Arts & Culture

Violin virtuoso Joshua Bell performs at The Music Hall in Portsmouth Friday night, accompanied by pianist Sam Haywood. 

If you’re feeling Shakespearean, the Keene State College Theatre Department performs The Tempest this weekend at the Redfern Arts Center

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre perform at the Hopkins Center in Dartmouth through the weekend; the San Francisco Chronicle referred to a company production as “spectacular dancing that thrills you to your marrow”.  The program includes Ailey’s signature work, “Revelations.”

And right here in Concord…jazz pianist and composer Pamela Hines will be playing at the Purple Pit.

New Sounds From Arab Lands is five musicians from Syria, Tunisia and Lebanon respectively. They were brought together in collaboration with the Aga Khan music initiative, and are artists in a residency at Dartmouth College curated by ethnomusicologist and music professor Ted Levin. The group performs this evening at the Spaulding auditorium. We caught up with the group from a studio at Dartmouth College.

Ai Weiwei is China’s best known artist and the sharpest thorn in the side of its government. He’s a humorous and clever digital dissident, whose installations, viral videos, and tweets mock Chinese censors, and have made him an international symbol for freedom.      

After years of attempting to cozy up to him with bribes and favors, the Chinese government turned on Ai Weiwei, charging him with tax evasion and bulldozing his freshly built studio in Shanghai. Then, on April 3, 2011, he disappeared.

Recently, long time Miami resident and author Dave Barry joined us for Writers on a New England Stage and he spoke a lot, as he always does, about his wacky adopted home:

"I think of myself as sort of an ambassador for the city of Miami - which needs an ambassador because it doesn't have a good reputation.

This year, the Dartmouth College campus has become temporary home for a mixed-media menagerie called Ice Chimes.  And the 20-foot tall pagoda-like structure outside the Life Sciences building gets a lot of curious stares from students.

Ice Chimes is supposed to be interactive.  But it isn’t exactly intuitive.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist joins us with his first solo adult novel in over a decade – the darkly comic Insane City. The book is a riotous tale of a destination wedding gone awry with Russian gangsters, angry strippers, a pimp as big as the Death Star, a very desperate Haitian refugee on the run with her two children from some very bad men, and an eleven-foot Burmese albino python named Blossom.

Which year would you call the single most important in US cultural history? Try 1993—life before the internet and pop star designer fragrances.  The year that marked the beginning of NAFTA, hope for peace in the Middle East, and a saxophone playing president.

“NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star” is a new exhibition at the New Museum exploring the year they argue changed everything about art, culture, and politics.  Margot Norton is Assistant Curator at the New Museum and joins us to talk about the art and historical context of the work featured in the show.

Ranjit Bhatnagar is no stranger to cool projects...he's made iambic pentameter from tweets, and is creating a bunch of instruments out of unexpected items, like a robo- toy piano.  Now, the sound artist can add one more feather to his cap...coming on our show.

In 1981, playwright, performer and theater company director Carlyle Brown decided on a whim to take a trip to Africa. That launched a journey of self-discovery and an adventure that became the basis for a one-man show called “The Fula from America: An African Journey," which Brown performs tonight at The Music Hall in Portsmouth. It’s a fund-raising event for Portsmouth’s African Burying Ground, and will be followed by a candelight procession to the site where the design for a memorial will be unveiled.

Nearly half a century ago, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood detailed the savage murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. That book is regarded as a literary landmark… the first so-called “nonfiction novel” that brought the true crime genre to the mainstream and cemented Capote’s celebrity status. It’s inspired three films, among them, “Capote,” in 2005, which earned a best actor Oscar for Philip Seymour Hoffman.