When she takes the stage at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown Friday night to tango with the pros, Esther Caroline Deming will do so with only a couple of hours of preparation. She’s an avid ballroom dancer and belongs to the Martha’s Vineyard Ballroom Dancers. But the tango is not a typical part of her repertoire. Instead, Ms. Deming will get a crash course from a group of classic Argentinian tango dancers when they arrive on Island at 5 p.m. Friday evening. The performance starts at 8.
The second annual Martha’s Vineyard Songwriters Festival last weekend combined pop and country BMI hit-makers in exclusive live music lineups and intimate settings, adopting the overwhelmingly successful approach of the perennially popular Key West Songwriters Festival. The event is designed to introduce top BMI pop and country songwriters not only to a wider audience, but to one another as well. While attendees soaked up performances from the composers behind the hits, the performers took advantage of the retreat-like setting and established new creative partnerships.
It’s not the Estuaries Project, but a project based on the estuary; the first annual collaborative arts retreat working under the title of the Great Pond Project. Unlike the long-awaited scientific research, Vineyarders will quickly see the results of this arts retreat on Edgartown Great Pond: on Friday, August 27, at 3 p.m. is a performing arts open house presented by the contributing artists.
The open house will be held at the home of Patrick Gage, 69 Kanomika Road (off of Meeting House Way) in Edgartown.
This is the season for holiday favorites spilling forth from the radio. Jose Feliciano, Bing and Bowie, those Jingle wooofing dogs. We smile for a bit, but then it fades. How could it not? We’ve heard it all before. There is nothing new the Boss can tell us about Santa coming to town.
Perhaps then it is time to seek out the new and different this year. Some feast for the ears and by extension the soul. But where to turn?
The Old Whaling Church this weekend, that’s where.
On a Tuesday afternoon, voice trills bounced around the grounds at the Yard off Middle Road in Chilmark. Some performers relaxed their diaphragms, lying on yoga mats on the floor of the barn studio. No dancers in tights or leotards ran in and out of the theatre on this day; opera singers have taken over the Yard for the next two weeks for the annual Yard Arts Opera performance.
The second annual Martha’s Vineyard Songwriters Festival will be held on Sept. 24 and 25. Staged at the Mansion House in Vineyard Haven and Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs, the festival will combine pop and country musicians in exclusive live music lineups and intimate settings.
Advance tickets for each show are $25; admission for both nights of performances is also available in advance for $40. To purchase tickets, visit ticketsMV.com.
For two nights only, Opera Noire of New York comes to Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs with two separate but equally spectacular programs: tonight, August 17, A Gala Performance of Opera’s Greatest Hits begins at 8 p.m. Then on Thursday, August 19, From The Underground Railroad to the
Seven years ago, the Irish fiddle player Oisin Mac Diarmada came to Martha’s Vineyard to play with his newly formed group Teada. It was the band’s first concert in the United States. Islanders in attendance that evening were rewarded with not just an outstanding evening of traditional Irish music. They also witnessed the birth of a band that would go on to earn top ten album honors of 2006 by MOJO magazine.
In 1940, at just 23, a young Southern writer — a woman no less — wrote a novel that somehow captured the racial tension and moral isolation of those times in Georgia with such compassion, apprehension, tenderness and humanity that it still inspires today.
Her name was Carson McCullers and the book was The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
Spoon in the Moon Coffeehouse at the Vineyard Playhouse begins its second season on Saturday, Dec. 18.
The Playhouse, in association with Hummingbird Productions and Kate Taylor, presents Tish Hinojosa in a concert titled, From Texas for a Christmas Night.
Tish’s chart topping hits include Something in the Rain and By the Rio Grande. She will perform at 8 p.m.
Admission is $20 and advance tickets are on sale now through the Playhouse Web site, vineyardplayhouse.org.
