Hancock Ballet
When the thirty-three-year-old painter, printmaker, and sculptor Trenton Doyle Hancock first began collecting comic books as a fifth grade minister’s son in Paris, Texas, his superheroes were more inclined to scale skyscrapers and don iron armor than to pirouette across the stage of a black-box theater. But in early April, the cartoonish cast of characters depicted in his artwork (see Art on Paper, Nov/Dec 2007), will be danced by real-life counterparts in Cult of Color: Call to Color, a new ballet choreographed by Stephen Mills, director of Ballet Austin, in Texas.
The performance, which will inaugurate Ballet Austin’s recently opened theater, presents Hancock’s first-ever collaboration with professional dancers and will be accompanied by an original score by the composer Graham Reynolds. (A concurrent exhibition, at Arthouse, Austin, will offer a behind-the-scenes look at materials relating to this unique collaboration, in the form of drawings, diagrams, and costume and prop designs.) Mills, for his part, said that choreographing a ballet in tandem with a visual artist was something he’d been considering for years and that the narrative element in Hancock’s artwork presented infinite possibilities for adaptation. After an initial meeting with the artist two years ago, Mills contacted Reynolds, who scored the 2006 film A Scanner Darkly, a sci-fi crime thriller. Reynolds, Mills felt, would provide an ideal accompaniment to Hancock’s story, since “the score needed to be cinematic.” ...
