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Events on Friday, May 26, 2023

Friday, May 26, 2023

Friday, May 26, 2023 at 7:30 PM

7:30 PM

Houston’s artist-led, artist-curated Kinetic Ensemble closes its 8th concert season with a deeply expressive program exploring themes of love, fear, and vulnerability through music for song and strings. At the centerpiece is the world premiere of “Behind the Sanctuary Walls” by award-winning composer Theo Chandler , written for soprano, double bass, and string orchestra. Featuring dynamic British-Canadian soprano Alexandra Smither , and C leveland Orchestra bassist Charles Paul , “Behind the Sanctuary Walls” takes us through the enthralling, intertwining nature of intimacy and distance, connection and separation, capturing the extremes of human experience across five movements.

Complementing this premiere is Tchaikovsky ’s celebrated “Serenade for Strings,” a work that epitomizes the outward, heartrending expressivity of nineteenth-century romanticism, along with a selection of newly adapted songs by Clara Schumann , arranged for string orchestra by Kinetic violinist Giancarlo Latta . This concert is generously sponsored by and dedicated to our dear friend, John Epstein.Read more

Friday, May 26 at 8:00 PM

8:00 PM

World Premiere by Candice D'Meza

The latest work by local interdisciplinary theatre artist Candice D’Meza is a genre blending, experiential exploration of the quantum mechanics that use imagination to liberate oneself from the confines of linear time. A thematic continuation of D’Meza’s surreal, Afrofuturist film series 30 Ways to Get Free , also produced by Catastrophic, A Maroon’s Guide uses film, technology, performance, and audience imagination to create the perfect environment to escape into space—where a new and better world is waiting for us.

A Maroon’s Guide is D’Meza’s third original performance piece, following Fatherland at Stages, 30 Ways to Get Free , and Wail at Diverseworks Artspace. A consummate theatre artist and self-described “artivist,” D’Meza’s first performed at Catastrophic in 2014 but she has dazzled on most Houston stages and her acting plaudits are many. As a creator of new work for the theatre, her star is on a meteoric rise.Read more

Friday, May 26 at 8:00 PM

8:00 PM

Written by Tracy Letts, Directed by Ron Jones

When the large Weston family unexpectedly reunites after patriarch Dad up and disappears, their Oklahoman family homestead explodes in a maelstrom of repressed truths and unsettling secrets. A vanished father, a pill-popping mother, and three sisters harboring shady little secrets becomes a mixture of brutal honesty and hurtful truth as old wounds reopen and new ones form. Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for best play that same year, August: Osage County examines how people function within dysfunction.Read more