next moment, she can smile and boogie like a smitten teen at her first rock concert. The two Big Women at Kitchen Dog — Vela and Tina Parker (who directed 26 Miles) — are often the driving forces in the company’s shows.

Sometimes, Hudes’ lyrical dialogue pays off as well — as in a quirky interlude the playwright provides  in North Dakota. Stopped for a restroom break, mother and daughter encounter a Peruvian immigrant (Chris Carlos, again), who sells them tamales. His account of falling asleep to his wife’s cooking is a hymn of rapture. In Carlos’ beautifully delivered cameo, one doesn’t know which is more seductive, drifting to sleep or savoring the cumin.

Overall, it’s a nifty move by Hudes, re-casting the mythic, buddy-movie, Huck-and-Jim, Sal-and-Dean, on-the-road scenario into a mom and daughter deal — and doing it onstage, to boot. Designer Cindy Ernst has provided a multi-tiered, rock-layered, wind-eroded set which suggests the Dakota Badlands (metaphor! ) even though the two women drive through there for only one scene. Most of the play is set in Philly or Yosemite. In any event, the set has ingenious things popping out or sliding open so this stage play can keep up with the mileage going past.

But 26 Miles‘ episodic, voyage-of-mutual-discovery seems to drift and decouple rather than link up and cohere into something memorable or convincing. For one thing, people seem to brush off suicide atttempts rather lightly here. And violations of privacy in the way of journal entries (most family road trips, I suspect, would have shut down with those particular revelations).

But it has more to do with my lack of belief in the daughter — which is not a knock against Donnelly, who’s remarkably assured onstage for such a young performer. But she’s saddled with those self-conscious, direct-address moments about her journal entries, and they puzzle us more than reveal Olivia’s inner life.

Of their bison-dreaming, journal-keeping daughter, Beatriz tells her ex, “She’s an intellectual — like you.” Which sounds like an explanation. Or a confession of frustration. Because it doesn’t really explain much, does it?

The City of Dallas’ new convention center hotel opens today. The City hopes the Omni Hotel will help the local economy. Good or bad, it’s already boosted North Texas artists’ bottom line. KERA’s Jerome Weeks reports the hotel displays more than 6,700 examples of their original artwork.

KERA radio story:

Expanded online story:

The Omni Hotel may now be the biggest commercial gallery in North Texas — because most of those artworks are for sale. The general manager Nils Stolzlechner says it’s  company policy to make each hotel unique. Each displays for sale local items: foods and fashions … and photographs and watercolors.

Stolzlechner: “So if you stay at an Omni in Dallas, you can bring great things home, great presents that you won’t find anywhere else – unless you go directly to those sources.”

More than one million dollars’ worth of art is on display in the lobbies – including sizable  pieces by  celebrated sculptor James Surls. There’s another 1.2 million dollars’ worth of smaller paintings, photos and pen-and-ink drawings [sound of door closing] in the hotel’s 1,001 guest rooms.

“In every guest room, you have four to six original pieces of art.”

Caryn Kboudi is vice president of corporate communications for Omni.

“Every room is different, no two pieces are quite alike. And they are all in celebration of the districts and the neighborhoods of Dallas.” [left, Dallas icons by Douglas Winters]

Photographer Sean Fitzgerald is one of the 150 local artists whose works are being shown. He says guests can go to a lobby computer to look up the artist and the price, which can range from around 200 dollars to a thousand.

But the hotel also let’s them check out the artist’s other works.

Fitzgerald: “That’s like an agent there. The Omni’s kind of a permanent agent. And that’s unique and extremely appreciated. In a way, it’s almost like this big, communal Dallas art gallery, and it’s  exciting to be a part of that.”

Wall sculpture (left) by James Surls, ceiling ribbon by Rick Maxwell

Students can now hear more than one opera company in the Dallas Arts District. KERA’s Jerome Weeks reports the Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School is the only campus outside of New York with access to live performances by the Metropolitan Opera.

KERA radio story:

Expanded online story:

[excited chatter, crowd noises continue under]

It’s late on a Saturday morning. Students and teachers from all over Dallas have filled the cafeteria of the Arts Magnet High School to see Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It’s the first of four Met performances to be projected at Booker T this school year.

Devlin DeCutler’s the point man for DISD’s Metropolitan Opera program (below, he explains the ticket situation to Big Thought’s LeAnn Binford). The Townview High School choir teacher used to distribute 50 tickets to DISD students to see live screenings of the Met at local movie theaters. Now he has to gather about 400 students, from fourth-graders to high school seniors, for a live, high-def, satellite transmission. And since Don Giovanni runs three and a half hours, they’re also selling pizza and bottled water.

[DeCutler heard giving directions over the crowd noise]

It’s not as chaotic as it sounds. In fact, DeCutler says the real struggle in arranging these opera-casts was getting everyone in the school bureaucracy to sign off on them.

