Neil O'Fortune and Clams Casino co-produce and co-host the Smells Like Tease Spirit! a 90s Burlesque Tribute tonight at Galapagos Art Space. Clams Casino is a burlesque performer, producer and writer who you can find entertaining anywhere from the Coney Island boardwalk to The Slipper Room. Together her and partner Neil O'Fortune have created a bevy of Burlesque shows for New Yorkers, as well as some non-Burlesque fun like the monthly, live-on-stage game show, What's......

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.......

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......

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......

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. 12 to 7pm // Nina's European Day Spa [5 W 35th St] // Free PERFORMANCE ART: Remember how in 2005, during a visit by England’s cricket team......

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,......

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......

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......

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,......

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.......

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......

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (directed by Mary Jordan): It's not such an uncommon story—a misunderstood, sensitive, artistic boy moves from the sticks to Manhattan seeking creative and sexual freedom. However, Mary Jordan's documentary, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, paints Jack Smith, the avant-garde photographer, filmmaker, actor and performance artist as hardly a common person. Influential on such filmmakers as Federico Fellini, John Waters and Andy Warhol, Smith's most notorious movie......

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......

The much anticipated, David Bowie-curated High Line Festival has finally announced a lineup. Upon the announcement of the festival last year, David Bowie said, "I've been particularly excited about seeking out emerging artists and giving them a place in a festival that will also feature some very well-known names." In that vein, we thought there would be some lesser known bands (Todd P-style), and are surprised with the abundance of (very obvious) bigger names: Arcade......

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......

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! Here’s a small sampling of some theater blogs that keep us busy at work. If you like James Urbaniak the actor, you’ll want to know James Urbaniak the blogger. At Voucher Ankles, the man......

It's not often that the person opening the door to let you in to a press screening is the distinctive screen personality Crispin Glover but when it happened, Gothamist knew we were in for a unique afternoon. Best known for his creep-tastic roles in Back to the Future, Charlie's Angels and Willard, Glover will be in town to host his directorial debut, What Is It? which begins a three day run at Anthology Film Archives......

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. The Dissident certainly takes its time. Opening simultaneously in Los Angeles and Beijing,......

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......

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......

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......

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). If you can't get a ticket to Knitting Factory,......

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......

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......

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......

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. In Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Marathon 2005, which started Wednesday,......

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! One park being cleaned up is Brooklyn's McCarren Park, where every Sunday night from 6 to 11pm the Brooklyn Kickball Society play ball. The teams, or those awake before......

One of the great things about living in New York is that Gothamist now often finds ourselves attending more lectures than we did in college - mainly because now they tend to provide an opportunity to legally stalk our betters, rather than listen to a four hour analysis of the intricacies of pre-Minoan pottery glazing. These next two weeks have a number of great opportunities to get your inner art nerd on, starting today with......

Guerrilla Girls On Tour...