13 downtown historic performing arts centers from Jamestown to Poughkeepsie have come together to form Alive Downtowns! The coalition, having met virtually since the start of the pandemic, is seeking $20 million in operating support from the state.
Bardavon, photo by Tim Lee.
Alive Downtowns! main goal is to encourage the lawmakers of New York to think of historic theatres in the same way they do aquariums and zoos, which are shown to have a significant public benefit. It is an affiliate corporation to the Upstate Theater Coalition for a Fairgame, established eight years ago in response to the creation of casinos in the eastern and southern tiers of the state.
Ulster Performing Arts Center, photo by Em Walis.
The historic theatres of Upstate New York are essential to each city’s urban education opportunities, economic viability, and continuing attractiveness. John Parkhurst, Chief Operating Officer of the Rochester Broadway Theatre League commented, “The COVID-19 shutdown of nearly two years has impacted us greatly as an industry. We are coming back, all of us, but, frankly without this coalition it would have been much harder.” The coalition is helping these places become recognized, and be bettered.
Proctors Theatre interior, photographed by Erica Miller.
These facilities combined have an average age of nearly 100 years and are keystones to the downtown areas of the cities they are in. They serve over 5 million people annually including thousands of students. Their economic impacts for upstates major downtowns exceed $350 million and their aggregate budgets exceed $100 million.
The Smith Center for the Arts, photo by Joe Booth.
In a meeting with local legislators and the Governor’s office, the response has been very supportive. The coalition is grateful for that response and hopes to reach all state elected officials to assure an annual appropriation that will allow its members to continue to be part of growing upstate downtowns guaranteeing accessibility for all citizens for years to come.
The Stanley Theatre.
Chris Silva, long-time Executive Director of the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie added, “This group of performing arts centers are economic, educational, and cultural engines in Upstate. We are hoping the state can make a modest investment in us that will pay huge dividends.” Upon meeting with local legislators and the Governor’s office, the response has been very supportive for the coalition’s efforts.
Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyer, and Zakir Hussain, along with Rakesh Chaurasia, have announced a US tour supporting their upcoming album, As We Speak. The group will tour throughout April and May, with a performance at The Town Hall in New York City on May 4, and the Troy Saving Bank Music Hall on May 5. Their upcoming album is scheduled for release on May 12, through Thirty Tigers.
From left to right: Bela Fleck, Zakir Hussain, Edgar Meyer, and Rakesh Chaurasia. Credit: Jeremy Cowart
As We Speak showcases the quartet’s various abilities and the wide range of influences at their command. Consisting of 12 songs, the album combines the complexity of Indian rhythm with the groove of a funky bass line. The show is sure to be one you’re not going to want to miss.
The album’s first piece, “Owl’s Misfortune” was written by Fleck. The song is intended to “echo the different worlds we all come from,” according to Fleck. “I imagined creating a world where classical language could live alongside Indian musical rhythmic ideas—and since I wrote it, bluegrass lives there too,” Fleck added.
The core trio was formed while Fleck and Meyer were searching for a third member for their triple concerto, to mark the opening of Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center. Zakir came to mind, who was eager to write for an orchestra. The three then collaborated on Fleck’s 2009 album The Melody of the Rhythm, recorded with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin.
The trio then met Chaurasia while in India on tour for The Melody of the Rhythm. Hussain already knew Chaurasia through his uncle, Indian flute legend Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, and invited him to sit in on their tour, and their chemistry shined. “I think we wanted to see if we could do something a little more organic with just a small group,” says Meyer. “What I think is good about this quartet is that everybody has to stretch in the direction of the other people,” added Fleck.
Pre-order / pre-save As We Speak here. Tickets for the group’s tour areon sale now. In addition to the quartet’s performance at The Town Hall in New York City and the Troy Saving Bank Music Hall on May 5, a November US tour is to follow.
