tagged w/ Events & Festivals
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It's official. There will be NO Halloween party in San Francisco's famed Castro district and SFPD says there'll be a "zero tolerance" policy.
R.I.P Block Party. :-(It's official. There will be NO Halloween party in San Francisco's famed Castro... more
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"Tim Robbins jokes that he could've given the title "While Rome Burns" to his new festival at the Actors’ Gang. Times are tough, people are angry, "and they have every right to be," says the Oscar-winning actor and artistic director of the Culver City-based theater company. "There've been really bad decisions made that we're paying the bill for now."
Like most cultural entities, the Gang, one of L.A.'s most accomplished theatrical institutions, has been scorched financially by the economic crisis. Earlier this summer, the ensemble's accountant even recommended that, to save money, the Gang should consider temporarily not producing theater and just focus on its extensive educational and community outreach programs.
Robbins' incredulous three-word response gave the new festival its name: "WTF?!" That scrappily emphatic statement of purpose expresses the outlook of the ambitious endeavor, which opens Tuesday and runs through Dec. 19.
"I'm not ignoring the economy," Robbins says. "We are flying in the face of it. We are saying, 'This is not going to stop us.' And so the best way we can figure out for it not to stop us is to do more than we ever have in the past."
Curated by Robbins, "WTF?!" will mix film screenings, live music, theater, poetry, dance performances and readings, among other activities. Several will be performed by members of the Gang, such as the double-bill performance "Sole Mates" and "Death and Giggles" by Daisuke Tsuji, who has toured as a clown with Cirque du Soleil.
Other events will bring in outside artists. Among the marquee names who'll lend their presence to the Gang's intimate 99-seat space at the Ivy Substation for the festival will be Jackson Browne, Tenacious D, John Doe of X, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie.""Tim Robbins jokes that he could've given the title "While Rome Burns" to his new... more
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sorry this is delayed but it just happened fyi
....we found out that Bakon Vodka heard about Portland Baconfest all the way up in Seattle – and they’re heading down, product in hand, to grace us with Bacon-y Vodka goodness, proving that you can’t stop the proud and delicious word of good bacon....sorry this is delayed but it just happened fyi
....we found out that Bakon Vodka... more
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"Last June, Actors' Gang artistic director Tim Robbins, above, and his colleagues at the Culver City theater company received some paradoxical advice. The world economy was still shaky. Donations to the theater were down. The best short-term strategy for the theater troupe, the Gang was told, would be to save money by not putting on plays.
A theater company that doesn't make theater? Robbins' none-too-subtle response gave birth to the festival title.
The Actors' Gang's "WTF?! Festival," starts Oct. 13 (a Tuesday) and will run Tuesdays through Saturdays through Dec. 19. It's an ambitious lineup of rotating activities that will encompass live music, poetry, theater and dance performances, readings and film and documentary screenings. Some events will be free.
To longtime Gang watchers, this aggressive approach to battling the recessionary blues seems in character for the Ivy Substation-based company, which is known for its boldly experimental new works and intrepid interpretations of the classics. Conventional wisdom holds that lean economic times require artists and arts groups to rein in their ambitions. The Gang maintains that the opposite is true.
"This is exactly the time, when things are falling apart, when the economy is bad, it's the time to drop ticket prices, it's the time to create free nights, it's the time to figure out how to produce even though the economics say 'don't produce,' " Robbins says.
The new festival, he believes, will allow the company to maintain its artistic goals, preserve its extensive community outreach programs and bring new audiences to the theater while riding out what he calls this "crap economy."
The Oscar-winning actor is curating festival programming, which will bring artists such as Jackson Browne, Tenacious D, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie to perform at the Gang's 99-seat space.""Last June, Actors' Gang artistic director Tim Robbins, above, and his colleagues at... more
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"Berlin will hold its annual unification celebration this week. But coming almost 20 years after the Wall fell, this year's festival will be even grander than usual. To highlight the importance of these anniversaries, the city is enlisting the aid of a French street theater troupe that turns junk into massive puppets."
