this week in lectures, signings, panel discussions, workshops, and Q&As

HOT TIME: SUMMER FOR THE CITY AT LINCOLN CENTER

Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City features numerous events tied to the World Cup

SUMMER FOR THE CITY: TOGETHER, WE MOVE
Lincoln Center
June 10 – August 8, free or choose-what-you-pay
www.lincolncenter.org

The fifth iteration of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City features art, film, music, comedy, workshops, discussions, meditation, silent discos, and more, but its focus is on dance — along with World Cup–related soccer programs.

Describing the series, which features an outdoor installation by Clint Ramos, Chief Artistic Director Shanta Thake explains, “Lincoln Center becomes a celebration of bodies in motion — dancing, gathering, and connecting people from all walks of life.” There are hundreds of events, with performers from around the globe.

All presentations are free or choose-what-you-pay, and some require advance RSVP; below are twi-ny’s don’t-miss highlights.

Reg Bloor will conduct her late husband Glenn Branca’s symphony for one hundred guitars at Lincoln Center on June 12 (photo by Maria Jose Govia)

Glenn Branca’s Symphony No. 13 (Hallucination City) for 100 Guitars
Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall
Friday, June 12, choose-what-you-pay, 7:30
www.lincolncenter.org

On June 13, 2001, avant-garde composer Glenn Branca premiered Symphony No. 13 (Hallucination City) for 100 Guitars on the plaza at the World Trade Center. Writing about the piece for Sound American, Reg Bloor, guitarist Reg Bloor, Branca’s wife, explained, “This is the first time Glenn had done anything like this with volunteers, so we had no idea if anyone was going to show up. I’ll never forget walking around the corner of the North Tower onto the World Trade Center Plaza for the first rehearsal and seeing people sitting there on their amps waiting for us. This was really going to work. . . . The piece was a swirling cauldron of consonance and dissonance, like a giant swarm of bees trapped in a cyclone, the single movement a long, gradual build of dynamics, pitch, and tempo to a crescendo bouncing off the towers and ringing through the plaza, spilling out onto the streets of Lower Manhattan. It’s a sound that stays with you for the rest of the day after the piece is over. You hear it coming out of the subway tunnel or in the air conditioning. You can’t get it out of your ear until whole world starts to sound like Glenn.” Bloor will conduct the symphony at David Geffen Hall on June 12 at 7:30, with one hundred guitarists along with drummer Greg Fox.

Juneteenth
Multiple locations
Friday, June 19
www.lincolncenter.org

Lincoln Center honors Juneteenth with three special performances that, unfortunately, overlap one another: Carl Hancock Rux’s Oh Sankofa at Hearst Plaza at 7:00, boasting a talented cast exploring the importance of folklore during the Transatlantic Slave Trade; Jeremy Nedd’s from rock to rock . . . aka how magnolia was taken for granite at Alice Tully Hall at 7:30, which looks at the Milly Rock; and Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Tune Up at the David Rubenstein Atrium at 7:30, directed by the Flea’s Niegel Smith.

The music of Labelle is celebrated by original member Nona Hendryx at David Geffen Hall

Nightbirds, the Music of Labelle
Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall
Sunday, June 28, choose-what-you-pay, 7:30
www.lincolncenter.org

In 1974, Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash, known as LaBelle, took the country by storm with the monster hit “Lady Marmalade.” The trio had been together in other forms since 1961, broke up in lurid circumstances in 1976, the re-formed from 2005 to 2009. On June 28, Dream Machine Studio is presenting “Nightbirds, the Music of Labelle” at David Geffen Hall, led by Hendryx, joined by the original Labelle backing trio of guitarist Eddie Martinez, bassist Carmine Rojas, and percussionist Jose Rossy, along with Tony winner Adrienne Warren, Kimberly Nichole, Ledisi, and Sandra St. Victor.

