Grimm Tales

Tony Tucci, former resident lighting designer for Ballet Austin, has created lighting design for the company’s repertory for over 34 years, lighting designer/director for Ben Stevenson’s Texas Ballet Theater and Bruce Wood Dance. Recently designed Flemming Flindt’s Phaedra Ballet for the Mariinsky Theatre in Vladivostok Russia. Tucci created the lighting designs for Bernstein’s Mass at the Long Center in June 2018. In September 2018, Tucci designed a new production of Cinderella, choreographed by Ben Stevenson for the National Ballet of China. Tucci and has created designs for national and international dance companies: Washington Ballet, Houston Dance Salad, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Colorado Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, Ballet West, Cirque Ziva-Golden Dragon Acrobats, Royal Danish Ballet, Winnipeg and Swedish Ballets, Hong Kong Ballet, Singapore Dance Theatre, Ballet Contemporaneo de Caracas, Christopher Bruce’s Kingdom- Geneva Ballet, Flemming Flindt’s Caroline Mathilde and Lucifer’s Daughter-Royal Danish Ballet. Tucci has designed for musical theater, including Austin productions of Damn Yankees, Carousel, West Side Story, Annie, Gypsy, Jesus Christ Superstar, Music Man, Oklahoma, A Chorus Line, Carousel and Sound of Music as well as Charles Duggan’s productions of Dames at Sea in San Francisco and at the Goodspeed Opera House. For 1996 Summer Olympics, Tucci designed for the Cultural Olympiad, showcasing national and international companies. He is the recipient of two Iden Payne Awards and Critics Table awards for lighting in Austin.

Patrick and Holly Crowley / DDP Productions – Fabrication and Design Company
These two Austinites have graced many stages together designing and building sets for more than fifty companies over the past 17 years. Known for their professionalism and perseverance, this dynamic duo will leave you awestruck with their grace and simplicity. They have been nominated for several B. Iden Payne and Austin Critics Table Awards over the years for Set Design and Prop Design. Their selected credits include- Ballet Austin: The Nutcrackers (Fabrication), Grimm Tales (Fabrication/Scenic Art Supervisor), Exit Wounds (Fabrication/Scenic Art Supervisor), The Sleeping Beauty (Caraboose Sleigh), POE/A Tale of Madness (Design/build of the pendulum) Ballet Austin TWO: Donde van las Mariposas (Set Fabrication); Maria and the Mouse Deer (Set Designers/Fabrication) Long Center for The Performing Arts: Greater Austin High School Musical Theatre Awards 2014 (Grand Staircase/Podiums/Step & Repeat); Summer Stock Austin 2016 /Set Fabrication- The Addams Family Musical, Carnival!, and The Steadfast Tin Soldier Austin Opera: Fidelio (Backdrops and Portal); Sweeney Todd – (Passerelle/Scenic Charge) Austin Symphony: Leonard Bernstein’s Mass 100th Celebration (Technical Director/Fabrication/Painting Supervisor). Other companies/clients: Beyond Exhibitions/Paquin Entertainment USA – Beyond Van Gogh USA Tour/The Normal Studio (Turn-key build/ 9 Sets), The Alchemy Theatre, Penfold Theatre, The Aurora Arts Theatre, The Frank Erwin Center, Austin Playhouse, Southwestern University (The Outdoor Stage 2021 build out), The Fairmont Hotel, Theatre en Bloc, Salvage Vanguard Theater, Pollyanna Theatre Co., Street Corner Arts, KLRU, PSAV, Corpus Christi Ballet, and more.

In the nineties, Holly spent her summers up north working for Maine State Music Theatre as a carpenter and doing internships for Broadway tours. During the year, she performed at Fort Worth Opera as a chorus member. By 1999, she transferred to Southwest Texas State University, graduated, and moved to Austin. Over the years, she lived and worked in many cities throughout the United States auditioning at Austin Musical Theatre, teaching high school, working as a lighting technician, scenic charge, carpenter, and dresser for Broadway tours, Rock and Roll, Ballet, and Opera companies. In 2009, she met the love of her life, Patrick, and the DDP venture began. Holly holds a BA in Music-Vocal Performance and a BA in Theatre-Design. Holly is a member and trainer with I.A.T.S.E. #205, USITT, and has served as a member of The B. Iden Payne Council. Holly is currently CEO/Director of Production for DDP Production Services.

