Another Cool Place in Austin : Austin Texas Children’s Museum
With 7,000 square feet of interactive and educational permanent exhibits, inventive traveling features, story-times and public events, this public museum serves as a hub of Austin’s family community.
Upon entering, kids are delighted to board a scaled down Austin Metro bus. Sitting in the driver’s seat or holding a strap in the passenger section, this exhibit is planned to distract the kiddos as the adult pays admission and learns about the day’s events. Other permanent exhibits include the dairy cow, an oversized milk-cow statue with a looping video about dairy farming, with a doll-house sized barn and toy cows to play with. The Rising Star Ranch provides a varied sensory experience especially designed for the under-two set, while the Tinkerer’s Workshop allows older kids to experience creating their own structures by inventing, designing, building and testing their ideas.
This being Austin, music is emphasized in the amazing Austin Kiddie Limits. Fun for all ages (including adults), this room is a kid-oriented interactive version of the acclaimed live music television show Austin City Limits. With toy instruments, cowboy hats and other costume pieces, a stage and a video monitor, kids can play along with their favorite Austin musicians including Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Miss Lavelle White, Asleep at the Wheel, Kelly Willis, Flaco Jimenez, and Toni Price. Kids can see themselves on the video monitor, making it a real rock-star experience.
Their program offerings include something for every age group. Baby Bloomers is a weekly opportunity for kids under three to explore the entire facility with only toddlers and their caregivers in the museum. Discovery Time offers daily, hands-on activities that enhance the permanent and changing exhibits. Storytime, held in their large foyer, is offered for different age groups, and often includes music making, bubble blowing, and other interactive elements.
Gallery programs include the popular Wednesday Community Night, featuring different performances, storytelling, music and activities, and Science Sundays, featuring hands-on activities led by real honest-to-goodness scientists. Checkout the Childbloom guitar program for a cacophonous and hilarious take on combining story telling with accompaniment by the kids, or the Austin Keyboard Orchestra program to learn how to build and play an instrument.
Located in downtown Austin the Austin Children’s Museum is centrally located for people in different areas of the city. It is also located close to other Austin attractions like Zilker Park the bat bridge so that visitors can see a number of fun Austin attractions in an afternoon.
The Austin Children’s Museum offers camps during the summer and spring break, for ages 4 to 10. They offer seasonal programs including the popular Gingerbread House workshop in December. The facilities are available for birthday (and other kids of) parties, including sleep-over parties. Special events can also be held on the premises.
With a stated goal to help Austin’s kids and families become more creative, more inventive, and more competent, the Austin Children’s museum combines fun and education in a world-class facility.
Ki lives in Austin and enjoys the local music scene. He works as a realtor in the Austin real estate market. He also regularly writes on his blog about updates on Austin Texas real estate. His site features a graphical search of the Ausin MLS.
The Triumph Of The Baroque Style
Toward the close of the 16th century a style came into being that expressed a new concept of nature and the world, of the relationships among people, and of the function of art itself in the realms of both secular and religious power and in the private realm dedicated to the enjoyment of beauty.
This amazing style was the baroque and the capital of baroque architecture was papal Rome, with Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini its leading exponents. Baroque architecture is the expression of a civilization of awe-inspiring, splendid, magniloquent images exploited by the powerful to disguise a far different reality, dramatic and full of strife: it is a tool for persuasion and propaganda.
In its effort to triumph over the Protestant heresy, the Roman church used artistic representations to spread the ideas of the Catholic religion; in the same way, Europe’s great monarchs called upon artists to use it to exalt their power and prestige. This architectural language used ‘rhetorical figures’ for the alteration of classical proportions, the effects of gigantism, the expansion of spaces, and the dynamism of forms in the constant search for surprising and paradoxical effects.
Almost at the same time in the history, the interaction between the arts was put to the service of a display that preferred theatrical and illusionistic effects because of their ability to turn the public into both spectator and participant at once. The Galilean vision of the universe had given the arts a yearning for the infinite, expressed and at the same time manipulated in the marvelous optical tricks and effects of the period, in the exploration of the uncertain borders between truth and verisimilitude.
Artists mimicked the creative processes of nature and transposed natural reality into something artificial, even using light, water, and fire in their artistic creations. The palace and its facade, conceived as a theatrical backdrop, assumed a fundamental value, while the royal palaces in the countryside, from Versailles to Caserta, became emblematic expressions of 17th-century absolutism.
The church reproposed the basilican scheme, often using the ellipse as the geometric model of reference in increasingly audacious combination effects that made the dome the visual centre of urban space. At the same time the cities of Europe were being redefined with the creation of new, more easily travelled street systems, usually with right-angled or radial arrangements and vast squares. Undeniable, the triumph of the baroque started to see its influences everywhere!
