The 10×10 Upstreet Arts Festival is in town, and Pittsfield is at play. Every year in late February, downtown Pittsfield holds a weeklong celebration with art and music, new plays, independent film and more.
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Contra dance is alive and growing in the Berkshires
The tradition of contra dancing stretches from coast to coast and back more than 400 years. A caller teaches a series of simple moves, and dancers join in to live music with a beat and a quick melody.
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The Foundry gathers independent and generous souls in West Stockbridge
In its first year, the Foundry has become the kind of place where musicians from Pittsfield High School may play informally on the patio, or a cast of New York and local actors may share a potluck and talk late.
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National Arab Orchestra’s Takht Ensemble performs ecstatic music
The ecstasy musicians feel as they play is tarab in Arabic, says Michael Ibrahim, founder and director of the National Arab Orchestra. The NAO’s Takht ensemble will perform at Williams College with strings, wind and rhythm.
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A revolutionary 15th-century poet lives in Prahlad Tipanya’s music
The poet Kabir has inspired a folk music tradition for 600 years, and Prahlad Singh Tipanya, a musician known and loved across India, will bring it to Williams College.
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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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Holiday music warms the Berkshires in midwinter — BTW column
Winds in the reeds lift a clear tone in longing for home — a heartbeat Last year, on a snowy day, we heard a solo harp. Students sang a medieval carol and a modern one by Richard Wilbur, our former poet Laureate and former Berkshire voice in the hills, and […]
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Leonard Bernstein found his feet at Tanglewood
The world is remembering Leonard Bernstein this summer. Aug. 25, 2018, would have been his 100th birthday, and on Saturday night the world will come to the Berkshires to remember him. Because in many ways he began here. He came as a student to the first class of what was […]
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Łempicka new musical brings Parisian art to Williamstown Theatre Festival
In a studio at night, two women are holding each other. The room smells of paint and turpentine and smoke and sweat. An artist trying to build a career and raise a daughter comes to a bar after her first big opening and meets a woman who has always lived on […]
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Fiddlers jam in a day of music at Hancock Shaker Village
Imagine holding hands and spinning until the room blurs. Imagine that movement in someone’s arms, to the beat of music. Imagine the musicians sliding from one tune to the next, the melody racing over the chords. Across the country, across 200 years and more, folk dance music has stayed alive. Mill workers […]
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