U.S. PREMIERE of JONAH BOKAER’S INNOVATIVE MULTIMEDIA DANCE PRODUCTION ‘CURTAIN’ at JACOB’S PILLOW
CURTAIN by Jonah Bokaer © Pascal Gely / SACD Performance Jonah Bokaer; Installation Daniel Arsham; Costume by Richard Chai
(BECKET, Mass.) – Jonah Bokaer, who has been making artistic waves on the international dance circuit since he began choreographing almost ten years ago, will return to Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival onWednesday, August 1 through Sunday, August 5, 2012, in the Doris Duke Theatre, to present the U.S. premiere of CURTAIN, an evening-length collaboration with acclaimed visual artist Daniel Arsham.
American Ballet Theatre and Bolshoi Ballet principal David Hallberg is an original collaborator for CURTAIN; however he will not perform as part of the U.S. premiere due to an injury. The cast for both the European and U.S. premiere performances at the Pillow includes Bokaer himself, with performers Adam H. Weinert and James McGinn.
The original commissioned score by Chris Garneau includes portions of a student lecture that composer John Cage gave at Jacob’s Pillow in 1984, identified from the Jacob’s Pillow Archives by director of preservation Norton Owen and Bokaer. This year marks John Cage’s centennial, an occasion being celebrated across the world.
Based in Brooklyn, Jonah Bokaer is an international choreographer, media artist, artist space developer, and social entrepreneur. His work integrates choreography with digital media and other visual and sound art media, resulting from cross-disciplinary collaborations with artists, architects, composers and designers.
LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III TO PLAY AT CLUB HELSINKI
Loudon Wainwright by Michael Wilson
(HUDSON, N.Y.) – Singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, a one-time “new Dylan” who has over time become the somewhat unlikely patriarch of a folk music family dynasty, performs his uniquely acerbic songs at Club Helsinki Hudson on Saturday, August 2, 2012, at 9 p.m.
Wainwright’s career spans more than 40 years and 23 albums. He sings with a distinct humor and wit, and his deeply folk-infused tone lifts his lyricism and poetry up to create an experience of entirely open hearted storytelling. In 2009, Wainwright’s album High Wide & Handsome earned him a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album, as well as the Album of the Year honors from Entertainment Weekly.
Wainwright is the father of musicians Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright Roche, brother of folksinger Sloan Wainwright, and the former husband of both the late folksinger Kate McGarrigle and of Suzzy Roche of The Roches.
For reservations in The Restaurant or in the club call 518.828.4800
MASS MOCA VIDEO EVENT BLURS BOUNDARY BETWEEN CONCERT, FILM and DANCE PARTY
A scene from 'Girl Walk'
(NORTH ADAMS, Mass.) – The long-form dance music video Girl Walk // All Day kicks off a dance party onSaturday, August 4, 2012, at 9 p.m. atMASS MoCA. Directed by Jacob Krupnick, Girl Walk // All Day is set to Greg Gillis’s (a.k.a. Girl Talk) album All Day, in which three dancers move across New York City, turning its sidewalks, parks, and architecture into an evolving urban stage.
The film essentially uses nothing but All Day as its narrative, foregoing dialog aside from a subtitled encounter between the movie’s star (Anne Marsen) and a Hasidic man who asks her why she’s dancing. Krupnick explains, “I knew I needed a piece of music that had an emotional arc to it, that had a story unto itself. At first listen, the album seemed like a godsend.” At virtually every screening, viewers dance in front of the screen – not unlike fans at the average Girl Talk concert. Krupnick notes, “Most of our screenings have been without chairs.”
BRITISH TROUPE STAGES ‘RIOT’ AT BERKSHIRE FRINGE
A scene from Wardrobe Ensemble's 'RIOT'
(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass.) – RIOT, a new physical theater play by the internationally acclaimed Wardrobe Ensemble from Bristol, U.K., has its U.S. premiere at the Berkshire Fringe – in the Daniel Arts Center at Simon’s Rock College – now through August 13.
Nominated for the Acting Excellence Award for Best Ensemble of 2011 at the Edinburgh Fringe, RIOT is a darkly comic window into the frenzied nature of consumer culture, integrating virtuosic physicality, live music and eyewitness accounts of an actual riot that broke out during the opening of an infamous Swedish furniture store North of London in February, 2005.