As We Speak Tour Dates
April 19 Nashville, TN Schermerhorn Symphony Center
April 20 Atlanta, GA Emory University
April 21 Germantown, TN Duncan-Williams PAC
April 22 Boone, NC Appalachian State University
April 23 North Bethesda, MD The Music Center at Strathmore
April 25 Charleston, SC Charleston Gaillard Center
April 27 Danville, KY Norton Center for the Arts
April 29 Cutler Bay, FL The Moss Center at South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center
April 30 Charlotte, NC Belk Theater at Blumenthal Performing Arts Center
May 2 Munhall, PA Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall
May 3 Norfolk, VA Virginia Arts Festival
May 4 New York, NY The Town Hall
May 5 Troy, NY Troy Saving Bank Music Hall
May 6 Boston, MA Celebrity Series of Boston at Berklee Performance Center
The debut recording from timing – featuring members of punk rock bands Public Access and The Slaughterhouse Chorus – will be premiered on Saturday, January 28 at The Hanger in Troy.
photo by Yuliya Peshkova.
The album, Storm’s Coming, is more of a recording project and one that cannot be performed live. However on this night at The Hanger, the album will be played in its entirety, set to a 30 minute video that follows the flow of the album. On Storm’s Coming, the weather seems fine -but it could change at any time.
timing’s formation was a reaction to an ever-changing forecast and the debut recording a song cycle about the storms of uncertainty that was borne on the winds of most uncertain times. In the strange, scary summer of 2020, four lifelong musical comrades – Chris Jordan (vocals, resonator, keys), Jason Bonafide (pedal steel guitar), Bob Watson (bass) and Mark McKenna (drums) -reconvened after their first extended break in nearly 20 years of weekly rehearsals for their reasonably regionally successful punk rock bands, Public Access and The Slaughterhouse Chorus. With the doors wide open and plenty of room to breathe, the four dragged some instruments into an old horse barn in rural Rensselaer County to start again.
art by Mavis McKinley
A handful of fingerpicked resonator riffs and bits of melodies collecting dust were finally given a place in the sun as the band developed a series of Jordan’s instrumental ideas into the basis of “Storm’s Coming” over that eerily quiet summer in the barn. Jordan and Bonafide traded their distorted guitars for plucked acoustics and steel guitar swells, learning to play as they went, while Watson and McKenna locked into backcountry rhythms that occasionally spiraled into chaos. Inspired by Radiohead’s approach to Kid A, the band forced itself to embrace the uncertainty of the times by substantiating those early demos with unusual instrumentations, unconventional songwriting, and unfamiliar production techniques.
Live recordings from the barn were brought back to Bonafide’s basement studio, unraveled, ripped apart, and reassembled, with the traditional sounds forming the dirt floor for an off-kilter skyscraper of strings, synthesizers, drones, and impressionistic lyrics delivered in rich harmonies. Built up brick by brick over the course of the next two years into a multifarious musical collage, the EP attempts to interface Nine Inch Nails‘ industrial dread with the organic warmth of Crosby, Stills, & Nash without losing course.
art by Mavis McKinley
Mixed by Scoops Dardaris (Prince Daddy & The Hyena, Undeath) and mastered by Nick Sebastiano (Another Michael), timing’s Storm’s Coming is a concept album where meteorology is the metaphor for life’s everyday anxiety and unease, where the thunderheads are always lurking somewhere on the horizon, where the river is always threatening to flood its banks. The alt-country heart of the record skips into arrhythmias of crashing doom, swirling post-rock, pastoral indie-folk, and glitching electronics. Tossed around somewhere in the trailing wakes of The Band and The Books, Aphex Twin and Aaron Copeland, the resulting mini-album is an amalgamation of the new and the old, the familiar and the unknown, blurring the lines between acoustic and electronic and riding the fence dividing tradition and experimentation.
Doors open at The Hanger on January 28, with music starting at 8pm. Admission is free.
Listen to “The King” below or on various streaming services here. The rest of Storm’s Coming will be released on Friday, February 3rd on Bandcamp.
Legendary musician Bruce Hornsby will perform at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall on Thursday, March 23rd.
Originally from Williamsburg, VA, Hornsby first rose to national prominence with “The Way It Is”, his 1986 Grammy-winning debut album with The Range. The title track became the most-played song on American radio in 1987 while Tupac Shakur’s timeless song “Changes” builds on “The Way It Is” and set the stage for many subsequent versions of the track.
