Rogovoy Report 1/20/17

The cultural highlights in the days and weeks ahead in our region include a multimedia work-in-progress; a site-specific theater work inspired by Edith Wharton; a tribute to Elvis Presley’s enduring legacy; a tribute to the enigmatic jazz great Billy Tipton; and a whole lot more.

Choreographer and multimedia performance artist Richard Move will stage a one-night-only work-in-progress showing of “XXYY” in the Hunter Center at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., tonight at 8pm. The new collaboration, exploring the multiplicities of the gender spectrum while deconstructing the conventional binaries of male and female, is conceived and directed by Richard Move, with an original sound-score by electronic music pioneer Martux_m, and costumes by theatre artist Alba Clemente. The work-in-progress showing culminates a two-week residency at MASS MoCA in collaboration with Jacob’s Pillow Dance.

“Peter and the Farm,” a full-length documentary by Hudson’s Tony Stone, about the irascible Vermont loner, Peter Dunning, will be screened at the Moviehouse in Millerton, N.Y., this Sunday at 11am. The event is free, and the filmmaker will be in attendance to lead a post-screening discussion and Q&A.

Club Helsinki Hudson’s annual Elvis Birthday Bash, featuring the Lustre Kings plus other special guests, will take place on Saturday at 9pm, just after what would have been Elvis Presley’s 82nd birthday. Elvis Presley’s impact on all music that came after him is impossible to tally. Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, U2 – they’re all impossible to imagine without Elvis having paved the way. For several decades, the Capital District-based Mark Gamsjager and the Lustre Kings have been keeping the sound of early rockabilly alive, both in the region and across the U.S. and around the world. They bring an immediacy to the joyful music with a dark underbelly that has compelled performers like Wanda Jackson, the Queen of Rockabilly, as well as Bill Kirchen, Eddie Angel, and Robert Gordon, to draft them into the service of rock ‘n’ roll revivalism.

Also at Helsinki Hudson this weekend, cabaret-rock singer-songwriter Nellie McKay brings her uniquely eccentric blend of pop, rock, jazz and hip-hop to Club Helsinki Hudson this Sunday at 8pm. This time out, McKay will be featuring songs from her musical biography, “A Girl Named Bill: The Life and Times of Billy Tipton,” a mid-20th century jazz musician and bandleader who lived his adult life as a man, although he was assigned female at birth. “A Girl Named Bill” was named one of the Best Concerts of 2014 by the New York Times.

Looking ahead to next weekend, “Leisure & Lust,” a unique, immersive, site-specific theater experience written by Sara Farrington and inspired by Edith Wharton’s life, love affairs, marriage, and writing style, receives a limited run at The Mount in Lenox, Mass., from Friday, January 27 through Saturday, January 28. The play is the story of Grace Hunter, a brilliant woman with an insatiable hunger for romance, and her tortured husband Harry, a closeted man rapidly losing his grip on reality. “Leisure & Lust” is a theatrical and psychological journey through the ravages of poverty and the oppressions of affluence in New York City in 1907.