That's right, puppets. Take that, Communism!"Berlin will hold its annual unification celebration this week. But coming almost 20... more
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2nd annual Lincoln Comedy Festival
Comedy award winners, TV & radio performers and acts breaking through on the national UK comedy circuit. Looks fun if you're in the UK, but shoot, I thought this was going to be a festival of straight-up USA Abe Lincoln jokes. Bummer....2nd annual Lincoln Comedy Festival
Comedy award winners, TV & radio performers and... more
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Hosted by Chicago Paranormal Author Ms. Ursula Bielski along with Mr. Michael McDowell.
Featured Speakers:
Lorraine Warren, Jeff Belanger, Eddie Brazil & Paul Adams, Joshua P. Warren, Fred Stonehouse, Deb and Tony Pickman, Bill Konkolesky, Dave Schrader, Ray Sawyer & Paul Von Eisengrein, Jeff Rezman and Wanda LouWillis.
With:
Edward Shanahan / Chicago Hauntings / Indiana Ghost Trackers / Beyond The Veil / Dark Angel Paranormal / Dave Schrader / Dan T. Hall / Jason Sullivan / Grimestone Paranormal / Jacob Venibule and Midwest Haunts Chicago Paranormal Research Society / Lake Claremont Press / Michael Esposito / Cross Roads Paranormal / Tales From Beyond.
Special Appearance by: TV's Svengoolie
Follow the link for more details..Hosted by Chicago Paranormal Author Ms. Ursula Bielski along with Mr. Michael... more
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1 month ago
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The portal doors of 11:11 lead to the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.
Observing, deserving, conserving energy for guided action through the doors of 11:11.
I heard an ancient hinge screech and felt a gust of wind from beyond wisdom's veil preach,
"The doors to the portal of 11:11 are open."The portal doors of 11:11 lead to the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.
Observing,... more
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Mozilla the non-profit organisation that gives us the very popular Web Browser Firefox have organised, what is known as "Mozilla Service Week" 14th Sep - 21st Sep 2009
They are asking for individuals to pledge their time to do something good for their local community by offering service to non-profits, local organisations like libraries / schools, giving their expertise and knowledge of the web to their local sector.
I think this is a great move and a much needed integration of the online world and the offline, it should also allow these groups and organisations with little funds to find top quality help, experience / consultancy, they would otherwise not be able to find.Mozilla the non-profit organisation that gives us the very popular Web Browser Firefox... more
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Eager participants of all ages have painted a Dutch town "ginger" for the annual Redhead Day in the Netherlands.
Thousands of redheads including a legion of children celebrated their day at Breda with picnics, art, workshops and competitions.
The event, Roodharigendag, was created in part to help spread awareness about redheads — who make up about 1 percent of the population worldwide and are becoming rarer, according to genetic research.Eager participants of all ages have painted a Dutch town "ginger" for the annual... more
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"Tickets sales for this year's Edinburgh festival fringe have hit a new record, after a surge in the number of people spending holidays at home and looking for an escape from the gloom of the recession.
The Fringe Society said more than 1.85m tickets were sold for this year's event, an increase of 9% on the previous record, set in 2007, and 21% higher than for last year's disastrous event, which was hit by problems with its box office.
The scale of the improvement surprised fringe organisers. Many producers and residents had feared the significant upheaval by tram works cutting through the city centre and a dispute by refuse workers that left rubbish piled on kerbsides in the run-up to this year's festival would frighten off some visitors.
Kath Mainland, the event's new chief executive, said: "As this year's festival draws to a close, we can look back on a month of exceptional ticket sales and one of the best festivals in my 20 years in and around Edinburgh."
Many of the city's top venues reported steep increases in audience numbers. The Gilded Balloon said its sales rose by 15% from last year, boosted in part by staging large events such as the comedian Bill Bailey at the 3,000-seat Playhouse, one of Edinburgh's largest theatres.
