The very first event at the brand-new West Oaks Art House takes place this Friday night, when the Suchu Dance company performs its first work in the eerie fluorescent-lit cavern left behind by JCPenney when it gave up on its freestanding building at the West Oaks Mall in 2003. The performance kicks off the appropriately named Big Range Dance Festival. It’s not just the repositioning dance of the vacant mall department store: 16 Suchu dancers will range around the enormous space in a piece called “Afternono.” To counter claims that this event is a bit too “way-out” for Suchu’s usual East Downtown audiences, the company is commandeering a trolley-style bus to bring audience members from the Spring Street Studios north of Downtown to the West Houston mall at Westheimer and Hwy. 6.
LA artist Sharsten Plenge, who’s been working to transform the abandoned 100,000-sq.-ft. store into some sort of arts center — in part by offering free rent to artist groups willing to venture so far from their usual haunts and set up shop or exhibits there — tells Swamplot she hopes the inaugural Suchu performance (as well as additional ones on subsequent Saturday afternoons) “marks the beginning of what we hope to be many more unique projects” in the building, which now bears the acronym WOAH.
“At 100,000 square feet, it is more than twice as big as all the alternative/artist-run spaces currently in existence in Houston combined. If it can actually be filled with stuff and events in a compelling, convincing way, it moves the center of gravity for Houston art to the west purely by virtue of its size. The more I think about it, the challenge will be figuring out ways to effectively use that space. Usually the issue for an art exhibit is a lack of space — a show at, say, Labotanica can feel uncomfortably cramped. For a curator or artist, this space presents the precise opposite problem. A good model in this regard might be Mass MOCA, the enormous museum in North Adams, MA. Filling the cavernous old factory buildings required big, bold artworks. Are there Houston artists who could step up to this challenge? I’d say yes — for example, Sharon Engelstein’s 
Following in the footsteps of groundbreaking Houston Press adventurers John Nova Lomax and David Beebe, an acolyte named Brent Zius has chosen today as the day he’s gonna walk the entire length of Westheimer, starting a full 3 miles west of West Oaks Mall and ending in Midtown, where the road gives up its name to Elgin. Zius, who claims he’s made “no real training or preparation” for the trek, is at least bringing his Twitter account with him: 
