For more info and directions....

CIRCUSundays in June
Saturday, April 5 - Sunday, May 11

CIRCUSundays in June (Every Sunday of the month) brings the circus to Red Hook every Sunday in June, featuring professional performers from around the globe who will dazzle, mystify, and make you laugh.

Hosted by Artistic Director Karen E. Gersch, every Sunday features an entirely new show with acts of daring dexterity, comedy and awe-inspiring skill.

JUNE 1:
CHRISTOPH RUMMEL From Koln, Germany, brilliant T.V. and Cabaret Juggler; acts of sensual grace and super skills. ALICE SHI Elegance in the air; a ballet on Tissu. BILLY BONES the GOOD PIRATE! Back by popular Command! Our fave Buccaneer and Pirate Proffessor sails in with his glorious, goofy antics. AMRAM LIMKOV A remarkable act in which Precision romances Risk: Hand Balancing atop a precarious stack of steel rola bolas.

JUNE 8:
ACROBUFFOS Acrobatics stitched with slapstick comedy. Donning half-masks & wigs, the knockanout philosophers - ACROBUFFOS - fuse mime with classical ballet. THE GIZMO GUYS Al Jacobs & Barrett Felker LI LIU Acrobatic Hand Balancer & Rizley Artist who trained since childhood in her native China, and has appeared in shows around the world.

JUNE 15:
WILL FERN Comedy Magician & interactive illusionist. CIRQUE MENAGERIE A cacophony of delightful animal acts, life-sized & animated, featuring the inventive artistry of Therese Schorn and Kim Winslow. KENNY LINDEMANN Tumbling and Aerial Corde

JUNE 22:
LUKE WILSON With typical British nonchalance & charm, this London-born manipulator controls cards and clubs with masterfull & magical skill. ALICE SHI Elegance in the air; a ballet on Tissu. CARLO PELLEGRINI Tri-talented, this dancer/ juggler/ Ringmaster is known for his verbal and movement eloquence: his White Clown was the only one to grace the Big Apple Circus Ring. THE SHINBONE ALLEY STILT BAND Bond St. Theatre's dynamic brass combo, all on stilits! Acrobatic boogying set to Dixieland, Swing, Jazz & Rock

JUNE 29:
THE GRAND FALOONS Kim Winslow and Stephen Ringold create havoc and harmony with comedy, clubs, bubbles and music. WILL SHAW Eccentric Juggler (Winner of Cabaret's prestigious "Bistro" Award) Will often mistakes himself for the Vice-President of the United States. DIKKI ELLIS The Clown Prince of Slackwire (and a Royal Veteran of CIRCUSundays!) Both Jester and Joyster, his balancing & boyancy are sheer magic. BOND ST. THEATRE Join us in "the Heights"! An acrobatic pas de deux on stilts.

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE TICKETS

For more info and directions....

OPEN CALL - Dumbo Arts Center
DEADLINE JULY 1, 2008

BE A PART OF THE 12TH ANNUAL D.U.M.B.O. ART UNDER THE BRIDGE FESTIVAL™! DAC is seeking proposals for:

SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATION AND SCULPTURE
DAC is seeking site-specific sculpture, installations and environmental interventions for the waterfront, bridges, streets, parks, and elsewhere. Artists are encouraged to use sound, lights and audience participation.

ROVING / PERFORMANCE / LIVE ART
Captivate a vast audience with live art activities throughout the weekend of the festival. You may schedule specific times and locations for your performance,
or act as a wandering art piece.

WATER ART
In, on, over, under the water, onshore and offshore, artists are urged to explore the possibilities of art on the river within Brooklyn Bridge Park, Empire Fulton Ferry State Park, and elsewhere in the neighborhood.

ELEVATOR / LOBBY ART
Create projects that use lobbies and elevators located in Dumbo, while engaging festival visitors in existing corporate environments. Past projects have included lights, sound, projections, and soap.

SIMULTANEOUS PROJECTIONS
Artists are invited to use slides, film loops, video and motion graphics to simultaneously illuminate streets, buildings and windows.

PROJECT GLOW
Proposals are being accepted for installations and sculptures that incorporate light to illuminate the waterfront, Empire Fulton Ferry State Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park.

INTERACTIVE ART
Engage the public in projects that change the role of an audience from spectator to fellow collaborator.

LEAD A GUIDED TOUR!
Propose your take on the concept of a “guided tour,” to entertain, educate, and fascinate festival-goers. Performance artists welcome.

Download full Open Call PDF here.

Learn more about the D.U.M.B.O. Arts Center

For more details, CLICK HERE

Man of La Mancha
April 26-May 18, 2008

One of the most beloved musicals of Broadway’s Golden Age, Man of La Mancha made its Broadway debut in 1965 starring Richard Kiley. Based on the CBS Dupont Show of the Month original drama, I, Don Quixote, with Lee J. Cobb, the show quickly gained acclaim, containing some of the most beautiful music ever written. The musical tells the tale of author Miguel de Cervantes who, imprisoned and awaiting trial before the Spanish Inquisition, joins with his fellow prisoners to perform a play about Don Quixote de la Mancha, the mad knight who quests for justice and tilts at windmills. “The Impossible Dream”, the show’s world-famous hit song, has been recorded by practically every major vocalist, from Frank Sinatra to Placido Domingo to Elvis Presley.

