Open Dance Project presents 'Flutter' at HBG
The fun, family-friendly and site-specific performance takes place in HBG’s Susan Garver Family Discovery Garden. While exploring the garden and its three butterfly installations created by Houston sculptor Meredith Tucker, each now a permanent part of the garden’s art collection, visitors can check out at their leisure three, half-hour immersive performances by members of Open Dance Project, choreographed by founding artistic director Annie Arnoult.
When it comes to dance and theater, Open Dance Project has never been interested in “the fourth wall.” Inspired by the tumult of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the company’s most recent immersive theater piece, 1968: The Whole World is Watching, had dancers screaming from makeshift scaffolding, running in-between audience members, and at one point, restaging boxer Sonny Liston’s 1964 match with a young upstart named Cassius Clay. Flutter is a bit calmer than that. In performance, the dancers, wearing very colorful, very butterfly-like costumes designed by Houston-based artist Natasha Bowdoin, will shape their movement around Tucker’s sculptures, which depict three different species of butterfly and a plant each pollinates. Beginning with the gestures and movement patterns of butterflies as source material, Arnoult brings a cast of “quirky characters and personalities” to life, each one embodying the spirit of both a sweaty human and a delicate butterfly.
Flutter also incorporates painted textiles and artistic props fabricated by Bowdoin, whose work is often augmented by live performance, and proposes a better future for humankind’s all-too-often adversarial relationship with the natural world.
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During the pandemic, childhood friends Barnett and Harris decided to use their time in quarantine to reach out to young readers by rolling out The First Cat in Space, a “live cartoon” video series on YouTube broadcast from their houses and consisting of the two authors holding up drawings and delivering dialogue, narration and sound effects. (Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.)
The popularity of the DIY videos led to the duo to create The First Cat in Space Ate Pizza, which upon publication in 2022, spent a whopping 46 weeks on the indie-bestseller list. The book’s silly yet surprisingly complex story line appealed to a generation of readers born after Harry Potter, and a global fanbase of First Cat fans emerged, as young readers began sending Barnett and Harris fan art and cartoons and dressing up as the story’s characters for special First Cat events. The First Cat in Space and the Soup of Doom follows the continuing adventures of First Cat, a cute little robot named LOZ 4000, and the Moon Queen as they try to solve the mystery of who poisoned the Queen’s soup. (Rest assured, the story is way more intriguing than that.)
The ticketed event starts at 6:30pm and will include live music (Harris is also a talented singer songwriter), dramatic performances, and “out-of-this-world hijinks.” Kids who show up dressed as their favorite First Cat character will receive a special gift.
Harris
Barnett
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