43 free things to do in New York City (NYC) on Friday, October 12, 2018
All events are free unless otherwise noted.
Improve balance, strength and focus through gentle exercises. The sights and sounds of the river provide ...
more >> a serene background for the ancient flowing postures. Tai Chi results in strength and focus of body and mind. An ideal choice for participants of all ages. Instructor: Alex Hing
New York City, NY; NYC
8:30 am
free, no reservation required
A presentation and discussion on Equinor's Energy Perspectives 2018 Edition with Eirik Wærness, Senior ...
more >> Vice President and Chief Economist at Equinor. The Energy Perspectives report addresses some of the key questions facing the global energy market – how much will energy demand grow over the coming decades? Is the world going through an energy transition? What is the future investment need in energy supply? The projection period runs until 2050 and covers all the main regions, sectors and fuels. In order to capture the wide outcome space for future energy markets, Energy Perspectives uses three scenarios based on different assumptions about regional and global economic growth, geopolitics, technological development, energy efficiency, and energy and climate policies:
New York City, NY; NYC
These free tours take place at various times during the day, all day long. You can make reservations ...
more >> for as many tours as your schedule allows.
SoHo, Little Italy and Chinatown
Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn Heights + DUMBO
3 Hour Lower Manhattan
Harlem
Chelsea and the High Line
6 Hour Downtown Combined
Greenwich Village
Central Park
Lower Manhattan
Midtown Manhattan
Grand Central Terminal
Graffiti and Street Art Tours
World Trade Center
New York City, NY; NYC
Free fun for the whole family, including arts, crafts, antiques, plants, entertainment, games, and more.
New York City, NY; NYC
10:00 am
free, no reservation required
Editor's Pick
Sociologist Virag Molnar will explore emergent relations between fashion and national populism. Recent ...
more >> examples show how dress and fashion are both an important site and an idiom through which political conflicts over cultural membership are played out.
New York City, NY; NYC
12:00 pm
free, no reservation required
The organ works of J.S. Bach (1685-1750) offered in 30-minute meditations. Bach at Noon concerts take ...
more >> place every Tuesdays through Fridays, from September 11, 2018 to May 22, 2019.
New York City, NY; NYC
12:20 pm
free, no reservation required
Discover architecture and social history of Grand Central neighborhood; learn secrets of Whispering Gallery ...
more >> in Grand Central Terminal; gaze upon hubcaps and roadsters on side of Chrysler Building; discover favorite Midtown Manhattan hangout of Mercury, Hercules, and Minerva; learn why Pershing Square isn’t really square; visit original Lincoln Memorial by Daniel Chester French. Award-winning tour led by urban historians Peter Laskowich and Madeleine Levi. This tour takes place every Friday.
New York City, NY; NYC
12:30 pm
free, no reservation required
When three different animals become infected with a dangerous pathogen, a primatologist and a geneticist ...
more >> team up to stop them from destroying Chicago. Director: Brad Peyton. Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Malin Akerman. 115 min.
New York City, NY; NYC
1:00 pm
free, no reservation required
During the Cold War, a disgraced English spy works to expose a double agent in British intelligence who's ...
more >> selling secrets to the Soviets. Directors Tomas Alfredson. Starring Colin Firth, Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, John Hurt. 127 min.
New York City, NY; NYC
1:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Learn about central banking functions that Federal Reserve System performs and see Bank's vault of international ...
more >> monetary gold on bedrock of Manhattan Island, five stories below street level. Learn why Federal Reserve has "Federal" in its name, while it's a private bank, not Federal at all. Tour times: 1:00pm, 2:00pm. This tour takes place Mondays through Fridays, except bank holidays.
New York City, NY; NYC
Take a mid-day pause to refresh your mind and re-establish your center in the midst of bustling city ...
more >> life. Meditation is a powerful tool to eliminate stress, to heal the body, mind, and brain, and to enhance your personal well-being and positive relationship with the world.
New York City, NY; NYC
1:00 pm
$10 suggested donation
This symposium brings together artists, curators, and scholars to discuss Mary Corse’s work and her ...
more >> innovative engagements with the medium of painting. Topics to be considered include: materials and luminosity, contingency and vision, and new perspectives on artistic practices of the 1960s and 70s.
New York City, NY; NYC
Editor's Pick
Organist Donald R. Meineke serves as Cantor at The Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity where ...
more >> he oversees the musical life of the Parish, conducts the Holy Trinity Parish Choir, curates an extensive concert series, and is Artistic Director of Bach Vespers featuring the renowned Bach Choir and Players. Weekly recitals showcasing the new organ, featuring New York City's leading organists.
