Storytellers from around the nation will meet this weekend at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for the 35th annual “Sharing the Fire” conference, a gathering where storytellers can sharpen their skills and exchange ideas. STF’s lineup includes more than two dozen workshops, slams and swaps. Professional tellers and novice tellers alike will be presenting.
As part of the conference, there will be a number of public performances, all in the first-floor auditorium at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Hotel and Conference Center. On Friday at 7:30 p.m., national award-winning performer and playwright Milbre Burch presents “Changing Skins: Tales About Gender, Identity and Humanity.” On Saturday at 7:15 p.m., six tellers will present stories that range from traditional to personal tales. Following that, at 9:15 p.m., there will be a storytelling slam, a friendly competition in which participants tell five-minute stories on the topic “Where I’m From.” The Saturday events are intended for adults.
On Sunday at 1:30 p.m., international storyteller Jay O’Callahan will perform “Falling for Emily Dickinson,” a journey into the poet’s mysterious and passionate world.
For information, visit www.lanes.org.
Jay Mankita, an Amherst-based songwriter and humorist, will perform Friday at 7:30 p.m. in the Great Room at the cohousing community, Coho, at 120 Pulpit Hill Road in Amherst. The first set will include all family-friendly humor; the second set maybe not so much.
The concert will also feature funny songs by special guests. Also, audience members will have a chance to offer short, funny pieces of their own, in a popcorn-style, names-in-a-hat round, so come prepared with a song, if you’re so inclined.
Mankita plays fun, funky songs on guitar and keyboard, and accompanies himself on a foot-driven percussion rig of his own design, made from found objects, recycled materials and knocked-about, pried-apart drum gear. He travels the world, records on the international Putumayo label and his CDs have been nominated for Grammy Awards. For information about Mankita, visit jaymankita.com.
The concert is held in a tobacco-, fragrance- and pet-free space. For information, send an email to robpeck@zestworks. com.
The “Local Vocal Chord Bowl,” a showcase of Valley a cappella groups, will perform Saturday at 7 p.m. in the Amherst Regional High School auditorium. The event is hosted by The Green Street Brew, based in Northampton.
The proceeds from the concert featuring three high school groups, along with three college and three adults groups, will benefit music and arts enrichment at Amherst and Northampton public schools. Last year, the event raised $6,000 for the schools.
Tickets cost $12 in advance ($14 at the door); $8 for children and students ($10 at the door), and are available at A.J. Hastings in Amherst, Coopers Corner in Florence and State Street Fruit Store in Northampton.
Folk performer and jazz and swing vocalist Annie Patterson, accompanied by Jim Henry (guitar) and Peter Blood (fiddle) will perform at the Song & Story Swap Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Nacul Center, 592 Main St. in Amherst.
Patterson has performed and led music retreats across three continents and is best-known for co-creating, with Blood, her husband, the “Rise Up Singing” and “Rise Again” songbooks. She interprets songs from the Appalachian Mountains and British Isles, accompanying herself on guitar and banjo, sings swing with the band Girls from Mars and is a regular guest vocalist with the O-Tones, a western Massachusetts swing band.
Tickets cost $15, at the door ($12 for ages under 13 and over 64). For more information, visit riseupandsing.org.
“Between Worlds,” a senior thesis dance concert, will be presented by the Smith College dance department Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Hallie Flanagan Studio Theatre in the Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts, 122 Green St., Northampton.
The performance will include original work by Sarah Achartz, Ella Ansell, Jessica Beliles, Taina Bey, Charnice O. Charmant, Victoria Gonzalez and Ali Naranjo, as the culmination of their undergraduate education.
Achartz’s structured improvisation will explore ideas of space and collaboration, while Ansell will look at perspective and interpretation to understand how seemingly dissimilar things can be combined. Beliles considers the human body’s relationship to memory through the lens of love, loss and longing. Bey’s piece continues the exploration of memory and its blurry nature.
Charmant contemplates race and diversity and the experience of being black in a white environment. Gonzalez uses the ideas of physicality and presence to understand power, gentleness and serenity. Naranjo presents stillness and slow movement to explore patience and vulnerability.
Tickets cost $10; $5 for students and seniors. To purchase, call 585-3220 or visit www.smith.edu/smitharts.
The Amherst Cinema at 28 Amity St. in Amherst, has been named a 2016 recipient of New England Public Radio’s Arts and Humanities Award, which honors people and organizations for their influential contributions to the arts and humanities.
