Weekend Cultural Highlights Oct 9-12
by Seth Rogovoy
In the collaboration of choreographer Emio Greco and director Pieter Scholten with composer and Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon, seven dancers oscillate along the seam between music and movement.
In this piece -- which was initially created during a residency at MASS MoCA in 2005 -- shiny black guitars are married with dancers' bodies, transforming them into flesh-and-blood soundboards. Titled [purgatorio] POPOPERA, the fully realized evening-length work will be performed on Saturday at 8 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass.
Composer Gordon, who is well known to MASS MoCA audiences from the annual Bang on a Can Music Festival, explains how the piece came to be:
“When I met Emio and Pieter in New York in 2000 I was taken by their thoughtful intensity, and this attraction only grew when I saw their dance. Their work captures an otherworldly energy that, when on the verge of cresting, just continues to get wilder and wilder. We began then a long conversation about creating a new work together. I suggested that the dance company learn how to play electric guitars and perform the music I write for them as part of a new dance piece.
"Although Emio and Pieter had reservations about this, they were intrigued, and in the summer of 2005 I met the company in North Adams, and we began a 10-day workshop to see if it was even feasible to think that they could learn how to play music. None of us, I think, were prepared for the intensity with which the dancers committed themselves to playing the guitar. The days consisted of long grinding morning-to-evening sessions in which they rarely wanted to take a break and never seemed to tire. At the end of the ten days we gave a workshop performance to an invited audience, and POPOPERA was born.”
Gordon continues, “From the very beginning the company incorporated movement into the creation of the piece, so that after a bit of music was learned they would start to workshop the movement. This whole thing might have seemed crazy to everyone involved in this project, but at a certain point it became clear that they were about to pull off something spectacular. All of a sudden they stopped being dancers and became musicians. I don't know exactly when this all happened, but it encouraged me to write some fairly tricky rhythmic interplays between the group members."
A co-production of MAPP International Productions and Emio Greco│PC, [purgatorio] POPOPERA is the second part of a triptych that follows the threefold structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy. As envisioned by Greco and Scholten, purgatory is a hallowed place, a richly potent netherworld of transition, transformation and purification. The dancers perform to the point of utter exhaustion and ecstasy, and the experience of watching their bodily struggle is thrilling and intense.
More information about Emio Greco | PC is available at ickamsterdam.com or mappinternational.org
Box Office: 413.662.2111 or www.massmoca.org
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The creators of the highly acclaimed play The Laramie Project, which since 2000 has been one of the most performed plays in America, will premiere a compelling and groundbreaking epilogue. The original production of The Laramie Project chronicled the true story of the small town of Laramie, Wyoming, following the brutal beating and murder of Matthew Shepard. The epilogue focuses on the long-term effect of the murder of Matthew Shepard on the town of Laramie. It explores how the town has changed and how the murder continues to reverberate in the community.
The staged reading of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later (An Epilogue) will be performed at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., and more than 100 other theaters around the world on Monday, October 12, 2009. Performances: 3pm and 7pm
In addition to professional actors, the cast features community members, including members of Pittsfield's Office of Cultural Development; poet, teacher, and martial artist Lisken van Pelt Dus; and Berkshire Living editor-in-chief Seth Rogovoy, who will be blogging about the experience throughout the Columbus Day weekend at berkshireliving.com.
BSC Mainstage
30 Union Street
Downtown Pittsfield
30 Union Street
Downtown Pittsfield
413.236.8888
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Close Encounters With Music’ Conversations With… series opens Sunday at 2 at Ventfort Hall in Lenox, Mass., with Music Rooms of the Gilded Age.
Harvey Rosenberg, professor of the History of Interior Design and Architecture at FIT/SUNY for 25 years, and frequent lecturer at Parsons, Pratt and the New School of Interior Design, offers a slide presentation and discussion of how European design principles were incorporated into the Berkshire “cottages” of the Gilded Age.
A series of intimate and stimulating conversations about music and ideas and an intrinsic part of the Close Encounters With Music season, Conversations With… has presented such notable speakers as writer and Berkshire Living editor Seth Rogovoy; composer, National Endowment grantee and Guggenheim fellow Judith Zaimont; pianist and author Walter Ponce; Emmy Award-winning animator, illustrator, cartoonist and children’s-book author R.O. Blechman; Academy Award nominee Daniel Anker; scholar/performer/multimedia artist Robert Winter; and former Yankee, author and sportscaster Jim Bouton.
Close Encounters With Music
800-843-0778
800-843-0778
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Berkshire Theatre Festival continues its 81st season with the world premiere of Red Remembers, a one-man show based on the career of Red Barber, former announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers and later the New York Yankees.
Red Remembers was written by Andrew Guerdat and features Tony nominee David Garrison as Red Barber. Well into retirement, Red Barber, invites the audience into an intimate, beautifully nostalgic story about his life, the history of baseball, and the core values of humanity in an ever changing world. The honor, loyalty, and perseverance of America and its favorite pastime are not lost upon Red, and he ensures they shall not be lost to us. Red Remembers runs though November 1. The performance schedule will be Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8pm, with matinees on Saturdays and Sundays at 2pm. Special performances will take place this weekend Saturday 2 and 8, Sunday 2 & 8, and Monday at 2.
