Marfa Triptych 2: The Desert are now on sale! Tickets are available for $20 online online and at the Ballroom Marfa gallery. All Ballroom Marfa members and residents of Brewster, Jeff Davis and Presidio counties get in for half price. Seating is extremely limited, so get yours today! SOLD OUT!!!

 

Ballroom Marfa Drive-In, rendering by MOS 2012

Dear Ballroom Marfa supporters and Marfa community members,

In 2006 Ballroom Marfa began developing an idea for a community space that we started calling the Drive-In. The name came out of our desire to conjure the spirit that used to exist around drive-in movie theaters. Our plans included an outdoor screen/bandshell that we hoped would be just as suitable for high school graduation ceremonies and community theater productions as for film screenings and Tejano concerts, and the Drive-In also called for all kinds of new developments to the eight-acre section of Vizcaino Park that we leased from Presidio County in 2012.

AJ and Sergio Castillo, August 31, 2013. Photo by Lesley Brown.

Now, after years of enthusiastic and imaginative collaboration between a crew of partners ranging from the Presidio County Commissioners to the architects at MOS, the Ballroom Marfa Board of Trustees has decided that, in spite of our best intentions, the project has outgrown the original vision. In its current proposed state, the Drive-In project will require significant fundraising efforts that could compromise the level of innovative and community-minded programming that has been Ballroom Marfa’s priority since 2003. As of now further development of the Drive-In is indefinitely deferred.

However, the spirit of this ambitious project is not confined to our enterprising architectural renderings. Thus we are moving forward with a more immediate strategy when it comes to the kind of events the Drive-In was intended to enable.

The Drive-In has invigorated Ballroom Marfa, and has guided us toward accessing existing spaces and better cooperation with our neighbors, whether bringing the Tish Hinojosa Band to the USO Building, inviting Fat Lyle’s food truck into the courtyard for the Sound Speed Marker reception or the spontaneous decision for Marisa Anderson to play an intimate sunset concert amid travel trailers and VW buses in the yard behind our office.

We are energized over the possibilities that this new, more agile framework allows us to realize. Ballroom Marfa’s lease at Vizcaino Park only pertains to the undeveloped softball field. The majority of the park – including the bandshell, baseball field, picnic area and playground – is managed by Presidio County. We’ll continue to program events there in coordination with Presidio County, taking inspiration from past and present Vizcaino Park gatherings like those put together by Ballroom Marfa and other members of the Marfa community.

The Doodlin’ Hogwallops, April 21, 2014. Photo by Lesley Brown.

The Drive-In project led us to collaborate with Marfa Chamber of Commerce at to bring Tejano superstar AJ Castillo to Vizcaino Park for the 2013 Marfa Lights Festival and to work with Presidio County 4-H for a concert by Big Bend honky-tonk heroes the Doodlin’ Hogwallops at the county fair. Drive-In thinking led us to work with composer Graham Reynolds for The Marfa Triptych, an ongoing suite of performances blending country, norteño, jazz and opera traditions, all inspired by the culture and landscape our Far West Texas backyard. It also brought us together with the El Paso Opera for July’s upcoming Marfa, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez performances of Vidas Perfectas, a multimedia Spanish-language opera filmed on location here in Marfa, which recently debuted at the 2014 Whitney Biennial to glowing reviews.

So with that in mind we invite your questions and ideas, and also remind you of our upcoming summer programs – our fifth annual DJ Camp, plus free workshops with jazz icon Kahil El’Zabar and a field recording class presented with Marfa Public Radio – and what is sure to be a legendary night with the inimitable Bonnie “Prince” Billy.

In closing we’d like to thank everyone for continuing on with us as we plan for a vibrant future, both here in Texas and abroad. Thank you to all the individuals, foundations, our board of trustees, present and past staff, community members, designers and champions of the Drive-In.

In bringing back our feature, “Who’s At Ballroom Marfa This Week?”, I got to speak to Brooke Hampshire, Rebecca Carroll, Lizzy Méndez and Melissa Repko on a busy Saturday afternoon this Memorial Day weekend. The four friends from Dallas were on a tour of Far West Texas, and stopped by Ballroom to check out Sound Speed Marker on their way to Prada Marfa, Big Bend National Park, and beyond. Despite spending only two nights in town, these gals were able to regale me with a bunch of “only-in-Marfa” stories.

Ballroom Marfa: Why did you want to come to Marfa?
Brooke Hampshire: I’ve wanted to come for the last decade…I’ve actually always wanted to visit Big Bend, and…friends of mine in the past have come for the art scene so it just worked out.
Lizzy Méndez: I only knew about the Prada thing and I was like, yes! I mean, when else am I going to be able to see that?
Rebecca Carroll: I’ve always just heard about the art… how unique the town was and that it was very eclectic and everybody had their own thing going on… I thought it was kind of like a cool little reclusive area where it was off the grid so that’s pretty cool.

