Tori Sparks is a rock star of sorts in the contemporary dance world. Her work will quiet your thoughts, allowing a flood of emotions to have their way with you. It is mysterious and sly, or joyful and smiley. Either way, it is damn potent.

Sparks as an artist is a do-er. Her work doesn’t stop with the stage. She uses the camera to take dance, as an established art form, out of the traditional venues and into a new era of expression. This weekend, Sparks presents this other form of visual choreography at the Bushwick Starr. “Trilogy of Two” is three movement-based videos featuring music by Towers of Hanoi and Antler.

Sparks was recently featured in TRACE’s Sporting Life issue along with a portfolio of six other dancers making quality work. Check out her reel for examples of brilliant performance work, or, for those of you nowhere close to Bushwick this evening, view some of her vids here and keep an eye out for her.

Trilogy of Two, three movement-based music videos by Tori Sparks, The Bushwick Starr, Bushwick, Brooklyn. April 4 & 5th, 8pm. $12

TRACE: Describe the work that you’re presenting this weekend.

Tori Sparks: I am presenting a series of movement-based music videos we at sharpelbow have been crafting, called “Trilogy of Two.” I use the term “music videos” lightly as they are not your typical formula, but they are not straight-up dance films either. I have been working in movement and costume design with the concept of “twinning” and the pitfalls of seeking individual sovereignty. With that in mind for the concept, I then juxtaposed music from independent bands like Towers of Hanoi (Gainesville) and Antler (New York).

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Burlesque is an old hat by now. New shows of questionable quality are popping on every soapbox that could be called a stage and some “shows” are little more than retro go-go girls in bars with a bit of extra spangle in their pasties. But if one thing tends to unite burlesque, whether old or revived, it’s that you mostly see white women doing it.

Which brings us to Brown Girls Burlesque. Oh, yes.

This bevvy of fierce women of color don’t skimp on the pasties, but they don’t skimp on the wink-wink factor that’s all-important to burlesque either. A retro go-go girl in a bar get watched; a real burlesque dancer watches back, winking and knowing. Now, that’s one thing for white women to do with their bodies and their audiences, but quite another for women of color to negotiate. And Brown Girls Burlesque negotiates it with stunning, smart and sexy sexy success.

Check it out on Saturday at the Zipper Theater in New York City.

As graffiti moved out of New York and became global street art, something kind of amazing happened. The medium’s core — claiming public space to visually articulate people and ideas whose voices were often distorted, ignored or silenced — remained intact. At the same time, taking paint to a wall was flexible enough for any can-ster in the world to voice a culturally specific cause.

Not many street artists have stayed as true to this global shift as French legend Blek le Rat, who blew up when he plastered Paris with life-size stencils of a French journalist who was kidnapped in Iraq and for whom politicians and the public didn’t seem to care.

But le Rat has been doing this since the early 1970’s, when he earned his alias by stenciling little rats all over Paris until they became as iconic to the city as REVS in was in New York.

Given Blek le Rat’s long reputation, it’s kind of surprising that his work has never made it to U.S. shores until now, so check it out this weekend if you are around L.A. His State-side debut at Subliminal Art Projects opens tomorrow.