Peter McDowell Arts Consulting is proud to offer our first international workshop.“The Basics of Self Promotion for Performing Artists” will take place in Hobart, Tasmania (Australia) on Friday, January 20, 2012, from 10AM – 5PM. This workshop is being presented by IHOS Music Theatre and Opera.

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The Basics of Self-Promotion for Performing Artists is a workshop designed to give musicians, composers, dancers, or other performing artists, simple but powerful tools and strategies for marketing and publicising their careers, creations and performances.

Areas covered include:

• overview of web site options for performing artists
• web site content basics
• creating promotional PDFs such as one-sheets
• writing a bio and a press release
• contacting critics, reviewers and bloggers
• getting events listed
• promoting audio/video recordings on the web, to radio stations, and to critics/reviewers

There will be time for networking, group discussion and for a question and answer session. Participants are asked to bring any self-promotional materials that they have created.

The morning of the workshop will be spent in a group lecture/discussion setting and the afternoon will consist of one-on-one meetings to review your marketing portfolio as an artist. Peter will be able to share his knowledge of festivals and events in the USA and Europe with a history of programming international artists and groups and how Australian artists can best approach them.

Registration limited to 25 participants.

WHERE: ARTS TASMANIA (10AM – 1PM) 146 Elizabeth Street, Hobart, and IHOS HALL (2PM – 5PM) 32 Pitt Street, North Hobart

COST: AUD$150

TO REGISTER: email info@ihosopera.com

Performing Arts Consultant Peter McDowell has lived in New York City, San Francisco, and Chicago, USA over the past 20 years and brings his wealth of knowledge of the performing arts scene in each of these cities to the workshop. He has lived in France and Germany and brings a unique perspective on the European market as well. He has built a solid career on high-level, strategic, creative, efficient and effective service to performing arts organizations and performing artists. He is also Co-Founder of www.PerformSites.com — a company which creates WordPress web sites for artists and arts organizations.

In The Ladies Ring Shout – a performance using a combination of spoken word, movement and an original soundtrack – Felicia Holman, Abra Johnson and Meida McNeal explore portrayals of women of color in popular culture and contemporary society offering their own poignant and personal stories of resistance in this three-woman show.

“There’s potency within this range,” says TimeOut Magazine. “It’s as if the trio’s work is fundamentally a tug-of-war between emotional and intellectual investigation.”

December 18-20, 7pm
eta Creative Arts Foundation, Chicago

General Admission: $15 (online price includes $1.52 service fee)
To purchase tickets online click here
To purchase tickets via Box Office call or stop by
eta Creative Arts Foundation
7558 S. South Chicago Avenue, Chicago
10am-6pm M-F
Phone: (773) 752-3955

A production of Honey Pot Performance

Co-devised by Felicia Holman, Abra Johnson & Meida McNeal

Directed by Sonita Surratt

Costumes by Lindsay Obermeyer

Set & Environmental Design by Jeanne Medina

Lillias White

Congratulations to the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus who just unveiled their new web site, designed by PerformSites, the web development branch of Peter McDowell Arts Consulting.

On December 18th at NYC’s Town Hall, the NYCGMC presents their annual concert of holiday singing in jazz and gospel styles. A New York holiday tradition, this fun-filled holiday show will combine original titles and swinging interpretations of the classics performed with high-spirited unity, peace and love.

This year, the Chorus is elated to have two very special guests on stage. The sensational, multi-talented Broadway powerhouse Lillias White will bring her unparalleled vocal talent to several songs. Ms. White won a Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics, and People’s Choice Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance as “Sonja” in The Life and recently enjoyed rave reviews for her starring role in the hit Broadway production of Fela! The Chorus will also welcome Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay man ever consecrated as a bishop in the Anglican branch of Christianity and an accomplished choral singer and director in his own right.

The holiday concert takes place Sunday, December 18th at 3pm and 8pm at New York’s landmark theater The Town Hall, 123 W. 43rd Street, New York. Tickets are available through the NYCGMC website, www.nycgmc.org. The evening will feature holiday favorites, alongside an exciting and unusual mix of choral music.

On the heels of the Chorus’s holiday spectacular, the men continue their momentum with the more-than-over-the-top March production. Following three years of sell-out, sing-along performances, NYCGMC will present Big Gay Sing 4, March 16 and 17, 2012, featuring the third annual “Big Gay Idol,” a singing competition for a chance to sing live with the Chorus. The summer Pride concert June 27, What Now?(!), will celebrate our achievements through an elegant evening filled with invigorating song while simultaneously asking what’s next on the GLBT political agenda. Both 2012 shows will be at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets are available through www.nycgmc.org.

