The weekend highlights in our region include monsters of postmodern dance; an art-funk legend; a cello-piano duo; a festival of Chopin; and a whole lot more.
Trisha Brown Dance Company performs in the Ted Shawn Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Mass., today through Sunday, representing the work of one of the seminal choreographers of the 20th century. The company will pay tribute to the late choreographer performing a version of Opal Loop prepared especially for Jacob’s Pillow, featuring former dancers of the company and an original cast member. The company will also perform more recent choreography, including Groove and Countermove and L’Amour au théâtre .
Nona Hendryx, a founding member of 1970s trio Labelle and backup vocalist on hits by Peter Gabriel, Prince, Yoko Ono, and Talking Heads, brings her distinctive art-funk and her Dream Opera - The Sound of Dreaming to MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., on Saturday for a two-part performance collaboration with Nick Cave: a gallery performance in the exhibition “Nick Cave: Until” at 7pm, and a general admission concert in the Hunter Center at 8pm.
Cellist Inbal Segev and pianist Alon Goldstein will perform works by Brahms, Ravel, and Dvorak in the Tannery Pond Concerts series at the Tannery on the grounds of Mount Lebanon Shaker Village and Darrow School in New Lebanon, N.Y., on Saturday at 8pm. The program explores the relationships among these Romantic composers and the ways in which they influenced each other - as friends and as mentors. The program includes Brahms’ Sonata in F Major and Six Songs, Ravel’s Kadish, Dvorak’s Rondo Op. 94, and solo piano works by Liszt .
Frances McDormand and Suzzy Roche, who in addition to being famous actors and singers, are members of the celebrated experimental theater collective The Wooster Group, will perform at the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon gala on Saturday. McDormand?and Roche will present an excerpt from? Early Shaker Spirituals: A Record Album Interpretation, a performance based on the record album of the same name recorded by the Sisters of the Sabbathday Lake, Maine, Shaker Community in 1976.
Monica Bill Barnes & Company – one of my all-time favorite dance companies, known as much for its physical humor and pratfalls as for anything else - performs a two-night preview performance of “One Night Only (running as long as we can)” at PS21 in Chatham, N.Y., tonight and Saturday at 8pm. The evening-length work, part of PS21’s Chatham Dance Festival and which draws on sports competitions for inspiration, features Barnes and her longtime dance partner Anna Bass.
Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin, who transformed the aesthetic potential of the piano, will be celebrated at the Bard Music Festival, which brings down the Bard Summerscape curtain this weekend in the Fisher Center at Bard College. A half-dozen themed concert programs will be complemented by pre-concert lectures, panel discussions, special events, and expert commentary.