In 1991 Hornsby collaborated with Bonnie Raitt, playing on her iconic hit “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” Additionally, Hornsby was a part-time member of the Grateful Dead from September 1990 to March 1992, performing over 100 concerts in America and Europe.
The 13-time Grammy nominee has also solidified his status as a highly sought-after collaborator. Hornsby’s own 23 albums have sold over 11 million copies worldwide, and he has appeared on over 100 records including releases. His most recent studio album, ‘Flicted, was released this past May.
Read our review of Bruce Hornsby and the Noisemakers at Beak and Skiff Orchards in Lafayette, NY on June 16, 2021.
EMPAC, located at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, has unveiled their Spring 2023 season of performances. This series of events is a special opportunity to experience synthesizing productions that integrate artistic practices, and fuses both art and technology. Starting in January and running through May, artists in residence at EMPAC premiere shows that span dance, visual arts, performance-installations, multimedia concerts, new music, film, and hybrid theatrical productions.
Since its first commission in 2006, the EMPAC curatorial program has supported the commissioning, production, and presentation of ambitious performances and artworks that span time-based visual art, music, theater, and dance. The program’s polyvocal curatorial approach resonates through each project, generating time-based artworks that are diverse in content, method, technology, and audience experience. Alongside the curatorial program, researchers at Rensselaer use the infrastructure of EMPAC to expand the discourse at the intersection of digital technology and the human condition through a broad range of research projects in science and engineering that include cognitive computing, immersive visual and auditory environments, and physical computing.
This spring season at EMPAC hosts some of our largest and most intimate projects to date, all of which stretch sensory exploration and technical research in the arts in new ways. As we continue to welcome audiences back to EMPAC, our curators and engineers are excited to connect the people of our region to this polyvocal program of expansive new works by our artists in residence, many of which have been in development for several years at the Center.
Vic Brooks, EMPAC Associate Director of Arts and Senior Curator of Time-based Visual Art.
EMPAC (The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) grants artists the creative sovereignty to pursue collaborations with others working not only in the fields of visual and performing arts, but also in science, new media, and technology. T
he Spring 2023 season showcases programs by worldwide artists that binds disciplines, medium, and subject matter–sculptors working with composers, visual artists with sound artists, a music/documentary-theater hybrid with an 18-person live orchestra, and a large-scale dome installation currently being designed to host performances with integrations of immersive VR, projection, and spatial audio. With the assistance of new and evolving technology developed by EMPAC, artists explore political, social, and global issues. Alongside this search, artists are also attentive to how new art forms can open imaginative spaces for rethinking the future.
On January 11, Daina Ashbee,a Canadian choreographer, recognized and admired for her innovativeness will make the US Premiere of her first group show J’ai pleuré avec les chiens(Time, Creation, Destruction)at EMPAC in Troy, NY.. You can expect a transformative experience about the rebellious potential of the human body in performative spaces, which has already been staged in a handful of major cities outside the US. Two more performances follow at Gibney: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center in New York City (January 13 & 14).
January 23 brings the live performance Cuando las nubes eran las olas / When the clouds were the waves by two EMPAC artists in residence, the Venezuelan-Ecuadorian artist Ana Navasand Venezuelan composer Mirtru Escalona-Mijares. The production explores the afterlives of the Venezuelan modernist art movement during a time of political and economic turmoil for the country. They pay homage to Alexander Calder’s panels in the Aula Magna, the main auditorium in the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas, and the commonalities the Aula Magna shares with the EMPAC concert hall, where the show will be installed and performed.
At Empact, the first program, A Kind Of Ache by music curator Amadeus Julian Regucerawill be delivered on January 27. The production will be an hour-long performance by the contemporary, experimental chamber music duo The Living Earth Show. This duo is on a mission to emphasize the voices, perspectives, and bodies of non-white and queer artists that mainstream classical music traditionally exclude. Sarah Hennies, a composer and percussionist whose works explore queer and trans identity, composes the original score. Terry Berlier, who investigates queerness and ecologies in her art, designs a sculpture-turned-instrument that the duo and Hennies will perform on. This is the kick-off to The Living Earth Show’s multi-season residency with EMPAC, with another engagement slated for Fall 2023.