About the NYCGMC:

A fixture on the New York City cultural scene since its founding in 1979, the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus has performed in a wide variety of venues from the Metropolitan Opera House to Madison Square Garden, and even Yankee Stadium and Joan Rivers’ living room. Named one of the five top amateur choruses in New York City by WQXR, The Classical Music Station in New York City, the group was the first gay chorus to perform in Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center, the first American gay chorus to tour Europe, and the first to have a recording contract with a major label, having produced eight recordings. To learn more, visit http://www.nycgmc.org/press/.

“Avant-Cabaret” electronic artist Amy X Neuburg performs on Tuesday December 13, 2011 at 8:00 PM at the brand new Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue (at 3rd Avenue) in Brooklyn, NY. Tickets are $15 ($10 for students, seniors, and members) and can be purchased at www.roulette.org or by calling (917) 267-0363. The beloved Bay Area techno-songstress collaborates this time with NYC pianist/improviser Cory Smythe (of ICE), The evening will consist of new compositions for voice, piano and live electronics, improvisational duets, and solos from Amy and Cory — including Amy’s spirited ‘avant-cabaret’ songs for voice and drum-controlled looping, and works from Cory’s recent release “Pluripotent” for piano with live processing.

Amy and Cory met in June 2011 where they performed with the venerable Present Music Ensemble in Milwaukee, and Cory premiered Amy’s “When” for live-looped piano and voice — a fully scored song in which both performers are recorded in real time, then instantly played back and layered in interlocking parts. Amy’s evocative, haunting “When,” which uses few words to sum up nearly a whole life, was paired with her 2001 voice and piano piece “What he Was” — a clever, tongue-twisting wordplay exercise that uses many words to say very little.

Amy and Cory will recreate this duet of songs as well as present new compositions for voice, piano and electronics — partly composed and partly improvised, and created by both artists expressly for this concert. In addition, Amy will perform several of her classic “avant-cabaret” solo songs for voice with electronic drums and live looping/processing, and Cory will perform selections from his recently released “Pluripotent” recording of solo piano works with electronic processing, about which composer Jason Moran said: “The music is captivating, and hands down one of the best solo recordings I’ve ever heard.”

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Amy X Neuburg is widely considered one of the most innovative practitioners of voice and live electronics performance working today. She calls her style “avant-cabaret,” as it combines theater and wordplay, intricate multi-layered composition, expressive use of music technology (with emphases on drums and live looping), and exploration of multiple genres using the many colors of her 4-octave vocal range — with lyrics ranging from the personal and poignant to the political and downright outrageous. As soloist Amy has performed at Other Minds, Bang on a Can, the Berlin International Poetry Festival, the Wellington and Christchurch Jazz Festivals (NZ), the Warsaw Philharmonic Hall, electronic music festivals, colleges, clubs, and concert halls at home and abroad. As composer/collaborator, commissions include numerous works for ensembles with and without live electronics (recently Present Music, Robin Cox Ensemble, Pacific Mozart Ensemble chorus, Del Sol String Quartet), as well as for theater, visual media, and modern dance, and she performs regularly with her Cello ChiXtet — three cellists with voice and electronics — for whom she composed her formidable song cycle “The Secret Language of Subways” (Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco Symphony After-Hours, LA Philharmonic Left Coast Festival). As vocalist Amy toured Europe and Japan with Robert Ashley’s operas. Among her many grants and honors she is a 2011 recipient of the Alpert/Ucross prize. A fixture of the San Francisco Area new music scene, this will be Amy’s fourth appearance at Roulette — her favorite place to play in New York.

Pianist Cory Smythe is an inventive improviser, chamber musician, and performer of contemporary classical music. As a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Cory has contributed to numerous premieres, worked with composers Philippe Hurel, Dai Fujikura, Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, Mathias Pintscher, David Lang, and Alvin Lucier among many others, and performed in venues across the U.S. and abroad. His recent performance of solo piano music by Lindberg was praised by the Boston Globe for its “grace and intensity,” and a forthcoming recording by ICE (Mode Records) will feature Cory as soloist in Iannis Xenakis’s “Palimpsest.” Equally invested in the classical repertoire, Cory is a sought-after chamber musician and soloist, appearing with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, violinist Hilary Hahn, and Present Music, and making his Carnegie Weill Hall debut with violinist Sung-Ju Lee. As an improviser and jazz musician, Cory has worked with the Greg Osby Four, Pete Robbins’ Centric, Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Evans, Beth Schenk, Kyle Quass, and Anthony Braxton.