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Rogovoy Report for February 20, 2015

New plays, old jazz, performance art, spiritual folk, sculpture, fashion and film are all on tap for a busy cultural weekend in the greater region.

Downtown Pittsfield is in the midst of its annual 10x10 arts festival, with all kinds of events popping up all around town. One of the highlights is Barrington Stage Company’s annual 10x10 New Play Festival – featuring ten, 10-minute plays, which this year runs through Sunday, March 1. Playwrights represented include Chris Newbound, Emily Taplin Boyd, Christopher Innvar, and Kelly Younger.

Also part of 10x10, New York City-based pianist Bill Mays will offer a program called “Ten Decades of Jazz Piano” on Saturday at 8 p.m., at Baba Louie’s Backroom. The program takes familiar works by 10 different composers – one per decade over a 100-year span - from raggedy honkytonk sounds to the speakeasy era to the swing era to bebop and beyond - and reimagines them in Mays’s own inimitable style.  

Performance artist Cynthia Hopkins brings her newest work “A Living Documentary” to the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College tonight and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. “A Living Documentary” is a humorous and searing reflection on the trials and tribulations of earning a living as a professional theater artist in the 21st century. Intertwining elements of musical comedy, documentary, and fiction, the show intersperses autobiographical storytelling with portrayals of semi-fictional comedic characters, all the while asking myriad questions about the realities of artistic life in New York City.

Mavis Staples, a scion of America’s first family of socially conscious soul-gospel music and a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, brings her contemporary sound, crafted in collaboration with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, to Club Helsinki Hudson on Sunday at 8 p.m. Even after achieving the status of a living legend for her work with the Staple Singers and her solo achievements, Mavis Staples has enjoyed an entirely new chapter in the past five years since teaming up with Jeff Tweedy for a series of Grammy Award-winning recordings, including 2011’s “You Are Not Alone” and 2013’s “One True Vine.” This is a rare chance to catch this living legend in the intimate confines of a nightclub; she usually performs in large theaters and on festival stages throughout the world.

Caprices, a solo exhibition of sculptures by Bruno Pasquier-Desvignes, curated by R.O. Blechman, will open at the Hudson Opera House on Saturday with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. and run through Sunday, March 29. On view will be a selection of sculptures made from recycled and found materials, including wooden wine crates, cardboard boxes, wire hangers, plastic bottles, and bicycle wheels. The artist cuts and paints and reassembles whatever is at hand to create expressive and wonderfully detailed sculptures.

There will be an artist talk and closing reception for Vilma Maré’s “Queen of Serpents,” an innovative fashion exhibition featuring Baltic-style works by the Lithuanian born, regionally based fashion designer, at McDaris Fine Art in Hudson on Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. Mare will discuss the importance of portraying the studious cultural history of ethnic minorities who observed and valued above all the powers of Nature. “Queen of Serpents,” an exhibition of artisanal clothing styles includes coats, skirts and other vestments based in Baltic mythology. Besides the usual body protection and adornment of apparel, Maré also maintains its spiritual content, as protection against harm and attractor of fertility and happiness.

Author and film critic Peter Biskind will discuss “An Insider’s View of Celebrity Journalism” as part of the monthly, free Authors & Artists Series at the Chatham Public Library on Saturday at 3 p.m. A renowned film critic for many years, Biskind is well known in Columbia County for programming all the films shown at the Crandell Theater and for being one of the two experts who choose movies for the popular Chatham Film Festival.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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