Jennifer Hart Redux -- Anticipating Anthropocene
by David Glen Robinson

Jennifer Hart, again

Comes the indefatigable Jennifer Hart with Anthropocene, another multimodal performance work, ,premiering August 15, 2025 at the Austin Ventures Studio theatre. Hart and her company, Performa/Dance, will present another characteristically serious, accessible, and humor-filled performance with her troupe of skilled, ballet-based dancers and well-trained actors. Performa/Dance was formed in 2014 with co-artistic director Edward Carr, who has now retired.

 

Jennifer Hart works her advantages in performance as the curriculum director of Ballet Austin, charged with the continuing education of young dancers admitted to BA’s academy. As a director, she can offer performance opportunities to the students. She has a keen eye for talent. Her career results have been impressive, with a string of Ballet Austin II performances and Performa/Dance shows including Bluegrass Junction, Mad Scene, and last year’s Pivot.

 

In the last few years, Hart has embraced experiment, mixed forms, and allegory. She has recruited from the contemporary dance and experimental theatre scenes (now languishing in underfunded state with most of the rest of the fine arts), blending forms to create work nevertheless clearly stamped with the look and feel of ballet. In this she joins the trending currents of ballet, which uphold the name of the most traditional form in the fine arts while pursuing the utterly new.

 

Anthropocene bodes well to become a new light in the arena of things not seen before. Hart’s principal collaborators, Alexandra Bassioukou Shaw and Kelsey Oliver, are powerful creators. They bring humor to serious subject matter as well—Oliver wore the highest pompadour wig in all of 2023’s Mad Scene. Audiences are still laughing over that set of jokes and scenarii. We won’t know what the new set of outrageous material will be until the new show premieres, .

 

The production and its title refer to our geological epoch, named after us (Anthropos, humankind) by earth history geologists. They point out that with human-caused mass habitat reduction around the globe, we, the human species, are potentially responsible for the extinction of as many vertebrate species as died out at the end of the Ice Age, probably more. The proposition is controversial in geological circles, but there seems to be suggestive evidence for it, as the thoughtful may observe on any road trip, trying not to glance at the abundant roadkill they pass—or create.

 

 

Jennifer Hart taps into important themes or issues that should be important with her characteristic high creativity and eye for funny. For proof, we only need to look at one of her publicity photos. In it, her co-creator Alexa Capareda, in skintight dancewear, stands on sterile river sands under the MoPac bridge over Lady Bird Lake. She has a bucket over her head. The visual metaphor works many ways—humanity rising out of barren sands? Humanity making the sands barren? We’re all in the sandbox here? We’re all faceless bucketheads and need to do something about it? All or part of the above? Don’t think too hard about it, the picture is funny at its baseline.

 

The marvelous thing about any creative is that they can’t help sharing all the richness of their mind. Jennifer Hart shares all the color, dance, thoughtfulness, and humor of her mind in wildly extravagant measure. Modern ballet is in good hands with Hart envisioning, making, and producing performances that certainly advance into the new. Go see her new show.

Click for CTXLT production listing. 

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Anthropocene
by Performa/Dance
Performa/Dance