BM: How did you feel about the work that you saw here?
RC: I really liked Movie Mountain (Méliés). I wish we had more time to sort of sit down and watch the whole thing. The two-screen experience…I’m more of a video art person, it’s a lot of what I did in college. I like the exhibit, it’s movie-oriented, and I like that it’s dedicated to all these separate parts, dedicated to one idea.
LM: It’s also just Texas art, which is cool. You can’t get that in, like, New York City.

BM: What’s been the highlight of your trip so far?
RC: We’ve had many. [laughter]
LM: We had like a 16 hour day yesterday, and we did…we walked to like the edge of town, which is just kind of nuts, because it’s four blocks, and it turns into just like a ranch, and you can see [everything], which was awesome… We did the star party, which was amazing.
BH: Yeah, it was amazing.
LM: We very randomly ended up at [Marfa Public Radio], they were so friendly.
RC: Yeah, we’d gone to the NPR studio, and they took us around and gave us advice and directions on what we should do.
LM: They gave us stickers and we bought t-shirts.
RC: …You asked for a highlight, I don’t know which one of those was the highlight.
LM: It was just a great day.
RC: Yeah, overall, it was sort of a package deal. All of Marfa was a highlight.

Thanks to everyone who came out for the free Slasher Flicks/Party With Death show on Monday! All photos by Alex Marks.

Guitarist Marisa Anderson played an intimate candlelit performance behind the Ballroom Marfa office on April 21, 2014 at 8pm. In case you missed the show, you can listen to her music on her Bandcamp page, and enjoy these photos courtesy of Lesley Brown and Alex Marks …

Vidas Perfectas premieres tomorrow at the Whitney Biennial and many have taken this opportunity to reflect on Robert Ashley’s legacy and the great works he left behind, particularly this recent three-opera series at the Whitney.

In an article for The Wall Street Journal, Corinne Ramey discusses with director Alex Waterman what drew him to Ashley’s operas:

“That’s the genius of Bob’s work,” said Mr. Waterman, in the Williamsburg apartment he shares with his wife Elisa Santiago, who performs in “Vidas Perfectas,” and their toddler son. “His idea of an opera is that it’s characters in a landscape telling stories musically.”

For Mr. Waterman, a major attraction of Ashley’s work is the idea of music as a social and collaborative process, where a less formal interpretation—like that of the performance collective Varispeed, which produced a site-specific “Perfect Lives” in the Catskills—is just as valid as Mr. Waterman’s more formal one.

“I’m interested in music not just as a way of organizing sound,” said Mr. Waterman, “but as a way of thinking about who we are when we gather together, and how we listen and speak together, and how we produce things together.”

Paul Grimstad focuses on the importance of Ashley’s Perfect Lives: A Television Opera for N+1 Magazine. An excerpt:

While the operas for television might seem yet another way in which the calculatedly outrageous became a commonplace of 20th-century art, Ashley’s work looks more like an ingenious trick of defamiliarization whereby that quaint banality “television” is transformed into a medium for opera. In the end, I think, Ashley was mostly interested in the sound of Americans talking to each other, or talking to themselves: insistent, often indistinct, never meaningless, demotic. In these voices can be heard something revelatory and strange, as if someone took the lid off life and let us see the works.

Finally, Steve Smith eulogizes Ashley in The New York Times. Finding comfort in the fact that Waterman’s new productions of Ashley’s work manage to both be faithful to Ashley’s vision while cleverly building upon them. An excerpt:

What I have appreciated most about previous reconceptions of Ashley’s operas was the extent to which newcomers found fresh possibilities. Already in “Crash,” broadened horizons were evident. Ms. Bell’s inquisitive “yeah” was not Mr. Pinto’s hipster aside. Mr. McCorkle’s stammer was more pronounced than Ms. Kidambi’s. Ms. Simons and Mr. Ruder employed distinct hues of wistfulness. If the specter of death haunted this wistful, articulate swan song, prospects of preservation and renewal were also at hand.

After extensive filming on location in Marfa, Vidas Perfectas will debut at the Whitney Biennial tomorrow, April 17, 2014. Please join us here in Far West Texas as the production returns to Marfa and El Paso from July 10-14.

Giant.
Image by Fredrik Nilsen.

During the second month of Hubbard/Birchler’s exhibition, Sound Speed Marker, Ballroom Marfa’s intern, Francesca Altamura, spoke with the artist duo about the works featured in the exhibition, comprising of three films, nine photographs and an installation located in the courtyard.