Born and raised in Austin, Patrick started his career at Zach Scott Theatre in 1976 taking his first theatre class at 9 years old with Don Day. By the time he was 19, he was hired as Master Carpenter for Zilker Summer Musicals and Props Construction for Austin Lyric Opera under the tutelage of Steve Parks at the University of Texas. In his free time, Patrick taught Technical Lab for Theatre at the ACC Rio Grande Campus. In 1989, he started rigging at the Frank Erwin Center, and within a year hired on as the Touring Manager with a local Austin band named Near Dark, moving him to New York City and living on St. Mark’s Place. In 1992 he started touring professionally with Adam Ant. Other tours included ZZ TOP, Bob Dylan, The Wallflowers, Slipknot, Jay-Z, Smoke Out Festival w/Snoop Dogg and Cypress Hill, and many more artists. In 2003 he was hired as General Manager for Spectrum Production Services and both toured and oversaw the Rental and Touring branches of the company. Over the years he traveled coast to coast setting up both hydraulic and conventional staging, managing logistics and maintenance of the trucks, and overseeing all production riders for both the Minnesota and the Las Vegas offices. After touring, Patrick returned to Texas to finish his degree. While attending classes, he was hired on as the Technical Director/Shop Foreman/Lab Instructor for the Department of Theatre and Dance at SWT. In 2009, he met the love of his life, Holly, and they started DDP at The Aurora Arts Theatre. Patrick holds a BFA in Directing-Summa Cum Laude. Patrick is currently a Production Supervisor at The Long Center for The Performing Arts. He is also a member and trainer with I.A.T.S.E. #205, and Artistic Director/Technical Director for DDP Production Services.

A BFA graduate of the University of Illinois and a product of the burgeoning theatre movement of the 1980s, Howard Werner has developed from a young Chicago lighting designer into a multi-talented, many-faceted lighting, projection, and multimedia design leader. Often found at the apex of the Broadway design world, he is just as likely to be found ground level, lighting a plaza, illuminating an historic building, or exercising his genius for exhibit design. His award-winning work spans theatre, architecture and event categories. and his expertise has brought him recognition as a Live Design Master Class presenter for Broadway Projections.

George Tsypin is an American stage designer, sculptor, and architect. He was an artistic director, production designer and coauthor of the script for the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games in Sochi in 2014. Tsypin was born in Kazakhstan and studied architecture in Moscow and theater design in New York. He has worked for many years with renowned directors and composers, such as Julie Taymor, Peter Sellars, Francesca Zambello, Pierre Audi, Jurgen Flimm, Philip Glass, John Adams, KaiJa Saariaho, and Andrey Konchalovsky. He has a longstanding creative association with the conductor Valery Gergiev. He has won many awards, including the International Competition of “New and Spontaneous Ideas for the Theater for Future Generations” at Georges Pompidou Center in Paris. His designs for opera have been produced all over the world, including Salzburg Festival, Opera de Bastille in Paris, Covent Garden in London, La Scala in Milan, Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg, Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and Metropolitan Opera in New York. Tsypin has worked in all major theaters in the United States, as well as in film and television. His sculpture received its first one-man gallery show in 1991 at the Twining Gallery in New York He created the Planet Earth Gallery, one of the Millennium Projects in England: a major installation of moving architectural elements, videos, and 200 sculptures. Tsypin was chosen to exhibit his work at the Venice Biennale in 2002. His monograph, GEORGE TSYPIN OPERA FACTORY: Building in the Black Void, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2005. Tsypin’s Broadway debut as a set designer for a musical was Disney Theatrical’s production of The Little Mermaid, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. He designed the set for the new musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark for which he won Outer Critics Award and received Tony Award nomination. Additionally, Tsypin designed the SeaGlass Carousel for Battery Park next to the World Trade Center site.

Constance Hoffman has designed costumes for opera, dance, and theatre regionally, internationally, and in New York City. Her credits include collaborations with theatre artists such as Mark Lamos, Julie Taymor, Eliot Feld, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, opera directors Robert Carsen, David Alden, Christopher Alden, Keith Warner, and entertainer Bette Midler. Her work has been seen on many stages in New York City, including the Public Theatre, The New Victory Theatre, The Second Stage, The Theatre for a New Audience, Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, The Joyce, and The New York City Opera. On her Broadway debut, she earned a Tony nomination and an Outer Critics Circle Award for her designs for The Green Bird, directed by Julie Taymor. Hoffman’s collaborations in opera have taken her to the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, the Paris Opera, the New Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich and The Tokyo Opera Nomori, among others. In the United States, she has designed costumes for the San Francisco Opera, the Santa Fe Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, the Minnesota Opera, the Portland Opera, the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, the Lincoln Center Festival, and she has had a long association with the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, New York, whose productions have traveled regularly to the New York City Opera. At the New York City Opera, Hoffman’s designs for the critically acclaimed Paul Bunyan, Tosca, and Lizzie Borden have been televised in the Live from Lincoln Center Broadcasts. Regionally, she has designed in theatres such as the Guthrie, the Hartford Stage, The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., The Center Stage in Baltimore, The Alley Theatre in Houston, Goodspeed Musicals and the Prince Music Theatre. In addition to her Tony Nomination and Outer Critics Circle Award for The Green Bird in 2000, Hoffman was honored in 2001 with The Theatre Development Fund’s Irene Sharaff Young Masters Award, and in 2003, 2007, and 2011 with an invitation to exhibit her work in the Prague Quadrennial.