PHOTO EXHIBIT FEATURES FIVE PHOTOGRAPHERS, ONE NUDE MODEL
Kaitlyn by Donna Feldman Lasky
(NORTH ADAMS, Mass.) – On Saturday, August 4, 2012, from 6 to 10 p.m., there will be an opening reception for KAITLYN 5X5, The Girl with the Crescent Moons Tattoo, an exhibition of works by five East Coast photographers all featuring nude model Kaitlyn at the Brill Gallery in the Eclipse Mill (Studio 109, 243 Union St.)
For the second time in three years, gallery director Ralph Brill, has created a NUDE & NAKED exhibit, honoring the human form, a tradition that began on prehistoric cave walls and has continued through the ages from Pompeii, to the Renaissance and Japanese Shunga Art, Degas, Marilyn Monroe and favored pop artists like Mel Ramos. This year, Brill invited five leading photographers who specialize in female nudes to work with one model over the past twelve months. Each photographer (one female, four male) selected five photographs to feature in the exhibition, Kaitlyn 5×5.
The photographers included in this exhibition are Donna Feldman Lasky, Dave Foss, Dmitri Belyi, Jason Tamvakis and Steve Azzara. A sixth photographer, Dave Gordon, who is an expert on Eadweard Muybridge, has created a view of KAITLYN in action.
NEW WORKS BY MAGGIE MAILER FEATURED AT FERRIN GALLERY
Maggie Mailer, Garden Party for the Rapture: Site 2, 2012; 20 x 16.5 in; Oil Painting on Canvas; Photo Credit: John Polak
(PITTSFIELD, Mass.) – The Starry Outpost, a collection of new paintings and drawings by Maggie Mailer that expands the narratives of her two previous bodies of work, The Volcano Sitters and The Balloonists, opens with a reception at Ferrin Gallery on Saturday, August 4, from 4 to 6 pm, and runs through September 2. Part of ArtBerkshire’s COVET project, in which new works relate to artworks found in the region’s museum collections, the new series depicts locations, characters, maps, and plots that present a constellation of facts and images which form the foundation for an imaginary novel.
Mailer is also the featured artist in an iCovet event on Wednesday, August 15, 7-8 pm, in conversation with Berkshire Museum director of interpretation Maria Mingalone, about how history informs contemporary art practice and Mailer’s use of museum painting collections in her recent artwork produced for COVET. Mailer’s solo exhibition, The Starry Outpost features paintings based on observations of 18th century landscape and portraiture in collections of The Clark in Williamstown and Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. The conversation will be moderated by Seth Rogovoy, editor of the Rogovoy Report, a media sponsor of the COVET project.
TURGENEV DRAMA CONCLUDES WTF’S MAIN STAGE SEASON
Jessica Collins
(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.) – A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev, with a world premiere translation by Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, brings down the curtain on the Main Stage season at Williamstown Theatre Festival, with a production running from Wednesday, August 1, 2012, through August 19, 2012. The play is being given an experimental staging, with a thrust stage built out into the first four rows of the audience.
FINLEY to SING MOZART; BRONFMAN to PLAY BRAHMS, THIBAUDET to PERFORM SAINT-SAENS at TANGLEWOOD
Yefim Bronfman
(LENOX, Mass.) – On Saturday, August 4, 2012, pianist Yefim Bronfman joins the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood under conductor Christoph von Dohnányi at 8:30 p.m. for a program including Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a prototypically Brahmsian work in its combination of formal mastery and expressive ingenuity, as well as typically monumental in scale and scope, stretching to almost an hour and requiring four movements instead of the typical three. The night before, Friday, August 3, at 8:30 p.m., baritone Gerald Finley joins revered maestro Lorin Maazel, a TMC fellow in 1951 and ’52, and the BSO for Ravel’s Don Quichotte à Dulcinée — the last work Ravel completed before succumbing to the debilitating neurological condition that silenced him in his final few years—and arias from Così fan tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni by Mozart, a composer in whose music Finley is especially respected. The program also includes Ravel’s colorful Alborada del gracioso and Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2 — a BSO specialty and a work that was performed in the first Tanglewood season in 1937 — as well as Mozart’s Symphony No. 38, Prague.
Maazel once again takes the podium Sunday, August 5, at 2:30 p.m., to lead the BSO in a program featuring the world premiere of Night Train to Perugia, a new BSO-commissioned work by Michael Gandolfi, who was a TMC Fellow in 1986 and has been a member of the TMC Faculty since 1997. The elegant and engaging French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet is soloist in Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 5, Egyptian, nicknamed for the fact that it was written in that country and was influenced by the music of its region. The concert concludes in thrilling fashion with Berlioz’s Symphonie fastastique, another work at the heart of the BSO repertoire and which the orchestra first performed in 1885.
