At UT, watch the drama evolve in front of your very eyes

On Oct. 20, writer Virginia Grise and musician Martha Gonzalez will invite an audience — seated directly on the Bass Concert Hall stage — to join in an ongoing project that yokes together art and politics.

Their "lecture performance" of "Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind," a play inspired by Helena María Viramontes' novel, "Their Dogs Came with Them," arrives as part of Grise's stint as an artist in residence at the University of Texas.

It comes at an exciting moment: At noon on Oct. 12, the MacArthur Foundation announced that Gonzalez had been named a MacArthur Fellow, an award known as a "genius grant." A resident of Claremont, California, the musician, scholar and artist/activist was recognized for "strengthening cross-border ties and advancing participatory methods of artistic knowledge production in the service of social justice."

That's quite a mouthful. It goes with an $800,000 grant.

More:University of Texas professor awarded MacArthur Foundation 'genius grant'

Returning to the subject at hand, the current partnership between Gonzalez and Grise chronicles the page-to-stage process of adapting Viramontes' epic novel about Latina women in gritty 1960s Los Angeles, when freeways obliterated longstanding communities.

The show's production history is as fascinating as its subject.

Grise developed the play with the help of prisoners at a medium-security women's prison in Goodyear, Arizona. It was first performed under an interstate in Tucson with a community cast of scholars, organizers and actors.

During the Austin show, Grise and Gonzalez will give a sneak peek into the songs they are putting together for a concept album. The multifaceted material seems to be turning into a musical. By responding to their "lecture performance," the audience becomes a part of the unhurried process.

Grise, who lives in Cedar Park, grew up in San Antonio and attended Converse Judson High School. She studied history and Spanish at UT and graduated in 1998. She taught at Austin High School, then in San Antonio. From 2006 to 2009, she studied at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, where she earned an MFA in writing for performance.

Back in the 1990s, Grise got involved with a group of Austin artists, academics and activists, led in part by stage and literary veterans Joni Jones, Daniel Alexander Jones, Raúl Salinas and Sharon Bridgforth.

"That was my training ground," says Grise, whose personal storytelling can be spellbinding. "I learned that 'art practice' and 'life practice' were not separate. I became an artist because I was finding ways as a teacher to help people to tell their own stories and claim their own power. Bridgforth's workshop is the reason I'm a writer."

More:Take a trip through some art and air-conditioning at this immersive ACL Fest installation

An alumna of the Women’s Project Playwrights’ Lab, Grise was a recipient of the Princess Grace Award in Theater Directing and the Playwrights’ Center’s Jerome Fellowship. Her play "Blu" received the Yale Drama Series Award and was published by Yale University Press.

"The Panza Monologues," co-written with Irma Mayorga, was published by University of Texas Press. She is currently playwright in residence at Cara Mía Theatre in Dallas and a research fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University.

The task of developing a play from a novel in an Arizona prison grew out of monthly meetings where prisoners talked about art. The performance under a freeway was well received and was headed to Los Angeles when the pandemic hit.

Texas Performing Arts picked up the ball, especially as Gonzalez's music became more integral to its future.

"With our resident artists, for the first time our stages are also laboratories for developing new performance," says Bob Bursey, executive and artistic director of the performing arts center. "Working with Virginia is especially meaningful because she’s a UT alum. She’s developed acclaimed works and received great recognition but hasn’t yet been featured here.

"I wanted to help develop this performance in particular because of both its form and content. It’s an unconventional collaboration between a playwright and a musician. The story that they’re telling is relevant to Austin and the current debate about Interstate 35."

The deliberate step-by-step method of growing this project allows Grise and Gonzalez time to engage in exchanges with audiences along the way.

"I make theater, in part, as an attempt to liberate myself from confinement, conventional rules, norms and structures," Grise writes on her website, "an attempt to imagine freedom."

If you go: 'Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind'

When: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 20

Where: Bass Concert Hall Stage, 2350 Robert Dedman Drive

Tickets: $10-$25

Info: texasperformingarts.org

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: How to see Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind at UT