Shalom,
!
Saturday, November 14, 2026
Saturday, November 14, 2026
Shalom,
!
Saturday, November 14, 2026
Saturday, November 14, 2026
Shalom,
!
Saturday, November 14, 2026
Saturday, November 14, 2026
Shalom,
!
Saturday, November 14, 2026
Saturday, November 14, 2026
Capital Region Curated: November 16-22
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with A Doll’s House at UAlbany, poets at the Tang and a classical guitar recital.
Alan Koslow
28
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
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FROM IBSEN TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Nora Helmer’s marriage comes apart on the UAlbany stage, ten poets read in the Tang galleries, a semiconductor engineer explains the machinery behind AI, and classical guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre plays Union’s Memorial Chapel.
In Amy Herzog’s adaptation of A Doll’s House, a secret Nora Helmer has kept to protect her family exposes how little freedom she has within it.
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⭐ TOP PICKS
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🎭 A Doll’s House
UAlbany · Wednesday–Sunday, November 18–22 · Six performances, opening Wednesday at 8 PM
Nora Helmer once took a desperate step to save her husband. When her secret threatens to come out, she discovers how differently they understand what she did and what their marriage requires of her. Kea Trevett directs Amy Herzog’s English adaptation of the Ibsen drama whose final confrontation helped change what audiences expected of modern theater.
See Theater & Performance below.
✍️ Poets in the Museum
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Thursday, November 19 · 6 PM
Ten regional poets will read in the galleries of A Feeling of With. Saratoga Springs Poet Laureate Jay Rogoff hosts the free reading, the second in a three-part series. Among the writers is 2026 Whiting Award recipient Hajar Hussaini, whose collection Disbound and work as a translator approach questions of language and belonging from different directions.
See Books, Writers & Ideas below.
🔬 How Wafer Fab Equipment Enables High-Performance Computing and AI
UAlbany · Monday, November 16 · 6–7 PM
Angélique Raley takes the discussion of AI inside the semiconductor factory. Her NANOvember lecture will look at the equipment and techniques that make advanced chips possible. Raley leads research in semiconductor and 3D integration at Tokyo Electron America, where stacking and connecting components is part of the work of building more capable computing systems.
See Science, Technology & Health below.
🎸 Raphaël Feuillâtre — Classical Guitar
Union College · Sunday, November 22 · 3 PM
A single classical guitar can carry a melody, bass line and inner voices at the same time. French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre brings that intimate sound to Union’s Memorial Chapel in a Capital Region Classical recital. The setting gives listeners room to hear the small choices that shape a solo performance: how a note is struck, how long it is allowed to ring and how a player makes one line stand out among several.
See Music, Dance & Performance below.
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📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
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One calendar file lets you add this week’s scheduled events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Individual calendar links beside each listing let you choose just the programs you want to attend. Adding an event to your calendar does not reserve a seat or complete any required registration.
DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links below open an event ready to save.
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📅 DAY-BY-DAY CALENDAR
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MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16
3–4:30 PM — Building Archives with Nathalie Duval · UAlbany / Humanities 354
3:30–5 PM — Inflammation Resolution & Healthy Aging · UAlbany / D’Ambra Auditorium
6–7 PM — NANOvember: The Chips Behind AI · UAlbany / ETEC 149/151
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17
8:30 AM–3:30 PM — Aging Well Together · UAlbany / ETEC
4:30–7 PM — UAlbany Zine Scene · UAlbany / University Library
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18
1–2 PM — Translating Compassion · UAlbany / Humanities 354
8–10:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19
Noon–1 PM — Jeanine Ouderkirk, jazz vocals · HVCC / Bulmer Auditorium
Noon–1:30 PM* — Mark Thomas Gibson Curator’s Tour · Skidmore / Tang
2–3:30 PM* — Advancing Medical Image Analysis with Limited Training Data · RPI / Isermann Auditorium
3–5:30 PM — Evolving Surveillance · Albany Law / DAMC and online
6–7:30 PM* — Poets in the Museum · Skidmore / Tang, Malloy Wing
7–9:30 PM* — Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play · Williams / ’62 Center
8–10:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — Rent · Siena / Beaudoin Theatre
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20
3–5:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
7–9:30 PM* — Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play · Williams / ’62 Center
7:30–9 PM* — Dance Winter Concert · Skidmore / Dance Theater
8–10:30 PM* — Rent · Siena / Beaudoin Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — This Emancipation Thing · Skidmore / Black Box
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21
2–3:30 PM* — Dance Winter Concert · Skidmore / Dance Theater
2–4 PM — The Art of Eastern Heritage · HVCC / Maureen Stapleton Theatre
2–4:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
7–9:30 PM* — Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play · Williams / ’62 Center
7:30–9 PM* — Dance Winter Concert · Skidmore / Dance Theater
8–10:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — Rent · Siena / Beaudoin Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — This Emancipation Thing · Skidmore / Black Box
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22
2–3:30 PM* — Tang Guide Tour · Skidmore / Tang
2–4:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
2–4:30 PM* — This Emancipation Thing · Skidmore / Black Box
3–4:30 PM* — Raphaël Feuillâtre, guitar · Union / Memorial Chapel
End time estimated for planning.
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🎭 THEATER & PERFORMANCE
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A Doll’s House
UAlbany / Performing Arts Center
When Nora Helmer secretly borrowed money to save her husband Torvald’s life, she broke rules that gave a married woman little control over her own affairs. Years later, the loan resurfaces just as Torvald is about to take up a new position at the bank. Nora expects him to understand why she acted. His response forces her to reconsider what he values and what she has accepted as the terms of their marriage.
Ibsen builds the pressure inside the Helmers’ drawing room from small exchanges: nicknames, requests for money and a rehearsal for a dance. The familiar routines of the household begin to sound different as Nora realizes how much of her life she has spent playing a part.
Amy Herzog’s adaptation brings that change into contemporary English. Directed by Kea Trevett, the production gives the actors room to show how affection, dependence and control can coexist in the same conversation, long before Nora and Torvald say plainly what they expect of each other.
📍 Studio Theatre, Performing Arts Center · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Advance: $20 general / $15 students, seniors and UAlbany faculty and staff
🎟️ Day of show: $25 general / $20 students, seniors and UAlbany faculty and staff
📅 Wednesday, November 18 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Friday, November 20 · 3–5:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 2–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 2–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Rent
Siena University Theatre
Jonathan Larson’s musical follows a group of young artists in New York’s East Village as they try to make work, pay rent and care for one another during the AIDS crisis. Mark, a filmmaker, records the lives around him. His roommate Roger struggles to write a song he believes will outlast him. A threatened eviction forces the friends to decide what they owe each other and how far they will go to keep their community together.
Larson borrows the outline of Puccini’s La bohème and gives it the sound of downtown New York. Rock numbers can turn a fight over a building into a public confrontation. A ballad lets a single character admit what they are afraid to say in front of the group. The score’s shifts between those modes give the musical its sense of people making lives together under pressure.
📍 Beaudoin Theatre · Siena University · Loudonville
🎟️ $5–$15
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Friday, November 20 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
This Emancipation Thing
Skidmore College Theater
Sara Lyons conceived, adapted and directed this participatory production, which revisits the feminist consciousness-raising circle through questions of identity, desire and embodiment. Skidmore theater students lead the gathering. Audience members are invited to sit close, speak if they wish, or listen.
The piece brings 1968 and 2026 into the same room. The circle itself is part of the staging. It gives participants a way to hear how people of different generations name experiences that earlier participants might have understood differently. The invitation to listen matters as much as the invitation to speak, especially when a story sounds familiar until someone describes it in their own terms.
📍 Black Box Theater · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Ticket link on the production page
📅 Friday, November 20 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 2–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Run continues December 3–5
🌎 Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play
Williams College Theatre Department
After an unnamed catastrophe, a group of survivors around a fire tries to reconstruct an episode of The Simpsons. Each person remembers different lines and scenes. In Anne Washburn’s play, the effort to piece together a television episode becomes the first step in making a story the group can tell again.
The play follows that story across decades. Details are lost, other details acquire new meaning, and familiar scraps of popular culture become material for live theater. The shifts in form let the audience hear how a story changes as the people telling it inherit memories of the catastrophe instead of remembering it firsthand.
📍 CenterStage, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance · Williams College · Williamstown, Massachusetts
🎟️ The event page lists tickets as coming soon
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 7–9:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Friday, November 20 · 7–9:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 7–9:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🔬 SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & HEALTH
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The computing power behind AI begins with the equipment that builds and connects features on a semiconductor wafer.
Inflammation Resolution: A Foundation for Healthy Aging
UAlbany / AgeWell Speaker Series
Inflammation helps the body respond to injury. Ending that response also takes work: cells and chemical signals must clear debris and shift damaged tissue toward repair. When that process breaks down, inflammation can persist and contribute to disease.
Gabrielle Fredman, professor and chair of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Albany Medical College, studies how this failure affects aging blood vessels. Her talk will draw on research into atherosclerosis, where the inability to resolve inflammation can help explain why damage continues inside the artery wall.
The distinction between turning down inflammation and helping tissue resolve it is central to the talk. Fredman will examine what that distinction means for understanding cardiovascular aging and for research into how damaged tissue might repair itself.
📍 D’Ambra Auditorium, Life Sciences Research Building · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Registration requested
📅 Monday, November 16 · 3:30–5 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
How Wafer Fab Equipment Enables High-Performance Computing and AI
UAlbany / NANOvember Lecture Series
Angélique Raley will explain how the machinery inside a wafer fabrication plant helps determine what a computer chip can do. A chip’s design has to survive the transition from a drawing to a physical object. Its layers must line up, its features must be built at nanoscale dimensions, and its components must connect reliably.
Raley is senior director of technology for semiconductor integration and 3D integration at Tokyo Electron America. Her work includes advanced packaging, which allows multiple components to be combined in a single package. Stacking components creates new possibilities for chip design, while making alignment and connections between layers especially consequential.
Most people encounter AI through software. Raley will start further back in the process, with the manufacturing equipment that turns designs into hardware capable of doing that work.
📍 ETEC, Rooms 149/151 · UAlbany · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to all · Registration preferred
📅 Monday, November 16 · 6–7 PM · Doors at 5:15 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Aging Well Together: The Next Chapter
UAlbany
This daylong conference begins with people describing how they have navigated aging, recovery and major life transitions. The opening panel gives those experiences room before the program turns to the research on health, resilience and social connection.
Neuroscientist Ben Rein and UAlbany researchers will discuss what studies can tell us about those subjects and where questions remain. Later sessions will consider mental wellness during life transitions, the relationship between medication and recovery, and ways community organizations can support healthy aging.
The organizers invite older adults, caregivers, health and behavioral health professionals, and others interested in the subject. The sequence gives each group a chance to hear how the same questions look from the perspectives of lived experience, research and day-to-day practice.
📍 ETEC · UAlbany · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
📅 Tuesday, November 17 · 8:30 AM–3:30 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Advancing Medical Image Analysis with Limited Training Data
RPI / Department of Biomedical Engineering
Amir Amini, a professor and endowed chair in bioimaging at the University of Louisville, will discuss a problem in medical imaging: how do you train AI to recognize useful patterns when the available examples are limited? Preparing training data can require specialists to review scans and mark the features a model is meant to recognize.
The question matters for disease detection because a model may perform well on images similar to those it learned from and struggle when it encounters something different. An uncommon condition may leave researchers with relatively few examples, even when the ability to recognize it is clinically important. The seminar will examine how researchers approach medical image analysis when they have fewer training examples to work with.
📍 Isermann Auditorium, Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies · RPI · Troy
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 2–3:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🏛️ IDEAS & PUBLIC LIFE
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Building Archives with Learning and Research Pathways in Women’s & Gender Histories
UAlbany / Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Which materials make it into a digital archive, and how will a student know what to search for once they are there? Nathalie Duval, senior director of product management for ProQuest Digital Collections, will discuss how publishers, librarians and scholars build resources for researching women’s and gender histories.
Digitization makes it possible to consult material without traveling to the collection. It also gives decisions about cataloging and organization greater weight. A document may be available online and still be difficult to find if the search terms or categories fail to reflect the question a researcher is asking.
Duval will address these choices from the perspective of a publisher working with libraries and historical collections. The talk puts the construction of the archive itself alongside the scholarship and teaching that depend on it.
📍 Humanities Building, Room 354 · UAlbany Uptown Campus · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
📅 Monday, November 16 · 3–4:30 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Evolving Surveillance
Albany Law School / Journal of Science and Technology
A license-plate reader can turn a passing car into a record of where someone was at a particular time. A network of readers can make it possible to reconstruct movements. The legal and civil-liberties questions change as those records become easier to collect, retain and search.
Daniel Schwarz, senior privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, will give the keynote at Albany Law’s symposium. His work has addressed automated license-plate readers and facial recognition, two technologies that show how surveillance can expand through the combination of ordinary encounters and searchable records.
The symposium will examine the consequences for privacy and the ways laws and public institutions respond to expanding monitoring capabilities. The hybrid format allows readers to attend online as well as in person.
📍 DAMC, Albany Law School · 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany · Online attendance available
🎟️ Registration available
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 3–5:30 PM · Reception follows · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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📚 BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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At the Tang, poems will be heard in the same galleries as the works that prompted them.
UAlbany Zine Scene
UAlbany / University Libraries
A zine can be a few folded pages, a hand-drawn comic or a small-run publication that circulates within a community. At this library gathering, participants will show selections from their own collections and talk about the people, interests and stories behind them.
The format is an informal show-and-tell. Someone who has never opened a zine can see what the form makes possible, while people who already collect or publish them can compare how others use the page. The size of a publication, the choice to draw or photocopy it, and the way it passes from person to person can all be part of its meaning. Food and conversation will follow.
📍 University Library · Creative Technologies Lab and Makerspace · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ All are welcome · Registration requested for food planning
📅 Tuesday, November 17 · 4:30–7 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Translating Compassion: Aleksandr Chudakov’s Novel of Family Survival Under Stalinism
UAlbany / Languages, Literatures and Cultures
Timothy Sergay, professor emeritus of Russian, will discuss Aleksandr Chudakov’s novel about family survival under Stalinism. The program approaches Soviet history through what it was like to live inside a family under political repression, where knowing what to say, and to whom, could carry consequences.