New York City, NY; NYC
1:00 pm
free, no reservation required
In the bleak days of the Cold War, espionage veteran George Smiley is forced from semi-retirement to ...
more >> uncover a Soviet agent within MI6. Starring Colin Firth, Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, John Hurt. 127 min.
New York City, NY; NYC
1:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Violette Nozière, the criminal, Delphine Seyrig, the actress, Páscoa, the slave. French actress Jeanne ...
more >> Balibar grapples with these three figures in a roundtable conversation with three French historians who have researched and written about their lives, Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini, Emmanuelle Loyer, and Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile, who gave shape to these three women’s histories. They discuss how to give voice to these women from the past, how to narrate – and perform -- their stories and histories.
New York City, NY; NYC
Do you love the sound of Yiddish, but never learned to speak it? Do you speak a bisl, but wish you spoke ...
more >> a sakh? Do you want to make your mispokhe kvel? Join Yiddish Master Teacher Nikolai “Kolya” Borodulin of the Workmen’s Circle and go from bupkes to bilingual! No prior Yiddish knowledge necessary. Even complete beginners will be able to follow. You’ll be surprised how much Yiddish you know already.
New York City, NY; NYC
1:00 pm
free, reservation required
Learn the basics with masters from Manhattan Fencing Center. Must be 16 or older to participate.
New York City, NY; NYC
Two con men try to settle their rivalry by betting on who can swindle a young American heiress out of ...
more >> $50,000 first. A fun comedy for two great actors. Director: Frank Oz. Starring Michael Cain, Steve Martin. 150 min.
New York City, NY; NYC
2:00 pm
free, no reservation required
A group of friends who meet regularly for game nights find themselves entangled in a real-life mystery. ...
more >> Directed by John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein. Starring Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Billy Magnussen. 100 min.
New York City, NY; NYC
2:00 pm
free, no reservation required
In remote Antarctica, a group of American research scientists are disturbed at their base camp by a helicopter ...
more >> shooting at a sled dog. When they take in the dog, it brutally attacks both human beings and canines in the camp and they discover that the beast can assume the shape of its victims. A resourceful helicopter pilot and the camp doctor lead the camp crew in a desperate, gory battle against the vicious creature before it picks them all off, one by one. Director: John Carpenter. Starring Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Keith David. 109 min.
New York City, NY; NYC
2:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Editor's Pick
We live in an age of smartphones, apps, Fitbits, smart watches and other gadgets that can be harnessed ...
more >> to help us become healthy. Since 2014, more than $16 billion has been invested in 800 startups in the “digital health” space. But what if the role for tech to improve health goes beyond getting us to change our behavior, to adhere to our medication regimens or to improve our care experiences? What if the role of tech runs deeper? Lori Melichar and Steve Downs of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation lay out the case for tech to focus on changing the experience of daily lives at a fundamental level and then lead a group discussion to elicit hunches about the interplay of tech, life and health.
New York City, NY; NYC
2:00 pm
free, no reservation required
English teacher John Keating inspires his students to a love of poetry and to seize the day. Director: ...
more >> Peter Weir. Cast: Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke. 128 min.
New York City, NY; NYC
2:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Billed as the “centre of unity,” Abuja, Nigeria’s planned capital city, concretizes a postcolonial ...
more >> ideology of nation-building known as Wazobia, an amalgamation of the respective words for “come” in Nigeria’s three major indigenous languages: Yoruba (wa), Hausa (zo), and Igbo (bia). But how, linguistically, are Nigerians supposed to come together as one? Speaker: Rudolf Gaudio of Purchase College, SUNY
New York City, NY; NYC
2:00 pm
free, no reservation required
3:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Editor's Pick
Four time Grammy Award winner, Glen Velez is the founding Father of the modern frame drum movement and ...
more >> is regarded as a legendary figure among musicians and audiences world-wide. Velez brought a new genre of drumming to the contemporary music scene by creating his own performance style inspired by years of percussion and frame drumming studies from various cultures. Velez's virtuosic combinations of hand movements, finger techniques, along with his original compositional style, which incorporates stepping, drum language and Central Asian Overtone singing (split-tone singing), has undoubtedly opened new possibilities for musicians around the globe, resulting in a shift in modern percussion.
