It’s the final weekend of the summer season at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, one of my favorite cultural haunts in the region. Finishing up the season is the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet in the Ted Shawn Theater, and LeeSaar The Company on the Doris Duke Stage, both performing tonight through Sunday. I caught LeeSaar earlier this week, in an incredible performance full of stark and sexy scenarios, suggestive music, stunning lighting effects, and an overall effect of contemporary dance for the here-and-now. I don’t think it gets any better than this.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman and WAMC’s own Sarah LaDuke will co-host Change Makers, WAM Theatre’s fifth season celebration and benefit at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington on Sunday at 7 pm. The event includes a panel discussion with award-winning artists and activists working to effect positive change; a sneak peek at WAM Theatre’s fall production, “In Darfur”; and an onstage reception for top-level ticketholders.
If Gypsy swing is your thing, you’ll want to catch virtuosic guitarist Stephane Wrembel performs with his quartet in the Dré Wapenaar Pavilion at MASS MoCA in North Adams, on Saturday, at 8pm. Wrembel has been called the second coming of Django Reinhardt - a fretboard wizard who embellishes the hot jazz of the 1930s with flourishes of world music to create a sound all his own.
While there’s still more to come in the next few weekends at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra takes its final bow of the 2014 season on Sunday at 2:30 p.m. with its traditional season-closing performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. Later that evening, the Maria Schneider Orchestra - a big-band group led by composer-pianist Maria Schneider that blends the freedom of jazz and the structure of classical music – performs in Ozawa Hall at 8.
Trio Virado performs in the Tannery Pond Concert Series at the Darrow School on Saturday at 8pm. Flutist Amy Porter, violist Juan-Miguel Hernandez, and guitarist João Luiz have been together for a little over a year performing a new and unique blend of jazzy chamber music.
Old-timey trio the Wiyos bring their original brand of music inspired by the early American musical idioms of the 1920s and ’30s, including blues, country, ragtime, gospel, and swing, to Club Helsinki Hudson tonight at 9pm.
“Playful,” an featuring new fresco secco art by Phyllis Palmer, Play-Doh constructions by Fernando Orellana, and wooden wall sculpture by Stephen Walling, will be on view at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson tonight through Sunday, September 21, with a public reception for the artists tomorrow from 6 to 8pm.
The interactive whale exhibit BUMP, created by brothers Frank DenDanto and Dan DenDanto, opens at Basilica Hudson with a reception for the artists tomorrow from 5 to 7pm, and will run through Labor Day on Monday, September 1. The installation includes bones from three different whales, suspended at eye level in the Basilica’s Main Hall.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of Berkishire Daily and the Rogovoy Report, available online atrogovoyreport.com.