Sausage & Opera Festival

Sausage & Opera Festival

Saturday, June 1, 2013 3pm-10pm.

For the second year, the French-American Vocal Academy (FAVA) is launching its festival Opera Without Fences at Elgin, TX (next to Austin).

PROGRAM:

3pm : Beginning with an Art Contest among all Bastrop County Middle Schools and High Schools. 60 pieces of artwork will be exhibited on Main Street and the public will vote to select the winning school.

5:30pm : EMS & EHS choirs performance.

6:30pm : Meyer’s Smokehouse and Southside Market will satisfy the palates of guests with a plethora of famed Elgin sausage at Depot Square.

8pm : the Franco-American Vocal Academy opera singers along with a chamber orchestra will perform “La Vie Parisienne” by Jacques Offenbach, at the FAVA studio on Depot Square in downtown Elgin.

For more info about the FAVA, visit their website www.favaopera.org

Puccini’s La bohème at the Miller Outdoor Theater

May 17th & 18th – 8 pm

 

Rodolfo (Scott Quinn), a poet, and Mimì (Natalya Romaniw) meet by chance in his atelier and fall immediately in love. They weather break-ups and inevitable reunions, but their love proves fragile as the light of a single candle when they confront the realities of bohemian life.

 

Ticket: required for the covered seated area (available at the Theater box office between 10:30am-1pm). Free on the hill

 

For more information, visit the Miller Outdoor Theater website: milleroutdoortheatre.com

 

The Alliance Francaise de Houston 90th Anniversary!

This year, The Alliance Francaise de Houston, one of the oldest in the country or world, if not THE oldest, marks its 90th Anniversary with a French Soiree and will celebrate it on:

May, 11th 2013 – 7pm.

Music of Edith Piaff, Brel, Aznavour, Lama, Jonasz, Duteil and much more, performed by the international cabaret performer, Deborah Boily.

Location: 427 Lovett Boulevard, Houston 77006.

 

A buffet a la francaise will be served before the show and desert after.

Tickets: $25 (include dinner, show and wine – only 100 seats available). Purchase at thefrenchsinger.com/buy-tickets

Walk-ins: $35

 

Optical Spaces: The Art of Victor Vasarely

The Museum of Printing History invites you to an opening reception for

Optical Spaces: The Art of Victor Vasarely

next THURSDAY, April 25, 2013 from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm.

 

In collaboration with the Museum of Geometric and MADI Art in Dallas, the Museum of Printing History is pleased to present Optical Spaces: The Art of Victor Vasarely, organized by Houston-based artist Orna Feinstein. Victor Vasarely (1906—1997), a Hungarian born artist active in France throughout the twentieth century, is considered to be one of the pioneers of the Op-Art movement. Through his studies at the ‘Mühely’ Academy (also known as the Budapest Bauhaus), Vasarely was introduced to geometric abstraction, which provided the foundation for his work as a painter and graphic artist. By augmenting basic geometric forms and combining them with principles of color theory, Vasarely destabilized the pictorial surface creating the illusion of depth and movement. His work went on to influence a generation of young artists in the 1960s and created a lasting impact on poster and fabric design.

Drawing from works in the MPH collection, as well as from private collections in Houston, this exhibition will present a striking overview of Vasarely’s oeuvre (in print and sculptural form) dating from the mid 1950s to the 1980s.

French Cultures Festival

Every March since 2008 the French Consulate in Houston has coordinated a Francophonie festival–a celebration of all things French. The French Cultures Festival (FCF) brings people together across Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

The FCF collaborates with many institutional and cultural partners, including diplomatic representations from Switzerland, Canada and Belgium, as well as museums, universities, international schools and local businesses and associations.  Featuring events such as lectures, films, shows, concerts, encounters with artists, scientific conferences, talks, degustations, and parties, the 2012 FCF  successfully introduced over 60 different cultural events in the main cities of the three states.

Condensed down to 17 days, the 2013 French Cultures Festival runs from March 8th-25th and is launching with a concert at Discovery Green Park in downtown Houston on March 8th. The concert will feature both French and local musicians, and is free to the public. French food and wine as well as other beverages will be available for purchase.

