The cultural highlights in the greater region this weekend include gothic folk, early music, contemporary dance, political theater, musical theater, classic folk, and avant-garde performance art.
Canada’s premier contemporary ballet company, Ballet BC, kicks off the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket with a diverse program tonight through Sunday. Among the works to be performed are an entirely new dance set to Igor Stravinsky’s landmark score, “The Rite of Spring.”
Tony Award-winning musical “Man of La Mancha” has opened the mainstage season at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield and has been garnering rave reviews. The often underestimated and overlooked show runs through Saturday, July 11. I’m planning to see the show this weekend, and will have my report for you next Friday.
“The First Forty,” a summer-long exhibition celebrating the first four decades of Scott Barrow’s life and work in photography, opens at Scott Barrow Photography in Lenox on Saturday, with a reception from 5 to 7pm. The work will remain on display through Labor Day.
Legendary singer-songwriter Tom Rush will perform a two-night stand at the Guthrie Center in Great Barrington tonight and Saturday at 8pm both nights. Rush is perhaps best known for having early on recorded songs by such then-unknown songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and James Taylor.
Not to be overlooked this weekend with all the well-earned hype surrounding Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival, a major mid-career museum survey at MASS MoCA, “Landscape Seen and Imagined,” documents Clifford Ross’s longstanding project to reconcile realism and abstraction. The exhibition takes place throughout two buildings, six galleries, and an exterior performing arts courtyard. The monumental exhibit includes a 24 ft. high x 114 ft. long photograph on raw wood that spans the length of MASS MoCA’s tallest gallery, and an immersive installation of animated video on twelve separate 24 ft. high screens. That’s big.
PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century in Chatham opens its summer season with the Tenth Annual Paul Grunberg Memorial Bach Concert on Sunday at 2pm. This year’s all-Bach program features the Broad Street Chorale and Orchestra directed by David Smith, performing works of Johann Sebastian Bach for chorus, orchestra, and both vocal and instrumental soloists.
Two Hudson-based outfits head up to Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs on Saturday night, when Ryder Cooley & Dust Bowl Faeries and Melora & Luis, featuring Melora Creager of Rasputina, will perform a double bill of original, ethereal gothic-folk at Caffe Lena at 8pm. Dust Bowl Faeries is an electro-acoustic, multimedia gothic-folk ensemble led by artist-musician Ryder Cooley, and features an all-female lineup on accordion, ukulele, singing saw, keyboards, lap-steel guitar, electric guitar, drums, and percussion, with the music all channeled through Hazel, a transgender taxidermy sheep.
The Caravan Stage Company has docked its 90-ft-tall ship, the Caravan Stage Tall Ship Theatre, at Hudson’s waterfront in order to stage its newest experimental opera, “Hacked: Treasure of the Empire,” a contemporary tale set in a futuristic and dystopic world of pirate hacker activists taking on the largest global bank on the planet, in a free presentation sponsored by Time & Space Limited, running tonight and Saturday at 9pm each night.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of Berkshire Daily and the Rogovoy Report, available online at rogovoyreport.com