Culture Shock Marketing (CSM), the New York City-based creative marketing consultancy, is thrilled to announce its partnership with the HOWL! Festival for their 2009 Preview Benefit. The HOWL! Festival, which celebrates the vibrant community of East Village and Lower East Side artists, will kick off its 2009 schedule with a multidisciplinary, mash-up event featuring video art, performance art, music, variety theater and spoken word, curated and produced by Culture Shock Marketing. The preview, part of HOWL! Arts Project 2009: Performance Art, will benefit HOWL! HELP (HOWL! Emergency Life Project) and take place on September 3rd from 11 p.m. – 1 a.m. at the Bleecker Street Theatre.

The annual Howl! Festival, named in honor of the groundbreaking poem by Allen Ginsberg, celebrates the East Village and Lower East Side's role as a preeminent locus of culture. It made perfect sense for the HOWL! organizers to call on Culture Shock Marketing to help get the weekend off to an amazing start. Celebrating her firm’s anniversary in September, Debra Anderson, CEO and Founder of CSM, saw this collaboration as the perfect opportunity to strengthen her commitment to the Village’s diverse creative community by bringing together a select group of talented artists, performers, musicians and video artists she has worked with and been inspired by since CSM’s successful launch two years ago.

The edgy late-night event will include surprise performance elements and will commence with a short video installation featuring films by artists including Hugh McGrory, Keith Olwell, and Glenn Marshall. In addition, the fine art of two UK-based artists, Kev Largey and Daniel Lumbini, along with works by other emerging and established contemporary artists, will be presented in an interactive auction with a portion of proceeds to benefit HOWL! HELP. An online auction component in advance of the September 3rd live event will further promote artists’ works and encourage on-site donations. To close out the evening, guests will enjoy an interactive absurdist variety theatre performance by the New York City and Berlin-based art collective, the Fantastic Nobodies, featuring the premier of sonic-duo Das Witness. This collaboration is presented in partnership with {CTS} creative thriftshop and Bipolart curator Eric Laine.

Weekend Events :: Friday, September 4th; Saturday, September 5th; and Sunday, September 6th
Tompkins Square Park/Bleecker Street Theatre
Three Days, Two Stages, Art Around the Park: Howlucination! Low Life! Hip Hop Howl! Howl Kidz! Poetry! Music! Dance! Events! All through the neighborhood, all month long!

For event details and updates, please visit us on-line                                                        

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about the artist: What began 10 years ago as party antics and costume wearing became, in the course of a decade, via relentless Bush Era disillusionment, a highly developed and unique artistic language, if not a cult of urban legend. The Fantastic Nobobies are a cast of performance characters who have collaborated together to create remarkable fusions of art and life. Acting as reflective mirrors for each other’s creativity, the collective has fostered great breadth of production including: performance, infiltrations, social sculptures, situations, happenings, road-trips, cooking, photography, installations, video, music, poetry, painting, and drawing.