For more information, visit their colorful website: www.frenchculturesfestival.com

Chagall: Beyond Color – February 17-May 26

In an exclusive U.S. presentation at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), Chagall: Beyond Color celebrates the breathtaking scope of artist Marc Chagall. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a display of costumes designed by Chagall in 1942 for the production of the ballet Aleko, on view for the first time in more than seventy years. The exhibition also features the artist’s beloved paintings alongside his works in sculpture, ceramics, and collage to explore his interest in space and volume.

 

EXHIBITION ADMISSION:

DMA Partners: free

Adults: $16

Seniors 65+: $14

Students with school ID: $12

Kids 11 and under: free

PARKING:

On-site parking is available in the Museum’s underground garage for a flat fee of $10.

 

For more information, click here!

Max Ernst – In the Garden of Nymph Ancolie

 

October 31, 2008-February 15, 2009

The Menil Collection

During the summer of 1934, German-born artist Max Ernst executed a mural for the Dancing Mascotte, the bar at Zürich’s Corso Theatre. One of the largest painted works of the artist’s seven-decade career, Pétales et jardin de la nymphe Ancolie (Petals and Garden of Nymph Ancolie) adorned a wall of the popular nightspot. Based on an illustration found in a Victorian-era botanical encyclopedia, the surrealist imagery features a dancing bird-like figure emerging from a lush backdrop of red and gold flower petals. Upon completion of the work, a writer for Neue Zurcher Zeitung observed: “Max Ernst has created a large fresco in the dancing area of the Corso … Lines, curves, ornaments intertwine in multifarious ways and in an absolutely planar style … It is an amusing, vivacious, cheerful ensemble…”

The newly restored work will form the centerpiece of the exhibition Max Ernst in the Garden of Nymph Ancolie, organized by the Museum Tinguely, Basel, and supplemented in Houston by the Menil Collection’s outstanding holdings of works by the artist. The only Ernst mural to have survived in its entirety, Pétales et jardin de la nymphe Ancolie stands today as an important example of the artist’s work between the World Wars — a celebration of Europe’s joie de vivre in an atmosphere of increasing political unrest and social hostility.

Co-curated by Menil director Josef Helfenstein with Menil assistant curator Clare Elliott, and Annja Müller-Alsbach, curator, Museum Tinguely, Basel, Max Ernst in the Garden of Nymph Ancolie will showcase the mural as an essential focal point of Ernst’s multifaceted body of work, while examining the artist’s complex oeuvre by concentrating on themes and techniques developed during the interwar period. The exhibition will also place the Zurich mural in the context of Ernst’s entire career, with special emphasis on work from the 1930s and 40s, years when he explored images of metamorphosis and nature’s irreconcilable conflicts with culture and technology.

The mural’s original nightclub environment took a toll on the work, which endured more than twenty years of raucous, smoky evenings — as well as the bar’s subsequent renovation. In the late 1950s the mural was cut from the wall, mounted on plywood panels, and relocated to Kunsthaus Zürich. After displaying the mural for nearly forty-five years, the museum undertook a joint effort with Basel’s Museum Tinguely to return Pétales et jardin de la nymphe Ancolie to its original condition. For the past year, the mural has been the focus of an intensive restoration project at the Museum Tinguely (on public view in a conservation lab), then at the Kunsthaus Zürich, where the work was completed.

Opening at the Menil on October 31, the exhibition (the first the Menil has devoted to Ernst in more than 15 years) will examine nearly 120 rarely seen paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings. While many are drawn from the Menil’s extensive Ernst holdings, others are on loan from notable public and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Max Ernst Museum in Bruhl, members of the de Menil family, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

The mural will focus attention on the subjects Ernst conceived during his militant 1920s Dada period in Cologne and developed through his surrealist endeavors in Paris. Echoing many of the anxiety-ridden sentiments of the era, Ernst’s work continuously puts humankind, nature, and the mechanized world at odds, often juxtaposing soft natural forms with the harshness of the modern age. In Ernst’s 1935 series Jardin gobe-avion, for example, clusters of prehistoric vegetation consume airplane parts. In paintings such as Éloge de la liberté (In Praise of Freedom) and Forêt (Forest), thick jungles of tree trunks nearly block out the sky and leave barely enough room on the canvas for a small isolated bird.