HARLEM QUARTET to PERFORM BEETHOVEN, CHICK COREA, at TANNERY POND
Harlem Quartet
(NEW LEBANON, N.Y.) – The Harlem Quartet, the resident string ensemble at the New England Conservatory of Music, performs a program of works by Beethoven, Turina, Ravel and Chick Corea on Saturday, August 4, 2012, at 8 p.m, in the Tannery Pond Concert Series at the Darrow School in New Lebanon. The members of the Harlem Quartet are Ilmar Gavilán, violin; Melissa White, violin; Juan-Miguel Hernandez, viola; and Paul Wiancko, cello.
The musicians will perform String Quartet in D major, Opus 18, No. 3 by Ludwig Van Beethoven; String Quartet No. 1 by Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea; L’Oración del Torero (“The Bullfighter’s Prayer”) by Joaquín Turina; and String Quartet in F major by Maurice Ravel.
Barbara Cook
BARBARA COOK AND JOHN PIZZARELLI TEAM UP FOR DUO SHOW AT MAHAIWE
(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass.) – The so-called Great American Songbook will be the script from which Broadway musical star Barbara Cook and jazz singer-guitarist John Pizzarelli will read when they join forces for an exclusive duet concert at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center on Saturday, August 4, 2012, at 8 p.m.
CANADA’S ROYAL WINNIPEG BALLET RETURNS to JACOB’S PILLOW FOR FIRST TIME IN NEARLY A HALF-CENTURY
Canada's Royal Winnipeg Ballet in Carmina Burana; photo Bruce Monk
(BECKET, Mass.) – Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet returns to Jacob’s Pillow this week for the first time since their historic two-week engagement in 1964, a high-profile showcase that launched the company toward international recognition, in a packed program that features works by award-winning choreographers Peter Quanz, Mark Godden, and Mauricio Wainrot, at the Ted Shawn Theatre from Wednesday, August 1, 2012, through Sunday, August 5.
The varied program opens with Canadian choreographer Peter Quanz’s In Tandem, a dynamic choreographic work set to the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning score, Double Sextet, by American composer Steve Reich. Originally commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process Series, In Tandem is a fast-paced and pointed neo-classical ballet that Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times praised for its “smartly expansive vocabulary [that] is full of chic.”
Gary Smulyan
JAZZ COMBO FEATURING SAXOPHONIST GARY SMULYAN TO PLAY AT BABA LOUIE’S
(PITTSFIELD, Mass.) – DownBeat award-winning baritone saxophonist Gary Smulyan performs an intimate gig in the backroom at Baba Louie’s Sourdough Pizza on Friday, August 3, 2012, at 8 p.m., part of the Berkshires Jazz series attached to Pittsfield’s monthly First Fridays Artswalks. Smulyan will be accompanied by pianist Noah Baerman and the Berkshires Jazz Duo, featuring bassist Jeff Link and drummer Peter Coombs, the three of whom will kick off the evening’s entertainment with a set of their own.
RARE FRENCH COMIC OPERA GETS CONTEMPORARY TREATMENT at BARD SUMMERSCAPE
(ANNADALE-on-HUDSON, N.Y.) – To enrich its immersion in the music of Belle Époque France, Bard SummerScape 2012presents the first staged revival of The King in Spite of Himself (Le roi malgré lui)by Emmanuel Chabrier in its original 1887 version, in five performances (July 27 & 29; August 1, 3, 5) featuring the festival’s resident American Symphony Orchestra with music director Leon Botstein.
The production, starring the “lyrical, expressive baritone” (New York Times) of Liam Bonner, will receive a contemporary treatment from Thaddeus Strassberger, whose previous SummerScape opera treatments rank among Bard’s undisputed success stories.
MIXED MEDIA ASSEMBLAGES by WENDY RABINOWITZ at HANCOCK SHAKER VILLAGE
VESSEL OF LIGHT, Weaving-Mixed Media Assemblage, by Wendy A. Rabinowitz
(PITTSFIELD, Mass.) — Hancock Shaker Village will unveil Shalom: Weaving Threads of Peace mixed-media assemblages by Wendy Rabinowitz in the Poultry House Gallery at an opening reception on Saturday, August 4, 2012, from 5pm to 7pm. The exhibition will run through Sunday, August 26. Rabinowitz will also give a gallery talk as part of the Village’s Return and Learn series on Saturday, August 11, at 2pm.
Pittsfield-based artist Wendy Rabinowitz’s unique artwork combines weaving and textile arts with other visual arts, graphics, and the written word, resulting in mixed media assemblages. Recognition of a living spirituality permeates all of her work.