For photographer, it’s all about supporting the arts
Stinky Smalls, the Notorious C-A-T, wants to play.
The 7-month old feline couldn’t care less about the interview you are trying to conduct with his owner. He wants to play, and he’s got claws.
When Stinky snags your dress, his owner puts him in “jail” under the coffee table for about a nanosecond. You begin to think maybe Stinky deserves the daily insults his owner throws at him on Facebook.
Although really, that seems a small price for sharing Lynn Lane’s two-story, 2,800-square-foot loft and studio space in Midtown, full of well-worn books, artful furniture and photography equipment.
Since returning to his hometown seven years ago from Brooklyn, N.Y., Lane seems to have settled into some kind of comfy bohemian dream.
He has made himself indispensable to Houston’s arts community, becoming the go-to photographer for Houston Grand Opera, the Alley Theatre and numerous small dance companies. Recently, he’s also been on stage himself, as the founder and impresario of the Transitory Sound and Movement Collective.
On the second Tuesday of each month, Lane conducts Transitory in an improvisational program at the Rec Room, a new 82-seat performance venue on the eastern edge of downtown that has quickly become an underground darling. Sitting at a table downstage, Lane creates electronic sounds in collaboration with an ever-changing ensemble of acoustic musicians and a dancer, against the backdrop of a cinema verité film.
During January’s show, set against a film made at Times Square, 18 musicians squeezed onto the Rec Room’s tiny stage, surrounding soulful dancer Annie Arnoult.
Last Tuesday’s show, “Echoes of Solitude in Grand Central,” featured soprano Julia Fox, Austin ballerina AJ Garcia-Rameau, bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward, flutist Emily Nelson, violinist Emmy Tisdel, harpist Caitlin Mehrtens and a film by Ron Kiley, a New York friend.
They tend to perform with minimal rehearsal. Lane said he wants to keep it fresh and raw.
“It’s not just free improv from a noise standpoint but free improv with a lot of virtuosity,” he said. “These are top-level musicians. They play with different orchestras, teach at Rice.”
Lane has cultivated a lot of friends, and the list is growing. He said people are now seeking him out, asking to participate.
Percussionist Brandon Bell, a Shepherd School Ph.D. candidate who played with Transitory in January, met Lane only last fall but calls him a tour de force.
“He’s always got multiple irons in the fire,” Bell said. “He’s filling a void that’s been missing.”
Mehrtens, the harpist, also loves what Lane is doing.
“I’ve been in music school six years. He runs with a totally different crowd,” she said. “What he’s doing is really valuable, bringing people together from a lot of different places to have a conversation about art. It’s very honest, real and relevant.”
So far, all of the Transitory shows at the Rec Room have sold out.
Lane has given proceeds to the nonprofits Dance Source Houston and Nameless Sound, although going forward, he plans to split any profits after show expenses with the musicians, he said.
“It’s not about making money. It’s about exposing people in Houston to different art forms and what immersive work is. Taking people in the music world and exposing them to dance … this collective, hybrid world I’m creating,” Lane said. “We could probably raise prices and still sell out, but I want to make it accessible. It’s important for me just to build and support the arts and expose people to things like this.”
Bell didn’t seem to mind that he wasn’t paid. He plans to perform again in April.
“We got pizza. That was good,” Bell said. “Just to get the chance to work with artists from other disciplines, I jump at the chance to do that. At conservatories, free-form improv is not something we get a chance to do often. It opens you up to new ideas.”
Lane appears to have as much energy, or more, than his cat Stinky. In addition to Transitory’s monthly shows, he’s performing at other venues and organizing frequent salon-style concerts at his studio.
It’s like he knows he doesn’t have time to waste.
The double whammy
Lane was living in Brooklyn on Sept. 11, 2001, just across the river from the World Trade Center. From the big studio where he and a partner had a furniture-design business, he watched the second plane come screaming down the island. He witnessed all that horror unfold — the buildings burning, people jumping, the buildings crumbling. He knew people who died.
He lived with white dust for weeks.
“We had all of it blowing in our houses. It was everywhere. You couldn’t avoid it,” he said. “And the jets flying over every night. There was a lot of stuff people didn’t realize was happening. It was a whole other world.”
For a while after that, Lane got involved with a real-estate management business. He also made films. He had studied architecture and landscape architecture at Texas A&M University before earning a degree in fine arts and film at the University of North Texas.
“I just have a lot of odd knowledge,” he said.
Then came a double whammy in 2008: The real-estate market crashed, and Lane got a diagnosis of prostate cancer. He founded Voices of Survivors, a web-based organization that documents the stories of cancer survivors. But after nearly 20 years in New York, it was time to come home.
His mother still lives in Houston. He has a brother in Victoria and a sister in Tyler. And he felt at home with the city’s art scene — it’s the reason he became an artist in the first place.
Lane saw his first opera, ballet and plays at Miller Outdoor Theatre. At the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Menil, he saw how art could be something different than paintings on a wall. The multimedia shows he’s creating now grew from those experiences.
His performances are rooted in his Quaker faith — an approach he compares to James Turrell’s use of light in sky spaces inspired by the Quaker refrain, “We hold you in the light.”
“My work is about consideration and space that happens between moments of someone coming in, like in improvisation,” Lane said. “In Quaker meetings, we sit in silence, and if you’re moved to say something, you stand up and say it. There has to be a consideration without a response. I tighten that up and blur the lines. That space that happens between each person’s moment, coming into the improvisation, is as important as the moment that they’re performing.”
His pieces always end with a period of silence, a “prolonged pause” that allows “consideration of the experience,” he said. “The audience is witnessing a conversation between all of us on stage.”
‘A whacky cat’
Stinky was batting at Lane for attention — the kind of moment, familiar to Lane’s friends on Facebook, that’s usually accompanied by some snide remark about the “stupid” cat.
That playfulness isn’t as flippant as it looks.
Lane said he has 5,000 Facebook friends, and more than 2,000 of them have survived cancer. He uses his games with Stinky to help remind them that life goes on, and to get them to talk to each other.
“Part of why I mess with this cat is that there is an audience out there going through a really rough period, and it brightens their day,” Lane said. “He plays fetch like a dog, and every morning he brings his ball and drops it by my head. He’s a whacky cat, that’s for sure.”