The cinema and other recipients will receive their awards May 10 in Holyoke.
The Amherst Cinema, an independent, non-profit cinema, screens independent and world films in more than 20 languages, along with current releases and theater and dance productions. It also runs the “See-Hear-Feel-Film” arts program, which teaches third-graders creative writing.
“Being recognized by NEPR is especially meaningful this year, as we celebrate our 10 years as a regional destination for the arts and offer a rich and growing array of programs onscreen,” said the theater’s executive director, Carol Johnson.
The 2016 Arts and Humanities Award is also honoring Pulitzer Prize winner and western Massachusetts author Tracy Kidder, Springfield Poet Laureate Maria Louisa Arroyo, and Community Access to the Arts of Great Barrington, which brings visual and performing arts programming to disabled individuals in Berkshire County.
For information about the Amherst Cinema, visit www.amherstcinema.org. For information about the award ceremony, visit www.NEPR.net. Tickets cost $75 and will be available online.
“Jellyfish Eyes,” a film by artist Takashi Murakami, will be shown Friday at 9:30 p.m. at Amherst Cinema.
The Japanese film is Murakami’s first; the artist typically works in painting, sculpture, fashion and animation. It follows a young boy as he moves to a small town and becomes friends with a flying, jellyfish-like sprite called Kurage-bo, a special effect animation designed by Murakami.
A different Japanese film will be screened every Friday in April to honor contemporary and classic Japanese cinema.
Regular admission.
“Once in a Lifetime,” a film by Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar, will be screened Monday at 7 p.m.
The French film, shown as part of the Pioneer Valley Jewish Film Festival, is about a class of underprivileged, multicultural students whose teacher enrolls them in a national competition about the experiences of children in Nazi concentration camps.
The Pioneer Valley Jewish Film Festival is a yearly two-week presentation of award-winning films from around the world that showcase the Jewish experience through cultural, religious, historical and political perspectives.
Tickets cost $10; $8 for students and seniors.
To purchase tickets for either of these films, visit www.amherstcinema.org.
“Art Hysterical: Errors and Approximations,” an exhibit of tapestries by China Marks, will open with a reception Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. and will remain on view through April 28 at the Hampden Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The exhibit will showcase Marks’ current series of tapestry approximations of paintings. She began making tapestries in 2014, when she came across a copy of a late renaissance painting of the Madonna in a fabric store in Miami. Since then she has been making tapestries as what she calls a “hybrid art form,” using an industrial sewing machine, clothing, hand tools and other machines not usually used for drawing.
“Men are Fools” is an example of her work. She started with a contemporary copy of Franz Xavier Winterhater’s Portrait of Sissi and embellished the piece using fabric, thread, lace, an earring and fusible adhesives.
Marks, who lives in Long Island City, New York, received a bachelor’s degree from the Kansas City Art Institute and a master’s degree in sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has been shown in galleries across the United States and in Europe. She has received grants and fellowships, including a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, naming her a Gregory Millard fellow, and a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
The gallery is at 131 South West Circle in the Southwest Residential Area at UMass. For information, visit fineartscenter.com/hampden.
For more about her work, visit www.chinamarks.net.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst Concert Band will perform Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Fine Arts Center Concert Hall on the UMass campus.
Music professor Timothy Anderson will conduct the group as they perform selections from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera,” “A Musical Toast” by Leonard Bernstein, Alfred Reed’s “Hounds of Spring,” “Florentine March” by Julius Fucik, and “Coney Island Washboard,” featuring a student barbershop quartet.
Tickets cost $10; $3 for UMass students; and $5 for other students, children and seniors. For information or to purchase tickets, visit the box office, call 545-2511, or go to www.fac.umass.edu/musicanddance.
The UMass Brass Ensembles will present a concert Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. in Bowker Auditorium in Stockbridge Hall on the campus.
Professors Eric Berlin, John Bottomley, Josh Michal and Greg Spiridopoulos will direct the Trombone, Horn and Brass choirs and the Trumpet and Tuba ensembles, which will perform music by Richard Wagner, James Stephenson, Eric Ewazen, Tylman Susato, Bruce Broughton, Gustav Mahler and others.
The concert is free and open to the public.
The UMass Advanced Percussion Ensemble will perform April 7 at 7:30 p.m. in the Fine Arts Center Concert Hall.