Teresa Hubbard, born in Dublin, Ireland 1965 and and Alexander Birchler, born in Baden, Switzerland 1962 have been working collaboratively in video, photography and sculpture since 1990. The exhibition Sound Speed Marker will be on view at Ballroom Marfa until July 31, 2014, traveling next to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland in December 2014 and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, Texas in May 2015.

Francesca Altamura: How would you describe the three featured video works, Grand Paris Texas (2009), Movie Mountain (Méliès) (2011) and Giant (2014) to viewers who may not have been introduced to your work before?

Alexander Birchler: There are three video installations, a trilogy, presented at Ballroom, including the premiere of Giant which was commissioned by Ballroom Marfa. All three works explore, in different ways, the physical and social traces that movies and movie making leaves behind.

FA: How has living in Austin, influenced the direction of your current, and future, works?

Teresa Hubbard: We’ve lived and worked in many places and we’ve moved around a lot over the time we’ve known each other — different cities and towns in Canada, Switzerland, Germany and the United States. During the past decade that we’ve been primarily based in Austin, we’ve gotten close to a number of people who are also based in Austin, and they work with us during the research phase, on location and in post production. These are long-term relationships which we really appreciate and have become such an important part of our community.

FA: What was your initial intrigue with the films Paris, Texas and Giant (1956)? Do these films evoke a sense of nostalgic reminiscence for you both?

Images from the March 8, 2014 Ballroom Marfa and Mexican Summer’s festival at El Cosmico, featuring Connan Mockasin, No joy, Quilt, Weyes Blood and ARP. All photos by Alex Marks.

Above photo, production still shot on location in Marfa, TX, February 2014 Courtesy of Alex Waterman and Peter Szollosi

Waterman, the director of Vidas Perfectas, a co-production with Ballroom Marfa and the El Paso Opera, recently shared this letter via email with friends and supporters after Robert Ashley’s passing on March 3. The subject was “Celebrating Robert Ashley’s Life and Work”:

Dear Friends and Supporters,

On February 21, 2014, we launched a 30-day Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to compensate the extraordinary talent and to cover the costs of all the technical equipment we need to stage 3 Operas by Robert Ashley at the Whitney Biennial.

On March 3, 2014, our friend, inspiration, and the composer of these incredible operas, Robert Ashley, passed away.

As we grieve and come to accept the new reality of these productions without Bob, we still face the daunting and awkward task of fundraising.

What’s clear to us is that these operas need to be staged. Bob would not have wanted a memorial concert. What he would want is for his work to be appreciated and performed with love and care, with a thoughtfulness that comes from spending days, months, years… working together and sharing these stories.

At the Whitney Biennial, we don’t want to grieve, we want to celebrate. Bob’s work has always been grounded in an every day life, even when the music veers to the cosmic. His operas are about the people he knew, the stories shared, the books read, the questions asked, the revelations unveiled. By staging his work, we celebrate a mind keen to the nuances of conversation and thought, and a life lived fully.

As difficult as it is to ask under these circumstances, we do need your help. We want these operas to be staged with the best possible sound, lighting, video, and sets, in order to honor Robert Ashley and his work. 12 days remain to raise nearly $35,000. My gratitude goes to those who have already donated. If we don’t reach our goal, we lose it all.

Photo: Rita Weigart

Elmgreen & Dragset’s Prada Marfa installation has provoked a number of reactions since it was constructed in 2005. Most responses take the form of playful snapshots while some would-be art critics register their thoughts in spent shell casings and graffiti. This is Far West Texas, and we would expect nothing less.

Public art like Prada Marfa encourages engagement. Ballroom Marfa and Art Production Fund have taken the steps necessary to keep this public forum alive, whether that means passing around another photo of someone imitating Beyoncé’s leap, painting over a few months of accumulated graffiti or patching up the bullet holes in the windows.

Photo: Rita Weigart

The most recent vandalism of the public Prada Marfa site is different. The large scale defacement of the structure overwhelms this forum and shuts down the dialogue. A site previously recognized as an example of sustainable earth architecture is now coated in toxic paint while the insulation foam garbage left behind by the defacer(s) blows across the highway and into the landscape. Spring breakers still stop to see the installation, but now there are Jeff Davis County deputies on scene as well.

No decisions have been made other than that Ballroom Marfa and Art Production Fund will restore Prada Marfa, and it will remain a public site. We’re close to resolving the widely publicized issues with the Texas Department of Transportation, and we expect Prada Marfa will be around for years to come. It will surely continue to inspire a wide range of commentary; we just hope that a single point of view — one comprised of blue paint, industrial adhesive and insulation foam — will not override and destroy this exchange of ideas.

For more on Prada Marfa, please see our Prada Marfa Explainer.

To support Ballroom Marfa and public art projects like Prada Marfa, visit our membership page.