Results tagged “performanceart”

It's gonna be a scorcher today, the first day of Williamsburg Walks -- where the neighborhood creates a pedestrian-only zone on Bedford Avenue between Metropolitan and North 9th Street.

Back in January video emerged of an enthusiastic street performer, Matthew Silver, dancing in front of Earwax record store on Bedford Avenue. It seems that a war has been going on since, between the employees of the store and the ever-growing troupe of Silver's clowns (dubbed the BC Fools) that adorn the outside of its shop.

Clams: We were going to shows on a regular basis and after a while I found myself coming up with ideas for acts...but I'm really shy in real life, so I didn't think it was something I'd ever do. Just for fun, I took a class with Jo Boobs, who put me in her show, Paperback Burlesque at the Cutting Room...and I've been hooked ever since.

In 2004, Mark Russell resigned from his position as Artistic Director of P.S. 122 after more than two decades spent developing the theater into a mecca for wildly adventurous performance art. And he hasn't looked back; in addition to serving as Artistic Director for Portland's Time Based Art Festival, Russell has remained a major force in New York with his Under the Radar Festival, now in its fourth year and headquartered at the Public Theater. The event draws performers and audiences from around the world for what has arguably become the most exciting theater festival in New York City, a town lousy with them. Russell's impeccable taste is integral to Under the Radar's success; as Eric Bogosian – who got his start at P.S. 122 in the 80s – puts it: "Russell is a genius at finding the awkward new stuff, the gems and diamonds no one's noticed yet. If the 'artist is the antenna of the race,' then Mark is the antenna of the antenna."

COMEDY: In November, shortly after the WGA strike sent SNL to reruns, the cast took the UCB Theater stage for an off-air show. If you missed that one, there's a chance to catch some of the cast doing stand-up at Comix tonight. The site says "sold out" but the people at the venue say they just added more tickets! So give a call and enjoy "An Evening with the Writers and Performers from Saturday Night Live." The money raised will go toward the Writers Guild of America. And yes, Andy Samberg (pictured with cat) will be there. Andy Samberg, originally scheduled to be there, has dropped out of the show.

There’s such a dizzying number of ways to throw money away on New Year’s Eve that it’s always tempting to just stay home and avoid the throngs of staggering amateurs altogether. But what to do about dinner? If you're not in the mood to cook, it's really not such a bad night to sample some of the New Year's Eve restaurant specials, as long as you're willing to a few extra bucks. Rather than deluge you with a mind-numbing list of restaurant recommendations, we’ve winnowed it down to a manageable number of not-outrageously-priced options, all things considered. As of last night all of them were still accepting reservations for the 31st.

LISTEN UP: Last month we set up shop at White Rabbit, which was transformed into Gothamist House, with WOXY for 4 days of shows. Now WOXY has put together "Best of" podcasts from each of those days, and the first one is up -- so give a listen! Gothamist House Day 1.mp3 ART: First Friday's are so over, tonight come to Williamsburg for Every 2nd Friday. Pick up a copy of "the only comprehensive guide...

SPA: FreeNYC tells us that "in honor of their 20th Anniversary, Nina's European Day Spa is offering up some free and discounted treatments!" Get there before 7pm and you'll get a free eyebrow threading or waxing, free mini microdermabrasion, and free hand treatments. Free: it's a beautiful price.

THEATER: Sarah Maxfield, the brains behind theater collective Red Metal Mailbox, brings THROW, the bi-monthly performance series she curates, to The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. Imbibe cheap beer and vibe new work by Rebecca Davis, Betsy Miller & Dancers, and Tara O'Con. After each experiment, Maxfield moderates an exchange in which each performer interrogates the audience in hopes of culling constructive criticism from the increasingly lubricated crowd. Who’ll be the first to declare, “Worst performance art EVER”? - John Del Signore

THEATER: New York Magazine called Kanene Holder’s last solo show, SITCHAASSDOWN “21 pitch-perfect snapshots of the black experience”. His current multimedia performance art installation, Committing that Black on Black Crime Called Blackface, goes down in the front window of chashama on 37th Street. Between the hours of 5:30pm and 8pm, curious passers-by can behold Holder paying satirical homage to Buckwheat “via a self-muzzled/pantomiming character who navigates a racist cauldron of images while staring into circus mirrors for glimpses and reconfirmations of reality, by repetitively applying and removing black-face makeup. The menacing screens around him “flash a motley crew of visual memorabilia and supplanted nostalgic references to "the good ole' days" of minstrel shows then and now.” - John Del Signore

