The theory is one thing - but if you have ever dreamed of having the chance to conduct a full, professional orchestra at a major concert then you are almost certainly (*) out of luck. Sorry. Unless you are a celebrity in which case the BBC might fix it for you (full program trailer on YT). Giving it their first go are actors Jane Asher and David Soul, Drum and Bass star Goldie, Blur bassist Alex James, broadcasters Katie Derham and Peter Snow, and comedians Sue Perkins and Bradley Walsh as they compete to be the "Maestro" [i-player link for UK only unfortunately]
posted on Aug 13, 2008 - View this thread

This fun Japanese contact juggler's clip is proving popular lately, but he is not the first Japanese practitioner of the art to surface online. Here are several more highly entertaining Japanese contact juggler clips worth watching: one, two (starts about 1:06), three, four, five. (all via the highly entertaining Ministry of Manipulation's blog).
posted on Jun 5, 2008 - View this thread

Sure, it's old news when Britney lip-synchs, but I reckon nobody really expected Pavarotti to lip-synch his his very last performance.
posted on Apr 7, 2008 - View this thread

Los Angeles! he walks again by night... ...out of the smog, into the fog. Relentlessly -- ruthlessly -- ("I wonder where Ruth is?") -- doggedly! ("Woof woof!" *) For the past 42 years the Firesign Theatre, the best comedy group of the 1960's, has been putting their art in cans from Canada to Kashmir. Up for the Grammy in 1998 and 2001, Firesign at their best combined clever, multilayered writing with pitch-perfect satirical performances as Rocky Rococco, Ralph Spoilsport, Art Holeflaffer, Hemlock Stones, Uh Clem and Barney, and many more. Back in the day, it would have been astonishing if at least one of your peers couldn't recite all of The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye, including the sound effects.
posted on Jan 31, 2008 - View this thread

Got an embarrassing love letter or humiliating photo from your angsty teenage years you’d like plastered all over the web, perhaps recited aloud and featured in live performances? Thought so
posted on Jan 22, 2008 - View this thread

With the wild success of the Guitar Hero series, using video game controllers shaped like guitars is nothing new. However, the duo at Modal Kombat actually use guitars as video game controllers. They won't reveal all of their tricks, but you can read a bit about their technology here and at this interview with Urban Guitar. The results are awfully impressive. View the original Modal Kombat here, and their newest installment, the admittedly trippy GuitarKart here. via
posted on Dec 3, 2007 - View this thread

The Cruise, director Bennett Miller's timeless portrait of New York City, free thinking and the 1990s as lived by Timothy "Speed" Levitch. In eleven beats on youtube: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
posted on Oct 2, 2007 - View this thread

Mine was The Fixx opening for A Flock Of Seagulls in '82 when I was 12 and it was the first time I smoked dope... I know this is the worst kind of query-Metafilter post but I can't resist. It is a fun article and I bet you have a better story.
posted on Oct 1, 2007 - View this thread

BIG BIG BIG BIG BIG is a musical composition by the inimitable Dan Deacon, dubbed by his local paper as part vaudeville ham, part electronica genius. Take a tour of Dan's thrift-store electronic keyboard and read his answers to stupid questions in Ignore Magazine. via Miss Cellania
posted on Aug 14, 2007 - View this thread

The Pardoner's Tale - adapted to rap by Baba Brinkman, who has been rapping Chaucer tales for a few years now. He's also released The Rap Canterbury Tales, a book that presents raps side by side with Chaucer's original Middle English. Both video and book are illustrated graffiti-style by his brother Erik. Discussed in a previous post by fatllama on hip hop classics.
posted on Aug 12, 2007 - View this thread

Oskar, Ernest and Anatole are Les Music-Robots, a four ton punchcard controlled trio currently playing at the Berlin Museum for Communication. [More inside]
posted on Apr 14, 2007 - View this thread

Haka is a type of ritual performance native to Aotearoa. Occurring before battles or peacetime ceremonies, it is less of a "war chant" than a way of fiercely asserting group solidarity while referring to a specific ancestry or significant event. The best known haka are probably the versions practiced by the New Zealand All Blacks: Ka Mate and, more recently, Kapa O Pango. More than just a traditional dance, haka has been an important element of the Maori Renaissance- the revival of language, culture and arts that has occurred since the re-affirmation of the Treaty of Waitangi (and has recently come under attack). For the All Blacks, haka now connects both Maori and Pakeha (outsider) players through a shared history and physical discipline, although this was not always the case. Nevertheless, the haka can make a powerful impression, particularly when someone answers in kind.
posted on Feb 19, 2007 - View this thread

The Pandora Podcast Series: "The idea behind them is to provide some interesting, and hopefully entertaining segments on various aspects of music theory. Kind of like a peek under the hood of music composition and performance using lots of musical examples." So far they've covered vocal harmony, drumming, electric guitar effects, recording vocals and elements of salsa. Schedule for rest of 2007.
posted on Feb 15, 2007 - View this thread

Hick Hop - Asylum Street Spankers (previously)
posted on Dec 22, 2006 - View this thread