New York City, NY; NYC
3:00 pm
free, no reservation required
All four authors -- Andrew Kahn (Oxford), Mark Lipovetsky (Colorado-Boulder), Irina Reyfman (Columbia) ...
more >> and Stephanie Sandler (Harvard) -- will be present for the launch of the ground-breaking volume that has already garnered glowing reviews: In addition, the authors have invited four guests to participate in the discussion of the book's genesis, novel structure, and tremendous scope. The guests are: Polina Barskova (Hampshire College), Caryl Emerson (Princeton), Olga Maiorova (Michigan) and Wes Williams (Oxford).
New York City, NY; NYC
4:00 pm
free, no reservation required
New Yorkers see the city as a character in their own personal novels. Choreographer Jerome Robbins was ...
more >> no different. Take a tour of the exhibition Voice of My City: Jerome Robbins and New York with Library staff and special guests to discover how all of Robbins’ love, frustration, and identity as a New Yorker were infused into his works. Special guest Robert LaFosse.
New York City, NY; NYC
4:00 pm
free, reservation required
Come celebrate the recent publications of new work by three extraordinary Cave Canem poets. Marcus Jackson ...
more >> is the author of Neighborhood Register and most recently, Pardon My Heart. Amanda Johnston‘s debut Another Way to Say Enter holds poems that possess “A beautifully crafted, fierce and compelling voice.” Dustin Pearson is the author of Millennial Roost, a debut of which Jericho Brown says is “a beautifully necessary book.” Refreshments served.
New York City, NY; NYC
5:00 pm
free, no reservation required
In his exhibit, C'mon in...the dream just started, Ken Ricci presents fifty two of his collages in three ...
more >> groupings. Photographer Cheryl Faust enjoys shooting a wide range of purely aesthetic as well as socially relevant subjects in her exhibit, Artifacts from Gowanus: A Community in Transition.
New York City, NY; NYC
5:30 pm
free, no reservation required
Editor's Pick
From Seymour M. Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and leading investigative journalist of our ...
more >> time, comes a revealing and heartfelt memoir. In Reporter, Hersh takes us behind the scenes of his decades-long career breaking major stories, from Washington to Vietnam to the Middle East. The bestselling author of The Dark Side of Camelot; Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib; and many other works speaks about his new book with Kai Bird, executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
New York City, NY; NYC
Heather Reilly is anti-war since her brother died fighting the Taliban, but huge student loans drive ...
more >> her to work in the Pentagon. Heather’s moved to a war-fighting office for which she has no experience and deep moral conflict. Despite insane bureaucracy, petty power struggles, and endless rules, Heather thrives, but success comes at personal cost, as she learns small mistakes have big consequences, in Kathleen J. McInnis's novel.
New York City, NY; NYC
5:30 pm
free, no reservation required
Kwang Young Chun is a Korean artist best known for his acclaimed Aggregation series, which features wall-embracing ...
more >> three-dimensional sculptures of triangular forms wrapped in traditional Korean mulberry paper, hanji. The small, individual triangles are grouped together and arranged by the artist to form harmonious works of art. Inspired by childhood memories, the artist continues to use consistent materials and techniques to preserve his cultural heritage.
New York City, NY; NYC
Ideas Have No Smell is a new edition of little-known gems of the Belgian Surrealist movement. This is ...
more >> a reading by translator M. Kasper and a dada-performance of Paul Nougé’s visual poems by Georgia Faust, Dikko Faust, Tracie Morris, Michael Barron and Alexandra Tatarsky followed by a discussion. The Belgian Surrealist movement, like its contemporary French cousin, included both visual artists—René Magritte most famously—and writers, who were also its theorists. They shared with the Parisians a fierce commitment to personal, political, and aesthetic liberty, and to humor, surprise, and transgression as artistic strategies, but they parted company when it came to the unconscious and the occult.
New York City, NY; NYC
Bob Dylan, Richard Pryor, Edgar Allen Poe, Jane Jacobs, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Dave Attell, Patti ...
more >> Smith, Joan Baez, and Truman Capote are just a few of the thousands of accomplished artists, writers, radicals, and performers who made their way through Greenwich Village. This tour, primarily focusing on the 1950s onward, visits the hangouts that have defined legendary people and the spirit of this iconic neighborhood.