THEATER: With his zany imagination and distinctive bass-baritone voice, Joseph Keckler (myspace) has been generating buzz throughout the gooey honeycomb of the downtown performance art cabaret scene. Tonight he sprinkles his particular blend of whimsical catnip at Dixon Place with Cat Lady, in which a man re-enacts an ordinary day with his mother, who runs a community theater with cat actors out of her home. “Past lives are recalled, songs are sung, and finally a trip to the vet's is made in this comedic and dark exploration of the relationship between art and trauma.” Part of the HOT! Festival. – John Del Signore

MOVIE: It's certainly not the kind of night for an outdoor movie, so we suggest sitting in the cool a/c and watching the 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead. "Gone is the possibility of mankind’s dominance in this sequel to Night of the Living Dead; the zombies are in control now, with a group of AWOL soldiers and TV producers on the run from the staggering hordes. A deserted shopping mall offers a safe hideout, as well as the setup for Romero’s savage satire on consumer culture." The early screening will be introduced by producer Richard Rubenstein, more info here.

MOVIES: It's a perfect night to head to the movies. Get a double-feature in at the MoMA with Fabricating Tom Zé followed by David Cronenberg's Crash. Let's focus on the former film. Tom Zé (pictured) is a Brazilian songwriter and composer and this documentary (filmed during a 2005 European tour) charts his "personal universe". Zé is an "uncompromising and inspired artist...seen by many (including David Byrne and Arto Lindsay) as revitalizing the ever-evolving Tropicalia movement. Zé, who narrates his own story, is a very special musical phenomenon in a genre mostly associated with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil—both of whom warmly assess the musical genius of their friend."

You may think you lived in a cramped apartment, but what would it be like to share a four-story, clear vinyl tenement no wider than your shoulders? A group of six international artists is 15 days into a radical experiment in "two-dimensional" living. FLATLAND is a piece of performance art being staged over a three-week period at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens. Attempting to carry on their individual work while adapting to the strange environment, the artists who inhabit the transparent structure have kept a blog of their experiences thus far.

prompted a free speech case heard by the Supreme Court and was the only film banned in New York as well as 24 states and 4 countries. For those interested in the underground film movement in New York in the '60s, Smith is a really seminal, though obscure figure. This documentary portrait gives a real sense of Smith's struggles to get his work made and his role within the scene, from his exotic, free-form film shoots on SoHo apartment roofs to his late night, drug-fueled performance art pieces. Ultimately we see how Smith unfortunate insistence that his work remain unfinished (ostensibly to safeguard against getting banned again) kept him woefully obscure. But Jordan's documentary is a wonderful opportunity to see much of his luscious, weird and provocative work blown up on the big screen as well as hear from the crazy crew of friends and enemies who knew Smith. The film is playing now at Film Forum through April 24th, so don't miss it.

There’s drama pinballing through the theater blogs this week, people! In a recent letter to subscribers, Carolyn Cantor, the director of Adam Rapp’s play Essential Self-Defense, took issue with Charles Isherwood’s “scathing” review in the Times. Isherwood has become something of a punching bag among theater bloggers for his perceived stodginess, and the review is, at times, unnecessarily ad hominem: “A self-conscious exercise in stagy attitudinizing, it could almost have been composed by a computer. Well, maybe a computer that spends a lot of time posing in funky bars in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.” [Disclosure: we once caught a nasty virus from a computer we picked up in a funky Williamsburg bar. Never again.]

The much anticipated, David Bowie-curated High Line Festival has finally announced a lineup.

We were traveling the day The Graffiti Research Lab's new show, Open City, premiered at Eyebeam, so we decided to go check it out yesterday afternoon. The exhibit was completely mind blowing-- a dozen or more installations showing the latest and greatest in graffiti technology and culture-jamming performance art. They've got fire-extinguisher tagging systems, subway-swings, laser-projection graffiti, and a whole bunch of other stuff that's impossible to describe. Check it out for yourself, either online or in person. Open City will be on-display through April 7th, Tuesday through Saturday, 12-6 @ 540 West 21st between 10th and 11th.

Blogs aren’t just for socially-awkward shut-ins anymore and we’ve got proof: many successful, outgoing theater types maintain weblogs. While they don't get as much glory (or contempt) as their influential music-blog counterparts, they do have their dignity. And there's sometimes drama!

which begins a three day run at Anthology Film Archives tonight. With his work, Glover attempts to push the envelope of cultural taboo, and in every aspect of his 2 plus hour presentation, he succeeds.

