The highlights of the cultural weekend in our region include choral music, chamber music, indie-rock, experimental performances, comedy … plus a whole lot more.
Two musicians, five dancers, and four designers create a three-dimensional performance that integrates indie rock with contemporary dance at MASS MoCA in North Adams on Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Hunter Center. Avant-glam musician/composer Perfume Genius AKA Mike Hadreas is best known for his “glorious, inventive, shape-shifting music”, making Pitchfork’s Best New Albums list three times in a row and garnering comparisons to PJ Harvey, Nina Simone, and David Bowie along the way. Kate Wallich, named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” is a Seattle-based experimental choreographer, director, and educator. Together with their creative teams they have created The Sun Still Burns Here, which has been called “a radical integration of live music and dance.”
Hello It’s Me. I Saw the Light. Can We Still Be Friends. All classics of soulful pop-rock of the mid- to late-1970s. All songs by Todd Rundgren. But Todd Rundgren is so much more than just a hitmaker. He’s a Zelig of rock and roll history, as a producer, engineer, video pioneer, computer software developer, conceptualist, and interactive artist. Todd Rundgren will bring his unique tour, The Individualist, to the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington on Sunday at 7 p.m. The performance will center on Rundgren’s recent autobiography, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams and Dissertations, in which he reflects upon both his career and his rollercoaster of a personal life. The memoir is structured into bite-sized chapters about Rundgren's encounters with rock royalty, including Janis Joplin, Brian Wilson, Ringo Star, Patti Smith, the New York Dolls, Meat Loaf, The Band, and many more. The evening’s setlist will mirror the timeframe captured in the book, which runs through 1996.
The Clark Art Institute’s big summer exhibition – Renoir: The Body, the Senses, opens with a reception tonight at 7:30 p.m. Also on view – if that’s the right word for it – is Canadian artist Janet Cardiff’s acclaimed sound installation, The Forty Part Motet, which deconstructs Thomas Tallis’s 16th-century choral work Spem in alium (Hope in any other) by assigning each of the forty voices to a single freestanding speaker in the gallery. Listeners are free to walk around and listen to just one voice, several, or the whole big shebang.
Close Encounters With Music presents its season finale gala -- Like Father-In-Law, Like Son-In-Law -- featuring the music of Antonin Dvo?ák and Josef Suk on Saturday at 6 p.m. at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington.
Folksingers Annie Guthrie and John Sheldon kick off the weekend at the Guthrie Center in Great Barrington, Mass., tonight at 8.
Comedian Dave Hill is at the Egremont Barn in South Egremont on Saturday night.
Horton Foote's 'Trip to Bountiful,' staged by the Actors’ Ensemble, completes its two-weekend run at PS21 in Chatham, N.Y., on Saturday at 7 and on Sunday at 2 p.m.
And finally, singer Wanda Houston and clarinetist Paul Green join forces for "Common Ground: A Celebration of Jazz and Jewish music," at Hevreh in Great Barrington on Sunday at 7 p.m., in a program to benefit the Clinton Church Restoration.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of Berkishire Daily and the Rogovoy Report, available at rogovoyreport.com