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    Modern Day Vaudeville

    Loincloths & beams, virginity poems with fishnets: FrenetiCore's Fringe Fest zooms past out there

    nancy wozny
    Aug 18, 2010 | 1:40 pm
    News_Nancy Wozny_Fringe Festival_Brandy Holmes_FRINGE
    "Fitting Room," conceived by Brandy Holmes
    Photo by Simon Gentry

    Houston, are you ready for yet another fringe festival? If we can stand two Starbucks across the street from each other, why not have two fringe fests?

    FrenetiCore's third annual Houston Fringe Festival gets underway Thursday and runs to September 1 at the Frenetic Theater. The folks at FrenetiCore aim to entertain, thrill and provoke, although not necessarily in that order, but quite possibly all on the same program.

    FrenetiCore's chiefs, Rebecca French and Robert Thoth, run a diverse festival, with everything from film to dance to theater to hard-to-classify performance art-y stuff. Hybrid forms are welcome and most shows contain more than one discipline.

    French finds performance opportunities lacking for independent artists. We all just can't afford to rent the Wortham to put on a show, but The indie Frenetic Theater provides a much needed performance venue for artists both up and coming and more established.

    "One of the best moments of the 2009 Fringe for me was when my former director Richard Hubscher performed a gorgeous dance solo wearing a loincloth and a 20-foot-long, eight-by-eight beam on his shoulders," French says. "That kind of magical performance doesn't happen everywhere.

    "We want to make sure that it can happen in Houston, and having Frenetic Theater as a venue puts us in an ideal position to produce the Fringe and provide this opportunity for other artists."

    Frenetic Theater's 1,200-square-foot space now boasts seating for 100, a new sound system, theatrical lighting, a projection system and the biggie, wait for it, air-conditioning. An exhibition hall and dance studio can also be found under their cozy east end roof.

    Unlike Bootown's Fringe Festival, this one is curated. Robert Boyd, of The Great God Pan is Dead blog fame, curates the visual arts component, while the performing arts is handled by a committee consisting of FrenetiCore board members, volunteers, and arts enthusiasts. The line-up is as eclectic as it gets.

    French is passionate about the role her festival plays in the overall ecology of Houston's art scene.

    "Festivals of all kinds are a crucial way for performers to get their work out there, meet other artists, and make a name for themselves," French says. "At the same time, the festival also presents work by artists who are already established in their own right, who just want to work on a new piece and be part of a fun, exciting festival.

    "A few examples of that are Ray Hill, who is very well known in Houston for both his social activism and one-man theatrical shows, and CORE Performance Company, who are practically dance legends in Houston. As presenters, we try to provide the audience with a healthy mix of experimental arts veterans and fresh talent."

    The festival offers a chance for artists to try out work still in the oven.

    Brandy Robichau Holmes is taking her first directorial leap with Fitting Room, with an A-list ensemble including Amy Guerin, Sara Jo Dunstan, Karen Schlag, John Dunn, Cristina Madero and Tracie Thomason. Holmes is experimenting with a co-creative process where each actor will be contributing their own virginity stories along with text from Pablo Neruda's poems and excerpts of Nancy Friday's collection of sexual fantasies. Women try on different dresses, fishnets, and other fetish clothing as they reveal what motivates them to consider having sex.

    "The Fringe offers me a chance to develop my work," Holmes says. "It's a place to be nurtured and play. I feel no pressure to present a polished or finished piece. If all goes well I may develop the piece into an evening length work."

    Out-of-town guests are always a highlight. Kettye Voltz, artistic director of the New Orleans-based Tsumani Dance Company, first met French when she came down for the Dance on Camera Festival hosted by FrenitiCore. The two hit it off, became Facebook pals and an invite was in hand shortly afterward.

    Voltz is a fringer herself, serving on New Orleans' festival jury. She cherishes the chance to get out of Dodge and have some new eyes on her work.

    "It's great to be produced by FrenetiCore," she says. "The space is inspiring; it really feels like home."

