DINOSAUR SAINTS & HUMBLE ROBOTS: a magic puppet bus tour

Habitable spaces recently had the pleasure of hosting two amazing puppet troupes from Puerto Rico and Brooklyn, NY.  While they were here they worked on their traveling show, and gave us a fabulous performance one sunny afternoon.

The gang takes a bow after the show.

  Here is more information about their work:
Jawbone Puppet Theater is a father and son act from Brooklyn, NY, by way of Taiwan.  Poncili Company is a collective of four young experimental puppeteers from Puerto Rico.  We have joined forces to embark on a project which is part puppet tour, part cultural exchange, and part life/art/theater/education experiment, and we would love to do some shows and workshops in your neighborhood.DINOSAUR SAINTS & HUMBLE ROBOTS: a magic puppet bus tour.

This month we welcome artists Kate Sopko and Angela Beallor to Habitable Spaces.  They have created Dragon Fort using a wooden spool top, bricks, wire, red flint rocks, huisache, mesquite, various thorny vines.  Dragon Fort is created in a landscape that  bites back, so it’s got some teeth.  The piece is based on a playsite Angela carved out of a large thorn bush as a child.  We make no guarantees of one’s physical safety in the structure, but feel certain there is an uncommon psychic protection that comes from standing within something fearful. Fallen trees have been shaped around the perimeter and a dome-shaped structure has been created out of branches and thorny vines in the center.  We were sad to see Kate return to her native Clevland, Ohio, but Angela is staying on until the end of the month to complete another structure out of sewn tents, camouflage, and wood that will become a habitable space.

Thank you to everyone who came out to enjoy the wonderful Fall weather with us at our Harvest Party and Thanksgiving. It was wonderful to see so many dogs, kids and kind folks enjoying themselves at Habitable Spaces. . ≈

This month we welcome resident artist Jesper Aabille to Habitable Spaces. He will be doing several performances in Austin and San Antonio, as well as building us a marvelous sculptural space that incorporates a smoker and a mesquite chopping area. Aabille works in a variety of artistic strategies: urban interventions, sculptures, drawings, and text-oriented pieces. The common thread is the focus on social life, whether it is creating solutions to mundane problems by making bridges to avoid stepping in a water pit or cooking a fried egg on self-destructive wooden kitchen sculptures. The borderline between reality and fiction often take on the form of the absurd to the point where this line becomes unstable. A central concern of Aabille is a specific and insistent interpretation of the world, which, because of it’s limited and defined scope, will never be adequate in a complex modern reality. Thereby failure is an imminent symptom of the work right from the beginning, but it only shows its grim face when Aabille has exhausted other opportunities.

We said goodbye to Julien and Laura, our wonderful French couple who stayed with us for two weeks. During their time with us they built an amazing fence around the chicken coop. Welcome to the Chicken Ranch!!