BTWBerkshires

A Berkshire writer and journalist explores art and performance, local food and trails and more, telling stories to inspire creative life.

08/29/2023

For everyone interested in the Hoosic River — the first community listening session for the new Army Corps of Engineers study is tomorrow, Wednesday August 30, at the UNO community Center at 5 p.m.

The city and .hooray and describe the study as a comprehensive look at the flood chutes and flood control systems and dams — and anyone interested in the downtown and neighborhoods along the river, walking or biking along the river, fishing or swimming or boating, river restoration and ecology and more, this can be a chance to talk ...

‘On hot days, people are tubing in midstream, fishing and wading in the shallows. Where the Hoosic River runs through Williamstown, the water takes some finding, but the locals know it. In summer they may be riding along the new bike path or sitting on a natural pocket of sand where the river bends.

But head two miles upstream and the landscape shifts dramatically. In North Adams, many people don’t know the city has a river at all, says Judy Grinnell, the president and founder of Hoosic River Revival.

Grinnell is standing in a paved lot on Willow Dell, just past Eagle Street, looking at a concrete wall that’s about 15 feet tall. And part of the wall is falling in. … (https://btwberkshires.com/outdoors/hoosic-river/)

08/10/2023

man spins and breaks, turning on one arm, holding his whole weight on one center of gravity and flipping across the stage as though his body is speaking a sadness and anger too great to say aloud or contain.

He’s kneeling next to a friend, trying to move him. And then he’s weeping, alone in a room where the light slants down as though through a window surrounded by buildings. Their movements hold a story, the sight and sounds and voices in a summer night with people at the center of your life — they can be bedrock and still vulnerable — and knowing that can leave you aware of how much they matter.

Joshua Colbreath and Phillip Cuttino perform in Rennie Harris’ Nuttin’ but a Word on the opening night of Hip Hop Across the Pillow, and they’re sharing one moment in a night that dives into deep feeling — community, loyalty, challenge and laughter and glorious comedy, as acrobatic as astronauts in in zero gravity.

August 2 to 6, contemporary Hip Hop artists are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop’s emergence in the Bronx in the 1980s. And as they tell us in Octavia Butler’s words, they are here to ‘make people touch and taste and know — make people feel.’

More at btwberkshires.com

07/18/2023

The ducks take off, almost running on top of the water, and we watch them through a screen of cat-tails. The tops of the stalks carry cones of russet-gold we think must be pollen, and in the rushes we can see yellow iris blooming. In more than 20 years here, I’ve never seen this place before.

And yet it’s close to the well-traveled ways into town. We’re standing on the path along Harmon Pond, an easy walk on a Williamstown Rural Lands trail. A friend wanted to swim, and he pulled me away from my computer screen to check out Margaret Lindley Park. And we found the trails along Hemlock Brook.

It’s a quiet Saturday, a muggy afternoon in the flat-out stretch of the year when so many creative places are teeming at once, so many actors and dancers and artists and musicians offering their work, I’m scrambling and wishing for a teleporter.

So many people share their minds with us, often only for a night or two. They are rare and moving, they keep me going — and I needed this too, someone to walk with in the hemlock trees and see the milkweed and crowned vetch and black-eyed Susans the meadow. The highbush blueberries are showing new green fruit along the shore, and the checkerberries taste of wintergreen. … More at btwberkshires.com

05/09/2023

As an incentive to call peoole out to vote in your hometown election … I can recommend holding it on the night every crabapple tree in town comes into full bloom …

03/06/2023

Complete snow-day kit for a late-winter weekend … , ,

02/06/2023

Two men face off on a round wooden platform, Their feet are playing percussion with the friction of the stage against the floor. Their movement has roots almost 3,000 miles away, in cockfighting rings in Mexico. But they are not posturing with the bravado and violence of a blood sport — they are dancing together.

Acclaimed artist Armando Guadaloupe Cortés invokes and challenges traditions from his native land in his art installation, Castillos, …

And he returns this month in a series of performances to animate his artwork.
On February 3 and 4, he and fellow artist M. Elijah Sueuga will shape a call and response with film and sound.

They call the work La Seca, the dry season in a stretch of land through Mexico and into the Southwestern U.S. — Sueuga’s ancestral homeland lies at the north end and Armando’s at the south.

And on February 18 and 19, Cortes and his brother Juvenal will perform a new version of aún los gallos lloran (Even Roosters Cry), the work they brought together for the opening of Castillos a year ago. … (More at link in bio)

02/01/2023

A day at work … (This is a few days back and 2000 feet up. Since then I’ve been in the vally writing …) The orange jelly fungi are called witches’ butter, and the pointed firs are balsam - spruce have rounder needles, and tamarack have tiny cones that come out deep red in summer and look coppery now. The frozen buds are red maple. And the new moon came up before I left … Thank you, and Tamarack Hollow!

01/26/2023

Soul Science Lab presents work in progress from their new Hip Hop musical, The Renaissance Mixtape, commissioned by The Apollo Theater - a mixed reality musical that centers ancestral remembrance to juxtapose Black History and Black Future.

The musical follows two young artists who use music, images, and choreography to reflect on compelling aspects of the Harlem Renaissance that parallel their contemporary experience.

Soul Science Lab is a Brooklyn-based music and multimedia duo that translates stories into soul stirring sounds and dynamic visuals. Formed by artist educator and creative director Chen Lo and multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer Asante’ Amin, they describe themselves as innovative ‘Afrufuturist griots — Rooted in history. Created for the present. Designed to inspire the future.’ … Using the perfect blend of soul, funk, hip-hop and universal messages of self love and empowerment …’ Welcome to the Berkshires!

01/23/2023

- finally! I’ve been waiting for this - a quiet day by the fire while the snow falls, the soft snow that holds onto branches and transforms the woods. Up along the Chestnut trail, tge woods look so open I walked off the path without knowing it and circled around (not lost, not far in, just curious) … I wondered how long it had been since I last looked at tge contours of the land, tried to find my way by the shape of it, where a gully parallels the ridge, where a stream comes through or a bank rises. You can see those curves now, in winter. And so many stories talk about mountains as people, spirits, waking or asleep. I was just reading about the Cailleach in Irish lore who makes the hills and is part of them … and we have a ridge called Sleeping Giant near the town where I was born, though I can’t remember any origins of the name … The snow was falling with a crystaline sound … how many million flakes on this hillside alone?

01/17/2023

The wave arcs upward, jade green and gleaming. British photographer Rachael Talibart has caught the water at the height of the movement, in the full thrust forward before the wave crests and creams over. And when she takes images like this one, she often comes out into the storm to catch them.

Cassandra Sohn tells me about her on a January morning in Lenox. Talibart has been winning international attention with her images, Sohn says, and traveling the world with her long lenses. She is photographing in Antarctica this winter, as her work appears in the Guardian back home.

And this wave (kin to the one shown here) she saw off the South cost of England. Talibart has named the image Sedna, for an Inuit goddess and mother of the sea. Caught in this moment, the water has a stippled surface, rough and smooth at once, like the quartzite bluffs on the ridge above Pine Cobble. …

(A beautiful image to happen on, walking through Lenox on a winter morning. More at link in bio.)

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