That puts the translator in an exacting position. An aside, a joke or a silence may carry meanings that are less apparent to readers who did not grow up with the history. The seminar will consider how a translator carries private speech and memory from one language into another while giving a new reader enough context to hear what is being said.
📍 Humanities Building, Room 354 · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
📅 Wednesday, November 18 · 1–2 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
✍️ Poets in the Museum
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
What does a poem notice in a work of art that a gallery label might pass over? Saratoga Springs Poet Laureate Jay Rogoff has invited ten regional poets to respond to works in A Feeling of With. This is the second reading in a three-part series. The audience will be in the galleries with the art as the poems are read.
The readers include Hajar Hussaini, a 2026 Whiting Award recipient whose collection Disbound and work in Persian literary translation are part of a practice that moves between languages. Also reading are Andy Fogle, Maggie Greaves, Elaine Handley, Kathleen McCoy, Suzanne S. Rancourt, Jordan Smith, Natalya Sukhonos, Barbara Ungar and Nancy White.
With ten readers, the evening will offer different ways to begin looking. A poet may start with a detail that another visitor would miss or follow an association that leads away from the object and back to it. Hearing the work beside the art lets listeners test those readings against what they see for themselves.
📍 Malloy Wing, Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 6–7:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎨 ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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Jack Tworkov on View
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
The Tang will put work by Jack Tworkov on view for four days in conjunction with SPAC’s Lotus Girl with Helen Tworkov. Jack Tworkov is associated with the New York School, where artists made the movement of paint and the process of making a picture part of what viewers were invited to see.
A short presentation gives visitors a chance to spend time with the work itself. Look at where a mark speeds up, where it stops, and where repeated gestures begin to suggest an underlying structure. Those details are a way into Tworkov’s painting whether or not you attend the SPAC program.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 November 16–18 · Noon–5 PM · November 19 · Noon–9 PM
Curator’s Tour of Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Ian Berry, the Tang’s Dayton Director, will lead a tour of We Are A Constellation. Gibson uses the visual language of cartoons and comics to explore American history and political life. The immediacy of a drawn figure can pull a viewer into a scene before its historical references and ambiguities become apparent.
A curator’s tour makes it possible to ask how those images work in relation to one another. A drawing that reads one way on its own may change when another image supplies a competing point of view. Berry will discuss the exhibition from the perspective of someone involved in shaping how visitors encounter the work.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 Thursday, November 19 · Noon–1:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Tang Guide Tour with Hallie Pomerantz ’27
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Student guide Hallie Pomerantz ’27 will take visitors through selected works in the Tang’s current exhibitions. The guide’s selection gives a few works more time than they might get on a first pass through the museum.
Visitors can ask about a detail, hear what drew Pomerantz to a particular piece, and compare what they noticed with what someone else saw. The tour also provides a starting point for exploring the galleries independently afterward.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 2–3:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎶 MUSIC, DANCE & PERFORMANCE
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🎙️ Jeanine Ouderkirk — Jazz Vocal Performance
Hudson Valley Community College / Cultural Affairs
Saratoga Springs vocalist Jeanine Ouderkirk will perform jazz standards from the Great American Songbook and demonstrate scat singing. Scat puts the voice in the role of an improvising instrument. With the words set aside, listeners can hear how a singer uses rhythm, tone and phrasing to build a new line over familiar chords.
Ouderkirk came to singing after years of playing bass clarinet and baritone saxophone in classical and jazz ensembles. Her 2025 debut album, Nightingale, is a collection of 13 standards featuring pianist and arranger Tedd Firth. At HVCC, listeners will hear both sides of her approach to a song: how she interprets a lyric and where she takes the tune when she improvises.
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium · HVCC · 80 Vandenburgh Avenue, Troy
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Nonperishable food donations requested for the Viking Cupboard Food Pantry
📅 Thursday, November 19 · Noon–1 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Dance Winter Concert
Skidmore College Dance Department
Skidmore’s winter concert brings together original works by Bo Brinton, Chia-Ying Kao, Erika Pujic, Andre Malo-Robles and guest artist Pam Tanowitz. With five choreographers on one program, audiences can compare how different works use the same stage. In one piece, the spacing between dancers might make the relationship between them clear. In another, the timing of a group entrance or a pause may be what changes the scene.
The three performances include a Saturday matinee. Admission is free, and the department makes reservations available one week before each performance. The department also lists a livestream for each show.
📍 Dance Theater · Skidmore College · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free · Reservations and livestreams on the department page
📅 Friday, November 20 · 7:30–9 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 2–3:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 7:30–9 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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NYSCA Artist & Apprentices: The Art of Eastern Heritage
Hudson Valley Community College / Asian Arts New York
Four master artists and their apprentices will share the stage in a program about how performance traditions are taught. The afternoon combines live performance, demonstrations and artist talks. The pairings give the audience a chance to see what passes from teacher to student, from the timing of a gesture to the way a phrase is shaped on an instrument.
Mathangi Srinivasan and Chinmayi Sri Maddali will present Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form that uses rhythm, gesture and expression. Sandra Balint and Wei Qin will demonstrate Tai Chi fan, and Liying Ye and Angelica Cooney will present Chinese water sleeve dance, in which long fabric extensions carry the movement beyond the dancer’s hands. Wenrui Shi and Mingtong Xu will play the guqin, a seven-string Chinese zither.
The artists are supported through the New York State Council on the Arts’ Folk and Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program. With the teachers and apprentices appearing together, audiences can hear how the artists explain a technique and then see or hear it put into practice.
📍 Maureen Stapleton Theatre, Siek Campus Center · HVCC · 80 Vandenburgh Avenue, Troy
🎟️ Free · Registration link on the event page
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 2–4 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Raphaël Feuillâtre — Classical Guitar
Capital Region Classical / Union College
In a solo guitar recital, the same player has to give a melody its shape, establish the bass and decide how clearly to bring out the notes in between. French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre will perform in Union’s Memorial Chapel, where listeners can follow how those layers fit together.
The guitar also gives a player several ways to change the color of a single note. Moving the right hand nearer the bridge can brighten the sound. Letting one string ring while another line moves can give the impression of separate instruments. In a solo recital those choices become part of the phrasing, as audible as a pause or a change in tempo.
Capital Region Classical presents the concert. The chapel setting suits a close listen to an instrument whose expressive range depends as much on what happens at low volume as on its strongest accents.
📍 Memorial Chapel, Union College · Schenectady
🎟️ $40 general admission · Children and college students free at the door
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 3–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🔥 PLAN AHEAD
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November 23–December 13, 2026
Humperdinck gives the Grimm brothers’ forest the sound of children’s songs, orchestral color and danger.
🌎 Hansel and Gretel
Bard College Conservatory of Music / Fisher Center
Humperdinck gives the Brothers Grimm’s story both the directness of a folk tale and the scale of a full opera. The children’s songs make the forest sound familiar at first. As the siblings lose their way and encounter the Witch, the orchestra gives their fear and resourcefulness a larger dramatic life.
James Bagwell will conduct the Bard Conservatory Orchestra in this fully staged production with singers from Bard’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, the Bard Chamber Singers and children from the Conservatory Preparatory Division. The opera is sung in German with English supertitles.
Bard has scheduled two in-person performances. If you’re arranging a trip around one of them, choose the date and book ahead. A pay-what-you-wish livestream is also available.
📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center · Bard College
🎟️ In-person tickets from $20 · Pay-what-you-wish livestream
🕒 Approximately 2 hours 15 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission
📅 Friday, December 11 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, December 13 · 2 PM
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🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
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December 14, 2026–March 15, 2027
INTERFACE: Robotics
RPI / EMPAC
Instrument builder and composer Qiujiang Levi Lu joins robotics researcher John Wen to examine what happens when a machine becomes part of an artistic practice. A device that responds to a performer’s movement can change both the sound produced and the gestures the performer learns to make.
The conversation will approach that relationship through the work of an artist who builds instruments and an engineer who studies how machines sense and act. Their starting points raise a practical question for performance: when a machine responds in ways the artist cannot fully predict, how does the artist learn to work with it?
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free · Limited studio capacity. Register early.
📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM
🌎 Beethoven and Brahms: Part 1
Bard College / Fisher Center
Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now in Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and Beethoven’s Third, the Eroica. Both composers use variation on a large scale, but their finales take different paths. Brahms builds tension by repeatedly returning to a short underlying pattern. Beethoven transforms a theme he had used in earlier works, bringing it into a symphony that has already passed through a funeral march.
The pairing lets listeners hear two composers arrive at large conclusions by revisiting a small amount of musical material. It is also one of the concerts eligible for Bard’s Create Your Own TŌN package. Readers considering several concerts can save 25% on three or more eligible programs while the package is available.
📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center · Bard College
🎟️ In-person tickets from $15 · Package available until only three concerts remain in the season
🕒 Approximately 2 hours 15 minutes, including a 20-minute intermission
📅 Saturday, February 6, 2027 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, February 7, 2027 · 2 PM
INTERFACE: Mixed Reality
RPI / EMPAC
Artist Lars Jan and mixed-reality researcher Talis Reks will discuss ROAM, a project that asks whether a group can move through the same physical space while experiencing the same imagined environment.
For a live performance, tracking and synchronization are part of the storytelling. If people see an action at different moments or from the wrong place, the shared scene changes. Jan’s performance practice meets Reks’s work on the technical systems that would let an audience move together through that scene.
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free · Limited studio capacity. Register early.
📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6–7 PM
Ensemble Connect: A Well-Being Concert
Skidmore College / Arthur Zankel Music Center
Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect will seat the audience onstage around the players, with chairs, cushions or mats. Chamber music will be paired with guided mindfulness and focused listening.
The arrangement puts listeners close enough to notice details that can recede in a larger room, from the sound of a bow touching a string to the way one player carries a phrase into another’s entrance. It also limits how many people can attend, so advance purchase makes sense if you want a place onstage.
📍 Arthur Zankel Music Center · Skidmore College
🎟️ Ticketed · Advance purchase recommended for the limited onstage seating.
📅 Sunday, February 21, 2027 · 2 PM
🌎 TŌN + ABT Studio Company
Bard College / Fisher Center
American Ballet Theatre Studio Company returns to Bard with The Orchestra Now. The collaboration puts dancers and a full live orchestra in the same performance, giving the timing of a leap, landing or change of direction a direct relationship to music being played in the room.
The program is eligible for the Create Your Own TŌN package. If you’re considering this ballet alongside the Beethoven and Brahms concert and another eligible program, the series discount is a reason to choose the performances together.
📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center · Bard College
🎟️ Tickets on sale · Save 25% on three or more eligible concerts with the TŌN package
📅 Saturday, February 27, 2027 · 7–9 PM
📅 Sunday, February 28, 2027 · 3–5 PM
Ensemble Connect’s Skidmore audience will sit onstage around the players, where listeners can hear a phrase pass from one instrument to another.
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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
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This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — Continuing December 3–5 · Details
Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — December 4–6 · Details
The Art of Exile: A Winter Studio Kabaret — Union College — February 11–14 · Details
Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — February 24–March 3 · Details
Cabaret — UAlbany — March 3–7 · Details
🌎 Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the Sun — Williams College — March 5 · Details
The World Goes Round — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — March 18–21 · Details
The Country Wife — Siena University — April 8–17 · Details
FRESH ACTS: A Festival of New Plays — UAlbany — April 14–17 · Details
Seussical: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — May 5–13 · Details
Little Women follows the four March sisters as each begins to imagine a different adult life.
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🖼️ CAMPUS GALLERIES & EXHIBITIONS
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Closing this week
Extra! Extra! Armistice Day and the Scrapbooks of Harold M. Lewis — Union College / Schaffer Library, Beuth Atrium — Through November 17 · Details
Jack Tworkov on View — Skidmore College / Tang — Through November 19 · Details
Practices: The Visual Arts Department Faculty and Staff Exhibition — Union College / Crowell and West Galleries — Through November 22 · Details
UAlbany / University Art Museum · Details
Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core — Through April 2
mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress — Through April 2
Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand — Through April 2
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Details
Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?! — Through November 29
Julian LaVerdiere & Duke Riley — Through January 3
Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Through January 3
Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation — Through January 3 · Town Crier performance at 2 PM on museum-open days
500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs — Through January 10
A Feeling of With — Through July 18
Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest — Through September 12
Art on Campus — Through October 3
Russell Sage College / Opalka Gallery · Details
Light and Transient Causes — Through December 5
Union College / Schaffer Library · Details
American Horror Stories: Audubon’s Morbid Curiosities — Through November 25
Conservation: Art & Science in the Archives — Fall 2026
Mid-Semester Student Exhibition — Foy Hall Gallery, Siena University — Through December 4
Hudson Valley Community College / Teaching Gallery
Tracing Time — Paul Mauren — Through December 12 · Details
Light and Transient Causes takes its title from the Declaration of Independence and asks who gets to decide which grievances count.
📍 BEFORE YOU GO
Event schedules can change, and programs may be canceled or moved after publication. Check with the venue before traveling to confirm that the event is still taking place, along with its time, location and attendance requirements.
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask campus staff for assistance and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Check event pages for special registration, parking, accessibility or building-entry instructions.
💬 READER FIELD NOTES
Did you attend something listed in Capital Region Curated?
Leave a quick comment: what did you see, and would you recommend it? One sentence is enough.
HELP SHAPE CAPITAL REGION CURATED
What would you like to see more of—music, science, history, literature, visual art or public affairs? Have you attended something that deserves a reader’s recommendation?
Send suggestions, corrections and field notes to Alan Koslow. If you organize a substantial public campus event, please include its official event page, date, time, location and attendance requirements.
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What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
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Capital Region Curated: November 16-22
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with A Doll’s House at UAlbany, poets at the Tang and a classical guitar recital.
Alan Koslow
28
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
🏛️ 📚 🎶 🎭 🔬
FROM IBSEN TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Nora Helmer’s marriage comes apart on the UAlbany stage, ten poets read in the Tang galleries, a semiconductor engineer explains the machinery behind AI, and classical guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre plays Union’s Memorial Chapel.
