WHIZ! BANG!

Frustrated by the institutionalization of the avant-garde, the founders of POW! Mini Performance Art Festival have taken matters into their own hands: For three nights, an unseemly union of sound, movement, video, comedy, concept, theater, and prose writhes beneath a borderless, interdisciplinary blanket. Artists include award-winning "post-Mexican" composer, performer, sound architect, and POW co-founder Guillermo Galindo, whose 3D installation live/en vivo employs a computerized microscope that transforms the activity of an ant colony into an aural and visual landscape, as well as Rocket Parlour, a sonic steam-punk duo consisting of a telegraph operator and a mule driver and whose use of Tesla and Moog technologies reinvents history to blow your mind. Elsewhere, find George Vernon Alley, creator of an installation and performance based on his hilarious weekly homo-podcast "I'm Going to Kill You," along with performance artist Violeta Luna, who toured extensively with her all-women theater company in Mexico before beginning a decade-long collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Pocha Nostra here in San Francisco. The fact that POW! runs concurrent with the Other Minds New Music Festival might be a happy coincidence if John Cage is no longer your idea of new.
March 7-8, 8 p.m., 2008