Jerome Murat A short video of a performance by Jerome Murat that is part Circ du Soliel and one of those human statues you see in Paris, New York and Florence and places like that. Amazing how music and pantomime can be so effective.
posted on Nov 28, 2006 - View this thread

Karolina Sobecka has made animations of a running tiger (Wildlife) and violent cartoon hijinks (Chase), which she projects onto city landscapes from a moving car. (Embedded Quicktime.) She's got a site full of her other projects, including a ton of nifty commercial work.
posted on Nov 22, 2006 - View this thread

Healing Dick
posted on Nov 10, 2006 - View this thread

Electronic Blockade of Mexican Government: Hactivism and Oaxaca; The Electronic Disturbance Theatre, founded by Ricardo Dominguez has organized a virtual sit-in of Mexican embassy and consulate websites. [More Inside]
posted on Oct 30, 2006 - View this thread

Tom Vague's History Walk (PDF downloads) of the Notting Hill district is an evocative roll call of books, films, personalities, restaurants, anecdotes and a timeline strung together to cover the period 1950 to 2005. [whet your appetite inside]
posted on Sep 30, 2006 - View this thread

Tehching Hsieh – Life Performance Never one to back down from performance art, Tehching Hsieh, a Chinese emigre to the US, has done some pretty impressive things: - A year in a cage in his loft without talking; -Punching a time clock every hour of every day for a year (and missing tons of REM sleep and making a film in the process;) -Spending a year outside, never entering a single building or roofed structure until he was arrested in a scuffle; Tied together with artist Linda Montano with a 8-foot piece of rope. Does Tehching Hsieh deserve to be called America's Greatest Performance Artist?
posted on Aug 18, 2006 - View this thread

8=8 is a group of four programmers = four performers = four artists. We each built our own program for my Hypertable platform, then created a program that would group them together for a public performance. More videos &c.
posted on Jul 10, 2006 - View this thread

Alexander Calder's Circus. A movie by Carlos Vilardebo, in four parts: one two, three, four, [YouTube]. Calder developed his own one-man circus, with tiny performers made of "cork, wire, wood, yarn, paper, string, and cloth," carefully engineered to walk tightropes, dance, tame lions, lift weights, and engage in gymnastics and acrobatics in and above the ring. Acting as omniscient ringmaster, Calder would manipulate the wire performers while his wife wound circus music on the gramophone in the background. via [more inside]
posted on Jun 29, 2006 - View this thread

On May 14th, 1967, the new British pop group The Pink Floyd makes one of their first ever TV appearances. Despite a stellar performance of the song Astronomy Domine, the pretentious host of the show, Hans Keller, has nothing good to say about the band. During the interview (youtube, performance comes first, interview starts about 5:50 in. transcript here.), he chastises the band for their "continuous repetition", "terribly loud" volume, and their "proportionately a bit boring" sound.

However, it seems that all Hans' show will ever be remembered for is this single interview. Pink Floyd, on the other hand.. Well, we all know what happened to them. Syd Barrett, on the other hand, was not so lucky.
posted on May 29, 2006 - View this thread

The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 features, among many compelling pieces, works by Tehching Hsieh. Hsieh may be best known for his 1983-84 collaborative piece with Linda Montano, in which the two artists were tethered together at the waist with an eight foot rope -- for an entire year. [Previously mentioned here.]
posted on Feb 13, 2006 - View this thread

Nam June Paik passed away on Sunday. We'll read educated commentaries in the next few days, but what I most affectionately remember about him is how his work made me laugh happily during the 70s and 80s. A precursor of video art, he was the first to use plugged tv sets as building blocks in the most playful ways. His TV Buddha is arguably an unsurpassed classic (a motionless moving image, an outside observation of an inner meditation, even -why not?- a premonition of a blogger) (this last one is a joke: I told you Paik made me laugh). R.I.P.
posted on Jan 30, 2006 - View this thread

17 Minutes is a performance and video blog project by new media artist Chris Barr. It's about suicide. [MI]
posted on Nov 22, 2005 - View this thread

Me and Billy Bob and To Vincent, With Love - Laying in the bathtub with Vincent and editing oneself into love scenes with Billy Bob; among other cult-of-celebrity obsessed work by Jillian McDonald.
posted on Nov 4, 2005 - View this thread

To invoke Fast and the Furious: It's not how you play the game that matters, it's the color of your uniform
posted on Oct 29, 2005 - View this thread

I love to guita-r. (QT required, but the downloads were pretty fast.) Wha-wha without the paddles. These are videos of past winners and hall-of-famers of US Air Guitar Championships. Makes for a laugh.
posted on Oct 27, 2005 - View this thread

OPB: The mother of all beers. Says artist Toi Sennhauser, "By adding a trace amount of my vaginal yeast to regular brewer's yeast, my 'Original Pussy Beer' pays homage to beer's ancient creators from 'the cradle of civilization.'" [more inside (heh)]
posted on Oct 20, 2005 - View this thread

The Song and the Singer For many he is the greatest Lieder singer of the 20th century. As he turns 80, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau reflects on his long career.
posted on Sep 8, 2005 - View this thread