In Amy Herzog’s adaptation of A Doll’s House, a secret Nora Helmer has kept to protect her family exposes how little freedom she has within it.
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⭐ TOP PICKS
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🎭 A Doll’s House
UAlbany · Wednesday–Sunday, November 18–22 · Six performances, opening Wednesday at 8 PM
Nora Helmer once took a desperate step to save her husband. When her secret threatens to come out, she discovers how differently they understand what she did and what their marriage requires of her. Kea Trevett directs Amy Herzog’s English adaptation of the Ibsen drama whose final confrontation helped change what audiences expected of modern theater.
See Theater & Performance below.
✍️ Poets in the Museum
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Thursday, November 19 · 6 PM
Ten regional poets will read in the galleries of A Feeling of With. Saratoga Springs Poet Laureate Jay Rogoff hosts the free reading, the second in a three-part series. Among the writers is 2026 Whiting Award recipient Hajar Hussaini, whose collection Disbound and work as a translator approach questions of language and belonging from different directions.
See Books, Writers & Ideas below.
🔬 How Wafer Fab Equipment Enables High-Performance Computing and AI
UAlbany · Monday, November 16 · 6–7 PM
Angélique Raley takes the discussion of AI inside the semiconductor factory. Her NANOvember lecture will look at the equipment and techniques that make advanced chips possible. Raley leads research in semiconductor and 3D integration at Tokyo Electron America, where stacking and connecting components is part of the work of building more capable computing systems.
See Science, Technology & Health below.
🎸 Raphaël Feuillâtre — Classical Guitar
Union College · Sunday, November 22 · 3 PM
A single classical guitar can carry a melody, bass line and inner voices at the same time. French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre brings that intimate sound to Union’s Memorial Chapel in a Capital Region Classical recital. The setting gives listeners room to hear the small choices that shape a solo performance: how a note is struck, how long it is allowed to ring and how a player makes one line stand out among several.
See Music, Dance & Performance below.
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📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
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One calendar file lets you add this week’s scheduled events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Individual calendar links beside each listing let you choose just the programs you want to attend. Adding an event to your calendar does not reserve a seat or complete any required registration.
DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links below open an event ready to save.
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📅 DAY-BY-DAY CALENDAR
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MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16
3–4:30 PM — Building Archives with Nathalie Duval · UAlbany / Humanities 354
3:30–5 PM — Inflammation Resolution & Healthy Aging · UAlbany / D’Ambra Auditorium
6–7 PM — NANOvember: The Chips Behind AI · UAlbany / ETEC 149/151
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17
8:30 AM–3:30 PM — Aging Well Together · UAlbany / ETEC
4:30–7 PM — UAlbany Zine Scene · UAlbany / University Library
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18
1–2 PM — Translating Compassion · UAlbany / Humanities 354
8–10:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19
Noon–1 PM — Jeanine Ouderkirk, jazz vocals · HVCC / Bulmer Auditorium
Noon–1:30 PM* — Mark Thomas Gibson Curator’s Tour · Skidmore / Tang
2–3:30 PM* — Advancing Medical Image Analysis with Limited Training Data · RPI / Isermann Auditorium
3–5:30 PM — Evolving Surveillance · Albany Law / DAMC and online
6–7:30 PM* — Poets in the Museum · Skidmore / Tang, Malloy Wing
7–9:30 PM* — Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play · Williams / ’62 Center
8–10:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — Rent · Siena / Beaudoin Theatre
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20
3–5:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
7–9:30 PM* — Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play · Williams / ’62 Center
7:30–9 PM* — Dance Winter Concert · Skidmore / Dance Theater
8–10:30 PM* — Rent · Siena / Beaudoin Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — This Emancipation Thing · Skidmore / Black Box
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21
2–3:30 PM* — Dance Winter Concert · Skidmore / Dance Theater
2–4 PM — The Art of Eastern Heritage · HVCC / Maureen Stapleton Theatre
2–4:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
7–9:30 PM* — Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play · Williams / ’62 Center
7:30–9 PM* — Dance Winter Concert · Skidmore / Dance Theater
8–10:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — Rent · Siena / Beaudoin Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — This Emancipation Thing · Skidmore / Black Box
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22
2–3:30 PM* — Tang Guide Tour · Skidmore / Tang
2–4:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
2–4:30 PM* — This Emancipation Thing · Skidmore / Black Box
3–4:30 PM* — Raphaël Feuillâtre, guitar · Union / Memorial Chapel
End time estimated for planning.
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🎭 THEATER & PERFORMANCE
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A Doll’s House
UAlbany / Performing Arts Center
When Nora Helmer secretly borrowed money to save her husband Torvald’s life, she broke rules that gave a married woman little control over her own affairs. Years later, the loan resurfaces just as Torvald is about to take up a new position at the bank. Nora expects him to understand why she acted. His response forces her to reconsider what he values and what she has accepted as the terms of their marriage.
Ibsen builds the pressure inside the Helmers’ drawing room from small exchanges: nicknames, requests for money and a rehearsal for a dance. The familiar routines of the household begin to sound different as Nora realizes how much of her life she has spent playing a part.
Amy Herzog’s adaptation brings that change into contemporary English. Directed by Kea Trevett, the production gives the actors room to show how affection, dependence and control can coexist in the same conversation, long before Nora and Torvald say plainly what they expect of each other.
📍 Studio Theatre, Performing Arts Center · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Advance: $20 general / $15 students, seniors and UAlbany faculty and staff
🎟️ Day of show: $25 general / $20 students, seniors and UAlbany faculty and staff
📅 Wednesday, November 18 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Friday, November 20 · 3–5:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 2–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 2–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Rent
Siena University Theatre
Jonathan Larson’s musical follows a group of young artists in New York’s East Village as they try to make work, pay rent and care for one another during the AIDS crisis. Mark, a filmmaker, records the lives around him. His roommate Roger struggles to write a song he believes will outlast him. A threatened eviction forces the friends to decide what they owe each other and how far they will go to keep their community together.
Larson borrows the outline of Puccini’s La bohème and gives it the sound of downtown New York. Rock numbers can turn a fight over a building into a public confrontation. A ballad lets a single character admit what they are afraid to say in front of the group. The score’s shifts between those modes give the musical its sense of people making lives together under pressure.
📍 Beaudoin Theatre · Siena University · Loudonville
🎟️ $5–$15
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Friday, November 20 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
This Emancipation Thing
Skidmore College Theater
Sara Lyons conceived, adapted and directed this participatory production, which revisits the feminist consciousness-raising circle through questions of identity, desire and embodiment. Skidmore theater students lead the gathering. Audience members are invited to sit close, speak if they wish, or listen.
The piece brings 1968 and 2026 into the same room. The circle itself is part of the staging. It gives participants a way to hear how people of different generations name experiences that earlier participants might have understood differently. The invitation to listen matters as much as the invitation to speak, especially when a story sounds familiar until someone describes it in their own terms.
📍 Black Box Theater · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Ticket link on the production page
📅 Friday, November 20 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 2–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Run continues December 3–5
🌎 Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play
Williams College Theatre Department
After an unnamed catastrophe, a group of survivors around a fire tries to reconstruct an episode of The Simpsons. Each person remembers different lines and scenes. In Anne Washburn’s play, the effort to piece together a television episode becomes the first step in making a story the group can tell again.
The play follows that story across decades. Details are lost, other details acquire new meaning, and familiar scraps of popular culture become material for live theater. The shifts in form let the audience hear how a story changes as the people telling it inherit memories of the catastrophe instead of remembering it firsthand.
📍 CenterStage, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance · Williams College · Williamstown, Massachusetts
🎟️ The event page lists tickets as coming soon
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 7–9:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Friday, November 20 · 7–9:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 7–9:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🔬 SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & HEALTH
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The computing power behind AI begins with the equipment that builds and connects features on a semiconductor wafer.
Inflammation Resolution: A Foundation for Healthy Aging
UAlbany / AgeWell Speaker Series
Inflammation helps the body respond to injury. Ending that response also takes work: cells and chemical signals must clear debris and shift damaged tissue toward repair. When that process breaks down, inflammation can persist and contribute to disease.
Gabrielle Fredman, professor and chair of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Albany Medical College, studies how this failure affects aging blood vessels. Her talk will draw on research into atherosclerosis, where the inability to resolve inflammation can help explain why damage continues inside the artery wall.
The distinction between turning down inflammation and helping tissue resolve it is central to the talk. Fredman will examine what that distinction means for understanding cardiovascular aging and for research into how damaged tissue might repair itself.
📍 D’Ambra Auditorium, Life Sciences Research Building · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Registration requested
📅 Monday, November 16 · 3:30–5 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
How Wafer Fab Equipment Enables High-Performance Computing and AI
UAlbany / NANOvember Lecture Series
Angélique Raley will explain how the machinery inside a wafer fabrication plant helps determine what a computer chip can do. A chip’s design has to survive the transition from a drawing to a physical object. Its layers must line up, its features must be built at nanoscale dimensions, and its components must connect reliably.
Raley is senior director of technology for semiconductor integration and 3D integration at Tokyo Electron America. Her work includes advanced packaging, which allows multiple components to be combined in a single package. Stacking components creates new possibilities for chip design, while making alignment and connections between layers especially consequential.
Most people encounter AI through software. Raley will start further back in the process, with the manufacturing equipment that turns designs into hardware capable of doing that work.
📍 ETEC, Rooms 149/151 · UAlbany · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to all · Registration preferred
📅 Monday, November 16 · 6–7 PM · Doors at 5:15 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Aging Well Together: The Next Chapter
UAlbany
This daylong conference begins with people describing how they have navigated aging, recovery and major life transitions. The opening panel gives those experiences room before the program turns to the research on health, resilience and social connection.
Neuroscientist Ben Rein and UAlbany researchers will discuss what studies can tell us about those subjects and where questions remain. Later sessions will consider mental wellness during life transitions, the relationship between medication and recovery, and ways community organizations can support healthy aging.
The organizers invite older adults, caregivers, health and behavioral health professionals, and others interested in the subject. The sequence gives each group a chance to hear how the same questions look from the perspectives of lived experience, research and day-to-day practice.
📍 ETEC · UAlbany · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
📅 Tuesday, November 17 · 8:30 AM–3:30 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Advancing Medical Image Analysis with Limited Training Data
RPI / Department of Biomedical Engineering
Amir Amini, a professor and endowed chair in bioimaging at the University of Louisville, will discuss a problem in medical imaging: how do you train AI to recognize useful patterns when the available examples are limited? Preparing training data can require specialists to review scans and mark the features a model is meant to recognize.
The question matters for disease detection because a model may perform well on images similar to those it learned from and struggle when it encounters something different. An uncommon condition may leave researchers with relatively few examples, even when the ability to recognize it is clinically important. The seminar will examine how researchers approach medical image analysis when they have fewer training examples to work with.
📍 Isermann Auditorium, Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies · RPI · Troy
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 2–3:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🏛️ IDEAS & PUBLIC LIFE
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Building Archives with Learning and Research Pathways in Women’s & Gender Histories
UAlbany / Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Which materials make it into a digital archive, and how will a student know what to search for once they are there? Nathalie Duval, senior director of product management for ProQuest Digital Collections, will discuss how publishers, librarians and scholars build resources for researching women’s and gender histories.
Digitization makes it possible to consult material without traveling to the collection. It also gives decisions about cataloging and organization greater weight. A document may be available online and still be difficult to find if the search terms or categories fail to reflect the question a researcher is asking.
Duval will address these choices from the perspective of a publisher working with libraries and historical collections. The talk puts the construction of the archive itself alongside the scholarship and teaching that depend on it.
📍 Humanities Building, Room 354 · UAlbany Uptown Campus · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
📅 Monday, November 16 · 3–4:30 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Evolving Surveillance
Albany Law School / Journal of Science and Technology
A license-plate reader can turn a passing car into a record of where someone was at a particular time. A network of readers can make it possible to reconstruct movements. The legal and civil-liberties questions change as those records become easier to collect, retain and search.
Daniel Schwarz, senior privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, will give the keynote at Albany Law’s symposium. His work has addressed automated license-plate readers and facial recognition, two technologies that show how surveillance can expand through the combination of ordinary encounters and searchable records.
The symposium will examine the consequences for privacy and the ways laws and public institutions respond to expanding monitoring capabilities. The hybrid format allows readers to attend online as well as in person.
📍 DAMC, Albany Law School · 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany · Online attendance available
🎟️ Registration available
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 3–5:30 PM · Reception follows · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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📚 BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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At the Tang, poems will be heard in the same galleries as the works that prompted them.
UAlbany Zine Scene
UAlbany / University Libraries
A zine can be a few folded pages, a hand-drawn comic or a small-run publication that circulates within a community. At this library gathering, participants will show selections from their own collections and talk about the people, interests and stories behind them.
The format is an informal show-and-tell. Someone who has never opened a zine can see what the form makes possible, while people who already collect or publish them can compare how others use the page. The size of a publication, the choice to draw or photocopy it, and the way it passes from person to person can all be part of its meaning. Food and conversation will follow.
📍 University Library · Creative Technologies Lab and Makerspace · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ All are welcome · Registration requested for food planning
📅 Tuesday, November 17 · 4:30–7 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Translating Compassion: Aleksandr Chudakov’s Novel of Family Survival Under Stalinism
UAlbany / Languages, Literatures and Cultures
Timothy Sergay, professor emeritus of Russian, will discuss Aleksandr Chudakov’s novel about family survival under Stalinism. The program approaches Soviet history through what it was like to live inside a family under political repression, where knowing what to say, and to whom, could carry consequences.
That puts the translator in an exacting position. An aside, a joke or a silence may carry meanings that are less apparent to readers who did not grow up with the history. The seminar will consider how a translator carries private speech and memory from one language into another while giving a new reader enough context to hear what is being said.
📍 Humanities Building, Room 354 · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
📅 Wednesday, November 18 · 1–2 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
✍️ Poets in the Museum
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
What does a poem notice in a work of art that a gallery label might pass over? Saratoga Springs Poet Laureate Jay Rogoff has invited ten regional poets to respond to works in A Feeling of With. This is the second reading in a three-part series. The audience will be in the galleries with the art as the poems are read.
