This past week saw many of the best and brightest of the downtown theater scene showing works-in-progress and talking at CUNY Graduate Center as part of Prelude 05. It was an intense and exciting week previewing some of the work that we’ll be seeing over the next season (probably). It was a great chance to see the development process of some of downtown’s more notable theatermakers all in one place. Culturebot still has a day job so he didn’t get to see everything, but his personal highlight was Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven. Keep your eyes peeled for this show – who knows where it will appear?!

If you missed Prelude 05 there’s another amazing event coming to town. From November 3-21 the New York Art World will be abuzz with Performa05, the first biennial of new visual performance art in NYC. Curated by the legendary RoseLee Goldberg the festival will feature work from over 80 artists in venues throughout the city, much of it free.

There is far too much going on in Performa05 for us to list here. So go check out their website at www.performa-arts.org and dig around. Culturebot will do his best to attend events and report back, but citizen reporting is welcome as well. Email me what you see and I’ll post it.