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Here are our picks for the week of June 11 through 17:
River To River is Lower Manhattan's largest free summer arts festival featuring music, film, dance, theater, art and participatory experiences in more than 25 indoor and outdoor locations in downtown New York. This year features a new curated series by the iconic composer/musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson, who also performs on June 18 and 19 in Rockefeller Park.
2. La Bienal 2013: Here is Where We Jump at El Museo del Barrio.
El Museo's seventh biennial exhibition features work by 37 emerging Latino and Latin American artists, from newly-minted to mid-career, who live and work in New York City. This year, La Bienal features Brazil as the special guest country, which presents an opportunity for El Museo to remain in conversation with similar urban artistic landscapes throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and expose audiences to emerging artists in other locales.
3. Conrad Tao's UNPLAY Festival at powerHouse Arena.
The multi-talented classical pianist Conrad Tao celebrates his 19th birthday with an ambitious festival of genre-breaking music. He will play contemporary composer Meredith Monk alongside Ravel and Rachmaninoff, and present his own compositions for piano and iPad. Friends from the alt-classical scene, including Face the Music, Iktus Percussion, Sideband, thingNY, and Todd Reynolds, will join.
4. Viking Rappers: From New York to the North Pole at NOoSPHERE.
Photographer Martin Johansen and director Simen Braathen spent the last two years following Norwegian rap artists to document what happens when different music and cultures mix. Braathen's film "Máze Represent!" tells the story of how Slincraze -- a rap group from a small Arctic village -- uses hip-hop to fight negative stereotypes and bring back their dying language. At the gallery's sneak preview (exhibition opens in the fall), Slincraze will perform live in a language spoken by fewer than 15,000 people on earth.
5. Gotham Chamber Opera: La hija de Rappaccini (Rappaccini's Daughter) at Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Gotham Chamber Opera presents Daniel Catán's 1988 opera, "La hija de Rappaccini," with the botanic garden's cherry trees as the backdrop. With a libretto by the Mexican Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz, and based on the short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Rappaccini's Daughter" tells of a doctor who keeps his daughter locked in a garden where he experiments with poisonous plants.