The readers include Hajar Hussaini, a 2026 Whiting Award recipient whose collection Disbound and work in Persian literary translation are part of a practice that moves between languages. Also reading are Andy Fogle, Maggie Greaves, Elaine Handley, Kathleen McCoy, Suzanne S. Rancourt, Jordan Smith, Natalya Sukhonos, Barbara Ungar and Nancy White.
With ten readers, the evening will offer different ways to begin looking. A poet may start with a detail that another visitor would miss or follow an association that leads away from the object and back to it. Hearing the work beside the art lets listeners test those readings against what they see for themselves.
📍 Malloy Wing, Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 6–7:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎨 ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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Jack Tworkov on View
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
The Tang will put work by Jack Tworkov on view for four days in conjunction with SPAC’s Lotus Girl with Helen Tworkov. Jack Tworkov is associated with the New York School, where artists made the movement of paint and the process of making a picture part of what viewers were invited to see.
A short presentation gives visitors a chance to spend time with the work itself. Look at where a mark speeds up, where it stops, and where repeated gestures begin to suggest an underlying structure. Those details are a way into Tworkov’s painting whether or not you attend the SPAC program.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 November 16–18 · Noon–5 PM · November 19 · Noon–9 PM
Curator’s Tour of Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Ian Berry, the Tang’s Dayton Director, will lead a tour of We Are A Constellation. Gibson uses the visual language of cartoons and comics to explore American history and political life. The immediacy of a drawn figure can pull a viewer into a scene before its historical references and ambiguities become apparent.
A curator’s tour makes it possible to ask how those images work in relation to one another. A drawing that reads one way on its own may change when another image supplies a competing point of view. Berry will discuss the exhibition from the perspective of someone involved in shaping how visitors encounter the work.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 Thursday, November 19 · Noon–1:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Tang Guide Tour with Hallie Pomerantz ’27
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Student guide Hallie Pomerantz ’27 will take visitors through selected works in the Tang’s current exhibitions. The guide’s selection gives a few works more time than they might get on a first pass through the museum.
Visitors can ask about a detail, hear what drew Pomerantz to a particular piece, and compare what they noticed with what someone else saw. The tour also provides a starting point for exploring the galleries independently afterward.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 2–3:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎶 MUSIC, DANCE & PERFORMANCE
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🎙️ Jeanine Ouderkirk — Jazz Vocal Performance
Hudson Valley Community College / Cultural Affairs
Saratoga Springs vocalist Jeanine Ouderkirk will perform jazz standards from the Great American Songbook and demonstrate scat singing. Scat puts the voice in the role of an improvising instrument. With the words set aside, listeners can hear how a singer uses rhythm, tone and phrasing to build a new line over familiar chords.
Ouderkirk came to singing after years of playing bass clarinet and baritone saxophone in classical and jazz ensembles. Her 2025 debut album, Nightingale, is a collection of 13 standards featuring pianist and arranger Tedd Firth. At HVCC, listeners will hear both sides of her approach to a song: how she interprets a lyric and where she takes the tune when she improvises.
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium · HVCC · 80 Vandenburgh Avenue, Troy
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Nonperishable food donations requested for the Viking Cupboard Food Pantry
📅 Thursday, November 19 · Noon–1 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Dance Winter Concert
Skidmore College Dance Department
Skidmore’s winter concert brings together original works by Bo Brinton, Chia-Ying Kao, Erika Pujic, Andre Malo-Robles and guest artist Pam Tanowitz. With five choreographers on one program, audiences can compare how different works use the same stage. In one piece, the spacing between dancers might make the relationship between them clear. In another, the timing of a group entrance or a pause may be what changes the scene.
The three performances include a Saturday matinee. Admission is free, and the department makes reservations available one week before each performance. The department also lists a livestream for each show.
📍 Dance Theater · Skidmore College · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free · Reservations and livestreams on the department page
📅 Friday, November 20 · 7:30–9 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 2–3:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 7:30–9 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
ADVERTISEMENT
NYSCA Artist & Apprentices: The Art of Eastern Heritage
Hudson Valley Community College / Asian Arts New York
Four master artists and their apprentices will share the stage in a program about how performance traditions are taught. The afternoon combines live performance, demonstrations and artist talks. The pairings give the audience a chance to see what passes from teacher to student, from the timing of a gesture to the way a phrase is shaped on an instrument.
Mathangi Srinivasan and Chinmayi Sri Maddali will present Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form that uses rhythm, gesture and expression. Sandra Balint and Wei Qin will demonstrate Tai Chi fan, and Liying Ye and Angelica Cooney will present Chinese water sleeve dance, in which long fabric extensions carry the movement beyond the dancer’s hands. Wenrui Shi and Mingtong Xu will play the guqin, a seven-string Chinese zither.
The artists are supported through the New York State Council on the Arts’ Folk and Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program. With the teachers and apprentices appearing together, audiences can hear how the artists explain a technique and then see or hear it put into practice.
📍 Maureen Stapleton Theatre, Siek Campus Center · HVCC · 80 Vandenburgh Avenue, Troy
🎟️ Free · Registration link on the event page
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 2–4 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Raphaël Feuillâtre — Classical Guitar
Capital Region Classical / Union College
In a solo guitar recital, the same player has to give a melody its shape, establish the bass and decide how clearly to bring out the notes in between. French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre will perform in Union’s Memorial Chapel, where listeners can follow how those layers fit together.
The guitar also gives a player several ways to change the color of a single note. Moving the right hand nearer the bridge can brighten the sound. Letting one string ring while another line moves can give the impression of separate instruments. In a solo recital those choices become part of the phrasing, as audible as a pause or a change in tempo.
Capital Region Classical presents the concert. The chapel setting suits a close listen to an instrument whose expressive range depends as much on what happens at low volume as on its strongest accents.
📍 Memorial Chapel, Union College · Schenectady
🎟️ $40 general admission · Children and college students free at the door
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 3–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🔥 PLAN AHEAD
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November 23–December 13, 2026
Humperdinck gives the Grimm brothers’ forest the sound of children’s songs, orchestral color and danger.
🌎 Hansel and Gretel
Bard College Conservatory of Music / Fisher Center
Humperdinck gives the Brothers Grimm’s story both the directness of a folk tale and the scale of a full opera. The children’s songs make the forest sound familiar at first. As the siblings lose their way and encounter the Witch, the orchestra gives their fear and resourcefulness a larger dramatic life.
James Bagwell will conduct the Bard Conservatory Orchestra in this fully staged production with singers from Bard’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, the Bard Chamber Singers and children from the Conservatory Preparatory Division. The opera is sung in German with English supertitles.
Bard has scheduled two in-person performances. If you’re arranging a trip around one of them, choose the date and book ahead. A pay-what-you-wish livestream is also available.
📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center · Bard College
🎟️ In-person tickets from $20 · Pay-what-you-wish livestream
🕒 Approximately 2 hours 15 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission
📅 Friday, December 11 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, December 13 · 2 PM
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🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
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December 14, 2026–March 15, 2027
INTERFACE: Robotics
RPI / EMPAC
Instrument builder and composer Qiujiang Levi Lu joins robotics researcher John Wen to examine what happens when a machine becomes part of an artistic practice. A device that responds to a performer’s movement can change both the sound produced and the gestures the performer learns to make.
The conversation will approach that relationship through the work of an artist who builds instruments and an engineer who studies how machines sense and act. Their starting points raise a practical question for performance: when a machine responds in ways the artist cannot fully predict, how does the artist learn to work with it?
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free · Limited studio capacity. Register early.
📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM
🌎 Beethoven and Brahms: Part 1
Bard College / Fisher Center
Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now in Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and Beethoven’s Third, the Eroica. Both composers use variation on a large scale, but their finales take different paths. Brahms builds tension by repeatedly returning to a short underlying pattern. Beethoven transforms a theme he had used in earlier works, bringing it into a symphony that has already passed through a funeral march.
The pairing lets listeners hear two composers arrive at large conclusions by revisiting a small amount of musical material. It is also one of the concerts eligible for Bard’s Create Your Own TŌN package. Readers considering several concerts can save 25% on three or more eligible programs while the package is available.
📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center · Bard College
🎟️ In-person tickets from $15 · Package available until only three concerts remain in the season
🕒 Approximately 2 hours 15 minutes, including a 20-minute intermission
📅 Saturday, February 6, 2027 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, February 7, 2027 · 2 PM
INTERFACE: Mixed Reality
RPI / EMPAC
Artist Lars Jan and mixed-reality researcher Talis Reks will discuss ROAM, a project that asks whether a group can move through the same physical space while experiencing the same imagined environment.
For a live performance, tracking and synchronization are part of the storytelling. If people see an action at different moments or from the wrong place, the shared scene changes. Jan’s performance practice meets Reks’s work on the technical systems that would let an audience move together through that scene.
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free · Limited studio capacity. Register early.
📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6–7 PM
Ensemble Connect: A Well-Being Concert
Skidmore College / Arthur Zankel Music Center
Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect will seat the audience onstage around the players, with chairs, cushions or mats. Chamber music will be paired with guided mindfulness and focused listening.
The arrangement puts listeners close enough to notice details that can recede in a larger room, from the sound of a bow touching a string to the way one player carries a phrase into another’s entrance. It also limits how many people can attend, so advance purchase makes sense if you want a place onstage.
📍 Arthur Zankel Music Center · Skidmore College
🎟️ Ticketed · Advance purchase recommended for the limited onstage seating.
📅 Sunday, February 21, 2027 · 2 PM
🌎 TŌN + ABT Studio Company
Bard College / Fisher Center
American Ballet Theatre Studio Company returns to Bard with The Orchestra Now. The collaboration puts dancers and a full live orchestra in the same performance, giving the timing of a leap, landing or change of direction a direct relationship to music being played in the room.
The program is eligible for the Create Your Own TŌN package. If you’re considering this ballet alongside the Beethoven and Brahms concert and another eligible program, the series discount is a reason to choose the performances together.
📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center · Bard College
🎟️ Tickets on sale · Save 25% on three or more eligible concerts with the TŌN package
📅 Saturday, February 27, 2027 · 7–9 PM
📅 Sunday, February 28, 2027 · 3–5 PM
Ensemble Connect’s Skidmore audience will sit onstage around the players, where listeners can hear a phrase pass from one instrument to another.
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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
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This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — Continuing December 3–5 · Details
Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — December 4–6 · Details
The Art of Exile: A Winter Studio Kabaret — Union College — February 11–14 · Details
Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — February 24–March 3 · Details
Cabaret — UAlbany — March 3–7 · Details
🌎 Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the Sun — Williams College — March 5 · Details
The World Goes Round — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — March 18–21 · Details
The Country Wife — Siena University — April 8–17 · Details
FRESH ACTS: A Festival of New Plays — UAlbany — April 14–17 · Details
Seussical: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — May 5–13 · Details
Little Women follows the four March sisters as each begins to imagine a different adult life.
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🖼️ CAMPUS GALLERIES & EXHIBITIONS
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Closing this week
Extra! Extra! Armistice Day and the Scrapbooks of Harold M. Lewis — Union College / Schaffer Library, Beuth Atrium — Through November 17 · Details
Jack Tworkov on View — Skidmore College / Tang — Through November 19 · Details
Practices: The Visual Arts Department Faculty and Staff Exhibition — Union College / Crowell and West Galleries — Through November 22 · Details
UAlbany / University Art Museum · Details
Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core — Through April 2
mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress — Through April 2
Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand — Through April 2
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Details
Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?! — Through November 29
Julian LaVerdiere & Duke Riley — Through January 3
Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Through January 3
Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation — Through January 3 · Town Crier performance at 2 PM on museum-open days
500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs — Through January 10
A Feeling of With — Through July 18
Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest — Through September 12
Art on Campus — Through October 3
Russell Sage College / Opalka Gallery · Details
Light and Transient Causes — Through December 5
Union College / Schaffer Library · Details
American Horror Stories: Audubon’s Morbid Curiosities — Through November 25
Conservation: Art & Science in the Archives — Fall 2026
Mid-Semester Student Exhibition — Foy Hall Gallery, Siena University — Through December 4
Hudson Valley Community College / Teaching Gallery
Tracing Time — Paul Mauren — Through December 12 · Details
Light and Transient Causes takes its title from the Declaration of Independence and asks who gets to decide which grievances count.
📍 BEFORE YOU GO
Event schedules can change, and programs may be canceled or moved after publication. Check with the venue before traveling to confirm that the event is still taking place, along with its time, location and attendance requirements.
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask campus staff for assistance and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Check event pages for special registration, parking, accessibility or building-entry instructions.
💬 READER FIELD NOTES
Did you attend something listed in Capital Region Curated?
Leave a quick comment: what did you see, and would you recommend it? One sentence is enough.
HELP SHAPE CAPITAL REGION CURATED
What would you like to see more of—music, science, history, literature, visual art or public affairs? Have you attended something that deserves a reader’s recommendation?
Send suggestions, corrections and field notes to Alan Koslow. If you organize a substantial public campus event, please include its official event page, date, time, location and attendance requirements.
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What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
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Capital Region Curated: November 16-22
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with A Doll’s House at UAlbany, poets at the Tang and a classical guitar recital.
Alan Koslow
28
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
🏛️ 📚 🎶 🎭 🔬
FROM IBSEN TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Nora Helmer’s marriage comes apart on the UAlbany stage, ten poets read in the Tang galleries, a semiconductor engineer explains the machinery behind AI, and classical guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre plays Union’s Memorial Chapel.
In Amy Herzog’s adaptation of A Doll’s House, a secret Nora Helmer has kept to protect her family exposes how little freedom she has within it.
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⭐ TOP PICKS
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🎭 A Doll’s House
UAlbany · Wednesday–Sunday, November 18–22 · Six performances, opening Wednesday at 8 PM
Nora Helmer once took a desperate step to save her husband. When her secret threatens to come out, she discovers how differently they understand what she did and what their marriage requires of her. Kea Trevett directs Amy Herzog’s English adaptation of the Ibsen drama whose final confrontation helped change what audiences expected of modern theater.
See Theater & Performance below.