Professor of percussion Ayano Kataoka will conduct duos, trios and mixed ensembles, performing music from Alejandro Viñao, Steven Snowden, Philippe Manoury, John Cage, Ross Edwards and Rich O’Meara.
The concert is free and open to the public.
“Eyes Are For Asking: Narratives in Photography,” the ninth annual Curatorial Fellowship exhibition, will be on view through May 1 at the University Museum of Contemporary Art in the Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The exhibit’s curators, Gretchen Halverson, an art history master’s degree candidate, and Procheta Mukherjee Olson, a studio art master’s degree candidate, will host a curators talk April 7 at 6 p.m.
“Eyes Are For Asking” explores the stories that surround still images, challenging viewers to imagine what was happening before and after the shot and create their own story. The featured pieces are picked from the UMCA’s permanent collection of more than 3,000 works of art.
The Curatorial Fellowship is a collaboration between studio art and art history graduate students to develop an exhibition over the course of year.
The exhibit and curator talk are free and open to the public. Museum hours are Tuesdays through Fridays from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays from 2 to 5 p.m. For information, visit www.fac.umass.edu.
“RE>CRETE>FACTORY>SHOWROOM,”an exhibit of work by Brooklyn-based artist Charles Goldman, will be on view through May 1 at UMCA. Goldman is an artist-in-residence with the UMass Art Department.
Goldman makes work that extends sculpture into painting, installation, performance, drawing, sound, photography and architecture. He is the founder and director of GRIDSPACE in Brooklyn, an artist-run project space. His work is in public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, California.
An exhibit of recent work by Keith Hollingworth and Larry Smith will open with a reception April 7 from 5 to 8 p.m. and will remain on view through April 30 at Gallery A3, 28 Amity St. in Amherst. A talk, “Artists in Conversation,” will be held April 21 at 7:30 p.m. in the gallery.
Hollingworth combines canvas paintings with found natural objects. His art connects contemporary painting and nature.
“Contemporary painting often tends to avoid any reference to nature, so I feel I have found my job,” he writes in an artist statement. He suspends seashells in front of his paintings to ground the abstract work in reality. “Shells are loaded with information; they have been exchanged as money and worked into jewels and musical instruments. … They are the metaphor for the larger framework we live in.”
Smith paints still lifes that focus on color combinations.
“Color has always been my greatest interest,” he writes in his statement. Smith works slowly and creates art that becomes more complex the longer the viewer looks. Objects look like they are painted in uniform color, but over time more hues emerge.
Gallery hours are Thursdays through Sundays from 1 to 7 p.m. For information, visit www.gallerya3.com.
The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum has acquired more than 30 prints from the Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI) at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.
The EPI is a printmaking program and workshop that allows students and professional artists to work together, combining traditional and experimental printmaking techniques.
This partial gift-partial purchase adds to an EPI print collection previously donated to the college by Janet Hickey Tague (’66) and her husband, Harold Tague. The new acquisitions bring the collection to nearly 50 prints, and diversifies it with many works from African-American artists.
‘The richness of imagery and thematic resonances represented in the EPI prints will be relevant for classes from a variety of disciplines — not only art and literature courses but also politics, gender studies, history, psychology, and others,” said Ellen Alvord, the interim director of the museum.
For information, visit www.mtholyoke.edu/artmuseum.
The Silverthorne Theater Company (STC) in Turner Falls is accepting submissions for a New Play Competition; theater organizers which will select a play from a local playwright of color for possible production. The competition runs through Sept. 1.
Play submissions must be 90 minutes to two hours running time and cannot have been previously fully produced. All playwrights of color living or studying in western Massachusetts or in the Connecticut Valley are welcome to submit work.
The winning play may be produced during the 2017 season. Three finalists will give public staged reading in November and December; the winner will be announced Dec. 30. Plays will be judged by a five-member committee led by Montague writer and actor Kent Alexander.
“We consider it a fundamental part of Silverthorne’s artistic mission to draw from the entire pool of talented writers, actors, designers and technicians who work, live and enrich our region with their cultural and ethnic diversity,” said STC president Lucinda Kidder.
STC is a non-profit professional summer company that provides paid work to local theater artists. For information about the competition, visit www.silverthornetheater.org. Email submissions to silverthornetheater@gmail.com. Limit of two submissions per playwright.