Tickets are $18 for Adults, $14 for Senior Citizens and children 12 and under. Tickets can be purchased 24/7 on-line at galleryplayers.com

11th Annual Black Box New Play Festival
June 6-22, 2008

June 6-15 - Two new full-length plays presented in repertory
The Reckoning of Kit & Little Boots by Nat Cassidy
Hope’s Arbor by Rich Espey

June 19-22 - A weekend of readings of full-length plays still in development
Titles to be announced soon

Read more about The 2008 Black Box New Play Festival.

Where can a playwright find an outlet? Where can an audience see new works? The Gallery Players provides both of these in this Festival. Over the years of producing the Festival, we have developed works by countless playwrights, many of whom continue to work with The Gallery Players each year to incubate their new ideas. More than 150 plays have appeared in the Black Box New Play Festival since its inception and this year will bring even more writing and acting talent to the stage. Who knows what you’ll discover in the Box?

Takashi Murakami Retrospective
April 5 through July 13, 2008

The most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of internationally acclaimed Japanese artist Takashi Murakami will be presented at the Brooklyn Museum from April 5 through July 13, 2008. The exhibition, © MURAKAMI, will include more than ninety works in various media that span the artist's entire career, installed in more than 18,500 square feet of gallery space.

The exhibition was organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it will be on view through February 11, 2008. Following the Brooklyn presentation, which will be the only other United States venue, © MURAKAMI will travel to the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (October 27, 2008-January 4, 2009) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (February-May 2009).

Born in Tokyo in 1962, Murakami is one of the most influential and acclaimed artists to have emerged from Asia in the late twentieth century, creating a wide-ranging body of work that consciously bridges fine art, design, animation, fashion, and popular culture. He received a Ph.D. from the prestigious Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he was trained in the school of traditional Japanese painting known as Nihonga, a nineteenth-century mixture of Western and Eastern styles. However, the prevailing popularity of anime (animation) and manga (comic books) directed his interest toward the art of animation because, as he has said, "it was more representative of modern day Japanese life." American popular culture in the form of animation, comics, and fashion are among the influences his work, which includes painting, sculpture, installation, and animation, as well as a wide range of collectibles, multiples, and commercial products.

The exhibition ©MURAKAMI explores the self-reflexive nature of Murakami's oeuvre by focusing on earlier work produced between 1992 and 2000 in which the artist attempts to explore his own reality through an investigation of branding and identity, as well as through self-portraiture created since 2000. Two works examining these subjects were a part of a group show My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation, presented at the Brooklyn Museum in 2001.

Among the works included in this large-scale survey tracing the trajectory of Murakami's artistic development are many of his acclaimed sculpture figures including the 23-foot-high Tongari-kun (2003-4); Miss Ko2 (1997), a long-legged waitress who has become one of the artist's signature characters; Hiropon (1997), a Japanese girl jumping a rope created by milk spurting from her gargantuan breasts; DOB in the Strange Forest, in which a benign and innocent DOB figure encounters a group of menacing mushrooms; and Second Mission Project Ko2 (2007), reprising the Miss Ko2 character, now transformed into a jet airplane. Among the paintings on view will be Tan Tan Bo (2001), as well as Tan Tan Bo Puking-a.k.a. Gero Tan (2002), in which DOB has evolved into a gigantic, sharp-toothed monster, with unknown substances oozing from his mouth; Flower ball (3D) (2002), a decorative work comprising dozens of Murakami's famous flowers; and Superflat Jellyfish Eyes 1 and 2 (2003).

Utagawa Toyokuni (Japanese, 1769–1825). The Actors Ichikawa Danzo IV and Iwai Kumesaburo I as Kawagoe no Taro Shigeyori and Kyo no Kimi, 1800. Color woodcut. Chazen Museum of Art, Bequest of John H. Van Vleck, 1980.3168

Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770–1900
March 21–June 15, 2008

Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770–1900 presents more than seventy prints from the renowned Van Vleck collection of Japanese woodblock prints at the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison and approximately twenty prints from the Brooklyn Museum. The Utagawa School, founded by Utagawa Toyoharu, dominated the Japanese print market in the nineteenth century and is responsible for more than half of all surviving ukiyo-e prints, or “pictures of the floating world.” Colorful, technically innovative, and sometimes defiant of government regulations, these prints were created for a popular audience and documented the pleasures of urban life and leisure. The prints represent famous places, landscapes, warriors, and kabuki actors; they were reproduced in books, posters, and other printed materials for mass consumption, and they fed a thriving Edo publishing industry.

This exhibition has been organized by Laura Mueller, Van Vleck Curatorial Intern, Chazen Museum of Art, and Doctoral Candidate, Japanese Art History, University of Wisconsin–Madison. The Brooklyn Museum’s presentation has been coordinated by Joan Cummins, Lisa and Bernard Selz Curator of Asian Art, Brooklyn Museum.