This week’s highlights including a new play festival, a multimedia performance, an indie-rock singer-songwriter, Bach remixed with jazz, West African kora music, and a tribute to Miles Davis.
Barrington Stage Company’s fourth annual 10X10 New Play Festival – featuring ten, 10-minute plays, as part of the annual 10X10 Upstreet Arts Festival in Pittsfield – kicks off this weekend and runs through Sunday, March 1. Playwrights represented include Chris Newbound, Emily Taplin Boyd, Christopher Innvar, and Kelly Younger. The 10x10 festival is a great way to sample theater and emerging playwrights – if something doesn’t appeal to you, you don’t have to worry, because it’s over in less than 10 minutes, and you’re onto the next thing. You know, when the Beatles started out, their concerts were only 20 minutes long. Think about that!
WAM Theatre’s production of “Emilie: La Marquise Du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight” by Lauren Gunderson, concludes a three-night run throughout WAMC’s listening area, at Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, tonight at 7:30 p.m., as part of the Pittsfield 10×10 Upstreet Arts Festival. This enhanced staged reading will audio and visual elements from the original production.
Where (we) Live, a multimedia theatrical performance featuring new-music ensemble So Percussion and guitarist Grey McMurray, takes place in the Fisher Center at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. The performance blends music, video, and storytelling in a theatrical creation that reflects on notions of community and home.
Indie-rock singer-songwriter Nicole Atkins brings her blend of pop-fueled hooks and moody introspection to Club Helsinki Hudson on Saturday at 9 p.m., providing a perfect soundtrack for a modern-day Valentine’s Day adventure. Atkins’s unique blend of styles connects the dots from Roy Orbison to the Shangri-Las to Janis Joplin to Led Zeppelin to Bruce Springsteen to the Pretenders and Radiohead – all tied up in a unique, compelling package of her own. And you’d better be careful, because she could steal your heart – and it is, after all, Valentine’s Day.
Dan Tepfer, a New York-based pianist and composer and one of the most formidable jazz musicians on the international stage, will perform his solo project, “Goldberg Variations/Variations,” at the Hudson Opera House on Saturday, at 7 p.m., as part of the inaugural season of Classics on Hudson, designed to showcase internationally celebrated artists performing music from treasured classics to the present day.
Soloist Sean Gaskell will perform traditional songs on the kora, a 21-string harp that he learned how to play throughout the course of multiple visits to its homeland in Gambia in West Africa, at the Athens Cultural Center tonight at 7 p.m. Kora music is traditionally played by oral and musical historians known as Griots. The kora is a very melodic and seemingly peaceful instrument, in contrast to its musical repertoire, full of songs recounting ancient stories of war and hardship.
And last but certainly not least, the Voodoo Orchestra North, led by legendary jazz drummer, improviser, bandleader and composer Bobby Previte, and featuring many great upstate New York musicians, continues its regular series of performances devoted to exploring the music of Miles Davis's eternal, electric, jazz-funk masterpiece, "Bitches Brew," at Club Helsinki Hudson, tonight at 9 p.m.
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