The Year in Culture

Collaborate and be prosperous: Houston art groups lean on each other like neverbefore

Houston Grand Opera and Talento Bilingüe de Houston broke operatic conventionsthrough the commission of the first mariachi opera
Photo by © Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters
The Houston Girls Chorus is a first for our city, giving young women educationalopportunities that extend beyond music making
The ARTernative festival was enjoyed by over 1,000 Sugar Land residents
Dr. David Eagleman delivering his TEDxTalk on "possibilianism"

Tough times call for tough measures. For Houston’s art scene, the sluggish economy has presented an opportunity to be creative and figure out ways to do more with less.

Yes, it would seem rather obvious to expect an arts organization to use its innate innovative resources to do so. At its core, art breathes creativity. But the business of the arts isn’t always willing to step out of convention, especially when bottom line and cash flow concerns start infiltrating programming and artistic decisions.

Michael Kaiser, in The Art of the Turnaround, preaches that great art combined with strong marketing strategy is key to economic solvency. In 2010, the Houston art scene added one more element to the formula: Do it with a little help from your friends, collaborate and be prosperous.

Perhaps Young Audiences of Houston headed the most impressive and large-scale collaboration. Todd Frazier, executive director, and friends were able bring to the table 16 of the major professional art organizations and eight school districts to create an unprecedented resource for the educational community. Houston Arts Partners: Arts 4 All became a website indexing all art program offerings enabling teachers to quickly search and find the resource best suited for their students' learning goals.

A task not for the weak, getting everyone to buy in was possible due to a strict focus on the mission. Frazier attributes the success to leaving money aside and concentrating on the effect of the final product.

In similar spirit, American Festival for the Arts (AFA) launched the Houston Girls Chorus in collaboration with Houston Grand Opera’s education arm, HGOco. Focused on creating a new offering targeting the local community, care was placed on not reproducing or competing with existing programs. If their first appearance at the Tree Lighting Ceremony at City Hall is an indication of things to come, the Chorus’ first full-length debut concert on Jan 21 is something not to be missed.

Executive director Michael Remson laid out educational goals that extend beyond the musical experience into lifelong learning while providing positive role models for the participants.

Houston Grand Opera already has a unique place in the operatic world as a major leader in new commissions. In collaboration with Talento Bilingüe de Houston, HGO presented its 41st premiere, To Cross the Face of the Moon / Cruzar la Cara de la Luna , which broke through all sorts of artistic and operatic conventions to produce the first mariachi opera. With music by José “Pepe” Martínez, music director of Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, the universal story of global travels and cross-cultural identity, immigration and assimilation sold-out performances at a concert version at the Wortham Theater Center and at a full- staged production at Talento Bilingüe de Houston.

A part of the Song of Houston project, the series of commissions celebrates the unique cultural diversity of the city. Mariachi songs tell human stories, so the juxtaposition with operatic conventions was a rather natural fit. The result? Continued exposure of HGO’s visibility and scope.

Spacetaker and Fresh Arts also joined resources in an unprecedented event. Bringing 17 arts organizations and nine individual artists to Sugar Land, the ARTernative Festival presented a jam-packed scheduled of back-to-back performances, workshops, interactive art stations and a visual art exhibition appropriate for families.

Culture Pilot’s own Javier Fadul was the driving force behind bringing the first TEDx conference to Houston. Although not an arts non-profit in the traditional sense, TED (technology, entertainment and design) is an organization dedicated to “Ideas Worth Spreading,” putting and licensing conferences worldwide.

A packed audience at University of Houston Lyndall Finley Wortham Theatre in the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Building heard 16 dynamic speakers share a wide range of thought-provoking topics from dance and music to architecture and health and their respective intersections. Most notably, neuroscientist and author David Eagleman presented his theory of possibilianism, the concept that allows freedom of thought amidst science’s inability to fully explain certain phenomena and concepts.

If we are optimistic about an economic recovery in 2011, Houston's art scene has already set a high expectation for the creative consumer. And it had better deliver.

Hear Dr. David Eagleman's TEDx Houston talk:

Editor's note: This is the 23rd in a series of articles CultureMap will be running this transition week (the end of '10 and the beginning of '11) on The Year in Culture. The stories in this series will focus on a key point or two, something that struck our reporting team about the year rather than rote Top 10 lists or bests of.

Movie Review

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 doesn't match the first movie's enthusiasm

Blumhouse

Five Nights at Freddy's 2.

Blumhouse Productions first made their name with the Paranormal Activity series, establishing themselves as a leader in the horror genre thanks to their relatively cheap yet effective movies. In recent years, they’ve added on “soft” horror films like M3GAN and Five Nights at Freddy’s to draw in a younger audience, with both films becoming so successful that each was quickly given a sequel.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 finds Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) still recovering from the events of the first film, with Abby particularly missing her “friends.” Those friends just so happen to be the souls of murdered children who inhabit animatronic characters at the long-defunct Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, children who were abducted and killed by William Afton (Matthew Lillard).

A new threat emerges at another Freddy Fazbear’s location in the form of Charlotte, another murdered child who inhabits a creepy large marionette. Mike, distracted by a possible romance with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), fails to keep track of Abby, who makes her way to the old pizzeria and inadvertently unleashes Charlotte and her minions on the surrounding town.

Directed by Emma Tammi and written by Scott Cawthon (who also created the video game on which the series is based), the film tries to mix together goofy elements with intense scenes. One particular sequence, in which the security guard for Freddy Fazbear’s lets a group of ghost hunters onto the property, toes the line between soft and hard horror. That and a few others show the potential that the filmmakers had if they had stuck to their guns.

Unfortunately, more often than not they either soft-pedal things that would normally be horrific, or can’t figure out how to properly stage scenes. The sight of animatronic robots wreaking havoc is one that is simultaneously frightening and laughable, and the filmmakers never seem to find the right balance in tone. Every step in the direction of making a truly scary horror film is undercut by another in which the robots fail to live up to their promise.

It doesn’t help that Cawthon gives the cast some extremely wooden dialogue, lines that none of the actors can elevate. What may work in a video game format comes off as stilted when said by actors in a live-action film. The story also loses momentum quickly after the first half hour or so, with Cawthon seemingly content to just have characters move from place to place with no sense of connection between any of the scenes.

Hutcherson (The Hunger Games series), after being the true lead of the first film, is given very little to do in this film, and his effort is equal to his character’s arc. The same goes for Lail, whose character seems to be shoehorned into the story. Rubio is called upon to carry the load for a lot of the movie, and the teenager is not quite up to the task. A brief appearance by Skeet Ulrich seems to be a blatant appeal to Scream fans, but he and Lillard only underscore how limited this film is compared to that franchise.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is better than the first film, but not by much. The filmmakers do a decent job of making the new marionette character into a great villain, but they fail to capitalize on its inherent creepiness. Instead, they fall back on less effective elements, ensuring that the film will be forgettable for anyone other than hardcore Freddy fans.

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Five Nights at Freddy's 2 opens in theaters on December 5.

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