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Artist Ticket Picks: Mighty Boosh, Maurice Sendak and 80’s Cinema Go Burlesque, Bitter Poetry and more!

The_Mighty_Boosh_Wallpaper_by_JWoods07Welcome to this week’s Artist Ticket Picks! The Artist Ticket program gives our customers a way to donate to causes that we care about.

If you’re an event producer, you can allow your ticket buyers to purchase limited-edition tickets printed with original artwork in your event settings. The ticket buyer will pay a small, additional charge of $0.25 and receive a limited edition, collectible ticket imprinted with original artwork. The current charity of our choosing will receive 100% of the additional charge. Physical tickets must be enabled on the event.

If you’re a ticket buyer, you can check to see if the limited edition ticket is available to you at the beginning of the ticket checkout process or by visiting the Artist Ticket page. You receive a small piece of collectible art and support a valuable cause just by checking the box in the Artist Ticket widget when you’re purchasing your tickets!

See a full list of events carrying the tickets on the Artist Ticket page, as well as find out more about the beneficiary for the current run of Artist Tickets.

So, without further ado, here are this week’s Artist Ticket picks:

Saturday, January 4 I Come With us on a Journey Through Time and Space: A Mighty Boosh Burlesque TributeSeattle, Washington

The Mighty Boosh is a British comedy troupe featuring comedians Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding. Developed from three stage shows and a six-episode radio series, it has since spawned a total of 20 television episodes for BBC Three and two live tours of the UK, as well as two live shows in the United States.

In May 2004, after the success of a Boosh pilot, Steve Coogan’s company, Baby Cow Productions, produced the first television series of The Mighty Boosh for BBC Three, before it moved to BBC Two in November that same year. Though each episode invariably starts and ends in Dixon Bainbridge’s dilapidated zoo, the “Zooniverse”, the characters of Vince and Howard often depart for other locations, such as the Arctic tundra and limbo.

A second series, shown in July 2005, saw Howard and Vince sharing Naboo’s flat in Dalston with previously minor characters Naboo and his familiar, Bollo, a gorilla living at the “Zooniverse”. This series had an even looser setting as the four characters leave the confines of the flat in every episode, travelling in their van to a variety of surrealistic environments, including Naboo’s home planet “Xooberon”.

Series three started in November 2007, still set in Dalston, but this time the foursome are selling ‘Bits & Bobs’ in their shop, the Nabootique. Their adventures and outings in this series focused more on the involvement of new characters (e.g. Sammy the Crab, or Lester Corncrake etc.) rather than just the two of them.

This burlesque tribute to the cult hit will take place at Belltown’s Rendezvous/Jewelbox Theater and is lead by the board of Shaman (aka L’Orchestre D’Incroyable) and hosts Morbid Curiositease will take you through a journey of time and space featuring: La Petite Mort, Czech Mate, Dogwood, Penelope Rose, Amy Corinne Dougherty and a few surprises. Electro Boy/Girl dance party in the Grotto to follow with a DJ battle Kevin Incroyable vs Dominick J Kreep!

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Tuesday Tease: Cirque-Lesque!

 Poster with Trapeze ArtistOn this date in 1956, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus closed its very last “Big Tent” show in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, signalling the end of an era; all subsequent circus shows would be held in sports arenas. This is significant because it was the end of the golden era of the circus. Once they entered sporting arenas a lot of the magic of the circus disappeared. For those of us that grew up in the 70s and 80s, arenas are we went to see the circus but somehow, sitting on grand stands in a cement box with sticky floors was not the circus that I imagined in my boyhood fantasies and it wasn’t until I was introduced to the cirque-noir movement in the late 90s via Circus Contraption and Bindlestiff Family Cirkus did I start to experience some of the “magic” of the old circus of my boyhood dreams.

Burlesque and circus have always operated in similar universes and many modern burlesque troupes incorporate circus arts into their shows and routines. This week on the Tuesday Tease, I want to highlight shows happening this week that incorporate a little bit of circus into their shows so I’m talking clowns, acrobats, magic and sideshow acts. While the big tents may be gone, we can still re-visit the magic of the magical circus days of yore.


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Tuesday Tease: The Pretty Things Peepshow

pretty-things-peepshowThe histories of American sideshows and burlesque have been intertwined for at least the last 150 years. “Girly shows” were a popular midway attraction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and for those living in rural areas, the travelling circus provided men with a sexy distraction from a hard life of working the land. Many small towns didn’t have supper clubs, vaudeville shows, speakeasies or burlesque nightclubs (and, remember, this pre-dated the massive distribution of “men’s” magazines), so the midway’s “hootchy-kootchy” tents were a big destination for rural males.

The girly shows were often placed right next to the sideshow tents advertising “freaks” and “human oddities” and both burlesque and sideshow performers were well versed in tempting coinage from the pockets of small town “rubes.” The girly tents and freakshows continued into the 1970’s but began to fade away as the exploitative qualities of both became both apparent and unsavory to the general public. Also, mainstream circus culture became geared towards family-friendly entertainment and, eventually, phased out the seedier elements of the midway.
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