Central to the exhibition’s narrative is Ernst’s technical acumen. One of the great innovators of modern art, Ernst delighted in manipulating meaning through formal experimentation and adaptation of traditional and new artistic practices. Among these experiments were the autonomist and chance-based methods, such as rubbing techniques (like frottage) that Ernst developed in the mid 1920s and would use until his death in 1976. Included in the exhibition will be one of the artist’s early publications, Histoire Naturelle (1926) — a series of 34 collotype prints after frottage drawings that transform elements of the natural world into otherworldly shapes and forms.

Given the Menil’s preeminent Ernst holdings – the result of a lifelong friendship between the artist and John and Dominque de Menil – the Houston museum is the ideal venue for the debut of the fully restored Pétales et jardin de la nymphe Ancolie. The de Menils met the artist for the first time, in Paris, in 1934 – the year Ernst completed the Zürich mural. That same year Ernst painted Portrait of Dominique, a work also included in the exhibition. The de Menils went on to host Ernst’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States (at Houston’s Contemporary Arts Association, 1952), a retrospective in Paris in 1971, and, two years later at Rice University, the exhibition Inside the Sight (the subject of the film, “Max Ernst Hanging,” being shown at the Menil during the entire run of the new exhibition). The de Menils also sponsored the ongoing (seven volume) catalogue raisonné of his work. In 1993, the Menil presented Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism, conceived and organized by William A. Camfield, who joins Josef Helfenstein in a public program at the Menil on January 13.

Said Helfenstein: “Shown along with some of the Menil’s most important works by Max Ernst, the unveiling of the newly restored mural constitutes an art event of historical significance. It also marks a particularly exciting moment for the Menil, and for Houston, where this artist has always held a special place. We are very pleased to be the only U.S. venue for this extraordinary exhibition.”

The Tournées Festival

University of Houston – Clear Lake

New French Films On Campus

October 23 – November 21

 

 

NE LE DIS A PERSONNE/Tell No One
Friday, October 23, 2009, 8:00 pm
Bayou Theater

 

Francois Cluzet stars in this French thriller from director Guillaume Canet. Eight years after the heinous murder of his wife, doctor Alex Beck receives an ominous email from an unknown source. The message contains a video image of Alex’s thought-to-be dead wife in real time.

 

 

 

 

ROMAN DE GARE
Sunday, October 25, 2009, 3:00 pm
Lecture Hall

 

True to its title, ROMAN DE GARE (CROSSED TRACKS) finds famed French director Claude Lelouch jumping between time and loyalties in this suspenseful mystery about fate and fatal secrets.

 

 

 

 

UN SECRET/A Secret
Sunday, November 8, 2009, 3:00 pm
Lecture Hall

 

On his fifteenth birthday a family friend tells Francois (Quentin Dubuis) a shattering truth – tying his family’s past to the Holocaust – that may enable him to develop his own sense of self. Until then, the secret had lain silent, known only to a few, including his mother Tania (Cecile De France), his father Maxime (Patrick Bruel) and lifelong family friend Louise (Julie Depradieu).

 

 

LE FILS DE L’ÉPICIER/The Grocer’s Son
Saturday, November 14, 2009,7:00 pm
Lecture Hall

When Antoine offers to lend money to Claire, his best and only friend, he is far from imagining where his promise will lead him. Because Antoine doesn’t in fact have any money. At 30 years of age, he drifts from one dead-end job and disaster to the next. In order to keep his promise, he has no other choice than to agree to cover for his father, a travelling grocer, who is in a convalescent home recovering after a heart attack.

 

 

 

ENTRE LES MURS/The Class
Saturday, November 21, 2009,7:00 pm
Lecture Hall

 

French director Laurent Cantet’s THE CLASS is an absorbing journey into a multicultural high school in Paris over the course of a school year. François Begaudeau–an actual teacher and the author upon whose work the film was based–is utterly convincing as François, an openminded teacher in charge of a classroom of youngsters from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Ticket Cost:  $3.75 general public.

Only the first event is free to UHCL students with ID

All films are in French with English subtitles.

Click HERE to see the map

MFAH French Short Film Festival

To get into the spirit of Bastille Day, here is a lively selection of new short films in all genres. Presented with generous support from the Consulate General of France in Houston and the Texas-French Alliance for the Arts. Special thanks to Cultural Attaché Dominique Chastres for organizing this program.