(413) 298-5576.
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Boston’s Junius will be making its Berkshire debut on Friday performing at The Room (Rebel Sound Records) located in downtown Pittsfield, Mass. Junius has been described as having “spacey walls of guitars, driving rhythms and haunting vocal hooks”. They blur the line between darker New Wave and brooding cinematic art rock thus forming a genre-defining Post-Wave aesthetic. Imagine Tears For Fears during “The Hurting”-era combined with Hum and The Cure’s “Disintegration”-era. Joining Junius will be local indie rockers A Sign Before and Awkward Ending. Tonight’s show is also a birthday celebration for Edgar of Awkward Ending.
The Instigators featuring Dennis Most will headline Pioneer Valley Punk Night at Rebel Sound Records on Saturday at 7. Pioneer Valley Punk Night features some of the best talent to be gigging around the 91 freeway at this special Pittsfield show. Also appearing will be The Uncomfortables featuring former members of the influential Pajama Slave Dancers, Pruf and Gimlet Slip. The Instigators are have released records on various labels since the mid to late 1970s but a well known as proto-punk pioneers. Dennis Most has been performing his solo material as well as songs by The Instigators. Dennis’ solo material can be heard often locally on Rebel Sound Radio airing Saturday afternoons on WTBR 89.7FM.
The Room at Rebel Sound Records is located at 146-A North Street in downtown Pittsfield.
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Woodstock veteran Richie Havens performs at the Colonial on Saturday night, joined by special guest Meg Hutchinson, a Berkshire native, at 8. Havens gained fame as an interpreter of songs by Bob Dylan and the Beatles, before his legendary three-hour solo performance opened the original Woodstock music festival in 1969, at which he improvised the song "Freedom," which grew out of the spiritual, "Motherless Child," and became the unofficial anthem of the festival.
The Berkshire Eagle's Derek Gentile interviewed Richie Havens here.
The Bill Lowe-Andy Jaffe Repertory Big Band perform on Friday at 8 in the MainStage in the '62 Center for Theatre and Dance on the Williams College campus. This free event is open to the public but tickets are required and will be available one hour before the concert.
Pianist Andy Jaffe and co-leader Bill Lowe, noted bass trombone player and tubist, bring their fresh and energetic big band, comprised of many of the finest players from all over the Northeast, to Williams to perform entirely original repertoire, mainly composed and arranged by leader Andy Jaffe, who for years has been among the vanguard of writers pushing the art of arranging and composition for big band into new frontiers, within the context of the tradition.
In this endeavor he fully exploits the colors available on his palette, continuously mixing them to create new shades and moods that can caress ears or raise hackles. Featuring full trumpet, trombone, and reed sections, French hornist John Clark as well as a rhythm section including faculty member Freddie Bryant on guitar and vocalist Nik Mathis, this is a rare opportunity to hear what a professional ensemble can do when it is unleashed to play the kind of music these musicians clearly love.
concert hotline: 413-597-3146
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The lively and glamorous Margaret Emerson Vanderbilt, who rented Ventfort Hall during the First World War, will be the subject of a lecture by Cornelia Brooke Gilder, co-author of Houses of the Berkshires and author of Hawthorne’s Lenox. The lecture will take place at 4 on Saturday, October 10 at Ventfort Hall. Using photos from private albums, Gilder will illuminate Margaret Vanderbilt’s long and multi-faceted life from a privileged society hostess to a capable Red Cross administrator. The lecture will be followed by a Victorian Tea.
Mrs. Vanderbilt’s connection to Ventfort Hall was the result of her desire to establish a country home in Lenox for her two little boys after her husband, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, perished tragically in the sinking of the ocean liner The Lusitania in May 1915.
While living at Ventfort Hall she oversaw the construction of one of Lenox’s last big “cottages” Holmwood (now known as Foxhollow) on a spectacular site next to her husband’s cousins, the Fields, at High Lawn.
Tickets for the lecture and tea are $15 per person for non-members and $12 for members and may be purchased by calling Ventfort Hall at 413-637-3206. The historic mansion is located at 104 Walker Street in Lenox.
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Mixed Company of Great Barrington, Mass., presents Five Flights, Adam Bock’s comic drama—a dreamy, comic take on family, spirituality, love, and birds. Five Flights runs Thursday-Saturday nights at 8 through October 24.
Five Flights centers on siblings Ed and Adele who inherit an enormous aviary that their late father built for his deceased wife, whose soul, he believed, had transformed into the body of a wren. The grown children are faced with the dilemma of what to do with the crumbling structure. Sister-in-law Jane wants to build tidy new houses; friend Olivia wants to build The Church of the Fifth Day honoring birds and the Fifth Day of creation; Ed wants to let the building fall to the ground. Folded into this debate are issues of religious conviction, fear of commitment, the way Russian ballet resembles a hockey game, and the courtship of Ed by Tom, a professional hockey player.
The production stars Diane Prusha, Hanuman Goleman, Stephanie Hedges, Ryan Marchione, Enrico Spada and Jennifer Young, and is directed by Emma Dweck. Lighting design by Maia Robbins-Zust, and sound design by Peter Wise.
Five Flights will be performed at Mixed Company, 37 Rossetter St, Great Barrington. Tickets are $15. For reservations call (413) 528-2320.
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