New York City’s Interdependence Project has been, as they say, taking meditation to the streets. First there was their November 2009 “Sit Down, Rise Up” 24-hour meditation marathon in the windows of ABC Carpet. (Video here.) Now, the IDP has gone underground to bring meditation to light.

This new public meditation — which the IDP calls an “Inter-Act,” and which Director of Arts and Communication Josh Adler describes as “a new type of performance art and civic engagement” — took place in an NYC subway tunnel: the one at Port Authority to be exact. A “challenging environment to try and meditate in,” to be sure. So, how did it go?

Well, the cops may have not liked it so much, but there surely can’t be a problem with walking meditation when sitting doesn’t work. And, as Adler states, the IDP intends to keep going. To join them, visit the IDP or treeplays.com.

Evan Brenner’s one-man play, “The Buddha: In His Own Words” will play in Cambridge, MA (after several successful runs elsewhere) on Sunday, October 4th. The play has been praised by the likes of The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, and Dr. Mark Epstein — and, just as good, proceeds go to that most venerable of institutions, the great Cambridge Insight Meditation Center.

Here are the details about getting tickets:

Date: Sunday, October 4, 2009
Time: 7pm – 9pm
Location: Cambridge YMCA Theatre
820 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge MA02139
Tickets Available: 1-800-838-3006 or: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/73386

And, here’s a clip:

The always-good Guardian UK website has a review of sorts of Monkey, a new theatre piece from graphic artist Jamie Hewlett and musician Damon Albarn (of Blur, Gorillaz, and seeingly a dozen other projects, some quite successful, all quite adventurous).

The piece climaxes with what Hewlett describes as “fifteen lotus maidens in pyramid formation, some doing the splits and all spinning plates in front of the all-knowing Buddha… it’s bliss.”

Read the Guardian‘s review/interview here.

Here’s a cool little article about how “Philip Glass has replaced the void left by the death of beat poet — and acid-dropping Jew turned Tibetan Buddhist — Allen Ginsberg by forming a collaboration with Leonard Cohen.”
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And here’s a review from Variety of the new play Passing Strange, in which “the impressionable innocent at the show’s center is “a Zen Buddhist stranded in 1970s black middle-class Los Angeles, with a mother intent on dragging him to church, he resists her notion of spirituality but has his own religious experience when it dawns on him that gospel music is the root of rock ‘n’ roll. “