Nicole Peyrafitte

TIMES UNION
Best of 2005: Arts
The top choices in the Capital Region
Best Performance Artist :
Nicole Peyrafitte
http://www.nicolepeyrafitte.com
Watching this poet-vocalist-all-around-artist performing the American premiere of ''Bi-Continental Chowder'' at Firlefanz Gallery in Albany earlier this year, one audience member was moved to describe the performance as follows: ''A French woman with stylist-spiky red hair balanced a brass chime bowl on her head, and while singing a 5,000-year-old Sumarian poem, walked the length of the gallery and back tapping the bowl with a sea shell and a wooden stick. When she returned to the stage, she kept singing, removed the bowl, then stood on her head and while performing various acrobatic leg movements, continued singing the poem until the end. At the same time a large pot of chowder was cooking.''
Now that's performance art.

TIMES UNION
Best of 2006: Arts
The top choices in the Capital Region
BEST PERFORMANCE ART VENUE
Nicole Peyrafitte's Experimental Cabaret at Tess' Lark Tavern
453 Madison Ave., Albany. 463-9779.
www.nicolepeyrafitte.com/experimentalcabaret/mondaycabaret.htm
Yes, we know all about delightfully strange art happenings at iEAR at RPI, but Nicole Peyrafitte's Experimental Cabaret -- held at Tess' Lark Tavern at 7 p.m. on the second Monday of the month -- has been a marvelous boon to thinking-outside-the-box artists, and it's decidedly more democratic. Since the monthly shows began back in November, Peyrafitte has hosted a wide variety of unclassifiable multimedia performance art -- improv poetry 'n' dance, PowerPoint 'n' stand-up comedy, poetry 'n' live jazz, video 'n' DJ, whatever. You just never know what you're going to see and hear -- and that's the beauty of it. Ex Cab is on hiatus for the summer, but Peyrafitte promises to rev things up again for a second season beginning in October.