Architecture Talk will help you on your way to understand more about the life and amazing works of particular world famous architect
Building an Opera House in Cyberspace
Reaching out to new audiences is a challenge for all branches of the arts, but this challenge is all the greater when you’re an opera company trying to keep an eighteenth century art form alive and well in the twenty first century.
The music, voices, and dramatic stories based in strong unchanging human emotions- have stood the test of time, but in this media stuffed, fast-paced, screen-age of computer games, high-octane entertainment and attention deficiency can you inject new life into an ancient art form to make it relevant to a whole new audience?
Where is the right space for opera amongst the explosion of easily accessible entertainment? How can opera reinvent itself for the hip-hop generation? How do you tackle the stigma of ‘elitism’ and create truly popular venues for performance?
These are questions and familiar to all modern opera companies, and one to which there is no easy answer.
Some companies reach out through schools and youth groups engaging youngsters in devising new ways of performing work. They hope that once the youths have discovered for themselves the transcendental power of this timeless music, it will be a huge force for good in their lives.
Others have taken opera out of the theatres and have collaborated with television production companies to create truly popular programmes like the Channel 4’s ground breaking ‘Operatunity’ in 2004 or ITV’s ‘Britain’s Got Talent’.
Their efforts have proven that, taken away from what is perceived by many in the UK as a rich man’s club, opera still has true widespread appeal.
Following on from these televisual excursions Lovlisetta Giubblis and her associate Fanny Batta, both with successful careers as sopranos behind them, have gone a step further.
In 2007 the two women, both Continental Europeans now based in the UK, set about the task of building a new opera house; one whose repertoire would attract a new kind of spectator. One that would banish forever the idea that opera is a stuffy, exclusive, pompous entertainment with no relevance in modern society.
Ms Giubblis explains: “We spoke to a lot of young people around the UK and it was depressing to realize that for them opera was just some fat white people singing in a foreign language to an audience of pretentious, rich coffin-dodgers”.
“We decided to do everything we could to change that perception.”
The enterprising pair started by looking at what interested the young people who would never normally be drawn to opera, in the hope of bringing some old-fashioned culture to the social housing projects and run-down urban areas.
“We wanted to grab the ‘ASBO generation’ and persuade them to put down their knives, stop texting, pull back their hoods, turn off Snoop Dogg and tune in to Puccini”, adds Mrs Batta.
“So We ran some focus groups based around some of the most accessible arias, and we realised pretty quickly that the answer lay in harnessing the power of the internet, and internet video, and of mobile phones. We needed to build our opera house in Cyberspace, then it would be in everybody’s neighbourhood.”
“Another thing we realized quite quickly was that no-one was going to watch a full blown opera on the small screen, so we needed to devise short versions of classic operas more suited to the medium. We wanted to keep the classic melodies, but we would have to create new stories more relevant to life in the ghetto.”
“Language was also a huge barrier. The kids wanted to understand the what was been sung about. We were looking around for a librettist who could write for a youth audience. Someone who could speak with their voice.”
The missing piece of the puzzle turned out to be Emiliano Fista, an Italian baritone, and librettist who had been working with young people from London’s infamous Craig David Estate for several years.
Emiliano suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome and had been forced to retire from singing, but he had thrown himself into writing. His work is multi-textured and manages to reach beyond traditional boundaries. His overt bigotry, profanity, deviant sexuality and obsession with chronic flatulence and are deeply offensive to almost all sections of society on many different levels. When he showed us his work we knew that it was dynamite. Emiliano also had the idea of calling the company ‘Pervarotti’.”
Thus was born the ‘Gran Teatro Pervarotti’, the World’s first virtual opera house. The first five featured arias are from Fista’s masterworks “Frigolletto” and “Don Gayovanni”. All are performed with great exuberance by the feline puppet soprano Isabella Strapponi.
Another innovation: all featured songs are in the form of timeless messages which can also be personalized and sent via email and to mobile phones.
Ms Giubbli is hopeful: “I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved. Basically young people love their phones and they really get a kick out teasing one another and flirting. This can go from poking gentle fun at each other to outright bullying. This usually involves a level of obscenity often accompanied by violence. Hopefully by sending these clips of opera to one another we will manage to reduce the incidence of violence and maybe increase the incidence of singing!”
The proof will be in the pudding, but the site has already come to the attention of one prominent member of the operatic establishment, Dr Jonathan Willer, who described it as being like “The sound of angels farting.”
You can decide for yourself by visiting their site – there is a seat ready for you and it’s the best one in the house. Although be warned the show does contain pretty strong language and so it’s not for those under 16!
Maria Fuchs-Alcox is an actress, singer, film-maker and shameless hagiographer. She is currently working as a presenter and reviewer for wiredvideo.net – London’s best video production company. Visit the “Gran Teatro Pervarotti: The Home of Rude Puppet Opera“.