Karen Koren, the venue's director, said many more local residents had bought tickets this year. Edinburgh's confidence has been hit by the collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS last year. "My feeling is that the credit crunch, people not going away and the weather – although it hasn't been great, has been a lot better than last year – has all helped," she said.
The Stand comedy club, which put on critically received theatre for the first time, said its audiences had grown by 20%. Tommy Sheppard, the venue's director, said: "It's been a record-breaking year despite the fact we've had to operate behind an iron curtain imposed by the city's tram builders."
This year's fringe, which featured a slightly larger number of shows compared with last year, with 2,098 productions, also featured a far larger number of recession-busting cut-price shows and cheap deals to draw in audiences. The number of shows on the so-called "free fringe" jumped from 350 last year to 465 this year, and they were held at a larger number of venues. While some shows were selling all their tickets for £5, the Underbelly comedy venue cut its prices for two nights a week.
Mainland said: "From the fringe's point of view, this is absolutely fantastic. We needed to re-establish confidence."""Tickets sales for this year's Edinburgh festival fringe have hit a new record, after... more
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Come join the fun with the Los Angeles Outreach Reps from Current TV as we throw an awesome networking event on September 2nd at The California Independent Production Center! This event is great for tips on your HP VCAM, and networking with other great producers, editors and filmmakers. We will have free food, drinks, and Current swag.
For more details on the HP VCAM go to: http://current.com/groups/hp-photosmart-vcam/
Here is the details for the event:
What: HP VCAM Networking Event
When: Wednesday September 2nd at 7:00PM
Where: The California Independent Production Center
4119 West Burbank Blvd.
Burbank, CA 91505
Call Tania Rashid if you have any questions: 310-408-3624Come join the fun with the Los Angeles Outreach Reps from Current TV as we throw an... more
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"Harry M. Bagdasian hopes memories are long and attics full among theater folk in Washington and beyond. He's on the hunt for scripts of plays that premiered in the 1970s and '80s at the long-defunct New Playwrights' Theatre in Washington, which, as a determined 23-year-old, he co-founded.
He remembers thinking, " 'Wow. No one's doing new plays in Washington, the capital of our country. Why don't we have a theater here working with American playwrights?' We only had about two cents, but we started anyway."
New Playwrights' presented new work on a shoestring from 1972 to 1988, for most of that time in what is now the Church Street Theater. Bagdasian left the company in 1984 "kind of burned out," he says. On his Web site (http://www.hbagdasian.com) he writes, "I left NPT in the incapable hands of a Board of Trustees that eventually let the place go bankrupt."
Some of the scripts he's seeking are: "And They Dance Real Slow in Jackson" by James Leonard Jr.; "Rats," a musical spoof of "Cats," by Tim Grundmann; "Canticle" by Michael Champagne and William Penn, based on Dante's "Inferno"; and a 45-minute musical "Hamlet!," which featured a very young J. Fred Shiffman, now a busy Washington actor.
Perusal of Bagdasian's Web site shows youthful shots of such soon-to-be Washington theater luminaries as Molly Smith, artistic director of Arena Stage, and Fred Strother, another busy actor. Stage and film actress Marcia Gay Harden worked there, as did Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa Simpson, and James C. Nicola, artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop. (Lloyd Rose, who was chief drama critic at The Washington Post, was New Playwrights' dramaturge.) A play by Washington-based writer Ernest Joselovitz, "Hagar's Children," was picked up by the Public Theater's Joe Papp and produced off-Broadway in 1977.
Aside from nostalgia, Bagdasian has other reasons to create a formal archive of his New Playwrights' treasures. "Being the eternal optimist, I would like to see some of this material rediscovered and revisited by this new generation of producers and artistic directors, because there's a lot of fun material. There's a lot of engaging drama that did not get published and is worth rediscovery," he says.""Harry M. Bagdasian hopes memories are long and attics full among theater folk in... more
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"The full seriousness of the failure of a new box-office system at last year's Edinburgh fringe festival has been revealed with the publication of new accounts.