New York City, NY; NYC
1678, Padua. Elena Cornaro Piscopia becomes the first woman to obtain a doctorate from a university. ...
more >> Her story begins in Venice, in a beautiful palace on the water. Voices from her life are told by a narrator who is going to bring the audience back to the 1600s, while a violin will give voice to Elena’s feelings. By and with Laura Caparrotti (Narrator) Featuring Nyssa Duchow (Violin)
New York City, NY; NYC
Editor's Pick
This fresh, fast-paced comedy inspired by Aristophanes' play, follows Lysistrata, an Athenian housewife, ...
more >> who calls for the women of Greece to help end the Peloponnesian War. She proposes a radical plan: all Greek women must refuse to engage in love-making until the men see reason, lay down their arms and come home to lie down with their wives in peace. The women agree to make the sacrifice and all hell breaks loose as men wander the country in an agony of unsatisfied lust. Will Lysistrata and her crew accomplish what the politicians could not? This college production is adapted by Ellen McLaughlin and directed by NJ Aguwna.
New York City, NY; NYC
Poet Wren Hanks is a 2016 Lambda Emerging Writers Fellow. His work appears or is forthcoming in Best ...
more >> New Poets, Foglifter, Gigantic Sequins, Waxwing, and elsewhere. The book contains utterly convincing prose forms studded with rhetoric he’s remastered and sampled from our culture.
New York City, NY; NYC
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Violinist Claudia Schaer explores the theme of collaboration and recycling. Each work on this program ...
more >> is directly influenced by other music including John Adams' masterpiece Road Movies in which he blends his signature minimalism with a folk/jazz American influence for a unique ride with a personality-filled engine. The program closes with three transcriptions by Claudia Schaer of collaborations by legendary jazz violinist and guitarist Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt.
New York City, NY; NYC
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Pianist Nathaniel LaNasa has performed at Carnegie Hall, Benaroya Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Aspen Music ...
more >> Festival, Institute and Festival for Contemporary Performance, Bowdoin Music Festival, Miller Theater and the Museum of Modern Art. He has presented many premieres, including three concerti and several works dedicated to him. He has appeared as soloist with the New Juilliard Ensemble, Tactus New Music Ensemble among others. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. General seating is available on a first-come-basis.
New York City, NY; NYC
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Moderators: Albert Nofi & Jerry Trombella, NYMAS Board Participants: Jim Dunnigan, Mark Herman, Al Nofi, ...
more >> Peter Perla
New York City, NY; NYC
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Antigone in Ferguson was conceived in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in 2014, through a collaboration ...
more >> between Theater of War Productions and community members from Ferguson, Missouri. Translated and directed by Bryan Doerries and composed by Phil Woodmore, the project fuses a dramatic reading by leading actors of excerpts from Sophocles’s Greek tragedy with live choral music performed by a choir of activists, police officers, youth, and concerned citizens from Ferguson and New York City. The performance is the catalyst for panel and audience-driven discussions on race and social justice, the core component of the event. This multifaceted production will offer a glimpse not only into the effects of the tragedy in Brown’s local community, but also the trauma of police violence and racial injustice in communities of color in New York and across the nation. Local stakeholders and community leaders will participate as panelists, assisting in opening up dialogues with audiences. These guided discussions, which aim to promote healing and bridge the growing divide between law enforcement and local communities, will focus on the impact of racialized violence against communities of color, and the legacies of the tragic deaths of Michael Brown, as well as Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Saheed Vassell, and numerous other victims. The presentation will feature a rotating roster of acclaimed actors, including Samira Wiley (The Handmaid’s Tale), who will reprise the role she portrayed in the premiere of Antigone in Ferguson presented on the stage of Michael Brown’s high school in Ferguson in 2016. Other cast members include: Paul Giamatti (Billions), Tamara Tunie (Law & Order: SVU), David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck), Adepero Oduye (12 Years a Slave), Frankie Faison (The Wire) and Kathryn Erbe (Law & Order: Criminal Intent). Each week will feature a different group of actors. Tuesdays through Saturdays, September 13-October 13, 2018.
New York City, NY; NYC
A standup comedy show featuring comics who have appeared on NBC, TruTV, Comedy Central and more.
New York City, NY; NYC
Editor's Pick
A wide variety of music from across the centuries--including Perotin (c1160-1230), Magister Piero (c1300-1350), ...
more >> Mattheus Pipelare (c1450-1515), Jacobo Peri (1561-1633), Henry Purcell (1659-1695), Johannes Petz (1664-1716), Giovanni Pergolesi (1710-1736), Marie Therese Paradis (1759-1824) and others. Most of the pieces are American premieres, and all are very rarely performed. The connection between the wide range of pieces will become apparent as the program unfolds. About the ensemble Collectio Musicorum ("collection of music") is one of the most adventurous ensembles, presenting music heard nowhere else. Founded by Artistic Director Dr. Jeff S. Dailey, its motto is "presenting the best performances of music from the earliest of times."
New York City, NY; NYC
8:00 pm
free, no reservation required