Double Down on Performance Art

It’s an exciting time for emerging arts across Dallas and Fort Worth, a point that’s proven well at DallasSites: Available Space, the let’s-do-this collaborative show currently on view at the Dallas Museum of Art’s main gallery. An interesting element of the all-local exhibition is the amount of room being given both directly and indirectly to performance art, a medium that’s been back on the regional upswing in the last two years. Thursday you can take in a double-dose as Apophenia Underground (the collective behind the Deep Ellum Windows project) intersects with PerformanceSW for a panel discussion featuring Rachel Cook, Anthony Thompson Shumate and Jesse Morgan Barnett, moderated by Darryl Lauster. You’ll get a few performances in there too, a highlight being when the AU updates from their just-wrapped six-week road trip: a cross-country gig documented on Tumblr that turned each day into a piece of performance-based art. See this from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Interestingly enough, that direct conversation about the medium is counterbalanced with HOMECOMING! Committee’s ongoing showroom, which is itself an evolving blend of 2-D, installation and performance. Set off further and also booked from 7 to 8:30 p.m. is a performance hosted in that space titled I hate it when a book smells bad by local body mover/shaker, Danielle Georgiou. There you’ll find a double-scoop of theory, blending Antonin Artaud’s ideas that “cruelty leads to a believable reality” and Trisha Brown’s concepts of avant-garde performance. It’s all free at the DMA (1717 N. Harwood St.). Visit dma.org.
Thu., Aug. 8, 2013