New Work: Performances
Journeys in story, song, and dance with four outstanding women of color
By Robert Faires, Fri., June 8, 2012
You can see Austin artists presenting new work on pretty much any day that ends in a "y," but it's still fairly rare for such presentations to showcase new work by women of color. That's what makes Women & Their Work's program on June 14 worthy of note. This evening brings together four top-notch Austin artists, all women of color, on a night of their original performance pieces.
• Wura-Natasha Ogunji, a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow and Austin Critics Table Award nominee for Outstanding Artist, presents A tortoise walks majestically on window ledges, a work drawn from 15 years' worth of dream journals kept by her father. In his descriptions of architecture, flying and space travel, tales of love, and mysterious portents of his future, Ogunji finds keys to untangling the past.
• Florinda Bryant, recipient of the YWCA Greater Austin 2012 Women of the Year's Racial Justice Award, performs Short Walks and Hamhocks, a collection of poems, monologues, and song that ruminate on everything from short walks to dancing, laughter to gunshots, crack pipes to sugar, minimum wage to AIDS, birth to death.
• Sadé M. Jones, Ballet Afrique dancer and recent Austin Critics Table Award winner for her movement direction on For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, presents My Toughest Critic, an exploration of how journeys to the truth can be stalled by one's obsession over the destination and missteps made on the way there, and how essential it is to forgive oneself.
• Natasha Mevs-Korff, a member of the UT Hispanic Caribbean Ensemble, presents Push Through, an exploration of the artist's relationship to song and the sea, incorporating video projections and South American and Caribbean songs sung by Mevs-Korff.
Seating is limited and, between the appeal of the artists and the fact that the program is free, you'd better believe it will fill up. Get there early.
New Work: Performances will be presented Thursday, June 14, 7pm, at Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca. For more information, call 477-1064 or visit www.womenandtheirwork.org.
