Tickets

Wednesday
October 12, 2011
at 8 PM

FDDT
presents

Useless Activities
(A Love Story)
 &
A Farrell Dyde Performance
music by Gavin Bryars, Nillson, Ink Spots and many other classic artists
at
Barnevelder Movement Arts Complex
2201 Preston Street
Houston, Texas
(map)
(ample street and lot parking nearby)

Pre and Post Show Featuring New Paintings by E.M. “Mike” Hollis

“senior master Michael Hollis ,  eloquent, well-honed compositions are as good as it gets.”
-- Paper City


Tickets are $12.00 each for General Admission.  Seating is limited and first come first serve.  Tickets may be purchased at the door but advance tickets are strongly recommended. Please try to pay cash. Advance tickets can be purchased below.

Useless Activities (A Love Story) is an evening length dance theatre work created and performed by veteran choreographer/dancer/actor/director Farrell Dyde.  The work has three distinct yet related parts: (1) Some Game to music by the Ink Spots & Dalek, (2) The Twilight of James Morrison James to music by Nilsson & Gavin Bryars & (3) Second Story Man to music from the 1930s.

The work is about love, work, and the conflict between anxiety about the future and nostalgia for the past leading hopefully to a championing of the present.

Useless Activities takes its title from a quote by painter, Jasper Johns: “If one wants to accomplish a certain thing, and one knows what that thing is, one should simply set out and do it. And I think the more interesting paintings are paintings which are made in a more open way. Because the paintings should use up everything.  I don’t think one should imagine one is making something which is useful to oneself. I don’t know but there is something quite marvelous about the uselessness of this activity.”   The title also comes from the philosophy of Johns’ great friend, composer John Cage who held that “free play” (nothing useful intended) was the highest form of human activity.

Useless Activities will have three short acts and will feature a variety of characters that may be seen as individuals or as various components of the same person. The work, though basically non-linear, will have a traceable narrative arc or “through line” of sorts that captures one man’s journey from middle age crisis through thoughtful meditation leading to a kind of transcendence that allows his life to go forward in a positive way. 

“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely…”.. All art is quite useless.” -- Oscar Wilde

Pre and Post show features new paintings by E.M. "Mike" Hollis.

“Dyde is a fine performer with a sly comic sense, gifted in improvisations.”
-- Suzanne Shelton, Dance Magazine

“ In pieces like Desire in the Hinterlands and the solo, Havana – both ironic examinations of love lost and regained, of meeting and parting – he opened a window on dance that revealed a panorama wider and grander than the views offered by many better known modern practitioners of movement.”
 – Elizabeth Elam, Houston Home & Garden

“The ideas are brilliantly surreal and dangle on the cutting edge of cruel comedy.”
-- Ann Holmes, The Houston Chronicle

Tickets are $12.00  each for General Admission. Seating is limited and first come first serve. Complimentary beverages with ticket (beer, wine, soft drinks, water).  All Tickets now must be purchased at the door (cash and checks only please .