On February 25, the world premiere of Paper Pianosby Mary Kouyoumdjian, an Armenian-American composer and documentarian and Nigel Maister, a South African- American director and writer will be performed live on EMPAC. The production will be delivered by the acclaimed 18-person Alarm Will Soundorchestra with projections by Syrian visual artist Kevork Mourad. The evening-length music and documentary-theater hybrid explores the dislocation, longing, and optimism of refugees and the experiences of those who provide services to them.
Bora Yoon, a Korean-American electroacoustic composer, vocalist, and sound artist, and Joshue Ott,a creative technologist who designs custom softwares, apps, and interactive visual and audio experiences for concert halls, join forces to premiere their multimedia concert SPKR SPRKL, on March 18. Yoon and Ott use EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis Array to produce a visually and sonically stimulating composition based on a new imminent album by Yoon.
Later in the season, Transtraterrestrial, a prequel and premiere of The Unarrival Experiments – Unconcealment Ceremonies(April 6), a long-term collaboration between EMPAC and queer/nonbinary/trans multidisciplinary artist Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, is installed in the EMPAC building. The installation features embodied performance, integrations of immersive VR, projection, and spatial audio in a custom-built 40’ x 15’ dome covered in painted organic matter. The performance dome structure was developed by Whitson through discourse with architects, engineers, and astrophysicists. In dialogue with Yorùbá Cosmology, astrophysics, and research on the “blackest black,” this iterative artwork is designed to magnify the dark, centering the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy through a black, queer, and trans embodied lens. For the fifth year, EMPAC is collaborating with graduate students from Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) on a public exhibition. This year focuses on the black body in Detroit techno music, and is inspired by the work of scholar and music artist DeForrest Brown, Jr. The project engrossed recordings from the artist’s new album Techxodus, which operates as a musical successor to the ideas in his recent publication Assembling a Black Counter-Culture (2021). The world premiere of DeForrest Brown’s Speakers That Speak To Youat EMPAC (April 28) makes use of EMPAC’s extensive spatial audio capabilities and is curated by Katherine Adams, Liv Cunibert, Mary Fellios, Abel González Fernández, and Sidney Pettice.
On May 8, 2023, the Canadian bilingual, multidisciplinary live art ensemble and winner of an EMPAC open call with CINARS, Theatre Junction, will be at EMPAC for a residency and work-in-progress showing. The production will guide an audience through four distinct rooms that feature live video feeds and live actors. The work is being developed at EMPAC and will premiere in Montreal in the Fall of 2023.
EMPAC’s Spring 2023 season also includes public tours, screenings, and conversations with film director Ayo Akingbade, artist Armando Guadalupe Cortés, artist/DJ M. Elijah Sueuga, and EMPAC’s Senior Curator for Theater/Dance Ashley Ferro-Murray, among others; and events presented in collaboration with iEAR Presentsand the Sanctuary for Independent Media.
The free Music at Noon concert series is back, set to take place at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall on Jan. 10 with The Bluebillies.
The Bluebillies
Since 1988, on the second Tuesday of each month from October to May, the free Music at Noon concert series has presented exceptional musicians with diverse musical styles. On Jan. 10, the Bluebillies start off the concert series. The group performs its unique blend of country, bluegrass, and folk music with traditional style, sound, and spirit. Husband and wife team Mark and Melody Guarino have been singing together since 1984, with their mission being preserving the rich heritage of country music.
The Bluebillies produce a series of traveling Old-time Gospel Music Revues each season, host their own gospel music open mic each summer, and have released three records; Adirondack Angels in 2016, Gal From Ioway in 2014, and Train to Paradise in 2013. Also happening before the performance will be a workshop featuring Deb Cavanuagh introducing traditional American instruments from the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Students will sing along, dance, move and perform traditional American folk songs such as “I’ve Been Working on The Railroad,” “The Erie Canal, Froggie Went A’Courtin’,” and other favorites. The workshop will be from 10-11 a.m., with the performance starting right after.
Other Music at Noon performances coming up is Bleecker Consort on Feb. 14, Natalia Shevchuk on March 14, Akina Yura on April 11, and Findlay Cockrell on May 9. Tickets to these performances can be found here.