✍️ Poets in the Museum
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Thursday, November 19 · 6 PM
Ten regional poets will read in the galleries of A Feeling of With. Saratoga Springs Poet Laureate Jay Rogoff hosts the free reading, the second in a three-part series. Among the writers is 2026 Whiting Award recipient Hajar Hussaini, whose collection Disbound and work as a translator approach questions of language and belonging from different directions.
See Books, Writers & Ideas below.
🔬 How Wafer Fab Equipment Enables High-Performance Computing and AI
UAlbany · Monday, November 16 · 6–7 PM
Angélique Raley takes the discussion of AI inside the semiconductor factory. Her NANOvember lecture will look at the equipment and techniques that make advanced chips possible. Raley leads research in semiconductor and 3D integration at Tokyo Electron America, where stacking and connecting components is part of the work of building more capable computing systems.
See Science, Technology & Health below.
🎸 Raphaël Feuillâtre — Classical Guitar
Union College · Sunday, November 22 · 3 PM
A single classical guitar can carry a melody, bass line and inner voices at the same time. French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre brings that intimate sound to Union’s Memorial Chapel in a Capital Region Classical recital. The setting gives listeners room to hear the small choices that shape a solo performance: how a note is struck, how long it is allowed to ring and how a player makes one line stand out among several.
See Music, Dance & Performance below.
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📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
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One calendar file lets you add this week’s scheduled events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Individual calendar links beside each listing let you choose just the programs you want to attend. Adding an event to your calendar does not reserve a seat or complete any required registration.
DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links below open an event ready to save.
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📅 DAY-BY-DAY CALENDAR
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MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16
3–4:30 PM — Building Archives with Nathalie Duval · UAlbany / Humanities 354
3:30–5 PM — Inflammation Resolution & Healthy Aging · UAlbany / D’Ambra Auditorium
6–7 PM — NANOvember: The Chips Behind AI · UAlbany / ETEC 149/151
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17
8:30 AM–3:30 PM — Aging Well Together · UAlbany / ETEC
4:30–7 PM — UAlbany Zine Scene · UAlbany / University Library
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18
1–2 PM — Translating Compassion · UAlbany / Humanities 354
8–10:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19
Noon–1 PM — Jeanine Ouderkirk, jazz vocals · HVCC / Bulmer Auditorium
Noon–1:30 PM* — Mark Thomas Gibson Curator’s Tour · Skidmore / Tang
2–3:30 PM* — Advancing Medical Image Analysis with Limited Training Data · RPI / Isermann Auditorium
3–5:30 PM — Evolving Surveillance · Albany Law / DAMC and online
6–7:30 PM* — Poets in the Museum · Skidmore / Tang, Malloy Wing
7–9:30 PM* — Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play · Williams / ’62 Center
8–10:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — Rent · Siena / Beaudoin Theatre
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20
3–5:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
7–9:30 PM* — Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play · Williams / ’62 Center
7:30–9 PM* — Dance Winter Concert · Skidmore / Dance Theater
8–10:30 PM* — Rent · Siena / Beaudoin Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — This Emancipation Thing · Skidmore / Black Box
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21
2–3:30 PM* — Dance Winter Concert · Skidmore / Dance Theater
2–4 PM — The Art of Eastern Heritage · HVCC / Maureen Stapleton Theatre
2–4:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
7–9:30 PM* — Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play · Williams / ’62 Center
7:30–9 PM* — Dance Winter Concert · Skidmore / Dance Theater
8–10:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — Rent · Siena / Beaudoin Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — This Emancipation Thing · Skidmore / Black Box
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22
2–3:30 PM* — Tang Guide Tour · Skidmore / Tang
2–4:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
2–4:30 PM* — This Emancipation Thing · Skidmore / Black Box
3–4:30 PM* — Raphaël Feuillâtre, guitar · Union / Memorial Chapel
End time estimated for planning.
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🎭 THEATER & PERFORMANCE
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A Doll’s House
UAlbany / Performing Arts Center
When Nora Helmer secretly borrowed money to save her husband Torvald’s life, she broke rules that gave a married woman little control over her own affairs. Years later, the loan resurfaces just as Torvald is about to take up a new position at the bank. Nora expects him to understand why she acted. His response forces her to reconsider what he values and what she has accepted as the terms of their marriage.
Ibsen builds the pressure inside the Helmers’ drawing room from small exchanges: nicknames, requests for money and a rehearsal for a dance. The familiar routines of the household begin to sound different as Nora realizes how much of her life she has spent playing a part.
Amy Herzog’s adaptation brings that change into contemporary English. Directed by Kea Trevett, the production gives the actors room to show how affection, dependence and control can coexist in the same conversation, long before Nora and Torvald say plainly what they expect of each other.
📍 Studio Theatre, Performing Arts Center · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Advance: $20 general / $15 students, seniors and UAlbany faculty and staff
🎟️ Day of show: $25 general / $20 students, seniors and UAlbany faculty and staff
📅 Wednesday, November 18 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Friday, November 20 · 3–5:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 2–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 2–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Rent
Siena University Theatre
Jonathan Larson’s musical follows a group of young artists in New York’s East Village as they try to make work, pay rent and care for one another during the AIDS crisis. Mark, a filmmaker, records the lives around him. His roommate Roger struggles to write a song he believes will outlast him. A threatened eviction forces the friends to decide what they owe each other and how far they will go to keep their community together.
Larson borrows the outline of Puccini’s La bohème and gives it the sound of downtown New York. Rock numbers can turn a fight over a building into a public confrontation. A ballad lets a single character admit what they are afraid to say in front of the group. The score’s shifts between those modes give the musical its sense of people making lives together under pressure.
📍 Beaudoin Theatre · Siena University · Loudonville
🎟️ $5–$15
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Friday, November 20 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
This Emancipation Thing
Skidmore College Theater
Sara Lyons conceived, adapted and directed this participatory production, which revisits the feminist consciousness-raising circle through questions of identity, desire and embodiment. Skidmore theater students lead the gathering. Audience members are invited to sit close, speak if they wish, or listen.
The piece brings 1968 and 2026 into the same room. The circle itself is part of the staging. It gives participants a way to hear how people of different generations name experiences that earlier participants might have understood differently. The invitation to listen matters as much as the invitation to speak, especially when a story sounds familiar until someone describes it in their own terms.
📍 Black Box Theater · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Ticket link on the production page
📅 Friday, November 20 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 2–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Run continues December 3–5
🌎 Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play
Williams College Theatre Department
After an unnamed catastrophe, a group of survivors around a fire tries to reconstruct an episode of The Simpsons. Each person remembers different lines and scenes. In Anne Washburn’s play, the effort to piece together a television episode becomes the first step in making a story the group can tell again.
The play follows that story across decades. Details are lost, other details acquire new meaning, and familiar scraps of popular culture become material for live theater. The shifts in form let the audience hear how a story changes as the people telling it inherit memories of the catastrophe instead of remembering it firsthand.
📍 CenterStage, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance · Williams College · Williamstown, Massachusetts
🎟️ The event page lists tickets as coming soon
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 7–9:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Friday, November 20 · 7–9:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 7–9:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🔬 SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & HEALTH
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The computing power behind AI begins with the equipment that builds and connects features on a semiconductor wafer.
Inflammation Resolution: A Foundation for Healthy Aging
UAlbany / AgeWell Speaker Series
Inflammation helps the body respond to injury. Ending that response also takes work: cells and chemical signals must clear debris and shift damaged tissue toward repair. When that process breaks down, inflammation can persist and contribute to disease.
Gabrielle Fredman, professor and chair of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Albany Medical College, studies how this failure affects aging blood vessels. Her talk will draw on research into atherosclerosis, where the inability to resolve inflammation can help explain why damage continues inside the artery wall.
The distinction between turning down inflammation and helping tissue resolve it is central to the talk. Fredman will examine what that distinction means for understanding cardiovascular aging and for research into how damaged tissue might repair itself.
📍 D’Ambra Auditorium, Life Sciences Research Building · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Registration requested
📅 Monday, November 16 · 3:30–5 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
How Wafer Fab Equipment Enables High-Performance Computing and AI
UAlbany / NANOvember Lecture Series
Angélique Raley will explain how the machinery inside a wafer fabrication plant helps determine what a computer chip can do. A chip’s design has to survive the transition from a drawing to a physical object. Its layers must line up, its features must be built at nanoscale dimensions, and its components must connect reliably.
Raley is senior director of technology for semiconductor integration and 3D integration at Tokyo Electron America. Her work includes advanced packaging, which allows multiple components to be combined in a single package. Stacking components creates new possibilities for chip design, while making alignment and connections between layers especially consequential.
Most people encounter AI through software. Raley will start further back in the process, with the manufacturing equipment that turns designs into hardware capable of doing that work.
📍 ETEC, Rooms 149/151 · UAlbany · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to all · Registration preferred
📅 Monday, November 16 · 6–7 PM · Doors at 5:15 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Aging Well Together: The Next Chapter
UAlbany
This daylong conference begins with people describing how they have navigated aging, recovery and major life transitions. The opening panel gives those experiences room before the program turns to the research on health, resilience and social connection.
Neuroscientist Ben Rein and UAlbany researchers will discuss what studies can tell us about those subjects and where questions remain. Later sessions will consider mental wellness during life transitions, the relationship between medication and recovery, and ways community organizations can support healthy aging.
The organizers invite older adults, caregivers, health and behavioral health professionals, and others interested in the subject. The sequence gives each group a chance to hear how the same questions look from the perspectives of lived experience, research and day-to-day practice.
📍 ETEC · UAlbany · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
📅 Tuesday, November 17 · 8:30 AM–3:30 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Advancing Medical Image Analysis with Limited Training Data
RPI / Department of Biomedical Engineering
Amir Amini, a professor and endowed chair in bioimaging at the University of Louisville, will discuss a problem in medical imaging: how do you train AI to recognize useful patterns when the available examples are limited? Preparing training data can require specialists to review scans and mark the features a model is meant to recognize.
The question matters for disease detection because a model may perform well on images similar to those it learned from and struggle when it encounters something different. An uncommon condition may leave researchers with relatively few examples, even when the ability to recognize it is clinically important. The seminar will examine how researchers approach medical image analysis when they have fewer training examples to work with.
📍 Isermann Auditorium, Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies · RPI · Troy
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 2–3:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🏛️ IDEAS & PUBLIC LIFE
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Building Archives with Learning and Research Pathways in Women’s & Gender Histories
UAlbany / Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Which materials make it into a digital archive, and how will a student know what to search for once they are there? Nathalie Duval, senior director of product management for ProQuest Digital Collections, will discuss how publishers, librarians and scholars build resources for researching women’s and gender histories.
Digitization makes it possible to consult material without traveling to the collection. It also gives decisions about cataloging and organization greater weight. A document may be available online and still be difficult to find if the search terms or categories fail to reflect the question a researcher is asking.
Duval will address these choices from the perspective of a publisher working with libraries and historical collections. The talk puts the construction of the archive itself alongside the scholarship and teaching that depend on it.
📍 Humanities Building, Room 354 · UAlbany Uptown Campus · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
📅 Monday, November 16 · 3–4:30 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Evolving Surveillance
Albany Law School / Journal of Science and Technology
A license-plate reader can turn a passing car into a record of where someone was at a particular time. A network of readers can make it possible to reconstruct movements. The legal and civil-liberties questions change as those records become easier to collect, retain and search.
Daniel Schwarz, senior privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, will give the keynote at Albany Law’s symposium. His work has addressed automated license-plate readers and facial recognition, two technologies that show how surveillance can expand through the combination of ordinary encounters and searchable records.
The symposium will examine the consequences for privacy and the ways laws and public institutions respond to expanding monitoring capabilities. The hybrid format allows readers to attend online as well as in person.
📍 DAMC, Albany Law School · 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany · Online attendance available
🎟️ Registration available
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 3–5:30 PM · Reception follows · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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📚 BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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At the Tang, poems will be heard in the same galleries as the works that prompted them.
UAlbany Zine Scene
UAlbany / University Libraries
A zine can be a few folded pages, a hand-drawn comic or a small-run publication that circulates within a community. At this library gathering, participants will show selections from their own collections and talk about the people, interests and stories behind them.
The format is an informal show-and-tell. Someone who has never opened a zine can see what the form makes possible, while people who already collect or publish them can compare how others use the page. The size of a publication, the choice to draw or photocopy it, and the way it passes from person to person can all be part of its meaning. Food and conversation will follow.
📍 University Library · Creative Technologies Lab and Makerspace · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ All are welcome · Registration requested for food planning
📅 Tuesday, November 17 · 4:30–7 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Translating Compassion: Aleksandr Chudakov’s Novel of Family Survival Under Stalinism
UAlbany / Languages, Literatures and Cultures
Timothy Sergay, professor emeritus of Russian, will discuss Aleksandr Chudakov’s novel about family survival under Stalinism. The program approaches Soviet history through what it was like to live inside a family under political repression, where knowing what to say, and to whom, could carry consequences.
That puts the translator in an exacting position. An aside, a joke or a silence may carry meanings that are less apparent to readers who did not grow up with the history. The seminar will consider how a translator carries private speech and memory from one language into another while giving a new reader enough context to hear what is being said.
📍 Humanities Building, Room 354 · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
📅 Wednesday, November 18 · 1–2 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
✍️ Poets in the Museum
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
What does a poem notice in a work of art that a gallery label might pass over? Saratoga Springs Poet Laureate Jay Rogoff has invited ten regional poets to respond to works in A Feeling of With. This is the second reading in a three-part series. The audience will be in the galleries with the art as the poems are read.
The readers include Hajar Hussaini, a 2026 Whiting Award recipient whose collection Disbound and work in Persian literary translation are part of a practice that moves between languages. Also reading are Andy Fogle, Maggie Greaves, Elaine Handley, Kathleen McCoy, Suzanne S. Rancourt, Jordan Smith, Natalya Sukhonos, Barbara Ungar and Nancy White.
With ten readers, the evening will offer different ways to begin looking. A poet may start with a detail that another visitor would miss or follow an association that leads away from the object and back to it. Hearing the work beside the art lets listeners test those readings against what they see for themselves.