Shen Wei Dance Arts and Guangdong Modern Dance Company team up for site-specific MindScape on Hearst Plaza (photo by Gabe Palacio)

Shen Wei Dance Arts | Guangdong Modern Dance Company: MindScape
Hearst Plaza
July 1-3, free, 5:00
www.lincolncenter.org

Chinese-born, NYC-based choreographer, director, and painter Shen Wei brings together Shen Wei Dance Arts (SWDA) and Guangdong Modern Dance Company for MindScape, a forty-five-minute piece that incorporates poetry, calligraphy, painting, and movement on Hearst Plaza. SWDA has presented dazzling dances in the Park Ave. Armory Drill Hall, at the Prospect Park Bandshell, in the Met’s Charles Engelhard Court, and other unique locations, so it should be fascinating to see what they’ll be doing outdoors at Lincoln Center. MindScape is part of Lincoln Center’s Dance Encounters series, which also has performances by Omari Wiles / Les Ballet Afrik (New York Is Burning), Ogemdi Ude (Major), Anna Sperber (Bow Echo), Benjamin Akio Kimitch (Tiger Hands), and Vangeline (Naiad Metal), which takes place in and around the Milstein Reflecting Pool, as well as Chinese Arts Week, which also includes Chinese-born, NYC-based Pulitzer Prize winner Du Yun’s family-friendly The Ocean Etched in the Forest.

Akram Khan’s Thikra is part of Summer for the City at Lincoln Center

Akram Khan Company: Thikra: Night of Remembering
Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway
Thursday, July 2, 7:30; Friday, July 3, 7:30; Sunday, July 5, 2:00, choose-what-you-pay
www.lincolncenter.org

English choreographer Akram Khan, who melds the Indian kathak form with contemporary dance, collaborates with visual director Manal AlDowayan on Thikra: Night of Remembering, a piece for between nine and eleven women set to “Gyura Beli Belo Platno” by the London Bulgarian Choir and “The Elephant’s Funeral” by Sushma Soma with Aditya Prakash. “As I stand humbled within the vastness of this epic desert known as AlUla, I feel the urge to unearth the many cultures that have passed through here,” Khan says about the work, which explores the ancient Saudi Arabia desert civilization. Thikra: Night of Remembering is part of the Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival, which also features Jeremy Nedd, Yinka Esi Graves, Sung Im Her / Her Project, Rachid Ouramdane / Compagnie de Chaillot, and others.

Documentary reveals how Elizabeth Streb and her Extreme Action Company (including Jackie Carlson, seen here) take dance to a whole new level

Dance Encounters: Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity (Catherine Gund, 2014)
Hearst Plaza
Friday, July 10, free, 6:00
www.lincolncenter.org
www.borntoflymovie.com

For more than fifteen years, New Yorkers have gotten the chance to see Elizabeth Streb’s Extreme Action Company perform such dazzling works as Ascension at Gansevoort Plaza, Kiss the Air! at the Park Avenue Armory, and Human Fountain at World Financial Center Plaza as her team of gymnast-dancer-acrobats risk their physical well-being in daring feats of strength, stamina, durability, and grace. In addition, Streb herself walked down the outside wall of the Whitney as part of a tribute to one of her mentors, Trisha Brown. Catherine Gund takes viewers behind the scenes in the exhilarating documentary Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity, going deep into the mind of the endlessly inventive and adventurous extreme action architect and the courage and fearlessness of her company. Gund follows Streb as she discusses her childhood, her dance studies, the formation of STREB in 1985, and her carefully thought out views on space, line, and movement as her work stretches the limits of what the human body can do. “I think my original belief and desire is to see a human being fly,” Streb says near the beginning of the film, which includes archival footage of early performances, family photos, and a warm scene in which the Rochester-born Streb and her partner, Laura Flanders, host a dinner party in their apartment, cooking for Bill T. Jones, Bjorn Amelan, Anne Bogart, Catharine Stimpson, and A. M. Homes. Gund also speaks with current and past members of the talented, ever-enthusiastic company — associate artistic director Fabio Tavares, Sarah Callan, Jackie Carlson, Leonardo Giron, Felix Hess, Samantha Jakus, Cassandre Joseph, John Kasten, and Daniel Rysak — who talk about their dedication to Streb’s vision while using such words as “challenge,” “velocity,” “endurance,” “magic,” “invincibility,” and “risk” to describe what they do and how they feel about it. The film is screening on Hearst Plaza on July 10 at 6:00 as part of Lincoln Center’s Dance Encounters series, which also includes “Movement on Film: Athletic Shorts” July 15–17.

Double Dutch Fusion Freestyle & Open Jump
The Dance Floor, Josie Robertson Plaza
Thursday, July 16, free, 5:00
www.lincolncenter.org

One of the most exciting events of every summer at Lincoln Center is the National Double Dutch League strutting its stuff with breathtaking displays of athleticism. It’s three hours of exhilarating movement, including an open jump where visitors are encouraged to participate.

