TFAA warmly supported the Foto Fun 2012 Literacy through Photography in-school education program created by FotoFest International to help students in grades 3-12 strengthen basic learning skills, particularly writing and critical thinking skills. TFAA helped out in the endeavor by creating fashion pieces with each child and letting their imaginations run free by decorating the items. Featured below are the highlights from the event that capture each special child, their designs and the mood of imagination! Let the dreams begin to come alive!
Category Archives: Events
Ars Lyrica Paradise 2011
“Paradise Found”
Friday, September 23, 2011
7:30 pm
Zilkha Hall Hobby Center for the Performing Arts
Join Ars Lyrica, a Grammy-nominated early music ensemble for their season opener on September 23 at 7:30pm at Zilkha Hall Hobby Center for the Performing Arts.
The 2011-12 season of Transformations begins with “Paradise Found”, a journey from worldly torment to heavenly ecstasy, featuring French-Italian soprano Céline Ricci in her Houston début with core Ars Lyrica string and continuo players.
Program:
Domenico Scarlatti: Pur nel sonno almen tal’ora
Couperin and Rameau: Instrumental works
G. F. Handel: Gloria in excelsis Deo
“Ricci…is a sensation, vital on stage and a dazzling coloratura. ” — Los Angeles Times
“a stunning virtuosity” —Opera Magazine
“Lots of bold, bright, nosethumbing fun.” —Records International
Tickets for “Paradise Found”: Call the Hobby Center Box office at 713.315.2525 or go towww.arslyricahouston.org
Ars Lyrica MFAH Concert
Grammy-nominated Ars Lyrica Houston fills the exhibition galleries of Life & Luxury: The Art of Living in Eighteenth-Century Paris with music for an aristocratic home, with viol virtuoso Mary Springfels, violinist Sean Wang, baritone Charles Stanton, and artistic director Matthew Dirst on harpsichord. This exhibition reimagines the lifestyle of elite 18th-century Parisians through the activities of a single day: dressing, writing, collecting, eating, and evening entertainment. Join us to celebrate Ars Lyrica’s first performance of the 2011-2012 season and the opening day of the MFAH exhibition.
Sunday, September 18
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Second Floor, Audrey Jones Beck Building
3pm Concert
Limited campstool seating available.
Admission to this afternoon program is open to the public and free with general museum admission.
7pm Concert
Stay after the 7pm concert and enjoy our season kick-off party with a reception to meet the performers and light hors d’oeuvres. Also season subscriptions will be available for purchase during the reception.
Tickets are $15 each and available on the MFA Houston website.
Dominic Walsh Dance Theatre
Dominic Walsh Dance Theatre
Dominic Walsh Dance Theatre Presents: Third Course featuring a piece set to Debussy’s Clair de Lune
May 5, 6 & 7, 2011 at 7:30 PM
Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, Zilkha Hall, 800 Bagby St., Houston, TX 77002
Walsh says: “After my creation of The Afternoon of a Faun set to Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune, I became more interested in the composer’s other work, notably his Clair de Lune, and I thought it would make for a fascinating subject to interpret.”
Clair de Lune is considered to be the most adventurous movement of Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque for piano—the rest of the suite is clearly in the Baroque style—and even the composer said that he did not like what he composed in the rest of the suite because of its strict adherence to the style. Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune is considered a symphonic poem, a piece of music that evokes the content of some type of literary or visual piece of art. Clair de Lune, taken from a poem by French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, is engaged with a similar dialogue between art and music which Walsh finds compelling. Verlaine’s poem uses abstract imagery to embody the themes of melancholy hidden beneath the flamboyant disguises of bergamasques, or French masqueraders. “I am looking forward to creating movement that reframes this piece of music that we, as a culture, have such a familiar relationship with,” says Walsh. Walsh’s revisualization of this iconic work will be created for DWDT Company Member Domenico Luciano.
Ticket prices range from $25 to $52 however, there is a special $5 discount for TFAA associates. Visit www.dwdt.org for tickets and enter Promotion CodeTFAA or call 713-315-2525 and mention the TFAA code. (No minimum number needed. Offer not valid on VIP Opening Night Package or Casting Couch.)
Click here for more information
Alley Theatre: Picasso
Alley Theatre presents
A Weekend with Pablo Picasso
By: Herbert Siguenza
Directed by: Todd Salovey
Scenic and Costume Design: Giulio Cesare Perrone
Lighting Design: Clint Allen
Sound Design: Bruno Louchouarn
Preview Start: January 28, 2011
Open: February 2,2011
Ends: February 27,2011
Tuesday-Thursday, Sunday evenings 7:30 pm
Friday and Saturday evenings 8pm
Saturday and Sunday matinees 2:30pm
Approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes, no intermission.
Acclaimed actor-writer Herbert Siguenza (¡Cantinflas! and Culture Clash in AmeriCCa) returns to the Alley with a new play. Siguenza brings his virtuosic writing, acting and design skills into Picasso’s private studio, “Le Californie” on the coast of France, for an intimate and revealing weekend. Picasso’s controversial and flamboyant opinions and creations gripped the public imagination and forever changed 20th century art. Delving into the creative mind and work of one of the most inspiring artists of modern history, this play explores Picasso’s proclamations about ambition, destruction, creativity and art as an agent of social change.
Recommended for mature audiences due to strong language.
Alley Theatre offers the Texan-French Alliance for the Arts a special ticket discount to the production of A Weekend with Pablo Picasso. Members can receive up to a 40% discount on select dates.
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)
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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
The Houston ballet presents “Manon”
Houston Ballet presents Manon. Music by Jules Massenet (1842 – 1912). Orchestrated and arranged by Leighton Lucas, with the collaboration of Hilda Gaunt. Choreography: Sir Kenneth MacMillan.
A modern classic, Manon charts the romantic adventures of an irresistibly beautiful femme fatale and her one true love, the impoverished student Des Grieux, from the demi monde of Paris to the bayous of Louisiana. Sir Kenneth has created a brilliant dance drama that explores the relationship between love, sex, and the corrupting power of money. The passion and danger of Manon’s central pas de deux have proven irresistible to audiences around the world, and have made it one of the most popular full-length ballets of the second half of the twentieth century.
Men will do anything to have her, and Manon will do anything for love. Or is it power she craves? Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s exquisite ballet charts the tale of a beautiful young girl, her penniless lover, and the ambition that is her downfall. This seductive, full-length production is highlighted by passion and accented with danger. One of the great narrative ballets of the late 20th century, this epic story provides dancer with a spectacular showcase for their theatrical gifts.
Age Recommendation: at least 12 years of age.
WHEN: At 7:30 pm on September 10, 12, 18, 19, 2009
At 2:00 pm on September 13, 20, 2009
WHERE: Brown Theater, Wortham Theater Center
501 Texas Avenue in downtown Houston
TICKETS: Call (713) 227 ARTS or 1 800 828 ARTS
Tickets are also available at www.houstonballet.org
and the Houston Ballet Box Office: Wortham Theater Center, 501 Texas Avenue (at Smith Street).
Use the promotion code TFAA to receive a 25% discount on your Manon tickets
Click here to purchase tickets for Manon
Click here for the Manon press release
Pictured: Dancer(s): Amy Fote and Simon Ball. Photo by: Pam Francis.