Get Lit at the Fuse Box Festival
What happens when you throw music, dance, poetry, photography, visual art, theatre, film, and -- why not? -- opera into a great big blue box and shake? You get an explosion of proportions that only the creative geniuses at Refraction Arts can contain. This year's Fuse Box Festival, featuring artists from Brooklyn to Portland and places in between, showcases works you've never seen before and aren't likely to see hence. Things start gearing up this Friday and continue with weekday and weekend shows all the way through Saturday, April 28.
We rifled through Fuse Box's well-designed calendar of events and scoured their lovely printed guide to pick out a few things we thought looked extra nifty. Here are our faves for this week's offerings (thru Tuesday, 4/17).
- All bets are on Blue 60, the kick-off party this Saturday night at the Blue Theater. Expect it to sell out before you can say "Blue what?" Blue 60, a crazy fun event where 60 of Austin's best artistes have 60 seconds apiece to perform whatever their little hearts desire. Sounds like mayhem of the sort that will make you laugh 'til you cry. Stick around afterwards to meet the people behind Fuse Box and hang with some of Austin's most talented folk.
- We were drawn to the description of Love Story, an audio walking tour, gallery performance, and photo exhibit at the Else Madsen Gallery. Get this: you download an MP3 file and print yourself a Google map that depicts a walking tour of the area near the gallery. Plug in your iPod and listen to a story as you follow the short walk through downtown Austin. The tour ends at the gallery where performance art and photography come together to complete the tale.
- Man, we don't want to spoil the surprise, but you might just catch a Spank Dance Company performance of 4Red Lines in conjunction with Fuse Box. How about we just give you the when, and you dig a little to find there where? The only 4Red Lines/Fuse Box performance is on Tuesday, 4/17, at 8:30pm.
These tasty morsels aside, we strongly suggest you take your own little poke around the Fuse Box website. The works this fest has to offer run the artistic gamut, and what piques our curiosity might not do the same for you. With ticket prices ranging from free to $25 (most being $5-$25, sliding scale), a variety of performance times, and locations all around town, we're sure you'll find something to set your filament aglow.
Fuse Box Festival
Friday 4/13 - Saturday 4/28
Performances and installations throughout Austin.
Tickets available per event on the Fuse Box website, or pick up a festival pass for $40 here.
Photo of work by Ben Aqua by Mikey Awesome.
