HSPVA STUDENTS GET A CHANCE TO SHINE
At a high school musical this weekend, the theatrics are Broadway-level.
Students in the roles of Mary Poppins and Bert will “fly” suspended above the stage at the Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA) production of Disney and Cameron Mackintosh’s “Mary Poppins” in the new on-campus theater.
The performance is the largest production in the HISD magnet school’s history, with 55 students performing from the orchestra pit, 45 kids on stage and 50 more behind the scenes contributing to set design, lighting and costumes.
“A big production of a musical is the one art form that incorporates every one of the things that we teach on our campus,” says the school’s magnet coordinator, Jonathan Klein, who is producing the show. HSPVA’s disciplines are dance, creative writing, theater, visual arts, vocal music and instrumental music.
Many HSPVA students want to pursue the arts in college and then as a career, he says, and productions like this offer real-world experience.
“Their passion is performing,” Klein says, and “a Broadway musical might be the most American art form of all.”
The production takes place in the school’s new theater, which holds about 800 people. For the flying scene, the school contracted the same special-effects company that works with Theatre Under The Stars (TUTS).
A magical umbrella
Paul Jarosz’s son Luca Jarosz, 16, is a junior playing the role of Bert. Jarosz says Luca was initially a little apprehensive to fly, but he got the hang of it in rehearsals, which started this summer.
In addition to joining his friend Mary Poppins in the air, Bert is part of the number “Step in Time.” In his role, Luca dances with an ensemble of chimney sweepers, who hoist him up so that he can walk up the side of the stage and flip off while continuing to sing.
“It’s both nerve racking as a parent” to watch and a proud moment to see, Jarosz says.
Jarosz’s daughter graduated from HSPVA. When family members have come to town for stage productions, they’re surprised to learn the show is put on entirely by students, including the orchestral accompaniment, he says.
“The production value is just fantastic,” Jarosz says, adding that the cast “takes a lot of pride in the quality of the work.”
Family-friendly stage performances allow local kids in the audience to learn that “if they’re interested in studying the arts, there’s a one-of-a kind school that can offer that,” Klein says.
HSPVA graduates have gone on to perform on Broadway. Opera singer Camille Zamora is returning to campus this year to lead a master class for vocal students.
An arts destination
HSPVA’s new downtown location near the Theater District gives students frequent exposure to the arts and the chance to perform with major arts organizations.
They’re also a short walk from Discovery Green, where students are currently putting on free weekly concerts.
The On Deck! series features performances including jazz and mariachi.
Klein says the series draws professionals who walk from nearby buildings to have lunch, in addition to those who come from conventions at George R. Brown and school groups who attend as a field trip.
“To have an opportunity to perform for the public and to add enjoyment to their lunch hour is not only a learning opportunity … but also fun for the kids,” Klein says.
The sly, hybrid, Colonial-era characters of Michael Menchaca’s “La Raza Cosmica 20XX” series appear to hail from from Mexico, Europe, Asia and Africa by way of some classic video-game realm.
They appear in two forms within his exhibition “The Silicon Valley Codex” at Lawndale Art Center: A series of 16 small prints hangs on one wall, then pops to life in the comic-book inspired panels of four animated videos on another.
The flat, woodcut-style portraits are based on Spanish casta paintings, small-format works popular during the Colonial era that categorized the various types of ethnic fusion happening with the interbreeding of humans in the New World. Each picture contains a set of parents with a child.
Menchaca also is reinterpreting a mestizo identity theory written in 1925 by Mexican philosopher and politician José Vasconcelos, who envisioned a “fifth race” so mixed that it would be universal and free of racist ideologies — a global, humanitarian utopia.
But Menchaca’s own lexicon also is unmistakable. A rising star from San Antonio who earned his advanced degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, he developed a distinctive visual language early on to speak to the 21stcentury Latinx experience. Concepts and symbols from MesoAmerican codexes (manuscripts that share history, religion and geography with codified graphics) collide in his art with the quirky graphics and movement of Japanese video games.
Menchaca uses his signature anthropomorphic animal figures as a kind of Trojan horse, to spark discussion about sociopolitical issues that concern him. With this series, the villain is surveillance capitalism — the manipulation of lives with the data people unwittingly produce every time they pick up a cellphone, look at a website or otherwise engage with the all-seeing eyes of giant tech corporations.
The “La Raza” figures are funny and kind of passive-aggressive. They looked trapped in animalmask heads and Colonial garb, but what’s really holding them captive is their cellphones, which emit WiFi signals into layered environments where familiar digital icons lurk. (That bluebird in the tree, the thumbs-up “like” symbol.)
According to his website, Menchaca is boycotting social media “until further U.S. legislation is passed to regulate and hold these private corporations directly accountable for violating global democracies.” There’s more ambivalence in his art, though, since he makes it with digital technology tools.
Lately, Menchaca has been creating custom wallpapers to give his shows an immersive quality. He has plastered the walls and columns of Lawndale’s huge O’Quinn Gallery with hundreds of these acrylic screenprints, in sections made from dot-sized digital icon patterns. This agitates the room, building noise behind the other works, including eight biggish paintings on canvas whose figures are contemporary Latinos ensnared in a digital world. The show also includes a salon-style hanging of small works on paper and a virtual-reality experience that’s easy to miss. (The goggles are attached to a flat mask that sits on a pedestal in the middle of the room.)
A brainy essay in the show pamphlet calls all of this “transmedial interplay.” I understand Menchaca’s need to explore his ideas through different mediums. He’s built some notoriety with his printmaking, and I suppose collectors demand paintings; or maybe Menchaca just wanted to make art with his hands and a brush instead of a stylus.
But videos are his strong suit, and I wish there were more of them in the Lawndale show. The little “La Raza” prints are colorfully seductive, but once you’ve seen the figures pop to life — with their disembodied parts, bobbing heads, swiveling arms and spinning collars — everything else in the show seems kind of lifeless. While there’s almost a subversive edge with the tactical qualities of the wallpaper, I’d like to see what Menchaca could do with a truly immersive, digital environment.
Menchaca presents his talk “Silicon Valley: The Seduction of Racial & Surveillance Capitalism” 1-3 p.m. Saturday at Lawndale Art Center, 4912 Main; free; 713-5285858, lawndaleartcenter.org. The exhibition is on view through Dec. 22.