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.
Read articleFiddlers 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 […]
Read articleSusan Merrill makes summer last
Susan Merrill and her husband, Carl Sprague, are sitting under the grape vines on the terrace outside their old white house, with two corgis underfoot. Susan’s grandfather lived in this house; it has been in the family almost 100 years. They have spent this summer quietly here, seeing friends and […]
Read articleBerkshire artist Carol Kinzel paints a Shaker summer day in 1950
A yellow-painted clapboard building catches the afternoon light. In the wood shed beside it, a pile of logs as broad as tree trunks slants under an overhanging roof, and glass is broken in the windows. Tall grass blows down the center of the dirt driveway. This is Hancock Shaker Village […]
Read articleRobert Hite builds spirit houses at Hancock Shaker Village and Berkshire Museum
Robert Hite, an artist based in the Hudson Valley, has brought sculptures from his “Imagined History” series to the Berkshires — miniature buildings that settle into the landscape and seem to hold their own stories.
Read articleShaker museums turn together in the Berkshires and New York
In the New York State Museum’s warehouse-sized storage space in Rotterdam, N.Y., the museum keeps Shaker artifacts among its collections, and a double cheese press can rest near a crushed ambulance from 9/11. Lesley Herzberg, curator at Hancock Shaker Village, walked through that vast room with colleagues from local Shaker […]
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