At the Festival Fringe Society's AGM in Edinburgh yesterday, the board said the failure contributed to losses of £882,407, leaving the organisation in danger of collapse.
The society had appointed the IT company Pivotal Integration to create a new ticketing system. However, its "liquid box office" was suspended the day after it went live, tickets were sent out late and popular shows were overbooked. The system was replaced by one created by ticketing company Red61, extra staff were hired, and by mid-August Pivotal had gone into administration.
Accounts for the year ending 30 November 2008 reveal that income was £2,163,771, while a total of £3,046,178 was spent.
"There's no question we came very close to the edge of the abyss," said Tommy Sheppard, a board member and director of the Stand Comedy Club. "There were times around the turn of the year when we were looking at the cash flow on a week-by-week basis to make sure we had enough money to pay people."
He said a £125,000 loan from Edinburgh council – now repaid – an advance from the Scottish government and funds from the Scottish Arts Council proved to be lifelines, and that the society was now "very much on the mend".
According to the accounts: "The Trustees expect that it will take at least three years to establish an adequate level of reserves." The society has net current liabilities of £671,833 against net assets of £48,442.
Kath Mainland, chief executive of the Festival Fringe Society, said it was now "robust". However, she acknowledged that 2008 was a "difficult year that highlighted what a fragile and vulnerable enterprise the arts can be".""The full seriousness of the failure of a new box-office system at last year's... more
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Festival-goers have been passing crowd surfers over their heads for ages. But this year a new trend has emerged with people ripping clothes off bodies as they pass overhead. This is posing problems for security, as well as embarrassing individuals who suddenly find themselves stark naked in front of thousands of people and on TV cameras. I'd imagine it's quite disturbing for unsuspecting people in the crowd when they get a bit more of a handful than they're expecting to.Festival-goers have been passing crowd surfers over their heads for ages. But this... more
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"Doctor Johnny Long has a PHD, only not of the seven-years'-study-and-thesis variety. Long is a porn star, and his "PHD" stands for "pretty huge dick". Yes, it's pretty basic stuff, but that's kind of the level in Porn: The Musical, part-funded by Cameron Mackintosh, and one of many fringe shows on the subject of sex and all things related.
Sex is always a hot ticket here: with more than 2,000 shows vying for audiences's attention, a poster featuring naked buttocks and the word "porn" is naturally going to get at least a double-take. But this year's recession-hit fringe is more sex-crazed than ever. The Chippendales are on at the Gilded Balloon; Jane Austen's Guide to Pornography is at the Zoo Southside; porn star Ben Dover is billing himself "innocent till proven filthy" at the Underbelly; and Ashley Hames, sometime reporter for cable TV sex show Sin Cities, is at the Pleasance Courtyard telling some disturbing tales about his adventures with "sexual astronauts".
For some, this glut of sex-related shows points to increasing commercialism. Richard Demarco, the veteran theatre promoter and one of the festival's founders, has worried that: "If it's not careful, the fringe will soon be associated with Las Vegas." But audiences don't seem to mind – there have been queues around the block for the Chippendales, Porn: The Musical and Ashley Hames, whose show opens with a sickening clip showing Hames having his scrotum nailed to a board by a Parisian dominatrix, and moves on to alcohol enemas apparently delivered for fun.
Both shows carry warnings and are recommended for over-18s only, but the explicit content has proved too much for some. An entire row got up and left Hames's show after 10 minutes, while others chose to quit Porn: The Musical shortly after the first lewd (if semi-obscured) coupling of Doctor Long and Sanddy "with a double D". Audience members Harry and Ruth, both students, told me they'd had enough of sexual excess on the fringe: "If I hear one more joke about penises," Ruth said, "I may just explode."""Doctor Johnny Long has a PHD, only not of the seven-years'-study-and-thesis variety.... more
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Vision Entertainment Worldwide is proud to present the most spectacular concert of the year as South Florida Summer Fest 2009 descends with a sizzling lineup of the biggest stars in the game today. Headliners Akon, Ne-Yo, Flo Rida, Keri Hilson and T-Pain....Vision Entertainment Worldwide is proud to present the most spectacular concert of the... more
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"New York City to Edinburgh to Adelaide, Australia, fringe theater festivals have become a staple of summertime culture, with troupes of actors producing experimental work on shoestring budgets and set-less stages. But none of these dozens of festivals are quite like the five-year-old Berkshire Fringe, in western Massachusetts, where its organizers work out of a cafe on Main Street because the wireless Internet is free.