📍 Malloy Wing, Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 6–7:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎨 ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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Jack Tworkov on View
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
The Tang will put work by Jack Tworkov on view for four days in conjunction with SPAC’s Lotus Girl with Helen Tworkov. Jack Tworkov is associated with the New York School, where artists made the movement of paint and the process of making a picture part of what viewers were invited to see.
A short presentation gives visitors a chance to spend time with the work itself. Look at where a mark speeds up, where it stops, and where repeated gestures begin to suggest an underlying structure. Those details are a way into Tworkov’s painting whether or not you attend the SPAC program.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 November 16–18 · Noon–5 PM · November 19 · Noon–9 PM
Curator’s Tour of Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Ian Berry, the Tang’s Dayton Director, will lead a tour of We Are A Constellation. Gibson uses the visual language of cartoons and comics to explore American history and political life. The immediacy of a drawn figure can pull a viewer into a scene before its historical references and ambiguities become apparent.
A curator’s tour makes it possible to ask how those images work in relation to one another. A drawing that reads one way on its own may change when another image supplies a competing point of view. Berry will discuss the exhibition from the perspective of someone involved in shaping how visitors encounter the work.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 Thursday, November 19 · Noon–1:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Tang Guide Tour with Hallie Pomerantz ’27
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Student guide Hallie Pomerantz ’27 will take visitors through selected works in the Tang’s current exhibitions. The guide’s selection gives a few works more time than they might get on a first pass through the museum.
Visitors can ask about a detail, hear what drew Pomerantz to a particular piece, and compare what they noticed with what someone else saw. The tour also provides a starting point for exploring the galleries independently afterward.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 2–3:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎶 MUSIC, DANCE & PERFORMANCE
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🎙️ Jeanine Ouderkirk — Jazz Vocal Performance
Hudson Valley Community College / Cultural Affairs
Saratoga Springs vocalist Jeanine Ouderkirk will perform jazz standards from the Great American Songbook and demonstrate scat singing. Scat puts the voice in the role of an improvising instrument. With the words set aside, listeners can hear how a singer uses rhythm, tone and phrasing to build a new line over familiar chords.
Ouderkirk came to singing after years of playing bass clarinet and baritone saxophone in classical and jazz ensembles. Her 2025 debut album, Nightingale, is a collection of 13 standards featuring pianist and arranger Tedd Firth. At HVCC, listeners will hear both sides of her approach to a song: how she interprets a lyric and where she takes the tune when she improvises.
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium · HVCC · 80 Vandenburgh Avenue, Troy
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Nonperishable food donations requested for the Viking Cupboard Food Pantry
📅 Thursday, November 19 · Noon–1 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Dance Winter Concert
Skidmore College Dance Department
Skidmore’s winter concert brings together original works by Bo Brinton, Chia-Ying Kao, Erika Pujic, Andre Malo-Robles and guest artist Pam Tanowitz. With five choreographers on one program, audiences can compare how different works use the same stage. In one piece, the spacing between dancers might make the relationship between them clear. In another, the timing of a group entrance or a pause may be what changes the scene.
The three performances include a Saturday matinee. Admission is free, and the department makes reservations available one week before each performance. The department also lists a livestream for each show.
📍 Dance Theater · Skidmore College · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free · Reservations and livestreams on the department page
📅 Friday, November 20 · 7:30–9 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 2–3:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 7:30–9 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
ADVERTISEMENT
NYSCA Artist & Apprentices: The Art of Eastern Heritage
Hudson Valley Community College / Asian Arts New York
Four master artists and their apprentices will share the stage in a program about how performance traditions are taught. The afternoon combines live performance, demonstrations and artist talks. The pairings give the audience a chance to see what passes from teacher to student, from the timing of a gesture to the way a phrase is shaped on an instrument.
Mathangi Srinivasan and Chinmayi Sri Maddali will present Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form that uses rhythm, gesture and expression. Sandra Balint and Wei Qin will demonstrate Tai Chi fan, and Liying Ye and Angelica Cooney will present Chinese water sleeve dance, in which long fabric extensions carry the movement beyond the dancer’s hands. Wenrui Shi and Mingtong Xu will play the guqin, a seven-string Chinese zither.
The artists are supported through the New York State Council on the Arts’ Folk and Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program. With the teachers and apprentices appearing together, audiences can hear how the artists explain a technique and then see or hear it put into practice.
📍 Maureen Stapleton Theatre, Siek Campus Center · HVCC · 80 Vandenburgh Avenue, Troy
🎟️ Free · Registration link on the event page
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 2–4 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Raphaël Feuillâtre — Classical Guitar
Capital Region Classical / Union College
In a solo guitar recital, the same player has to give a melody its shape, establish the bass and decide how clearly to bring out the notes in between. French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre will perform in Union’s Memorial Chapel, where listeners can follow how those layers fit together.
The guitar also gives a player several ways to change the color of a single note. Moving the right hand nearer the bridge can brighten the sound. Letting one string ring while another line moves can give the impression of separate instruments. In a solo recital those choices become part of the phrasing, as audible as a pause or a change in tempo.
Capital Region Classical presents the concert. The chapel setting suits a close listen to an instrument whose expressive range depends as much on what happens at low volume as on its strongest accents.
📍 Memorial Chapel, Union College · Schenectady
🎟️ $40 general admission · Children and college students free at the door
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 3–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🔥 PLAN AHEAD
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November 23–December 13, 2026
Humperdinck gives the Grimm brothers’ forest the sound of children’s songs, orchestral color and danger.
🌎 Hansel and Gretel
Bard College Conservatory of Music / Fisher Center
Humperdinck gives the Brothers Grimm’s story both the directness of a folk tale and the scale of a full opera. The children’s songs make the forest sound familiar at first. As the siblings lose their way and encounter the Witch, the orchestra gives their fear and resourcefulness a larger dramatic life.
James Bagwell will conduct the Bard Conservatory Orchestra in this fully staged production with singers from Bard’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, the Bard Chamber Singers and children from the Conservatory Preparatory Division. The opera is sung in German with English supertitles.
Bard has scheduled two in-person performances. If you’re arranging a trip around one of them, choose the date and book ahead. A pay-what-you-wish livestream is also available.
📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center · Bard College
🎟️ In-person tickets from $20 · Pay-what-you-wish livestream
🕒 Approximately 2 hours 15 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission
📅 Friday, December 11 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, December 13 · 2 PM
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🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
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December 14, 2026–March 15, 2027
INTERFACE: Robotics
RPI / EMPAC
Instrument builder and composer Qiujiang Levi Lu joins robotics researcher John Wen to examine what happens when a machine becomes part of an artistic practice. A device that responds to a performer’s movement can change both the sound produced and the gestures the performer learns to make.
The conversation will approach that relationship through the work of an artist who builds instruments and an engineer who studies how machines sense and act. Their starting points raise a practical question for performance: when a machine responds in ways the artist cannot fully predict, how does the artist learn to work with it?
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free · Limited studio capacity. Register early.
📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM
🌎 Beethoven and Brahms: Part 1
Bard College / Fisher Center
Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now in Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and Beethoven’s Third, the Eroica. Both composers use variation on a large scale, but their finales take different paths. Brahms builds tension by repeatedly returning to a short underlying pattern. Beethoven transforms a theme he had used in earlier works, bringing it into a symphony that has already passed through a funeral march.
The pairing lets listeners hear two composers arrive at large conclusions by revisiting a small amount of musical material. It is also one of the concerts eligible for Bard’s Create Your Own TŌN package. Readers considering several concerts can save 25% on three or more eligible programs while the package is available.
📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center · Bard College
🎟️ In-person tickets from $15 · Package available until only three concerts remain in the season
🕒 Approximately 2 hours 15 minutes, including a 20-minute intermission
📅 Saturday, February 6, 2027 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, February 7, 2027 · 2 PM
INTERFACE: Mixed Reality
RPI / EMPAC
Artist Lars Jan and mixed-reality researcher Talis Reks will discuss ROAM, a project that asks whether a group can move through the same physical space while experiencing the same imagined environment.
For a live performance, tracking and synchronization are part of the storytelling. If people see an action at different moments or from the wrong place, the shared scene changes. Jan’s performance practice meets Reks’s work on the technical systems that would let an audience move together through that scene.
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free · Limited studio capacity. Register early.
📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6–7 PM
Ensemble Connect: A Well-Being Concert
Skidmore College / Arthur Zankel Music Center
Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect will seat the audience onstage around the players, with chairs, cushions or mats. Chamber music will be paired with guided mindfulness and focused listening.
The arrangement puts listeners close enough to notice details that can recede in a larger room, from the sound of a bow touching a string to the way one player carries a phrase into another’s entrance. It also limits how many people can attend, so advance purchase makes sense if you want a place onstage.
📍 Arthur Zankel Music Center · Skidmore College
🎟️ Ticketed · Advance purchase recommended for the limited onstage seating.
📅 Sunday, February 21, 2027 · 2 PM
🌎 TŌN + ABT Studio Company
Bard College / Fisher Center
American Ballet Theatre Studio Company returns to Bard with The Orchestra Now. The collaboration puts dancers and a full live orchestra in the same performance, giving the timing of a leap, landing or change of direction a direct relationship to music being played in the room.
The program is eligible for the Create Your Own TŌN package. If you’re considering this ballet alongside the Beethoven and Brahms concert and another eligible program, the series discount is a reason to choose the performances together.
📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center · Bard College
🎟️ Tickets on sale · Save 25% on three or more eligible concerts with the TŌN package
📅 Saturday, February 27, 2027 · 7–9 PM
📅 Sunday, February 28, 2027 · 3–5 PM
Ensemble Connect’s Skidmore audience will sit onstage around the players, where listeners can hear a phrase pass from one instrument to another.
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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
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This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — Continuing December 3–5 · Details
Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — December 4–6 · Details
The Art of Exile: A Winter Studio Kabaret — Union College — February 11–14 · Details
Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — February 24–March 3 · Details
Cabaret — UAlbany — March 3–7 · Details
🌎 Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the Sun — Williams College — March 5 · Details
The World Goes Round — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — March 18–21 · Details
The Country Wife — Siena University — April 8–17 · Details
FRESH ACTS: A Festival of New Plays — UAlbany — April 14–17 · Details
Seussical: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — May 5–13 · Details
Little Women follows the four March sisters as each begins to imagine a different adult life.
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🖼️ CAMPUS GALLERIES & EXHIBITIONS
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Closing this week
Extra! Extra! Armistice Day and the Scrapbooks of Harold M. Lewis — Union College / Schaffer Library, Beuth Atrium — Through November 17 · Details
Jack Tworkov on View — Skidmore College / Tang — Through November 19 · Details
Practices: The Visual Arts Department Faculty and Staff Exhibition — Union College / Crowell and West Galleries — Through November 22 · Details
UAlbany / University Art Museum · Details
Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core — Through April 2
mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress — Through April 2
Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand — Through April 2
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Details
Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?! — Through November 29
Julian LaVerdiere & Duke Riley — Through January 3
Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Through January 3
Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation — Through January 3 · Town Crier performance at 2 PM on museum-open days
500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs — Through January 10
A Feeling of With — Through July 18
Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest — Through September 12
Art on Campus — Through October 3
Russell Sage College / Opalka Gallery · Details
Light and Transient Causes — Through December 5
Union College / Schaffer Library · Details
American Horror Stories: Audubon’s Morbid Curiosities — Through November 25
Conservation: Art & Science in the Archives — Fall 2026
Mid-Semester Student Exhibition — Foy Hall Gallery, Siena University — Through December 4
Hudson Valley Community College / Teaching Gallery
Tracing Time — Paul Mauren — Through December 12 · Details
Light and Transient Causes takes its title from the Declaration of Independence and asks who gets to decide which grievances count.
📍 BEFORE YOU GO
Event schedules can change, and programs may be canceled or moved after publication. Check with the venue before traveling to confirm that the event is still taking place, along with its time, location and attendance requirements.
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask campus staff for assistance and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Check event pages for special registration, parking, accessibility or building-entry instructions.
💬 READER FIELD NOTES
Did you attend something listed in Capital Region Curated?
Leave a quick comment: what did you see, and would you recommend it? One sentence is enough.
HELP SHAPE CAPITAL REGION CURATED
What would you like to see more of—music, science, history, literature, visual art or public affairs? Have you attended something that deserves a reader’s recommendation?
Send suggestions, corrections and field notes to Alan Koslow. If you organize a substantial public campus event, please include its official event page, date, time, location and attendance requirements.
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What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
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Capital Region Curated: November 16-22
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with A Doll’s House at UAlbany, poets at the Tang and a classical guitar recital.
Alan Koslow
28
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
🏛️ 📚 🎶 🎭 🔬
FROM IBSEN TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Nora Helmer’s marriage comes apart on the UAlbany stage, ten poets read in the Tang galleries, a semiconductor engineer explains the machinery behind AI, and classical guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre plays Union’s Memorial Chapel.
In Amy Herzog’s adaptation of A Doll’s House, a secret Nora Helmer has kept to protect her family exposes how little freedom she has within it.
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⭐ TOP PICKS
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🎭 A Doll’s House
UAlbany · Wednesday–Sunday, November 18–22 · Six performances, opening Wednesday at 8 PM
Nora Helmer once took a desperate step to save her husband. When her secret threatens to come out, she discovers how differently they understand what she did and what their marriage requires of her. Kea Trevett directs Amy Herzog’s English adaptation of the Ibsen drama whose final confrontation helped change what audiences expected of modern theater.
See Theater & Performance below.
✍️ Poets in the Museum
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Thursday, November 19 · 6 PM
Ten regional poets will read in the galleries of A Feeling of With. Saratoga Springs Poet Laureate Jay Rogoff hosts the free reading, the second in a three-part series. Among the writers is 2026 Whiting Award recipient Hajar Hussaini, whose collection Disbound and work as a translator approach questions of language and belonging from different directions.
See Books, Writers & Ideas below.
🔬 How Wafer Fab Equipment Enables High-Performance Computing and AI
UAlbany · Monday, November 16 · 6–7 PM
Angélique Raley takes the discussion of AI inside the semiconductor factory. Her NANOvember lecture will look at the equipment and techniques that make advanced chips possible. Raley leads research in semiconductor and 3D integration at Tokyo Electron America, where stacking and connecting components is part of the work of building more capable computing systems.