    Voltz is bringing one dance for camera work and two other dances, including her Banco Ballante and John Allen's athletic trio set to Philip Glass' relentless rhythms.

    "It's full of risk-taking near miss partnering," she says. "The dancers reach out for each other but struggle to connect."

    Other visiting artists include Austin's award-winning comedy troupe The Rat Girls, Atlanta's Zoetic Dance and Canada's circus dancers Moth/Sol L Luna. French dreams of starting of a fringe network as a kind of modern day vaudeville route.

    "So we didn't exactly blanket the country with calls for entries, but we intend to do so in the future as our festival continues to grow," French says. "We'd like to help create a fringe circuit for the lower United States, so an artist or group could conceivably perform at our festival after the Phoenix Fringe, on the way to the New Orleans Fringe.

    "The first fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland was a response to a bunch of theater groups being kept out of a mainstream festival and starting their own festival on the 'fringes' of the town. So we're committed to continuing the tradition of presenting and celebrating edgy, weird, and wild performances."

    Dreams of oblivion in the trees A short film by louviere + vanessa featuring featuring Tsunami Dance Company:

    Woody Golden, "Screwed from the Start"

      
    unspecified
    news/entertainment

    Movie Review

    Final Destination: Bloodlines reboots cult favorite horror franchise

    Alex Bentley
    May 15, 2025 | 4:30 pm
    Kaitlyn Santa Juana in Final Destination: Bloodlines
    Photo by Eric Milner
    Kaitlyn Santa Juana in Final Destination: Bloodlines.

    On the surface, the Final Destination films really shouldn’t work. There is no villain other than the concept of death itself, and nearly every death that occurs is foreshadowed so heavily that it removes the normal suspense that comes in horror films. And yet the franchise was successful enough to spawn five films over 11 years in the early 2000s, and now a reboot, Final Destination: Bloodlines.

    A fantastic opening sequence set in the 1960s sets both the tone and the plot of the film, in which Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) has a recurring nightmare about a disaster that her grandmother, Iris (Gabrielle Rose), helped to avert. A visit to the reclusive Iris convinces Stefani that she and her family should not exist, and that each one of them is destined to meet a grisly end in the near future.

    Met with resistance from her family members, Kaitlyn is unsurprisingly proven right as the film goes along, with different people dying in a variety of bizarre ways. A visit to William Bludworth (the late Tony Todd), a mortician who’s been the one constant in the series, provides a glimmer of hope that they can cheat death. But will they figure it out before it’s too late?

    Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, and written by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, the film does not try to reinvent the wheel for the concept. The entire point is to get as creative as possible with the death scenes, and the filmmakers take that mandate seriously, with each successive death becoming increasingly gruesome. The Rube Goldberg-like manner in which each death occurs makes the scenes come off as entertaining instead of off-putting.

    The idea of Death hunting down an entire family line due to the actions of the family elder is a solid twist on the series’ central premise, and that change keeps the film from feeling repetitive. The story also introduces the possibility that the entire series is connected due to Iris’ actions, with the character possessing a scrapbook that references well-known incidents from previous films, a fun Easter egg for longtime fans.

    The creativity of the kill sequences does not carry over to the overall story, though. Almost every character in the film only exists in order to meet a horrific end, so anything that they have going on outside of being stalked by Death is purely window dressing. Consequently, it’s hard to really care about anybody, even if they are all related to one another.

    Because characters are so easily dispatched in the film, the cast is devoid of well-known actors. This is by far Santa Juana’s biggest role to date, and she does well enough to want to see more of her in the future. Adults like Alex Zahara and Rya Kihlstedt are character actors who bring some history with them, while the younger group is composed of people still trying to make names for themselves.

    Final Destination: Bloodlines is a solid return for the franchise, even if it feels more like a one-off film rather than a justification for more stories in the future. But given how easily the concept can be adapted into new circumstances, don’t be surprised if another movie pops up in a couple of years.

    ---

    Final Destination: Bloodlines opens in theaters on May 16.

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