This week’s cultural highlights in our region include a new exhibition, a comedy dance troupe, an orchestral concert, a live podcast, a live dance installation, plus a whole lot more.
Conductor Ronald Feldman and the 75-member Berkshire Symphony are joined by guest artist Haldan Martinson on violin for a Scottish-themed program tonight at 8 in Chapin Hall on the Williams College campus in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The free concert includes Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3, Peter Maxwell Davies’ “An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise,” and Max Bruch’s “Scottish Fantasy,” featuring Martinson.
The Art and Wit of Rube Goldberg, an exhibition exploring the humorous illustrations of the visionary artist who has become famous for the creative inventions bearing his name, opens at Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., on Saturday and runs through June 9. The exhibition will offer a revealing look at Goldberg’s creativity through original comic strips from the 1930s, where the artist created his complicated machines, as well as later political cartoons and instructional materials from the Famous Artists School, which are now part of the permanent collection of Norman Rockwell Museum.
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the world’s foremost all-male comedy ballet company, is celebrating its 44th anniversary season. The drag-clad Trockaderos got their start in the 1970s at late-late shows in off-off-Broadway lofts, and have since become one of the most popular, critically recognized, and outright funny dance companies in the world. By exaggerating the foibles and accidents of serious dance, they bring a whimsical spirit to the ballet repertoire, which they bring to MASS MoCA in North Adams on Saturday at 8 p.m.
String band trio Molsky’s Mountain Drifters, featuring Grammy-nominated fiddler Bruce Molsky, are at Dewey Hall in Sheffield, Mass., on Saturday night at 7:30. The trio also includes Allison de Groot on banjo and guitarist Stash Wyslouch.
Author Susan Orlean is all over our region this weekend. Tonight, the New Yorker journalist and author of books including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; My Kind of Place; Saturday Night; Lazy Little Loafers, and The Orchid Thief, will visit the University at Albany for an evening of conversation with WAMC's own Joe Donahue as part of The Creative Life: A Conversation Series. Free and open to the public, the event will take place at 8 p.m. at the UAlbany Performing Arts Center. Then, on Saturday night at 7:30, Susan Orlean teams up with actor Sarah Thyre for a live version of their hilarious and touching podcast, Crybabies, in the Fisher Center at Bard College. Orlean and Thyre will be joined by special guest actor, author, and comedian Michael Ian Black, humorist and comedy writer Karen Chee, and novelist and social satirist Gary Shteyngart.
And while it may seem like nepotism for me to mention it, there’s no reason why my relationship with Anna Peretz Rogovoy should be held against her. Anna, who is indeed my daughter as well as an accomplished Brooklyn-based dancer and choreographer, will perform The Rubble and The Clang, a durational installation dance performance, during the opening reception of 30under30:3 at No. 6 Depot Gallery in West Stockbridge, Mass., on Sunday at 4 p.m. The site-specific dance performance by Anna – who grew up in Great Barrington, Mass., and who graduated from Bennington College in 2013 – is motivated by her belief in the body’s capacity to transcend logic and convey truth. At least that’s what she tells me.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of Berkishire Daily and the Rogovoy Report, available at rogovoyreport.com