Five troupes come together for annual BAAND Festival (Francesca Levita by Rachel Neville, Christopher R. Wilson by Andrew Eccles, Fangqi Li by Karolina Kuras, Taylor Stanley by Paul Kolnik, DTH Company Artist Kamala Saara by Nir Arieli)

BAAND Together Dance Festival
David H. Koch Theater
Tuesday, July 28, through Sunday, August 1, choose-what-you-pay
www.lincolncenter.org

The sixth BAAND Together Dance Festival takes place July 28 thorugh August 1, with five exciting troupes performing in the David H. Koch Theater: Ballet Hispánico New York, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem. It doesn’t get much better than that. Each company will also host a family-friendly dance workshop every day.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MARGARET CHASE SMITH AND “A DECLARATION OF CONSCIENCE”: A SIMPLE HERSTORY AT THE TANK AND TORN PAGE

Who: Jocelyn Kuritsky, Kate MacCluggage, Jake Hart, Colleen Werthmann, Cecil Baldwin, Carl Raymond
What: Special live radio play presentation of A Simple Herstory
Where: The Tank, 312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.; after-party at Torn Page, 435 West Twenty-Second St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
When: Sunday, June 7, radio play $28, 3:00, after-party free (suggested donation $13), 6:00
Why: In its award-winning inaugural season, actor, creator, producer, host/interviewer, and occasional designer Jocelyn Kuritsky’s audio fiction podcast, A Simple Herstory, explored the life and career of Victoria Woodhull, the suffragist who was the first woman to run for president, in 1872, representing the Equal Rights Party, battling incumbent commander in chief Ulysses S. Grant and newspaper editor and publisher Horace Greeley.

The upcoming second season turns its attention to Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith, who served in the House from 1940 to 1949 and in the Senate from 1949 to 1973. She ran for president in 1964 in the Republican primary, which was won by Barry Goldwater. Smith is most well remembered for her June 1, 1950, fifteen-minute speech delivered on the Senate floor that concluded with “A Declaration of Conscience,” a five-point message aimed at Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt but still rings true today. “It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom,” she said, supported by six other senators.

On June 7 at 3:00, a segment from season two of A Simple Herstory will be performed live at the Tank, featuring Kuritsky (Woodshed Collective), Kate MacCluggage (Left on Tenth), Jake Hart (Big George), Colleen Werthmann (Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play), and Cecil Baldwin (Welcome to Night Vale), directed by Meghan Finn (A Trojan Woman, Mahinerator) and written and developed by Jonathan A. Goldberg (Real Dead Ghosts, Deus Machina Ex or Eleanor Roosevelt vs. the God Machine). Don’t worry about the serious, and relevant, subject matter; Kuritsky promises “a fast, funny, inventive recounting of history that refracts the complexity and tension of politics through a live radio play experience.”

The show, being held in conjunction with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tribeca Festival, will be followed by an after-party at Torn Page, where the creative team will discuss the project with moderator Carl Raymond, creator and host of the podcast The Gilded Gentleman.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BEING PRESENT: ALVIN AILEY BACK IN BROOKLYN AT BAM

Fourth consecutive AAADT BAM season features company premiere of Medhi Walerski’s Blink of an Eye (photo by Georgia Modi)

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
June 4–7, $46-$156
www.bam.org
ailey.org

New Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater artistic director Alicia Graf Mack leads the company into its fourth consecutive visit to BAM with an exciting program running June 4–7. A mix of the old and the new concludes Mack’s inaugural season, which included a terrific December/January season at City Center that featured the world premiere of Cuban American theater director and arts educator and activist Maija García’s dazzling, fabulously costumed Jazz Island, a fable celebrating the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, inspired by Geoffrey Holder’s book Black Gods, Green Islands, about Trinidad and Tobago, with original music by jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles; Matthew Neenan’s Ailey debut, Difference Between, set to emotive choral music by MacArthur fellow and two-time Obie winner Heather Christian; Jamar Roberts’s compelling narrative solo Song of the Anchorite, a reimagining of Alvin Ailey’s 1961 solo Hermit Songs, set to jazz trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s interpretation of a Ravel adagio; Fredrick Earl Mosley’s Embrace, which incorporates tunes by Stevie Wonder, Kate Bush, Etta James, Maxwell, Ed Sheeran, Des’ree, and P!nk in exploring the intimacy of human connection as a group of dancers in everyday dress make inventive use of tables; and the company premiere of Medhi Walerski’s Blink of an Eye, set to J. S. Bach’s violin sonatas and partita performed by Itzhak Perlman.

