The Reading was an annual program at Ballroom Marfa between 2011 and 2013 which offered a staged reading of a winning script from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ annual Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. The program aimed to bring the screenwriter together with an actual audience at an early point in the creative process and included performances at Marfa’s Crowley Theater, panel discussions with the screenwriter and others involved with the project. Presented as part of Ballroom Marfa’s year-round Film Program, the screenwriter of the winning script was selected from among five Nicholl Fellows by a committee of filmmakers.

Ballroom Marfa’s distinguished Filmmakers’ Selection Committee chose Academy Nicholl Fellow James DiLapo’s script Devils at Play for the 2013 production of The Reading. 

Set in the Soviet Union circa 1937, Devils at Play centers on an officer of the secret police who finds a list of traitors that he believes could be his ticket out of the repressed existence he struggles with day to day. In addition to being selected for The Reading and awarded a coveted Academy Nicholl Fellowship, Devils at Play also made the 2012 Black List of the year’s top 10 unproduced screenplays.

Julia Dyer — director of 2012’s highly acclaimed The Playroom and festival darling Late Bloomers — helmed the staged performance of Devils at Play for The Reading. Chuck Huber played the lead role of Stepan. Award-winning Dallas actor Drew Wall returned to The Reading stage opposite Huber, in the role of Ilich. Veteran film producer Carolyn Pfeiffer and Ballroom Marfa board member Nancy Sanders returned as producers. Devils at Play was performed by actors with scripts in hand, full stage direction, and state-of-the-art lighting and sound.

2013’s esteemed Filmmakers’ Selection Committee was comprised of: 2012 Sundance winner for best director Ava DuVernay; Oscar® & Tony® Award-winning actress Marcia Gay Harden; Hitchcock director Sacha Gervasi; and returning committee chairman, pioneering producer Robert Shapiro.

As part of Ballroom Marfa’s Education and Outreach program, we launched a Children’s Film Series in collaboration with Marfa Public Library. Our inaugural screening was princess Mononoke, written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. The now-iconic 1997 film about a questing Japanese prince and the battles between human and nature he encounters. The movie was preceded by an introduction and followed by a brief discussion with the children. Our discussion investigated pressing environmental concerns as well as morality in relation to Miyazaki’s animation.

Ballroom welcomed Gary P. Nunn to Marfa for a special Valentine’s Day performance in 2013. Local legends, Primo Carrasco & Friends (featuring David Beebe and Gary Oliver) opened.

By all appearances, the longest-running love affair in Gary P. Nunn’s life is with the state of Texas. Though he was born in Oklahoma, Nunn’s songs are inspired by his deep affection for the Lone Star State.

Nunn is best known for his song “London Homesick Blues,” a ballad sung from the perspective of a country musician stranded in England, pining for the armadillos, country music, and attractive women. His anthem was first made famous by Jerry Jeff Walker and David Allan Coe, and then immortalized as the theme song for PBS’s long-running live music showcase, Austin City Limits.

After moving to Austin to pursue a degree in pharmacy at the University of Texas, he became involved in the nascent outlaw country movement, playing bass for Michael Martin Murphy and Willie Nelson.

Soon he found a home with the infamous Lost Gonzo Band, backing Jerry Jeff Walker on 1973’s Viva Terlingua!, an album that ranks with Honky Tonk Heroes and Shotgun Willie as one of the stone-cold classics of progressive country music.

Nunn went on to make three more albums with the Lost Gonzo Band, and then began performing under his own name in the ’80s. In keeping with the ethos that defined him early on, he took a hands-on approach to his solo career, avoiding major labels, releasing his own music, and gravitating toward Campfire Records, an indie label based in San Antonio, with whom he’s released nine albums.

Nunn has never hidden his love for Texas, and in turn former Texas Governor Mark White named him our Official Ambassador to the World in 1985. In 1995 he was included in the West Texas Walk of Fame, and in 2004 he was inducted into the Texas Hall of Fame.

Beach House  |  Holy Shit

Lauded dream-pop band Beach House returned to West Texas for a live concert, with opener Holy Shit. In addition to near-universal critical acclaim, the unique sound Beach House has refined also translates across a wide swathe of contemporary culture outside of the indie rock world that birthed them: Kendrick Lamar and The Weekend have both sampled a number of Beach House tracks, and their songs have shown up in film and TV episodes.

Beach House recorded Bloom with Chris Coady at Sonic Ranch Studios in Tornillo, TX, just up the road from Marfa. 

Ballroom Marfa and the Marfa Public Library presented the second installment of Book and a Movie, a program highlighting novels that have been adapted for the cinema. The novel and film selected for November was The Godfather, written by Mario Puzo in 1969 and adapted by director Francis Ford Coppola in 1972.

A searing novel of the Mafia underworld, The Godfather introduced readers to the first family of American crime fiction, the Corleones, and the powerful legacy of tradition, blood and honor that was passed on from father to son. It resonated with millions of readers across the world—and became the definitive novel of the Mafia subculture that remains an essential component of  our collective consciousness.

But what happens when an adaptation consumes its source material? Such is the case with Coppola’s vision, a blockbuster piece of cinema that transformed Puzo’s well-received book into one of the most financially successful and critically acclaimed films of all time. As The Guardian wrote in Puzo’s 1999 obituary, “For Puzo, the characters so vividly presented in The Godfather had, in the end, been swallowed by Brando, Pacino and Duval. It was no longer his Mamma’s voice that he heard, but Brando’s rasp, mandolins, sepia tints, and Coppola’s soundtrack.”