Natalie Frank explores contemporary discourse on feminism, sexuality, and violence. Recent drawings and books The Story of O and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Princeton University Press, 2017) use literature as inspiration. Her gouache and chalk pastel drawings of the unsanitized Brothers Grimm tales, brings back, with Jack Zipes’ translations, aspects of sexuality and physical violence left out of our familiar stories. In Frank’s 2015 exhibition at The Drawing Center, N.Y., Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and in her accompanying publication Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Drawings by Natalie Frank (Damiani), Frank drew the unsanitized tales with a feminist interpretation, emphasizing the rotes of women.
The exhibition traveled to the Blanton Museum of Art (University of Texas at Austin) and the Kentucky Art Museum. Frank earned a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 2002, and Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in 2006. She is a Fulbright Scholar, Oslo, Norway. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Blanton Museum of Art, the Rose Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Museum.

Called “the quintessential modern composer” by the London Independent, Austin, Texas based composer-bandleader-improviser Graham Reynolds records and performs music for film, theater, dance, television, rock clubs, and concert halls with collaborators across a multitude of disciplines. He recently scored Richard Linklater’s Hit Man (Netflix) with Glen Powell and Adria Arjona, Happy Jail (Netflix), Stop Hitting Yourself (Lincoln Center Theater), Out of Her Mind (BBC), POE / A Tale of Madness (Ballet Austin), and a multi-year commission from Ballroom Marfa, The Marfa Triptych, culminating in his Creative Capital Award winning project Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance, a bilingual cross-border opera created with librettists Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol (Mexico City) and director Shawn Sides (Rude Mechs) and staged in over a dozen cities in North America.

As Artistic Director of the non-profit Golden Hornet, Graham spearheads efforts which draw on both the collaborative spirit of rock bands and the composer-led nature of classical music, with a focus on commissioning new music, fostering young and emerging composers, and presenting adventurous works in non-traditional settings. These endeavors include the The Sound of Science alongside Kronos Quartet’s longtime cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, Insectum with Zeigler and drummer/percussionist Susie Ibarra, and MXTX: A Cross-Border Exchange; a multi-faceted project comprised of a live performance, album, remixes, and open-source audio sample library involving more than 40 artists from Texas and Mexico.

Reynolds leads the jazz-based but far reaching Golden Arm Trio, is a company member with the internationally acclaimed Rude Mechs theater collective, and resident composer with Salvage Vanguard Theater and Forklift Danceworks. His accolades include a Creative Capital Award, an Independent Music Award, two Frederick R. Loewe Music Theatre Awards, ten Austin Critics Table Awards, the John Bustin Award, multiple Austin Chronicle ‘Best Composer’ wins, and a B. Iden Payne Award. MARFA: A Country & Western Big Band Suite (Fall 2019) broke into the top 100 on the NACC radio charts along with a track premiere in Billboard. In 2020, Graham signed with London-based record label Fire Records and released his original score for Alfred Hitchcock’s silent classic, The Lodger. His most recent release with Fire, Music for Prophet (Parts 1-4), dropped earlier this year, offering a glimpse into a forthcoming full-length solo album slated for release in 2025.

Known for his innovative and collaborative choreographic projects, Stephen Mills has created over 60 premieres for Ballet Austin and has works in the repertoires of companies across the United States and around the world.

His inaugural season as artistic director in 2000 attracted national attention with his world-premiere production of Hamlet, hailed by Dance Magazine as “… sleek and sophisticated.” The Washington Post recognized Ballet Austin as “one of the nation’s best kept ballet secrets” in 2004 after Mills’ world premiere of The Taming of the Shrew, commissioned by and performed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. The Company’s first Kennedy Center invitation in January of 2002 was to perform Mills’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Ballet Austin presented a variety of Mills’ works at The Joyce Theater (NYC) in 2005 and returned to the Kennedy Center in collaboration with The Suzanne Farrell Ballet in 2008 and for the Ballet Across America Festival in 2013.

In 2005 after two years of extensive research, Mills led a communitywide human rights collaboration that culminated in the world premiere work Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project (Light). In 2006 Light was awarded the Audrey & Raymond Maislin Humanitarian Award by the Anti-Defamation League. The work made its international debut in September 2013, with performances in three cities across Israel and is the subject of the award-winning documentary film, FINDING LIGHT. In October 2016, Mills led the company through a 16-city tour of the People’s Republic of China, concluding in China’s largest city, Shanghai.

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