At BAM, AAADT will present a new production of Judith Jamison’s Emmy-winning Hymn, the 1993 thirty-seven-minute tribute to Ailey set to music by Robert Ruggieri and text by Anna Deavere Smith that uses the words of Ailey dancers and Ailey himself; the fifteen-minute Blink of an Eye; and the thirty-six-minute 1960 classic Revelations, a cultural touchstone inspired by Ailey’s childhood.

“I definitely can say to the audience to be present as much as our dancers because it will be over in the blink of an eye,” stager Valentina Scaglia says about Walerski’s piece in the above video. “I think it’s important to just be there and just breathe it in and see what it does. I think the music and the dancers together will bring it over in the most wonderful way.”

On June 4 at 6:00, there will be a free roundtable discussion with the original cast of Hymn in the Adam Space; you can RSVP here.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

PROFOUND ABSENCE: SHTTL KICKS OFF REEL JUDAISM SERIES

Two men are at odds over religion and love in Ady Walter’s Shttl

SHTTL (Ady Walter, 2022)
Temple Israel
112 East Seventy-Fifth St. between Park & Lexington Aves.
Tuesday, June 2, free, 7:00
Series runs select Tuesday nights through August 11
tinyc.org
www.menemshafilms.com

On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a small Yiddish-speaking village on the Polish border teeters on the edge as the citizens debate war, collaboration, religion, women’s roles in society, and true love. In the tense, gripping Shttl, Ady Walter pulls off quite an impressive directorial debut, shooting the 110-minute film in one continuous take, shifting between black-and-white and color as the narrative unfolds: Mendele (Moshe Lobel) joins the military, promising to come back for Yuna (Anisia Stasevich), but while he is gone she is wooed/harassed by the mean-spirited Folie (Antoine Millet), whose father (Saul Rubinek) is the community’s spiritual leader. The strange spelling of the title is an homage to Georges Perec’s 1969 novel, La Disparition (A Void), which never uses the fifth letter of the alphabet, its loss a symbol of profound absence. (Both of French novelist Perec’s parents were killed during the Holocaust, his father on the field of battle, his mother in Auschwitz.) The village, or shtetl, was built for the film and was going to be turned into a Jewish-Ukrainian museum until Russia invaded Ukraine.

Shttl is screening June 2 at 7:00 at Temple Israel on the Upper East Side, kicking off the synagogue’s free summer Reel Judaism festival, and will be followed by a Q&A with New Yiddish Rep veteran Lobel, moderated by Rabbi David Gelfand. The series continues select Tuesday nights through August 11 with such other films as Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s 2025 The Last Spy, Sandi DuBowski’s 2025 Sabbath Queen, and Daniel Am Rosenberg’s 2023 Less Than Kosher, all followed by discussions.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

AUDITIONING SCHEHERAZADE: 1001 FRAMES AT BROOKLYN FILM FEST

Mehrnoush Alia’s 1001 Frames makes its NYC premiere at the Brooklyn Film Festival

1001 FRAMES (Mehrnoush Alia, 2025)
Brooklyn Film Festival
Sunday, May 31, Wythe Hotel, 80 Wythe Ave., Williamsburg, $25, 4:00
Monday, June 1, BRIC, 647 Fulton St., $28.37, 4:00
Festival runs May 29 – June 7
www.brooklynfilmfestival.org
www.loco-films.com

In the Middle Eastern fairy-tale collection One Thousand and One Nights, also known as The Arabian Nights, a woman named Scheherazade marries an evil king and tells him a different bedtime story every evening in order to stay alive. Brooklyn-based Iranian-American filmmaker Mehrnoush Alia uses that as her jumping-off point in her chilling feature debut, 1001 Frames, making its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Film Festival on May 31 and June 1.

Expanded from her 2015 short Scheherazade, the intense 1001 Frames brilliantly blurs the lines between fiction and reality, photographed by Hamed Hosseini Sangari in a cinéma vérité style. The film is set in a vast, empty warehouse studio where a famous Iranian director (Mohammad Aghebati) is holding auditions for the role of Scheherazade in his new horror film. Over the course of one day, he meets with more than a dozen women, ostensibly to audition them, but it becomes clear early on that something else is going on.