See Science, Technology & Health below.
🎸 Raphaël Feuillâtre — Classical Guitar
Union College · Sunday, November 22 · 3 PM
A single classical guitar can carry a melody, bass line and inner voices at the same time. French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre brings that intimate sound to Union’s Memorial Chapel in a Capital Region Classical recital. The setting gives listeners room to hear the small choices that shape a solo performance: how a note is struck, how long it is allowed to ring and how a player makes one line stand out among several.
See Music, Dance & Performance below.
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📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
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One calendar file lets you add this week’s scheduled events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Individual calendar links beside each listing let you choose just the programs you want to attend. Adding an event to your calendar does not reserve a seat or complete any required registration.
DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links below open an event ready to save.
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📅 DAY-BY-DAY CALENDAR
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MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16
3–4:30 PM — Building Archives with Nathalie Duval · UAlbany / Humanities 354
3:30–5 PM — Inflammation Resolution & Healthy Aging · UAlbany / D’Ambra Auditorium
6–7 PM — NANOvember: The Chips Behind AI · UAlbany / ETEC 149/151
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17
8:30 AM–3:30 PM — Aging Well Together · UAlbany / ETEC
4:30–7 PM — UAlbany Zine Scene · UAlbany / University Library
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18
1–2 PM — Translating Compassion · UAlbany / Humanities 354
8–10:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19
Noon–1 PM — Jeanine Ouderkirk, jazz vocals · HVCC / Bulmer Auditorium
Noon–1:30 PM* — Mark Thomas Gibson Curator’s Tour · Skidmore / Tang
2–3:30 PM* — Advancing Medical Image Analysis with Limited Training Data · RPI / Isermann Auditorium
3–5:30 PM — Evolving Surveillance · Albany Law / DAMC and online
6–7:30 PM* — Poets in the Museum · Skidmore / Tang, Malloy Wing
7–9:30 PM* — Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play · Williams / ’62 Center
8–10:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — Rent · Siena / Beaudoin Theatre
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20
3–5:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
7–9:30 PM* — Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play · Williams / ’62 Center
7:30–9 PM* — Dance Winter Concert · Skidmore / Dance Theater
8–10:30 PM* — Rent · Siena / Beaudoin Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — This Emancipation Thing · Skidmore / Black Box
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21
2–3:30 PM* — Dance Winter Concert · Skidmore / Dance Theater
2–4 PM — The Art of Eastern Heritage · HVCC / Maureen Stapleton Theatre
2–4:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
7–9:30 PM* — Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play · Williams / ’62 Center
7:30–9 PM* — Dance Winter Concert · Skidmore / Dance Theater
8–10:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — Rent · Siena / Beaudoin Theatre
8–10:30 PM* — This Emancipation Thing · Skidmore / Black Box
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22
2–3:30 PM* — Tang Guide Tour · Skidmore / Tang
2–4:30 PM* — A Doll’s House · UAlbany / PAC Studio Theatre
2–4:30 PM* — This Emancipation Thing · Skidmore / Black Box
3–4:30 PM* — Raphaël Feuillâtre, guitar · Union / Memorial Chapel
End time estimated for planning.
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🎭 THEATER & PERFORMANCE
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A Doll’s House
UAlbany / Performing Arts Center
When Nora Helmer secretly borrowed money to save her husband Torvald’s life, she broke rules that gave a married woman little control over her own affairs. Years later, the loan resurfaces just as Torvald is about to take up a new position at the bank. Nora expects him to understand why she acted. His response forces her to reconsider what he values and what she has accepted as the terms of their marriage.
Ibsen builds the pressure inside the Helmers’ drawing room from small exchanges: nicknames, requests for money and a rehearsal for a dance. The familiar routines of the household begin to sound different as Nora realizes how much of her life she has spent playing a part.
Amy Herzog’s adaptation brings that change into contemporary English. Directed by Kea Trevett, the production gives the actors room to show how affection, dependence and control can coexist in the same conversation, long before Nora and Torvald say plainly what they expect of each other.
📍 Studio Theatre, Performing Arts Center · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Advance: $20 general / $15 students, seniors and UAlbany faculty and staff
🎟️ Day of show: $25 general / $20 students, seniors and UAlbany faculty and staff
📅 Wednesday, November 18 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Friday, November 20 · 3–5:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 2–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 2–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Rent
Siena University Theatre
Jonathan Larson’s musical follows a group of young artists in New York’s East Village as they try to make work, pay rent and care for one another during the AIDS crisis. Mark, a filmmaker, records the lives around him. His roommate Roger struggles to write a song he believes will outlast him. A threatened eviction forces the friends to decide what they owe each other and how far they will go to keep their community together.
Larson borrows the outline of Puccini’s La bohème and gives it the sound of downtown New York. Rock numbers can turn a fight over a building into a public confrontation. A ballad lets a single character admit what they are afraid to say in front of the group. The score’s shifts between those modes give the musical its sense of people making lives together under pressure.
📍 Beaudoin Theatre · Siena University · Loudonville
🎟️ $5–$15
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Friday, November 20 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
This Emancipation Thing
Skidmore College Theater
Sara Lyons conceived, adapted and directed this participatory production, which revisits the feminist consciousness-raising circle through questions of identity, desire and embodiment. Skidmore theater students lead the gathering. Audience members are invited to sit close, speak if they wish, or listen.
The piece brings 1968 and 2026 into the same room. The circle itself is part of the staging. It gives participants a way to hear how people of different generations name experiences that earlier participants might have understood differently. The invitation to listen matters as much as the invitation to speak, especially when a story sounds familiar until someone describes it in their own terms.
📍 Black Box Theater · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Ticket link on the production page
📅 Friday, November 20 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 8–10:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 2–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Run continues December 3–5
🌎 Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play
Williams College Theatre Department
After an unnamed catastrophe, a group of survivors around a fire tries to reconstruct an episode of The Simpsons. Each person remembers different lines and scenes. In Anne Washburn’s play, the effort to piece together a television episode becomes the first step in making a story the group can tell again.
The play follows that story across decades. Details are lost, other details acquire new meaning, and familiar scraps of popular culture become material for live theater. The shifts in form let the audience hear how a story changes as the people telling it inherit memories of the catastrophe instead of remembering it firsthand.
📍 CenterStage, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance · Williams College · Williamstown, Massachusetts
🎟️ The event page lists tickets as coming soon
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 7–9:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Friday, November 20 · 7–9:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 7–9:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🔬 SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & HEALTH
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The computing power behind AI begins with the equipment that builds and connects features on a semiconductor wafer.
Inflammation Resolution: A Foundation for Healthy Aging
UAlbany / AgeWell Speaker Series
Inflammation helps the body respond to injury. Ending that response also takes work: cells and chemical signals must clear debris and shift damaged tissue toward repair. When that process breaks down, inflammation can persist and contribute to disease.
Gabrielle Fredman, professor and chair of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Albany Medical College, studies how this failure affects aging blood vessels. Her talk will draw on research into atherosclerosis, where the inability to resolve inflammation can help explain why damage continues inside the artery wall.
The distinction between turning down inflammation and helping tissue resolve it is central to the talk. Fredman will examine what that distinction means for understanding cardiovascular aging and for research into how damaged tissue might repair itself.
📍 D’Ambra Auditorium, Life Sciences Research Building · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Registration requested
📅 Monday, November 16 · 3:30–5 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
How Wafer Fab Equipment Enables High-Performance Computing and AI
UAlbany / NANOvember Lecture Series
Angélique Raley will explain how the machinery inside a wafer fabrication plant helps determine what a computer chip can do. A chip’s design has to survive the transition from a drawing to a physical object. Its layers must line up, its features must be built at nanoscale dimensions, and its components must connect reliably.
Raley is senior director of technology for semiconductor integration and 3D integration at Tokyo Electron America. Her work includes advanced packaging, which allows multiple components to be combined in a single package. Stacking components creates new possibilities for chip design, while making alignment and connections between layers especially consequential.
Most people encounter AI through software. Raley will start further back in the process, with the manufacturing equipment that turns designs into hardware capable of doing that work.
📍 ETEC, Rooms 149/151 · UAlbany · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to all · Registration preferred
📅 Monday, November 16 · 6–7 PM · Doors at 5:15 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Aging Well Together: The Next Chapter
UAlbany
This daylong conference begins with people describing how they have navigated aging, recovery and major life transitions. The opening panel gives those experiences room before the program turns to the research on health, resilience and social connection.
Neuroscientist Ben Rein and UAlbany researchers will discuss what studies can tell us about those subjects and where questions remain. Later sessions will consider mental wellness during life transitions, the relationship between medication and recovery, and ways community organizations can support healthy aging.
The organizers invite older adults, caregivers, health and behavioral health professionals, and others interested in the subject. The sequence gives each group a chance to hear how the same questions look from the perspectives of lived experience, research and day-to-day practice.
📍 ETEC · UAlbany · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
📅 Tuesday, November 17 · 8:30 AM–3:30 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Advancing Medical Image Analysis with Limited Training Data
RPI / Department of Biomedical Engineering
Amir Amini, a professor and endowed chair in bioimaging at the University of Louisville, will discuss a problem in medical imaging: how do you train AI to recognize useful patterns when the available examples are limited? Preparing training data can require specialists to review scans and mark the features a model is meant to recognize.
The question matters for disease detection because a model may perform well on images similar to those it learned from and struggle when it encounters something different. An uncommon condition may leave researchers with relatively few examples, even when the ability to recognize it is clinically important. The seminar will examine how researchers approach medical image analysis when they have fewer training examples to work with.
📍 Isermann Auditorium, Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies · RPI · Troy
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 2–3:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🏛️ IDEAS & PUBLIC LIFE
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Building Archives with Learning and Research Pathways in Women’s & Gender Histories
UAlbany / Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Which materials make it into a digital archive, and how will a student know what to search for once they are there? Nathalie Duval, senior director of product management for ProQuest Digital Collections, will discuss how publishers, librarians and scholars build resources for researching women’s and gender histories.
Digitization makes it possible to consult material without traveling to the collection. It also gives decisions about cataloging and organization greater weight. A document may be available online and still be difficult to find if the search terms or categories fail to reflect the question a researcher is asking.
Duval will address these choices from the perspective of a publisher working with libraries and historical collections. The talk puts the construction of the archive itself alongside the scholarship and teaching that depend on it.
📍 Humanities Building, Room 354 · UAlbany Uptown Campus · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
📅 Monday, November 16 · 3–4:30 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Evolving Surveillance
Albany Law School / Journal of Science and Technology
A license-plate reader can turn a passing car into a record of where someone was at a particular time. A network of readers can make it possible to reconstruct movements. The legal and civil-liberties questions change as those records become easier to collect, retain and search.
Daniel Schwarz, senior privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, will give the keynote at Albany Law’s symposium. His work has addressed automated license-plate readers and facial recognition, two technologies that show how surveillance can expand through the combination of ordinary encounters and searchable records.
The symposium will examine the consequences for privacy and the ways laws and public institutions respond to expanding monitoring capabilities. The hybrid format allows readers to attend online as well as in person.
📍 DAMC, Albany Law School · 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany · Online attendance available
🎟️ Registration available
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 3–5:30 PM · Reception follows · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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📚 BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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At the Tang, poems will be heard in the same galleries as the works that prompted them.
UAlbany Zine Scene
UAlbany / University Libraries
A zine can be a few folded pages, a hand-drawn comic or a small-run publication that circulates within a community. At this library gathering, participants will show selections from their own collections and talk about the people, interests and stories behind them.
The format is an informal show-and-tell. Someone who has never opened a zine can see what the form makes possible, while people who already collect or publish them can compare how others use the page. The size of a publication, the choice to draw or photocopy it, and the way it passes from person to person can all be part of its meaning. Food and conversation will follow.
📍 University Library · Creative Technologies Lab and Makerspace · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ All are welcome · Registration requested for food planning
📅 Tuesday, November 17 · 4:30–7 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Translating Compassion: Aleksandr Chudakov’s Novel of Family Survival Under Stalinism
UAlbany / Languages, Literatures and Cultures
Timothy Sergay, professor emeritus of Russian, will discuss Aleksandr Chudakov’s novel about family survival under Stalinism. The program approaches Soviet history through what it was like to live inside a family under political repression, where knowing what to say, and to whom, could carry consequences.
That puts the translator in an exacting position. An aside, a joke or a silence may carry meanings that are less apparent to readers who did not grow up with the history. The seminar will consider how a translator carries private speech and memory from one language into another while giving a new reader enough context to hear what is being said.
📍 Humanities Building, Room 354 · UAlbany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
📅 Wednesday, November 18 · 1–2 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
✍️ Poets in the Museum
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
What does a poem notice in a work of art that a gallery label might pass over? Saratoga Springs Poet Laureate Jay Rogoff has invited ten regional poets to respond to works in A Feeling of With. This is the second reading in a three-part series. The audience will be in the galleries with the art as the poems are read.
The readers include Hajar Hussaini, a 2026 Whiting Award recipient whose collection Disbound and work in Persian literary translation are part of a practice that moves between languages. Also reading are Andy Fogle, Maggie Greaves, Elaine Handley, Kathleen McCoy, Suzanne S. Rancourt, Jordan Smith, Natalya Sukhonos, Barbara Ungar and Nancy White.
With ten readers, the evening will offer different ways to begin looking. A poet may start with a detail that another visitor would miss or follow an association that leads away from the object and back to it. Hearing the work beside the art lets listeners test those readings against what they see for themselves.
📍 Malloy Wing, Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Thursday, November 19 · 6–7:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎨 ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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Jack Tworkov on View
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
The Tang will put work by Jack Tworkov on view for four days in conjunction with SPAC’s Lotus Girl with Helen Tworkov. Jack Tworkov is associated with the New York School, where artists made the movement of paint and the process of making a picture part of what viewers were invited to see.
