Just as hipsters all over town are completing their post-SXSW Master Cleanse, yet another festival is about to begin. Reassure your aching liver, Fusebox Festival is a tad less beer soaked and requests a bit more sobriety from its audiences - which is not to say that the twelve day, city-wide, performance and art fest won't be a trip. Each spring, Fusebox brings some of the most innovative contemporary artists and performers to Austin - you may have never heard of them before the fest, but be assured, you'll be talking about them afterward. The eclectic nature of the festival means that some performances are free and accessible to hundreds of viewers while other works are presented intimately to a few dozen ticket holders. more ›

Dubbed as a "cultural phenomenon" by Newsweek, Mortified has been showcasing embarrassing childhood moments and tales of teen angst all over the country for years. It started back in the day (the late 90s), when founder Dave Nadelberg came upon a notably embarrassing love letter and shared it with friends. The project has now grown to include thousands of old notes, journals, photos and videos presented by the original authors and/or creators. If you need a little taste, check out one of the website's Shoebox Shows. Presenters vary between sales executives, writers, actors, singers, waitresses and the list goes on. The show comes together in a storytelling format using various props such as beat up notebooks and Hello Kitty journals. These are the stories of our lives, many of which are horrifying, heartfelt, heroic and hilarious. more ›

Radical Nautical, which opens this Thursday at Gallery Lombardi, introduces the question of whether more than one octopus in a room spells a troop of octupuses, or just a bunch of octopi. (You might prefer to dodge the issue altogether by referring to them as cephalopods). The show's general nautical theme sprang forth from the collective consciousness of its jurors, all big machers on the Austin art scene: Ian Schultz, Michael Schliefke, Kevin Peake,... more ›

Saturday June 30th marks the 5th installment to the multi-media spectacle Everyone Knows Everyone, sponsored by The Onion. This event is held twice a year and focuses on the celebration of artistic community in our city. Many have compared it to Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable, where visual artists and multi-genre musicians, DJs and filmmakers showcase their talents in front of a live audience. The event is being held on all of Emo's stages... more ›

Friday night's Glorium reunion show marks the final pinnacle of Emo's 15th anniversary celebration. Glorium are one of the vital pages in Austin's long musical history. The band originally formed in San Antonio in 1991 and immediately began to make a name for themselves by using avant-garde aesthetics with lessons learned from the hardcore punk scene. The result was an explosion of emotional and musical creativity; pushing the boundaries of lyrical imagery and human... more ›

HBMG Foundation is still inviting folks to apply for the 2007 ArtSpark Festival, a twelve-week-long creative festival and competition that pits teams of theatre junkies, video game developers, and visual artists against one another to create awesome new works. At orientation, each team is given a "spark," an object which serves as the catalyst and inspiration to jumpstart the team's creative process. If you'd like to apply but can't find a team to join,... more ›

FRIDAY [13] fashion • RARE Magazine Spring Fling Fashion Show at The Belmont Hi-Lo (Moved due to rain) art/music • Take That!, a show of new images by Lance McMahan, plus music by Amanda Jones, Connie Ball, & Teddy and Marge at The Opera House (7-10pm) art • Hot and Cold: The Best of Canadian Contemporary Art at Art on 5th, 1501 W 5th (10am-6pm) art • Opening Reception for abstract paintings and encaustics... more ›

What happens when you throw music, dance, poetry, photography, visual art, theatre, film, and -- why not? -- opera into a great big blue box and shake? You get an explosion of proportions that only the creative geniuses at Refraction Arts can contain. This year's Fuse Box Festival, featuring artists from Brooklyn to Portland and places in between, showcases works you've never seen before and aren't likely to see hence. Things start gearing up this... more ›

The new images on the front page were sent to us from Chris Carson, a photographer who took part in the bird stunt downtown yesterday. He has more photos and information posted on his webiste. Amidst the Avian Emergency downtown yesterday, the threat level reached Yellow, as Big Bird (played by Ivan Spaller of Floribunda) and a Hazmat worker (played by Kevin Witt of Three Jazz Collective) re-created the Terror on Congress. Carson was... more ›