In the first shot, a woman is on the floor on all fours, grunting like an animal until she rolls over and lays still. Writer, director, editor, and producer Alia then cuts to a series of interviews as the unseen director asks the women ever-more-invasive questions. The actresses sit in a plain wooden folding chair, trying to balance confidence with their growing sense of discomfort as the director asserts his power and control over them in both subtle and overt ways, mirroring the treatment of women not only in the film industry but in the world as a whole.

“Tell me. It stays right here between us. It’s only you and the camera here,” he says to one auditioner, as if his presence is not central to their relationship.

Alia switches between a stationary camera focused on the woman in full and in closeup and a handheld camera as the director physically approaches them, often in a threatening manner. The effect forces the viewer to be the perpetrator, to be the one with the male gaze, a phrase coined by Laura Mulvey, who wrote in Visual and Other Pleasures, “Woman, then, stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of a woman still tied to her place as the bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”

As the interactions become more personal and intimate, some of the women squirm, some consider leaving, while others start challenging the director.

“You think you can edit everything, even your life!” his ex-wife, Firoozeh (Iranian multidisciplinary artist Mahin Sadri), boldly argues. A model states, “I’m not supposed to do whatever I’m told.” Another actress, looking frightened, says, “I’m afraid of that moment that you cross a line that things become ok that shouldn’t be.”

Meanwhile, the director refuses to back down, asking one auditioner about the role, “What are you willing to do to get it?” He scolds another, “This is my workplace. You can’t show up and say whatever you want.”

The dynamic of men’s insistent domination over women, in all areas of life, turns 1001 Frames into its own horror film, going beyond the mere psychological as the ending approaches.

“Are you scared of me?” the director asks one actress, who answers, “Do you want me to be scared?”

Previously known as Mehrnoush Aliaghaei, Alia based many of the incidents in 1001 Frames on real stories; she also worked closely with the actresses in developing their characters, allowing improvisation and giving the full script to only some of the women, depending on their preference. The result is a terrifying finale that morphs into a spectacularly effective coda.

The ensemble cast is remarkable, representing a wide range of ages and experience, each worthy of note: Sadri, Leili Rashidi, Mahsa Rezaei, Behafarid Ghaffarian, Fereshteh Aliyari, Maryam Arabzadeh, Aisan Ghanbari, Parastoo Ghorbani, Mahdieh Mohammadi, Dorsa Panjehband, Shayesteh Sajadi, Fatemeh Salehian, Helia Shadifar, and Avin Taffakori. They spend most of the film sitting in the chair, the camera zooming in on their face, capturing their changing, conflicted emotions as they reach difficult realizations and have impossible decisions to make. Aghebati, who is also the casting director and one of the film’s producers, is menacing as the director, his face never seen, as if he could be any man; he is a persuasive and controlling figure who completely understands his power and flaunts it, and perhaps not only to find the right actress for the part.

The most potent film about auditions since Takashi Miike’s 1999 ultraviolent cult classic Ôdishon, in which two men hold a fake audition in order to find a romantic partner for one of them, a tryout that doesn’t go particularly well, 1001 Nights is a haunting tale of all-too-real psychological horror, a beautifully rendered parable about misogyny with an unforgettable conclusion.

The eighteenth-century version of One Thousand and One Nights consists of such beloved, familiar tales as “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.” 1001 Frames is never so benign but all too familiar and scary, a story that Scheherazade has to keep on telling, over and over again, one frame at a time.

The May 31 and June 1 screenings will be followed by a Q&A with Alia and Aghebati. The Brooklyn Film Festival runs May 29 to June 7 at multiple venues and online; among the other films to watch out for are Walter Thompson-Hernández’s If I Go Will They Miss Me, Carlye Rubin, Katie Green, and Tina Grapenthin’s Blood & Guts, and Thales Banzai’s Tony Odyssey.

[ Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

CELEBRATING THE PEARL OF AFRICA: BAM DANCEAFRICA BRINGS UGANDA TO BROOKLYN

Who: Abdel R. Salaam, Ndere Troupe, Asase Yaa African American Dance Theater, the Billie’s Youth Arts Academy Dance Ensemble, DanceAfrica Spirit Walkers, DJ YB, more
What: DanceAfrica Festival 2026
Where: BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Ave.
When: May 22-28, many events free, Gilman dances $21-$86, film screenings $17
Why: The coming of the summer season means the arrival of one of the best festivals of every year, BAM’s DanceAfrica. The forty-ninth annual iteration focuses on Uganda, with four companies performing “Umoja/Mirembe/Obulungi (Unity/Peace/Beauty)!” in BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House: DanceAfrica Spirit Walkers, Asase Yaa African American Dance Theater, the Billie’s Youth Arts Academy Dance Ensemble, and Ndere Troupe, highlighting movement and music from the Pearl of Africa. Curated by artistic director Abdel R. Salaam, the festival also includes the DanceAfrica Bazaar with more than 150 vendors, dance workshops and master classes at the Mark Morris Dance Center, Sanaa Gateja’s “Voices of Peace” art installation, the Council of Elders Roundtable: Legacy & Preservation moderated by Dyane Harvey-Salaam, the Memorial Room, which offers a place to honor festival ancestors, and a late night dance party with DJ YB.

This year’s FilmAfrica screenings and cinema conversations, held in conjunction with the New York African Film Festival, are highlighted by Mohamed Ahmed’s A Tribe Called Love (2025), Maia Lekow and Chris King’s How to Build a Library (2025), Ossie Davis’s Black Girl (1972), Olive Nwosu’s Lady (2026), and Awam Amkpa’s The Man Died (2024) all followed by Q&As with the directors and/or others.

“Thousands of years of African cultural development were interrupted by centuries of colonialism, which gave rise to a sociopolitical movement that led to Uganda’s independence on October 9, 1962, and its formal nationhood in 1963. In the decades since, a powerful artistic movement has emerged to reclaim and celebrate Ugandan identity and intelligence through cultural expression, a force that continues to this day,” Salaam said in his mission statement. “Today, ancient Uganda is considered a cradle of human evolution and early civilization in the East African region of Lake Nalu Baale, the traditional name of what became Lake Victoria. In Luganda, a Bantu language, ‘Nalu Baale,’ translates to ‘Mother of the Ancestral/ Guardian Spirits.’ I am honored to share more of these ancient dances and songs, mixed with shades of contemporary visions of East Africa.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

GLORY GLORY: LAURELYN DOSSETT AND BET WILLIAMS AT JALOPY

Who: Laurelyn Dossett, Bet Williams
What: Songwriting Studio and live concert
Where: Jalopy Theatre, 315 Columbia St. between Woodhull & Rapelye Sts.
When: Saturday, May 9, $60, 2:00; Saturday, May 9, $25, 8:30
Why: “There are secrets / Secrets I swore I’d never tell / But the ones that I loved are all good gone dead / So listen, children, listen well,” Laurelyn Dossett sings on “Run to the River” on her debut solo album, How Many Moons (August 28, Sycamore Road). The North Carolina native has written songs that have been recorded by Levon Helm and the Carolina Chocolate Drops and for the theater (Brother Wolf, Radiunt Abundunt) and has toured with Rhiannon Giddens, Alice Gerrard, and others, but she now takes center stage, joined by her longtime friend and Penn State college roommate, Bet Williams, who is currently recording a new LP, Magic Beauty Pain, the follow-up to such discs as Rose Tattoo, Elephants and Angels, and The 11th Hour. Williams and Giddens appear on How Many Moons, along with Sophia Catanoso, Kari Sickenberger, Charly Lowry, M. C. Taylor, and the Glory Glory Chorus, made up of friends and relatives singing on a family porch.

Produced by Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger), How Many Moons is an intoxicating mix of Americana, folk, country, jazz, and blues, built around Dossett’s lovely voice. “Laurelyn Dossett is a songwriter and human that I find immensely inspiring. A survivor and a wonder-er. I know she has played a huge part in the lives of so many creative people, and I’m honored to have played a part in her new album,” Taylor said in a statement.

Dossett and Williams come to the Jalopy Theatre in Brooklyn on May 9, first for a two-hour Songwriting Studio workshop at 2:00 in which they will share their musical knowledge, giving advice on tunes that participants can bring with them. At 8:30 they take the stage for a reunion concert; despite knowing each other for four decades, they have never performed together before this tour. Expect a rollicking, poetic evening of gorgeous and camaraderie, as evidenced in the below brand-new video.

“It’s all about the music, yes,” Dossett explained about the record. “But I have pulled together some stuff, and some experiences, that come from me, my friends and family, and this beautiful place I call home. It’s all of a piece of me — the music, the people I love, the land, the river, the flora and fauna. And you, the listener.”

So listen, everyone, listen well.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]