DeCutler: “There are an absurdly large number of people in Dallas ISD.”

The other hurdle was getting commercial cinemas onboard — because the Met’s four performances with DISD looked like competition for their own high-def screenings. With The Met: Live in HD, the opera company transmits its programs to 1,600 theaters in 54 countries around the world — to places like Russia, China and St. Thomas in the Caribbean.

Currently, the Met’s educational program provides tickets for those movie-house screenings to 25 school districts across the country. But DISD doesn’t get tickets anymore. It gets the same live feed as the movie houses.

DeCutler: “In essence, we had to convince these theaters that we’re not taking business away from them. These kids are not going to see one of these operas in the theater.”

But they may start – once they’ve seen them in school, once they’ve had teachers  explain their artistry and background– music teachers, English teachers, history teachers, even members of the Dallas Opera who will speak before each Met show. Gabrielle Dotson is a sophomore from Townview.

Dotson: “I love plays, I love seeing the arts in action. But this is going to be my first time seeing an opera.”

And they may end up a convert like Ricardo Jaramillo, who’s already seen several operas. The senior at Booker T has even decided he wants to sing opera.

[sound of  Don Giovanni comes up underneath, Mojca Erdmann as Zerlina and Mariusz Kwiecien as Don Giovanni sing "Là ci darem la mano"]

Jaramillo: “I think really right now, it’s one of the only arts where it really doesn’t matter how you look. I think I lot of these, like, new pop-culture stuff? It’s more about how you look. Opera, it’s more about performance and how it’s so amazing you can sing over a full orchestra. It’s just these voices are so powerful, and that’s what I want to do.”

The Met Live with DISD began because Edith and Peter O’Donnell of the O’Donnell Foundation in Dallas are fans of the Met. They learned about how  – in addition to giving tickets to schools across the country — the Met’s education program transmits its performances directly to five schools in New York.

The O’Donnells wanted Dallas students to have the same opportunity.

That entailed putting two new satellite dishes on the roof of Booker T — one for the feed, the other for backup — and a lot of new digital equipment in the theater. Brad Williams is the project manager for AVI SPL, the audio-tech firm that installed everything.

Brad: “We’ve got full HD projectors, we’ve got a 35-foot-wide screen that weighs almost a thousand pounds, it’s dropping down out of the ceiling with a full pan array of surround-sound speakers that drop down behind it. This thing is just absolutely amazing once it’s turned on and cranked up.”

Marsha Drummond, the Met’s director of education, says there are 100 schools on the waiting list to join the opera company’s ticket-distribution program. The Met plans on eventually having at least one school district in each of the 50 states. But, Drummond says, currently, there’s no other district anywhere that’s angling for the same kind of live-feed set-up that Dallas ISD has.

Obviously, that’s because of the cost (which no one would reveal). Dallas has the rare combo of the O’Donnell Foundation and Booker T — right next door to the Dallas Opera’s home, the Winspear Opera House. It’s not like the equipment, installation, transmission costs — plus DeCutler’s training in New York — add up to more than, say, the budget for the school district’s sports programs. Still, why all of this effort, equipment and expense – for opera?

DeCutler: “Oh, opera combines so much. Opera is literature, opera is poetry. Opera’s history. Opera is music, definitely. Opera is dance. Opera has elements of every subject and every art within it.”

[The conclusion of "Là ci darem la mano"]

It certainly has enough to quiet and enthrall some 400 students on a Saturday afternoon.

Well, according to a lengthy feature in Artinfo, the auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, are doing that sort of backstairs private deal a lot more these days. In fact, the Poussin Deal is High Profile Example #1 in Judd Tully’s article about their profitable efforts outside the public auctions.

Mostly, what they’ve been doing is establishing their own private galleries to compete with leading dealers.  Sotheby’s, which the article says helped broker the Poussin-to-Kimbell deal, has just opened its own gallery in Manhattan, and has been in the private gallery business since at least 1990 when it “partnered with Acquavella Galleries of New York to buy 2,300 paintings from the Pierre Matisse Gallery for $143 million following the dealer’s death.” Over time, Sotheby’s doled out the works privately and at auction — and made a gold mine.

Needless to say, private galleries and dealers are not happy with the increased competition from the Big Boys. But the article goes on to say, expect more of the Poussin kind of deal, the seemingly-from-out-of-nowhere major purchase. It cuts out the risks of auctions, which jack up prices through competition (good for the seller, not for the buyer). But a discreet sale can also be good for the seller: It can hide any family financial problems (that led to the forced sale) and prevents any embarrassment if the art doesn’t meet its reserve price at auction.

Going forward, both houses’ venues should produce plenty of action. “We’re seeing growing interest from our clients wanting to buy and sell privately,” says Caroline Sayan, Christie’s international managing director for private sales, who notes that in the first half of 2011 such transactions brought in $467 million, a 57 percent increase over the same period in 2010.

So … is North Texas’ own Heritage Auctions doing the same?