Tuesday, March 25, 2014

CounterCurrent Coming Up

Robert Boyd

So this thing is happening next week:


CounterCurrent14 from Mitchell Center for the Arts on Vimeo.

And you can see their schedule and featured performers on their website. It's weird that there would be two large scale performances festivals in Houston in a given year, much less within a month and a half of one another. But the Houston International Performance Biennale wrapped up in February (and was so packed with performances that this blog is still processing it--you can read about some of the performances here, here, here and here, and there are more posts to come).

The difference seems that HIPB was much more of a grassroots thing. While it had performers from out of town, a lot of it was all about the local performance art community. Also, there wasn't much in the way of social practice-oriented pieces at the HIPB.

CounterCurrent, on the other hand, is being run by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston. It appears to be much more professional and seems at first glance to be split more-or-less evenly between out-of-town artists and local artists, with a strong emphasis on artists associated with UH.

Which festival is the better festival? I guess it doesn't matter--having two festivals like these just gives us all more choices. (That said, part of me wants to see a performance art cage match between them.)


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