Mid-Century Building Hosts Mid-Air Event

Seaholm was constructed in the 1950’s as a City of Austin power plant, and it looks it, inside and out. Sure, the turbines have been removed, some remediation work done, and plywood flooring and railings installed to make it audience-safe, but it’s still a rough, raw 1950’s industrial space, with concrete walls three-feet thick. The long building with a soaring ceiling is reminiscent of a mid-century modern version of the train-station beginnings of Paris’ Musée d’Orsay.

At first the dancers were at least a football field away, even though we were practically in the front row. The bat-like opening was followed by pieces including a solo in a ginormous skirt, with the dancer slowly somersaulting in midair before disappearing down into the open pits where the turbines used to turn. We saw a group of dancers flitting like birds—on ropes—around the columns on stage left. In other pieces, the dancers moved with the eerily languid gentleness of inhabitants of a giant aquarium.

As the show progressed, it moved closer. The aerial dancers became artfully entangled in long pieces of white cloth that were nearly right in front of us. So was aerialist Laura Cannon’s captivating, spinny solo in a twisting belt device.

While this wasn’t the kind of show with a plot, it was evocative of the more lyrical aspects of Cirque du Soleil. We applaud the aerialists (including Cannon, Nicole Whiteside, Alicia Maria Carlin, Kiera Griffin, Mimi Kayl-Vaughan, Julia Langenberg, Khoi Le, Ivry Newsome, Brenda Porta, Vincent Sandoval) for presenting such a pretty, pretty event. The lighting design by brilliant Jason Amato added to the dramatic presentation.

Though we were extremely pleased overall, we won’t claim the show was perfect. We were slightly bored with a repeated “flying around the columns on stage left” segment, and we were bummed that the opening variation was so far away from us. Binoculars would have helped. Nevertheless, this was our first exposure to Austin’s guru of artistic flight, and seeing it made us wish we’d seen Jacques’ other site-specific dance works—like the 2006 Requiem, preformed on the then-standing Intel building framework. Illumnation made us sad that we’ve missed past shows.

“It was like being awake inside a dream,” we overhead a fellow audience member say after the show. We totally agree. You should make an effort to see this show. Remounting it is unlikely, as Seaholm is soon transforming into a condo/retail/office/hotel space.