Puzo went on to write two more novels in the universe that he’d created on his own — The Sicilian and Omertà — but it was his shared vision with Coppola and the cinematic trilogy that followed the original Godfather film that would define his legacy. The two went on to collaborate on the screenplays for The Godfather II and III, an epic narrative that built on the one crucial difference between the texts — a decision by one of the main characters at the end of story.

All of this is a testament to the expanded pleasures The Godfather has to offer when experienced both as original novel and adapted film. 

This program was made possible by the Friends of the Marfa Public Library and PEARL — two organizations striving to bolster the public library as an essential and engaging establishment in rural Texas communities.

As part of Ballroom Marfa’s fourth annual New Year’s film program, Sarah Lipstate (AKA Noveller) played an original score for Victor Sjöström’s 1921 Swedish film, The Phantom Carriage, a masterpiece of silent cinema often cited as an aesthetic touchstone for Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

The film opens on New Year’s Eve as three drunks recount the legend of how the last person to die before the end of each year must serve as Death’s soul collector in the year to come, driving the titular phantom carriage. One of these men dies just before midnight, shortly after spurning the wishes of a dying woman. His sins are then recounted in ethereal flashbacks by Georges, the driver of the carriage from the preceding year.

Lipsates’s melodic guitar soundtracked this iconic silent film masterpiece with new compositions.

New Growth was a solo exhibition of new work by Rashid Johnson. For this exhibition, Johnson combined both personally and historically loaded material–such as shea butter and black soap–with LP covers and books in complex paintings, sculptures and installations that confound the uniformity of collective identity and multicultural representation. Beginning with the question:  “What would happen if Sun Ra, George Washington Carver and Robert Smithson started a community together in the desert?,” Johnson attempts to answer this hypothetical by drawing on personal and historical references. New Growth‘s playful scrutiny intertwined cosmology, escapism and irrigation in a re-contextualization of the lines between past, present and future in a desert setting.

The concept of physical manipulation of biomaterial into an abstract form ran through the work on display, with references to the transformation and rehabilitation of bodies, landscapes and the identities embedded within them. This played out most dramatically in the outdoor installation in which the sun-baked gravel of the gallery courtyard was irrigated with shea butter, terraforming the high desert grasslands of Far West Texas.

In keeping with Ballroom Marfa’s mission, New Growth featured newly commissioned work including the video Samuel in Space and the Shea Butter Irrigation System–both of which were produced during the artist’s stay in Marfa. Works in wax, burned wood, tile and mirror, as well as brass and wood chairs and rugs rounded out the exhibition. A film program curated by Rashid Johnson in collaboration with MoMA film curator Josh Siegel also ran throughout the exhibition. 

To inaugurate New Growth, Ballroom Marfa hosted a weekend of festivities, including an opening reception which featured a performance by multi-instrumentalist legend Kahil El’Zabar and saxophone master Hamiet Bluiett, whose musical styles range from avant-garde to bebop. 

All events were free and open to the public.

The Sebastian Ensemble played an intimate concert in Ballroom Marfa’s north gallery. The Sebastian Ensemble — with Stephen Redfield on violin; Susan Patrick, harpsichord; and Katie Rietman, cello — is a group dedicated to the performance of Baroque chamber music on original instruments at low pitch. 

Their evening-length program served as an aural reflection of the art works from The El Paso Museum of Art’s concurrent ’s Golden Age exhibition. The composers of these lived and worked in the countries and within the cultures, even among the very artists, featured in the exhibition. Sebastian Ensemble imagined that the musical and visual artists of this period provided inspiration to each other, and that those relationships could be brought to light through this concert. The program featured the music of: Willem de Fesch (Dutch); Jean-Baptiste Loeillet (Flemish); William Byrd (English); Johann Sebastian Bach (Germanic); Jean-Marie LeClaire (French); and Dario Castello (Italian).

Vidas Perfectas was an all-new Spanish-language version of Robert Ashley’s ground-breaking “television opera” Perfect Lives (1983). With Ashley’s blessing, Alex Waterman directed this production from a Spanish translation by Javier Sainz de Robles.

The singer-songwriter Ned Sublette starred as the opera’s narrator “R,” in the role originated by Ashley. Playing with him was “Buddy, The World’s Greatest Piano Player,” a unique all-piano role for Cuban virtuoso Elio Villafranca. Composer Peter Gordon, who collaborated with Ashley on the original incarnation of Perfect Lives, returned as music producer, to play live electronics and mixing. The chorus was Elisa Santiago (appearing as Isolde, Gwyn, and Ida) and Raúl de Nieves (appearing as Will, Ed, and The Captain of the Football Team).

Perfect Lives was originally commissioned for television by The Kitchen (NY) in 1979 and was completed in 1983, co-produced by The Kitchen and Channel Four in Great Britain. It was aired on Channel Four in 1983 and in 1984, and subsequently on German, Austrian and Spanish television. Perfect Lives’ innovative combination of chanting, storytelling, meditation and ecstatic revelation, challenges the ways in which we perceive the relationship between language and music. It has almost single-handedly changed the way we think about opera, television, and performance.

In July 2014, Vidas Perfectas traveled “on location” for theatrical stagings in Marfa, Texas and on-site performances in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, TX. All seven episodes were then compiled and edited for television. At the completion of all seven episodes, Vidas Perfectas toured internationally, accompanied by a full recording to be released on CD and DVD.