The first songs I learned as a child were rebel songs. They recounted uprisings, hunger strikes, and rebellions; they rhymed and were easy to remember. Lyrics like "Some say the devil is dea…
The president of the United States sits in a wheelchair commode, speaking in a synthesized voice. A man in a lab coat and rat ears stands at a screen designed to look like a cardboard box. A…
Geraldine Realigned Drives from Gay Place to Gay Place and You're in the Car Too ostensibly follows a drag queen, Geraldine, on a road trip working her way through a list of great American g…
Building arts and culture infrastructure? Here are some lessons learned from a community-based cultural asset mapping initiative in South Los Angeles.
A few pages into the script of Peregrine Teng Heard's" playwright and artistic director of The Associates Theater Ensemble" newest play Redemption Story, I could sense its implicit political…
If the human world is organized in small groups, what are the qualities and conditions that make small groups work best?
 By Emma Schneider What does one come to see at a dance performance? There are components of productions that help to create a whole"costumes, lighting, music, etc."yet, it would be diff…
Once you notice it, you can't stop seeing it - the world organized in small groups. Why? What makes small group experiences uniquely powerful?
In 2004, nearly 300 NYC bloggers and their readers came together IRL for the first time to meet each other, drink and try to hook up. What does it mean when online communities gather in pers…
Daniel Fish's "Oklahoma!" in Los Angeles, Taylor Mac, Kiki and Herb and other tales of "Black Box to Broadway". Essay #3 in a series about the unique power of live performance in small venue…
Then Eamon yes-anded by saying, "By the way, I found this vibraphone on the street that I want to take apart." So then we deconstructed the vibraphone.
What happens to an artist and their music on the journey from small clubs to stadiums and how are these experiences different? Essay #2 in a series about the unique power of live performance…
 "Banality of Evil, as a phrase," Jesse Freedman the Artistic Director of Meta-Phys Ed. told me on the phone last week, each of us speaking from our respective Brooklyn apartments, "is m…
If it weren't for my erudite Anglophile cousin, I would never have known to see Lucy Prebble's The Effect at The Shed (from March 3-March 31). An early Prebble fan, she one day turned on I H…
Currently mounted at Nimbus's Firmament Gallery + Boutique is "Sometimes I Wander..." an exhibit displaying the photography of Life Magazine's first Black photographer, Gordon Parks,…
The first in a series of essays about the power of live performance in small rooms.
There is a photograph of my grandad and three of his brothers taken in Dublin in the early 1930s; the brothers stand in a row and pose with their arms firmly placed by their sides or their h…
 There is a photograph of my grandad and three of his brothers taken in Dublin in the early 1930s; the brothers stand in a row and pose with their arms firmly placed by their sides or th…
at the end of the day, the concept of "bastardizing your own culture to get ahead" is not a new one in this country - I'd just never seen it done within an Eastern European context
​​ The first time I saw David Greenspan perform was in Adrian Einspanier's Lunch Bunch this past spring at the 122 Community Center in the East Village. I didn't know of him or…
Were they bearing their teeth in preparation to kill? Screaming silently in agony? Conjuring lost joy of their youth?
So, while trying to strictly manage the pervasive NYC version of Arts Presenters-infected "festival fomo," I still accumulated enough exposure to the spores of a range of performances in the…
The interdisciplinary work "Aristotle Thinks Again" is a thought-provoking masterpiece written by Chuck Mee, directed and choreographed by Dan Shafer, and co-created and choreographed by the…
Complexity often frightens people from engaging with the critical context and history that informs our current realities. So, what you will read is [not] complex. It is current and qui…
This iteration of the work, presented as part of the Underground Uptown Festival's Works and Process at the Guggenheim, was segmented to create discourse around the creative process. I can o…