A short presentation gives visitors a chance to spend time with the work itself. Look at where a mark speeds up, where it stops, and where repeated gestures begin to suggest an underlying structure. Those details are a way into Tworkov’s painting whether or not you attend the SPAC program.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 November 16–18 · Noon–5 PM · November 19 · Noon–9 PM
Curator’s Tour of Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Ian Berry, the Tang’s Dayton Director, will lead a tour of We Are A Constellation. Gibson uses the visual language of cartoons and comics to explore American history and political life. The immediacy of a drawn figure can pull a viewer into a scene before its historical references and ambiguities become apparent.
A curator’s tour makes it possible to ask how those images work in relation to one another. A drawing that reads one way on its own may change when another image supplies a competing point of view. Berry will discuss the exhibition from the perspective of someone involved in shaping how visitors encounter the work.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 Thursday, November 19 · Noon–1:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Tang Guide Tour with Hallie Pomerantz ’27
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Student guide Hallie Pomerantz ’27 will take visitors through selected works in the Tang’s current exhibitions. The guide’s selection gives a few works more time than they might get on a first pass through the museum.
Visitors can ask about a detail, hear what drew Pomerantz to a particular piece, and compare what they noticed with what someone else saw. The tour also provides a starting point for exploring the galleries independently afterward.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 2–3:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎶 MUSIC, DANCE & PERFORMANCE
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🎙️ Jeanine Ouderkirk — Jazz Vocal Performance
Hudson Valley Community College / Cultural Affairs
Saratoga Springs vocalist Jeanine Ouderkirk will perform jazz standards from the Great American Songbook and demonstrate scat singing. Scat puts the voice in the role of an improvising instrument. With the words set aside, listeners can hear how a singer uses rhythm, tone and phrasing to build a new line over familiar chords.
Ouderkirk came to singing after years of playing bass clarinet and baritone saxophone in classical and jazz ensembles. Her 2025 debut album, Nightingale, is a collection of 13 standards featuring pianist and arranger Tedd Firth. At HVCC, listeners will hear both sides of her approach to a song: how she interprets a lyric and where she takes the tune when she improvises.
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium · HVCC · 80 Vandenburgh Avenue, Troy
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Nonperishable food donations requested for the Viking Cupboard Food Pantry
📅 Thursday, November 19 · Noon–1 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Dance Winter Concert
Skidmore College Dance Department
Skidmore’s winter concert brings together original works by Bo Brinton, Chia-Ying Kao, Erika Pujic, Andre Malo-Robles and guest artist Pam Tanowitz. With five choreographers on one program, audiences can compare how different works use the same stage. In one piece, the spacing between dancers might make the relationship between them clear. In another, the timing of a group entrance or a pause may be what changes the scene.
The three performances include a Saturday matinee. Admission is free, and the department makes reservations available one week before each performance. The department also lists a livestream for each show.
📍 Dance Theater · Skidmore College · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free · Reservations and livestreams on the department page
📅 Friday, November 20 · 7:30–9 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 2–3:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 7:30–9 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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NYSCA Artist & Apprentices: The Art of Eastern Heritage
Hudson Valley Community College / Asian Arts New York
Four master artists and their apprentices will share the stage in a program about how performance traditions are taught. The afternoon combines live performance, demonstrations and artist talks. The pairings give the audience a chance to see what passes from teacher to student, from the timing of a gesture to the way a phrase is shaped on an instrument.
Mathangi Srinivasan and Chinmayi Sri Maddali will present Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form that uses rhythm, gesture and expression. Sandra Balint and Wei Qin will demonstrate Tai Chi fan, and Liying Ye and Angelica Cooney will present Chinese water sleeve dance, in which long fabric extensions carry the movement beyond the dancer’s hands. Wenrui Shi and Mingtong Xu will play the guqin, a seven-string Chinese zither.
The artists are supported through the New York State Council on the Arts’ Folk and Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program. With the teachers and apprentices appearing together, audiences can hear how the artists explain a technique and then see or hear it put into practice.
📍 Maureen Stapleton Theatre, Siek Campus Center · HVCC · 80 Vandenburgh Avenue, Troy
🎟️ Free · Registration link on the event page
📅 Saturday, November 21 · 2–4 PM · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Raphaël Feuillâtre — Classical Guitar
Capital Region Classical / Union College
In a solo guitar recital, the same player has to give a melody its shape, establish the bass and decide how clearly to bring out the notes in between. French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre will perform in Union’s Memorial Chapel, where listeners can follow how those layers fit together.
The guitar also gives a player several ways to change the color of a single note. Moving the right hand nearer the bridge can brighten the sound. Letting one string ring while another line moves can give the impression of separate instruments. In a solo recital those choices become part of the phrasing, as audible as a pause or a change in tempo.
Capital Region Classical presents the concert. The chapel setting suits a close listen to an instrument whose expressive range depends as much on what happens at low volume as on its strongest accents.
📍 Memorial Chapel, Union College · Schenectady
🎟️ $40 general admission · Children and college students free at the door
📅 Sunday, November 22 · 3–4:30 PM* · Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🔥 PLAN AHEAD
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November 23–December 13, 2026
Humperdinck gives the Grimm brothers’ forest the sound of children’s songs, orchestral color and danger.
🌎 Hansel and Gretel
Bard College Conservatory of Music / Fisher Center
Humperdinck gives the Brothers Grimm’s story both the directness of a folk tale and the scale of a full opera. The children’s songs make the forest sound familiar at first. As the siblings lose their way and encounter the Witch, the orchestra gives their fear and resourcefulness a larger dramatic life.
James Bagwell will conduct the Bard Conservatory Orchestra in this fully staged production with singers from Bard’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, the Bard Chamber Singers and children from the Conservatory Preparatory Division. The opera is sung in German with English supertitles.
Bard has scheduled two in-person performances. If you’re arranging a trip around one of them, choose the date and book ahead. A pay-what-you-wish livestream is also available.
📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center · Bard College
🎟️ In-person tickets from $20 · Pay-what-you-wish livestream
🕒 Approximately 2 hours 15 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission
📅 Friday, December 11 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, December 13 · 2 PM
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🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
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December 14, 2026–March 15, 2027
INTERFACE: Robotics
RPI / EMPAC
Instrument builder and composer Qiujiang Levi Lu joins robotics researcher John Wen to examine what happens when a machine becomes part of an artistic practice. A device that responds to a performer’s movement can change both the sound produced and the gestures the performer learns to make.
The conversation will approach that relationship through the work of an artist who builds instruments and an engineer who studies how machines sense and act. Their starting points raise a practical question for performance: when a machine responds in ways the artist cannot fully predict, how does the artist learn to work with it?
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free · Limited studio capacity. Register early.
📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM
🌎 Beethoven and Brahms: Part 1
Bard College / Fisher Center
Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now in Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and Beethoven’s Third, the Eroica. Both composers use variation on a large scale, but their finales take different paths. Brahms builds tension by repeatedly returning to a short underlying pattern. Beethoven transforms a theme he had used in earlier works, bringing it into a symphony that has already passed through a funeral march.
The pairing lets listeners hear two composers arrive at large conclusions by revisiting a small amount of musical material. It is also one of the concerts eligible for Bard’s Create Your Own TŌN package. Readers considering several concerts can save 25% on three or more eligible programs while the package is available.
📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center · Bard College
🎟️ In-person tickets from $15 · Package available until only three concerts remain in the season
🕒 Approximately 2 hours 15 minutes, including a 20-minute intermission
📅 Saturday, February 6, 2027 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, February 7, 2027 · 2 PM
INTERFACE: Mixed Reality
RPI / EMPAC
Artist Lars Jan and mixed-reality researcher Talis Reks will discuss ROAM, a project that asks whether a group can move through the same physical space while experiencing the same imagined environment.
For a live performance, tracking and synchronization are part of the storytelling. If people see an action at different moments or from the wrong place, the shared scene changes. Jan’s performance practice meets Reks’s work on the technical systems that would let an audience move together through that scene.
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free · Limited studio capacity. Register early.
📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6–7 PM
Ensemble Connect: A Well-Being Concert
Skidmore College / Arthur Zankel Music Center
Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect will seat the audience onstage around the players, with chairs, cushions or mats. Chamber music will be paired with guided mindfulness and focused listening.
The arrangement puts listeners close enough to notice details that can recede in a larger room, from the sound of a bow touching a string to the way one player carries a phrase into another’s entrance. It also limits how many people can attend, so advance purchase makes sense if you want a place onstage.
📍 Arthur Zankel Music Center · Skidmore College
🎟️ Ticketed · Advance purchase recommended for the limited onstage seating.
📅 Sunday, February 21, 2027 · 2 PM
🌎 TŌN + ABT Studio Company
Bard College / Fisher Center
American Ballet Theatre Studio Company returns to Bard with The Orchestra Now. The collaboration puts dancers and a full live orchestra in the same performance, giving the timing of a leap, landing or change of direction a direct relationship to music being played in the room.
The program is eligible for the Create Your Own TŌN package. If you’re considering this ballet alongside the Beethoven and Brahms concert and another eligible program, the series discount is a reason to choose the performances together.
📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center · Bard College
🎟️ Tickets on sale · Save 25% on three or more eligible concerts with the TŌN package
📅 Saturday, February 27, 2027 · 7–9 PM
📅 Sunday, February 28, 2027 · 3–5 PM
Ensemble Connect’s Skidmore audience will sit onstage around the players, where listeners can hear a phrase pass from one instrument to another.
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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
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This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — Continuing December 3–5 · Details
Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — December 4–6 · Details
The Art of Exile: A Winter Studio Kabaret — Union College — February 11–14 · Details
Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — February 24–March 3 · Details
Cabaret — UAlbany — March 3–7 · Details
🌎 Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the Sun — Williams College — March 5 · Details
The World Goes Round — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — March 18–21 · Details
The Country Wife — Siena University — April 8–17 · Details
FRESH ACTS: A Festival of New Plays — UAlbany — April 14–17 · Details
Seussical: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — May 5–13 · Details
Little Women follows the four March sisters as each begins to imagine a different adult life.
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🖼️ CAMPUS GALLERIES & EXHIBITIONS
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Closing this week
Extra! Extra! Armistice Day and the Scrapbooks of Harold M. Lewis — Union College / Schaffer Library, Beuth Atrium — Through November 17 · Details
Jack Tworkov on View — Skidmore College / Tang — Through November 19 · Details
Practices: The Visual Arts Department Faculty and Staff Exhibition — Union College / Crowell and West Galleries — Through November 22 · Details
UAlbany / University Art Museum · Details
Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core — Through April 2
mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress — Through April 2
Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand — Through April 2
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Details
Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?! — Through November 29
Julian LaVerdiere & Duke Riley — Through January 3
Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Through January 3
Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation — Through January 3 · Town Crier performance at 2 PM on museum-open days
500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs — Through January 10
A Feeling of With — Through July 18
Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest — Through September 12
Art on Campus — Through October 3
Russell Sage College / Opalka Gallery · Details
Light and Transient Causes — Through December 5
Union College / Schaffer Library · Details
American Horror Stories: Audubon’s Morbid Curiosities — Through November 25
Conservation: Art & Science in the Archives — Fall 2026
Mid-Semester Student Exhibition — Foy Hall Gallery, Siena University — Through December 4
Hudson Valley Community College / Teaching Gallery
Tracing Time — Paul Mauren — Through December 12 · Details
Light and Transient Causes takes its title from the Declaration of Independence and asks who gets to decide which grievances count.
📍 BEFORE YOU GO
Event schedules can change, and programs may be canceled or moved after publication. Check with the venue before traveling to confirm that the event is still taking place, along with its time, location and attendance requirements.
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask campus staff for assistance and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Check event pages for special registration, parking, accessibility or building-entry instructions.
💬 READER FIELD NOTES
Did you attend something listed in Capital Region Curated?
Leave a quick comment: what did you see, and would you recommend it? One sentence is enough.
HELP SHAPE CAPITAL REGION CURATED
What would you like to see more of—music, science, history, literature, visual art or public affairs? Have you attended something that deserves a reader’s recommendation?
Send suggestions, corrections and field notes to Alan Koslow. If you organize a substantial public campus event, please include its official event page, date, time, location and attendance requirements.
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Senior Moments program welcomes storyteller Sandy Schuman at luncheon on Nov. 18
Storyteller and musician Sandy Schuman brings Chelm folklore and Adirondack tall tales to the Gates of Heaven luncheon in Schenectady.
The Jewish World
November 12, 2026
Local
Arts & Entertainment
Capital Region Curated: November 9-15
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Elliot Williams on the Goetz case, Tara Westover, Siena’s Rent and more.
Alan Koslow
November 7, 2026
Local
Community News
Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York names Jennifer Lean director of development
Lean will oversee Women’s Philanthropy, the annual campaign, and Major Gifts and Corporate Sponsorships for the Federation.
The Jewish World
November 5, 2026
Local
Events
Senior Moments program welcomes storyteller Sandy Schuman at luncheon on Nov. 18
Storyteller and musician Sandy Schuman brings Chelm folklore and Adirondack tall tales to the Gates of Heaven luncheon in Schenectady.
The Jewish World
November 12, 2026
Local
Arts & Entertainment
Capital Region Curated: November 9-15
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Elliot Williams on the Goetz case, Tara Westover, Siena’s Rent and more.
Alan Koslow
November 7, 2026
Local
Community News
Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York names Jennifer Lean director of development
Lean will oversee Women’s Philanthropy, the annual campaign, and Major Gifts and Corporate Sponsorships for the Federation.
The Jewish World
November 5, 2026
Local
Community News
‘Israel’ participates in 55th Festival of Nations Nov. 1 at Empire State Plaza
Albany’s Jewish community represented Israel at the Empire State Plaza festival with song, crafts for children and kosher food.
Jim Clevenson
November 2, 2026
© 2026 The Jewish World · Since 1965 - The Capital Region's gateway to Jewish life
Designed and Developed by Ta-Da Studios
© 2026 The Jewish World · Since 1965 - The Capital Region's gateway to Jewish life
Designed and Developed by Ta-Da Studios
© 2026 The Jewish World · Since 1965 - The Capital Region's gateway to Jewish life
Designed and Developed by Ta-Da Studios
© 2026 The Jewish World · Since 1965 - The Capital Region's gateway to Jewish life
Designed and Developed by Ta-Da Studios