Fusebox Festival 2018 Is Still (In Part) Available for You

And here comes the 14th annual Fusebox Festival, with its citywide array of performances and installations and artist- salons filled with creative savants from all over the globe, curated and produced by Ron Berry and his hardworking coterie of arts provocateurs, bringing Austin a diverse wealth of –

Whoops, most of the events are already sold out.

Because the entire Fusebox Festival lineup is free to attend, as long as you make your reservations as soon as reservations are available. And, ah, yes, we here at the Chronicle have made a note to notify readers about this ASAP next year – bloody well weeks ahead of time, even, online and in print.

And yet, hold on: There’s still some of this year’s Fusebox goodness available.

Heard it from the man himself. Sat down with that busy Ron Berry in a local coffeeshop and asked him about it …

Austin Chronicle: OK, ah, how do we promote this wonderful Fusebox Festival of y’all’s when every goddamn thing is already sold out?

Ron Berry: Well, the Fusebox Hub is not sold out – and there’s lots of stuff going on there every night, every night of the festival, starting around ten o’clock.

AC: So what can citizens – people who didn’t reserve attendance weeks ago – what can they look forward to?

RB: I would say, at the Hub, there’s something going on every night and it culminates in a big event we’re doing Saturday night with BossBabes and Exploded Drawing – a showcase of female electronic music DJs and composers from all over the country. It’s a super-special gathering, they’re all amazingly talented and they’ve never been together on one bill before. And on Friday night, we’re doing a big evening with the Museum of Human Achievement: There’s an artist from Australia, Justin Shoulder, who’s incredible – he kind of floats between the queer club culture and the visual-art world and the performance world, and he creates these otherworldly mythological beings, using prosthetics and sculpture and sound. Also, Selina Thompson is doing a durational performance on Saturday afternoon, presenting her project called Race Cards, which is also an installation. She’s written a thousand questions about race, handwritten them on index cards, and any day during the week you can go and experience the installation. And then, Saturday afternoon, Selena’s going to be reading all thousand questions – which should take several hours – and you can just pop in and stay as long as you like. That’s not at the Hub, though: Race Cards is at the Mastrogeorge Theatre, which is right down the street from the Hub.

AC: And the Hub this year is … it’s not at Fair Market again, is it?

RB: No – basically, it’s at Fourth and Onion. It’s near the Scoot Inn, just around the corner from White Horse. And Big Red Sun is helping us create an outdoor biergarten there, too, so that should be really nice.

AC: So the Hub’s definitely the place to be, then.

RB: Well, we also – at least so far – we have tickets available for the Mammalian Diving Reflex show called All the Sex I’ve Ever Had, which is a piece about aging and sexuality that explores the sex lives of six Austinites over the age of 65. I saw it in Portland, and it was one of my favorite projects that I’d seen that whole year. It’s touching, hilarious, and heartbreaking by turn – it’s life, y’know? And that’ll be at the AFS Cinema, at one of the spaces in that venue. The company’s from Toronto, and they work all over the world. Usually they work with youth; a few years ago they did Haircuts by Children for Fusebox.

AC: Yeah, I remember that. I was one of the people getting a haircut. Ah, Jesus, the back of my head looked like a badly terraced mountainside rice field from South Vietnam.

RB: [laughs] Yes! Yes, I remember that! God bless ‘em.

AC: And – thank you, Ron – we’ll remember to let our readers know about Fusebox 2019 well in advance.