I have a soft spot in my heart for novels that are deceptively simple or straight-forward, and for plots that take their sweet time unraveling their secrets. I appreciate the nuance, the seduction, of well-shaped characters and quiet implications. In certain keys, Nell Freudenberger’s new novel – the chaser to her 2003 short story collection, Lucky Girls – was a well-suited match.

THEATER: One saving grace of working in midtown is that there's plenty to see on a lunchtime or late afternoon stroll, if you don't get stampeded by the crowds. And one of the best things to see, which is also away from the worst of the congested sidewalks, are Chashama's installations of window performance art. This week and next, in the 9th Oasis festival, you can catch 20-minute works from a brilliant range of over 40 choreographers chosen by Debbie Stamos and Marc Dale; with such a prime opportunity both to play the voyeur and see the next generation of artists while you're at it, maybe you should head to midtown one day even if you don't work there. - Mallory Jensen

THEATER: The Ontological-Hysteric Theatre itself is a great incubator for avant-garde performance art-type work, so when they have an incubator program themselves, you know what you're seeing there will be fresh and startling. Banana Bag and Bodice was in the program last year with Panel. Animal and is back with The Sewers, a "conjuring act" in which a village called, um, The Sewers, disappears one night in the theatre, leading to a love triangle and loads of dead children. Go with confidence that you will emerge (if you don't disappear too) deliciously baffled. - Mallory Jensen

At least, that's what reader Evan wonders. He sent us some pictures of a Toyota 4 Runner parked with an "open letter to the city" parked convenientaly just a block or two from City Hall. Evan writes, "Apparently New York Methodist Hospital implanted a foreign body in the owner of this vehicle; now the 'man' is trying to bring him and his 10 year old daughter down." Well, there's nothing like taking a message to the streets. And not only is the letter taped to the car, medical documents are taped near it also (so if it's performance art, it's pretty authentic-looking).

Happy Halloween! If you missed the Mountain Goats Saturday night at Bowery Ballroom, you've got another chance to catch them tonight at the even cozier Knitting Factory. This show is extra exciting thanks to the packed lineup of not-to-be-missed opening bands. We're talking about Grizzly Bear (read the Gothamist interview) and The Tears & Prayers of Arthur Digby Sellers (as seen in Gothamist Does CMJ).

Canal Park, a Parks Department project started in 2003, will be opened today in a dedication ceremony. There had been a park there in the late 1800s, later redesigned by Calvert Vaux and Samuel Parsons Jr., but it was "removed" in order to build the Holland Tunnel. The NY Times says that the land was once a garbage truck parking lot, but tonight, after the dedication, there will be a concert with Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. The more interesting part of the NY Times article is that community leaders Carole De Saram, Richard Barrett and Jana Haimsohn were the ones who spearheaded the restoration effort: They researched and found that there really was a park there (the city didn't believe them and wanted proof), and ended up suing "sued the federal, state and city governments, contending that removal of the park had been illegal because no one had obtained the State Legislature's approval." That's is some love for the community.

Tickets for the Fringe Festival, which starts August 12, went on sale on Saturday, and by the looks of the website there’s going to be the same mind-boggling range of performances that theatre-loving New Yorkers have come to expect. Just scrolling through the titles of the shows about to be put on by the 200+ companies is practically an adventure in itself. Gothamist will have much more to say about the Fringe in the next couple weeks, but in the meantime there are still plenty of interesting new non-festival offerings.

So we know that David Cross and Co. have bought the bar "Eleven" on Orchard Street, it was only inevitable that younger, more energetic comedian Jimmy Fallon has beat him to the punch by already opening the doors to his very own performance space: Mo Pitkin's House of Satisfaction [as reported on the Apiary]. Okay maybe he's not more energetic, we don't know, we're basing this on the fact that Fallon danced a lot at the Scissor Sisters show last week. Cross, on the other hand, usually stands disaffectedly in the crowd at shows, blending nicely with the rest of the jaded music fans in this city.

If you’re like Gothamist and you enjoy new theatre in small venues (with small ticket prices), theater festivals are unbeatable. If you don’t go to shows much but want to get a taste for what’s out there, again, these gatherings of innovative voices and acting talents are the way to go. In the summer months, festivals arrive thick and fast; the first wave begins this week.

Today is "It's My Park Day"! Which means that citywide you can volunteer to help clean up a park near you by planting, painting, restoring and just making it green again. Parks are important for things like: suntanning, reading the paper, people watching and of course...sports!