 

MFAH Films Fall 2009

Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 02:47PM

Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro)

Sunday, November 8, 1:00 p.m.

 

Directed by Marcel Camus

(Brazil/France/Italy, 1959, 107 min., subtitled)

 

This frenetic Latin melodrama, set during Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, is credited with bringing the bossa nova beat to North America. The plot was inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a couple so in love that Orpheus convinced Hades, god of the underworld, to return Eurydice to the land of the living after her death. The only condition Hades placed on the deal was that Orpheus could not look at Eurydice on the way up from the underworld. Here, the myth is retold as Orfeo (Breno Mello), a streetcar conductor grappling with death in the streets of Rio, falls for Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn), a provincial girl newly arrived in the city. Black Orpheus won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the award for best foreign film at both the Oscars and Golden Globes.

35 Shots of Rum (35 rhums)

Friday, November 20, 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, November 21, 7:00 p.m.

Sunday, November 22, 5:00 p.m.

 

Directed by Claire Denis

(France/Germany, 2008, 100 min., subtitled)

“Claire Denis has created a sensual and contemplative body of films over the years, but nothing in her work prepares us for this deeply emotional yet light-of-touch story set among a small circle of Parisians and their friends. In fact, Denis evokes nothing so much as Eric Rohmer in his “seasons” quartet as she follows the various characters in a roundelay of relationships that touches on almost every kind of love there is: father-daughter, old lovers, old colleagues, absent mother, lost sister, unrequited, one-night, budding, brooding . . . Lionel (Alex Descas), a train engineer, shares an apartment with his daughter Jo (Mati Diop), a university student. In the same building live taxi driver Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and a young man who comes and goes, Noe (the intense and always mysterious Grégoire Colin, like Descas a Denis regular). Together, they are a kind of family. We figure out their roles and relationships only gradually as Denis leaves crumbs along her narrative path for us to follow—it’s one of the great pleasures of this extraordinarily pleasurable film made up of small moments, of looks and silences, of magical touches of physicality and pensiveness. Agnés Godard’s cinematography richly limns an interior architecture in which objects take on an Ozu-like delicacy and immediacy, and uses train tracks (and cars and motorbikes and vans) to propel the story into the out of doors and eventually, the future, as father and daughter face the inevitable: her independence.” – San Francisco International Film Festival

“Marvelously profound, illuminating the love between a father and daughter but also highlighting the difficulty of relinquishing what most people spend a lifetime putting into place.” – Variety

 

French: http://www.wildbunch-distribution.com/site/35rhums/

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French Short program I

Sunday, July 12, 2009 at 07:00PM

“12:17Am”

This program is composed of six shorts including:

First Journey (by Grégoire Sivan); Pencils (by Didier Barcelo); Make Yourself at Home (by Gautier About); In their Skin (by Arnaud Malherbe); 12:17 a.m. (by Xavier de Choudens); and 200,000 Phantoms (by Jean-Gabriel Périot)

MFAH website

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French Short Program II

Sunday, July 12, 2009 at 07:00PM

“Toi que j’eusse aimée”

Six more shorts complete the program including:

Skhizein (by Jérémy Clapin); Manon on the Asphalt (by Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont); In the Train (by Emilie Sengelin); Edward in Wonderland (by Vincent Burgevin and Franck Lebon); You Whom I Would Have Loved (by Emmanuel Broussouloux); and St. Feast Day (by Anne-Laure Daffis and Léo Marchand).

Pierre Bensuan in Houston

 

TFAA is happy to promote French guitarist: Pierre Bensusan

Saturday, October 3rd

Show: 9pm  Doors open at: 8:30pm

Tickets:  $30 cash only at the door

$25.00 in advance online: www.listeningroomhouston.com

Location: ListeningRoom at NiaMoves, 508 Pecore, Houston, TX  77009

 

“One of the most unique and brilliant acoustic guitar veterans in what might most accurately be described as the world music scene today.”  The Los Angeles Times

“There is only a handful of guitar players who have taken the sound of John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Bert Jansch to another level. Michael Hedges was one. Pierre is another.” John Diliberto, Amazon.com

click here to see the flyer

click here to see bio and press info