Second Annual CounterCurrent Festival

JohnBrown. (Photo: Mark Simpson)

​The University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts announces dates for the second annual CounterCurrent festival, scheduled Tuesday, April 14 through Sunday, April 19, 2015. CounterCurrent is a free, city-wide festival of bold experimental art that occupies a range of unexpected sites in the Houston, including galleries, outdoor sites and non-traditional spaces. The festival will be comprised of nine major cutting-edge contemporary and collaborative works, including audio and video installations, live performances, and participatory events by artists from around the world. The lineup includes artists from the Middle East, Europe, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, Austin, and Houston. All CounterCurrent events are free of charge.

Highlights among the lineup of radical and collaborative performances, installations and experiences include:

• Bodycast, Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra featuring for the first time actress Lili Taylor and directed by Paul Lazar. Bocanegra’s work is an inventive theatricalization of the ubiquitous “artist talk.” Bodycast, part performance and part essay, mines specific details of Bocanegra’s life to create a more general meditation on art-making and shifting ideals of feminine beauty. Performed by film and television actress Lili Taylor (Mystic Pizza, Say Anything…, I Shot Andy Warhol, Six Feet Under, The Haunting), the story of Bocanegra’s Bodycast takes on a new life, with the phantom presence of the artist herself looming on the sidelines.
• johnbrown, Dean Moss. Multidisciplinary artist Dean Moss draws from an intimate and varied history with activism to create a dark meditative performance on the legacy of a white 19th-century abolitionist, using video, dance, theater, visual design, and community involvement
• Cry You One, Mondo Bizarro and ArtSpot Productions. The performance is a collaborative creation of two New Orleans theater companies, Mondo Bizarro and ArtSpot Productions. This three hour outdoor, participatory performance is a powerful musical and theatrical journey about the effects of one of this country’s worst environmental disasters, Hurricane Katrina, and its relevance to other communities such as Houston. Cry You One addresses themes of the company’s Louisiana home: converging cultures, human error, forced evacuation, living with water and the desire for permanence. 

Festival presenting partners include DiverseWorks; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Aurora Picture Show; Blaffer Art Museum; Buffalo Bayou Partnership; She Works Flexible; Dance Source Houston; and others.

For more information about CounterCurrent and a complete schedule of events, please visit www.countercurrentfestival.org. Please note that space is limited and reservations are highly recommended.