Fusebox Festival brings together artists in Austin for some unforgettable live performances, and they are celebrating 20 years at this year’s event. Co-Artistic Director Ron Berry joined us to tell us more.
Twenty years ago, a group of Austin-based artists launched the first ever Fusebox Festival. 608 years earlier (in the year 1397), Central Texas experienced a total eclipse of the sun and has not experienced one since. This April represents the first time ever these two phenomena are happening at the same time. We hope you can join us for this rare occasion in which mother nature is a featured artist.
The 2024 festival takes a look back and celebrates the past 20 years of Fusebox, while also looking ahead toward the future. For eight days in April, artists and audiences will gather from all over the world for unforgettable live performances, exhibitions, parties, and conversations at sites across Austin. View festival artist list here.
The festival opens with a series of performances celebrating the eclipse starting with writer Maria Popova (The Marginalian) and The Universe in Verse, part of the Simons Foundation’s In the Path of Totality initiative presented in partnership locally with Fusebox, The Long Center, and Waterloo Greenway. The three-day eclipse celebration continues with a free viewing party on April 8th with Radiolab and Graham Reynolds at the Long Center (come early and then catch the totality at 1:36pm).
To celebrate this milestone anniversary, Fusebox doubled down on one of its core values: collaboration. For the past twenty years Fusebox has been using its festival as a platform to bring the artistic ecosystem together to share unique (often singular) experiences through a series of partnerships. Building this year’s festival in partnership with organizations who have been part of Fusebox’s long history became a strategy for celebrating our past and a way to model a pathway forward. We firmly believe there is no future without partnership and collaboration. This year, partners include: The Contemporary Austin, Women & Their Work, Museum of Human Achievement, Co-Lab Projects, Texas Performing Arts, The Long Center, Waterloo Greenway, Forklift Danceworks, Ground Floor Theater, The Vortex, Performance Space Sydney, and a host of others.
The Fusebox + Texas Performing Arts partnership that began last year continues with a constellation of remarkable artists as part of the festival this April, including: award-winning choreographer Abby Zbikowski’s genre-bending work Radioactive Practice; filmmaker Sam Green’s immersive documentary 32 Sounds that explores the elemental phenomenon of sound; Lisa B. Thompson’s latest project The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body, a meditation on the experience of aging as a Black woman in the U.S.; Tania El Khoury’s interactive live art project that shares her family memoirs of life in a border village between Lebanon and Syria in Cultural Exchange Rate.
“Like so many of the artists we work with and love, we wanted to create a living, breathing thing. A thing that could continue to unfold over time and remain curious about the world. That thing happened to be a festival, but it was really about creating a space for sharing all kinds of ideas across art forms and geographies–a space that expands our sense of possibility and reaffirms our connection with each other as humans.”–Executive + Co-Artistic, Ron Berry
Fusebox Festival tickets will be released on Friday, February 9th at www.fuseboxlive.com.
PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS
- Anito (Justin Talplacido Shoulder): Working primarily in performance, sculpture, video and collective events, Shoulder uses invented alter-personas based on queered ancestral mythologies. These creatures are embodied through hand crafted costumes and prosthesis and animated by their own gestural languages. Joining with a remarkable collective of artists to create Anito, the project honors their roots in Sydney’s underground queer and diasporic club scenes to re-imagine myths and stories for the now.
US PREMIERE
- Cultural Exchange Rate (Tania El Khoury): In this interactive live art project artist Tania El Khoury shares her family memoirs of life in a border village between Lebanon and Syria. The audience is invited to immerse themselves into one family’s secret boxes to explore sounds, images, and textures of traces of more than a century of border crossings. This one-of-a-kind performance demonstrates that the cruelest of borders are invisible to the eye and present in everyday life.
TEXAS PREMIERE Presented in partnership with Texas Performing Arts
- 32 Sounds (Sam Green): An immersive documentary and profound sensory experience from Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Sam Green explores the elemental phenomenon of sound. Presented in its “live cinema” form, 32 Sounds features live narration by Green accompanied by original music performed by JD Samson of pioneering electro band Le Tigre.
Presented in partnership with Texas Performing Arts.
- Canto de Todes (Dorian Wood): Inspired by a lyric of the late Chilean singer and songwriter Violeta Parra, this immersive 12-hour composition and installation emphasizes the urgency of folk music as a vessel for social change. A genre-defying canon of songs arriving as a long-durational spatial experience.
TEXAS PREMIERE. Presented in partnership with Women & Their Work + MoHA
- Radioactive Practice (Abby Z and the New Utility): Award-winning choreographer Abby Zbikowski and crew have created a genre-bending work that brings together a mosaic group of dancers to redefine purpose for themselves as they labor their way through complex, demanding, and often perplexing physicality to confront expectations and dive into the unknown head on. Utilizing their skills through practices in different movement traditions the cast draws from an arsenal of physical possibility to shatter assumptions of established forms and test the group’s own physical and mental limits.
TEXAS PREMIERE Presented in partnership with Texas Performing Arts.
- In the Path of Totality: In celebration of the first total solar eclipse in Austin since 1397, the Simons Foundation have programmed three days of eclipse-related programming from April 7-9 as part of its In the Path of Totality initiative in partnership locally with Waterloo Greenway Conservancy, the Long Center for the Performing Arts and Fusebox.
- HOST: Fusebox (curated by Robin K. Williams, Curator, The Contemporary Austin, with Ron Berry, Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director, Fusebox): This exhibition celebrates the 20th anniversary of Fusebox, featuring a sampling of works by current and former Fusebox artists as an immersive gallery display. The exhibition opens during the 20th annual Fusebox festival and includes celebratory events during the opening weekend, April 11-14. Other programs will include performances and events with featured artists throughout the exhibition.
About Fusebox
Fusebox is a non-profit arts organization based in Austin, TX. We were founded by a group of artists in 2005 who wanted to create a robust exchange of ideas across different art forms and geography, with a particular interest in the live experience. Today Fusebox partners with organizations all over the world ranging from small grassroots organizations to major art centers, and we produce two festivals (The Fusebox Festival & Live in America) along with year-round programming and events.
Mission: Fusebox celebrates the boundless potential of live performance and the unique possibilities that emerge when we gather.
Our programs:
- bring adventurous performances to thousands of people in Central Texas (and beyond) through our festivals and year-round programs.
- provide support, resources, and professional development for artists.
- address vital civic issues at the center of contemporary life and culture.
- explore what live performance can be, can do, and look like.
- expand access to live performance through our Free Range Art initiative.
Fusebox is supported in part by the City of Austin Economic Development Department, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additionally, work was made possible by the Simons Foundation and is part of its ‘In the Path of Totality’ initiative.
