Tributes to nonviolence meet experiments in violence during a week with more artistry than you can wave a baton at.
Monday, January 16 – Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
Starting at 11:30 a.m., the Z Experience Poetry Slam, the main event of the Peabody Museum’s MLK Celebration this year, looks like it’s sold out—for in-person viewing. But you can still register for the Zoom stream.
Meanwhile, from noon to 4, the courtyard-level reading room at Yale’s Beinecke Library (down the stairs from the lobby) hosts “a special one-day display highlighting Beinecke Library collections related to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and to the African American freedom movement.”
Tuesday, January 17
“Larry Bellorín hails from Monagas, Venezuela, and is a legend of Llanera music. Joe Troop is from North Carolina and is a GRAMMY-nominated bluegrass and oldtime musician. Larry was forced into exile and is an asylum seeker in North Carolina. Joe, after a decade in South America, got stranded back in his stomping grounds in the pandemic.” Together, they’re Larry & Joe, and they’ll be at Cafe Nine tonight, where an 8 p.m. show is opened by another duo: Maggie Shar and Brian Slattery, two-fifths of the local folk fusion band The Moon Shells.
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Wednesday, January 18
“Civil rights activist and global humanitarian” Martin Luther King III—MLK’s eldest son and “an ambassador of his parents’ legacies of nonviolent social change”—is the keynote speaker at an MLK Commemoration starting at 5:30 p.m. in Woolsey Hall. His talk is titled, “Sanctuary in the Storm: Healing in Action.” Register here.
Thursday, January 19
The Treasures from the Yale Film Archive series is on a roll. Next up is the 1993 film The Scent of Green Papaya, screening at 7 p.m. in Yale’s Humanities Quadrangle. “Set in midcentury Saigon, the first film in
For a subversive and counterintuitive experience aimed at eliciting delight through disgust—though something tells me there will be more of the latter—Yale Cabaret presents Hot and Cold Showers: An Evening of Grand Guignol at 8 p.m., with four more performances across tomorrow and Saturday. “Grand Guignol, or Theatre of Horror and Laughter, is a French physical theatre form that has resulted in many accounts of audiences vomiting and fainting from the scenes they witness,” producers explain. “Be warned, this experience will take you on a journey and you may be sitting in a (blood) splash zone.”
Friday, January 20
At noon on the second floor of the Yale Center for British Art, English professor Stephanie Newell discusses The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kweh Armah, “the classic Ghanaian novel that inspired Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s ongoing series The Beautyful Ones, represented in the YCBA’s current exhibition of her work. … In this visceral novel, filled with dirt and bodily fluids, Armah vividly conjures the stench of political corruption. Through sarcasm and comic exaggeration, he confronts Africa’s political class and asks if and when the continent’s ideals will begin to flower.”
At 7:30 p.m. in SCSU’s Lyman Center for the Performing Arts, Donato Cabrera, one of four finalists auditioning to take over as music director of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, conducts the NHSO through selections from Dvořák, Strauss, Emmanuel Séjourné and Anna Clyne.
Saturday, January 21
Featuring artwork by Allison Davis, Emily Mansi, Martin Masi and Magnus Toys, the opening reception for this month’s Art in the Back exhibition at Three Sheets starts at 9 p.m.
Sunday, January 22
The Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury hosts a $5 Admission Day in conjunction with the opening of three exhibitions that variously illuminate the museum and its city: a show of staff favorites from the museum’s collections; a juried members’ exhibition; and a tribute to the quaint tradition “of the Soap Box Derby, an annual race between cars made by local boys that was once held on the streets of Waterbury.”
Written by Dan Mims. Readers are encouraged to verify times, locations, prices and other details before attending events.