Found in translation: Much more than / Hip hop Chaucer, and it don't stop / Hip hop Aeschylus, and it don't stop / Hip hop Shakespeare, and it don't stop / Yeah [3.4MB .wmv], and it don't stop, and it don't quit.
posted on Aug 5, 2005 - View this thread

Sometimes You Can't Fix You On Your Own. (Quicktime and Windows Media.) If there has ever been doubt about Coldplay's burning ambition to be U2, let it be put to rest.
posted on Aug 5, 2005 - View this thread

A video clip (direct link: approx 10 MB WMV, streaming) of two clever performers on stage, aired on a Netherlands television channel.
posted on May 12, 2005 - View this thread

Ethan Acres demonstrates the Rapture. The Reverend Acres is both a preacher, who wants to "put the fun back into fundamentalism" (turn the sound down) and an art school graduate. He will christen your children if they so desire (and if they are flowers). And he really, really likes Thomas Kinkade. I just wish I could show you his pigs, but you'll have to go to the library.
posted on Apr 28, 2005 - View this thread

A lecutre musical (QT video) by Columbia University spontaneous performance artists PRANGSTGRÜP (warning: flash site). Lots of great stuff in their videos section.
posted on Mar 31, 2005 - View this thread

1 year performance video (aka samHsiehUpdate)
posted on Nov 3, 2004 - View this thread

Movieoke - emote along with your favorite scenes from Casablanca, Taxi Driver, Grease and a bunch of others. All the classics except, inexplicably, A Few Good Men.
posted on Sep 12, 2004 - View this thread

I've seen it happen where these types of managers have the nerve to hold this type of book up in front of a group of people and imply the problem is the workforce for not choosing to be happy about poor leadership. From an Amazon review of Fish!. I've been motivated with that twice. A friend of mine was encouraged to take The Flight of the Buffalo and another is going to a sponsored Dale Carnegie class. So, who's moved your cheese?
posted on Jul 26, 2004 - View this thread

Chicken John is quitting! (SanFranciscoFilter) It looks like the Odeon is looking for new management. Does this mean the end of good/bad/scary performance art in SF, or is it just a new beginning?
posted on May 12, 2004 - View this thread

More on the Texas Miracle

It was called the “Texas Miracle,” and you may remember it because President Bush wanted everyone to know about it during his presidential campaign. It was about an approach to education that was showing amazing results, particularly in Houston, where dropout rates plunged and test scores soared. Houston School Superintendent Rod Paige was given credit for the school success, by making principals and administrators accountable for how well their students did. Once he was elected president, Mr. Bush named Paige as secretary of education. And Houston became the model for the president’s “No Child Left Behind” education reform act.

After yesterday's fund raising and self congratulatory orgy in Knoxville TN it seems appropriate that the record be examined more closely. No child left behind indeed.
posted on Jan 9, 2004 - View this thread

Emotional rescues. An article by Susam Tomes questions how much distance is required by a performer in order to communicate emotion effectively. Does the on-stage show of emotion by some musicians distract from their performance? Compare and contrast: cellists Yo-Yo Ma and Jacqueline du Pré with the immobile, stone-visaged Jascha Heifetz. [via Arts & Letters Daily]
posted on Dec 11, 2003 - View this thread

Cleveland Press Shakespeare Photographs Er, no, not photographs of Shakespeare--that would be difficult--but of Shakespeare's plays in performance, 1870-1982. Covers productions in all media; photographs can be browsed by dramatic genre (tragedy, comedy, etc.). On a related note, see also Harry Rusche's Shakespeare Illustrated (outstanding and extensive site devoted to nineteenth-century paintings of scenes from Shakespeare's plays).
posted on Sep 27, 2003 - View this thread

Battle of the "Gypsy"s. There was Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly and Bette Midler. There was even the possibility of Barbra Streisand as Madonna's mother. And now comes Bernadette Peters in the Sam Mendes production of the show theater guru Frank Rich called his favorite musical. This surely begs the question: who's the swellest, greatest, world-on-a-platiest Mama Rose ever? And who are your top five desert island Mama Roses? (Note: participation weighs significantly on your sexuality...contribute at your own risk.)
posted on Apr 22, 2003 - View this thread

Busker Dü: You're short of money. You're not afraid to make a fool of yourself. You have no pride. You have a musical instrument to abuse. Well - that, apparently, is easy. At least if you're a Guardian journalist. But what else can a feller do these days to drum up that old "Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime?" spirit?
posted on Feb 26, 2003 - View this thread

You are the performer! "More art than regular housework. More housework than regular art."
posted on Nov 8, 2001 - View this thread

This weekend's DialTones is yet another fascinating "found sound" performance. (Let's just hope Andras Schiff's not in attendance.)
posted on Aug 29, 2001 - View this thread

It was Fantasia in C Minor with mobile phone, beeping watches and coughing and sneezing accompaniment." Andras Schiff (a wonderful, wonderful pianist, who I've been lucky to hear in concert) had enough of the background noise and left the stage at the Edinburgh festival until people turned off their phones and cleared their throats. Over-reaction, or justified against rudeness? And have you ever experienced something similar at a play/concert/gig?
posted on Aug 22, 2001 - View this thread