“Most fringe festivals are in cities, but here we are, out in the Berkshires, writing press releases on our laptops over coffee and trying to save every cent that we can,” said Sara Katzoff, one of the Fringe’s three artistic directors, as she sat in the Fuel Coffee Shop in downtown Great Barrington. “Fringe theater is a different kind of theater, and we’re a different kind of fringe.”
Ms. Katzoff hatched the idea for the three-week festival soon after she graduated from Bard College at Simon’s Rock, where the Berkshire Fringe is now running in a 100-seat studio theater through Aug. 17. She recruited her boyfriend, Peter Wise, a musician, and Timothy Ryan Olson, a friend from Simon’s Rock, to join her mission to bring young and new artists to this cultural destination known for venerable institutions.
The Berkshire Fringe has quickly become a respected fixture on the landscape here, drawing praise from local newspaper theater critics and respect for its grit at a time when some established fringe festivals have ceased to exist because of financial concerns, the most prominent demise being the Seattle Fringe’s in 2004. The current Berkshire Fringe offerings include “Elephants and Gold,” running through Monday, which blends song and movement to explore the relationship between humans and elephants, and “Phi Alpha Gamma,” which runs next week, about brothers in a college fraternity dealing with the aftershocks of a gay-bashing incident.
“We knew we wanted to do the Fringe in the Berkshires because we thought the festival would add something fresh to the landscape and because we thought the Berkshires hadn’t fully developed as a place where emerging artists could have a voice,” Ms. Katzoff said.""New York City to Edinburgh to Adelaide, Australia, fringe theater festivals have... more
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"In a small Kansas town that inspired some of William Inge’s most melancholy characters, about two dozen never-before-performed plays are poised to become the found treasures of his collected works. These plays were not hidden in the proverbial cedar chest in a dusty farmhouse but languishing in a college library in obscurity and solitude, like a tragic Inge heroine.
One of them, “The Killing,” is part of the Summer Shorts festival at 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. This story about a man so terrified of committing suicide that he asks another man to kill him has parallels to Inge’s life. He killed himself in 1973 after struggling for years with depression and alcoholism.
Pain permeates most of Inge’s work. His major plays, “Come Back, Little Sheba,” “Picnic,” “Bus Stop” and “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” portray rural Americans struggling with sexual repression (he was gay), alcoholism, small-town gossip and religiosity.
These issues haunted Inge most of his adult life, said Peter Ellenstein, artistic director of the William Inge Center for the Arts in Independence, Kan., Inge’s hometown. Inge, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Picnic” in 1953 and an Academy Award for writing the 1961 film “Splendor in the Grass,” sought approval from townsfolk who often scorned him for being a homosexual.
“The Killing,” which runs through Aug. 27, is the second rediscovered Inge play to receive its world premiere in New York this year. The Flea Theater in SoHo staged a reading of the three-act “Off the Main Road” on May 11 with Sigourney Weaver, Jay O. Sanders and Frances Sternhagen. The Flea is considering staging a full production of it or another unperformed play by Inge this fall.
These two works are among about 25 — an exact count is still being determined, since some of the plays may be incomplete — stored in the library at Independence Community College, which houses a collection of Inge’s writings, as well as artwork he collected. The plays have been available for researchers to read on site but, in order to preserve them, were not to be copied or checked out of the library. It was a case of manuscripts hiding in plain sight.""In a small Kansas town that inspired some of William Inge’s most melancholy... more
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