Tonight, appropriately on Friday the 13th, is the opening of the Haunted Forest, which is described as “a spectacularly terrifying experience that is part twisted performance art, part wicked art installations, and total freak the bejesus out of your soul.” We’ve been to haunted houses, but the idea of a three acre haunted forest sounds like much more scary fun. Tonight, there will be music by Gorch Fock and the Jolly Rogers and through... more ›

As mentioned in last week's TWIT, the Black Arts Movement Festival, presented by ProArts Collective, is Austinist's Pick of the Week this week. The Chronicle and the Statesman have also made good mention of the fest, but to catch up the few of you who've yet to get the skinny on this event, here's what's going on. For the next two weeks, BAM brings to Austin an awesome smorgasbord of performance art by African... more ›

Alright. Gloves off. We’ve been snarked on in the past for flippantly referring to productions at the Vortex as “naked theatre”. Taking that into consideration, we’d like to bring to your attention some “adults only” (read: probably naked) theatre opening this weekend. Bell(e): The Museum of Suicide Machinery is a “mesh of performance art, visual installation, experimental theatre, and sound montage” from Austin’s purveyors of the out-there-experimental, Ethos. Anne Marie Gordon designs the scenery... more ›

Now in its third instantiation, the multimedia arts showcase dubbed Everyone Knows Everyone brings together some of Austin's creative types, spanning artistic mediums from music to performance art. Drawing on the success of last December's pre-holiday event, the production quality of tonight's EKEIII, at Emo's, seems to have grown tremendously in the past six months: Throughout the evening, sets by Those Peabodys, Visitors, Mars Wars, Young Love, Rory + the Artificial Heart, and Pirates... more ›

If you're not already familiar with Pinback, we're hoping you attended the crash course at Emo's last Friday, which also featured Mary Timony supporting. Rob Crow and Armistead Burwell Smith IV performed for a massive crowd of sweaty, bouncy, and devoted fans, and they didn't disappoint. more ›

Its premise is charming in its optimism: let's, for a single day, transform a barren, urban city block into a vibrant, organic gathering of public art and music. This weekend, Austin Green Art and Capital Sports and Entertainment (CSE) are taking over Block 21 -- better known as 2nd Street and Lavaca -- to throw a huge Earth Day celebration. "Rock The Block" promises to be replete with performance art, temporary sculptures/installations, and a... more ›

Every spring since 2004, a make believe funeral procession has meandered through Hyde Park, occassionally interupted by snippets of site-specific performance art. It was conceived in the aftermath of 9/11, is performed by 36 dedicated followers, and utilizes more than 3,300 styrofoam cups. Oh yeah, and only 18 people get to see it. What in the sam hell? The piece is called Floodlines, and it's being performed this Saturday as part of Refraction Arts'... more ›

Okay! Time for a little break from all the SXSW zaniness! Let's talk about women, shall we? Did you know that March is National Women's History Month? One of our favorite women, the Vortex's fabulous fearless leader Bonnie Cullum, clued us in to this fact a few days ago. To honor the so-called gentler sex, Vortex has created a menu of tasty treats for the entire month. I Look Like An Egg, but I... more ›

We are soaked, soaked we tell you, in Frontera. This week, we've attended Best of Fest Bill A (to be repeated tomorrow night, and highly recommended), and the first Wild Card bill -- which won't be repeated, but we definitely suggest you take a stab at the second Wild Card bill, 2pm Saturday. It happens to be the only remaining Frontera show that's not sold out. Yikes! (A tip: If you want to try... more ›

*Photo of last year's Heydays taken from UT's College of Fine Arts' website* What are you doing On Thursday? What about this weekend? No seriously, what is going on in your little world? Could you manage to squeeze a little culture in there somewhere? The Creative Research Laboratory of the Department of Art and Art History at UT is hosting Heydays(again) on Thursday, December 8th and again on December 10th. The December 8th date,... more ›

This Friday, September 30th, Yellow Tape Construction Company - who combine dance, theatre, music and performance art - will be celebrating the opening of their newest endeavor, Come Home. Written by Amanda Butterfield and Jonathon Morgan, Yellow Tape describes Come Home as "...an indie-folk, road-trip musical beneath the overwhelming expanse of an American sky." We're not sure what that means, but after the recent success of Hobbled (which starred a few Lonestar Rollergirls), we're... more ›

Tomorrow, June 16th, Gallery Lombardi (910 West 3rd St) will be opening Mulligen Stew. more ›