Regional Cultural Preview, January 20-27, 2020

MAKU Soundsytsem

M.A.K.U. Soundsystem brings its potent mixture of Colombian folklore, psychedelic rock, and Caribbean grooves to Club B10 at MASS MoCA on Saturday, January 25, at 8pm. The stripped-down trio features lead singer and bassist Juan Ospina, drummer Andres Jimenez, and guitarist Camilo Rodriguez.

 

Academy Award-winning comedian Steven Wright, the king of deadpan observational comedy, brings his new standup show to UPAC in Kingston, N.Y., on Friday, January 24 at 8pm.

 

The Orchestra Now’s six-concert winter-spring season at Bard College’s Fisher Center begins on Saturday, January 25, at 7pm, as the orchestra performs in The Sound of Spring, a Chinese New Year concert presented by the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music and the Central Conservatory of Music, China. Soloists from the Central Conservatory’s world-class faculty in traditional instruments will perform on Chinese percussion, erhu, pipa, sheng, and suona.

 

Comedian Steven Wright

I Am, You Are, We Were, a play by Jane Denitz Smith, gets a staged reading by Berkshire Playwright’s Lab at St. James Place in Great Barrington, Mass., on Sunday January 26, at 7pm. Directed by Joe Cacaci, the play takes place in 1914 and today, and explores the equilibrium of two families — one Russian, one suburban Jewish — and a garage bursting with a lifetime’s worth of possessions.

 

 

Stupid F*%king Bird, a new adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull written by Aaron Posner, runs at Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, N.Y., from Friday, January 24, through Sunday, February 2. Directed by Kirk Jackson (A Walk in the Woods, The Book Club Play, Rigoletto, Gianni Schicci) and produced in partnership with Bennington College, is “…an accessible and unfailingly delightful jaunt into misery …. absorbing in its every glance and revealing in its every sigh,” according to the Washington City Paper. The play runs Fridays-Saturdays at 7:30 pm and Saturdays-Sundays at 2 pm.

 

 

Gregory Maqoma, the South African choreographer of William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load, returns to the Hunter Center at MASS MoCA with Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro, performed by the Vuyani Dance Theatre, on Saturday, February 1, at 8pm. The work weaves a narrative of greed, power, and the pain of mourning with a moving live score interrogating Ravel’s music through South African vocal traditions.

 

 

 

 

 

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