The scent of honey and wood smoke is as thick as the warm, dense hum. The worker bees are active today. A few hot days have come after cool, wet weeks, and the wild primrose are blooming in the pastures. David Thayer gently lifts a small wood and mesh box to […]
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Penelope tells the Odyssey in Tom Stoppard and André Previn’s new work
Penelope is coming down to dinner slowly on the night Odysseus comes home. The high-walled courtyard with its cypress pillars is full of noise. She has stayed as long as she could in the shelter of the loom, in her workroom, and the sea below the house is dark in […]
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‘Selling Kabul’ shows courage at Williamstown Theatre Festival
A young man is sitting on a thick, warmly-colored rug and leaning against the couch that wraps around the room, trying to fix the router. He wants to check his email. He wants to distract himself, because his wife is in the hospital, in labor with his first child. He […]
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Internationally acclaimed artist Doug Aitken launches New Horizon
It will gleam like lake water and drift in a clear sky. In late July, the internationally acclaimed artist Doug Aitken will bring a new work to the Berkshires. And it will fly. New Horizon is an abstract sculpture and a moving stage — and a hot air balloon. By […]
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Reggie Wilson’s Fist and Heel Performance Group invokes black Shaker dance
Voices call and respond, as men and women move in a circle in a tresillo pulsing rhythm, keeping a beat with their hands and feet, and singing. They are moving together in an ecstatic ritual, a ring shout. Here and in the Caribbean, people brought from Africa and enslaved created […]
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Norman Rockwell Museum offers a tribute to the summer of ’69
In the summer of 1969, Norman Rockwell told a reporter for the Associated Press that his work had changed. He wanted to paint an image “that would bring America back together again — promote understanding.” He had just finished a broad canvas textured with earth from the Southwest; a Dinee […]
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