Capital Region Curated: November 9-15

📍 Campus Center Multipurpose Room, UAlbany Uptown Campus, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany

Science Fiction and AI

William Alexander · UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute

What does an artificial intelligence need to learn after it becomes intelligent? In William Alexander’s Sunward, that question falls to a human space traveler responsible for juvenile AI—adolescent “baby bots” learning how to live among others. Her assignment resembles foster parenting, with its mixture of attachment, instruction, uncertainty, and responsibility.

Alexander, a Cuban-American writer, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for Goblin Secrets, a fantasy about a boy searching for his missing brother in a world of masks, theater, and magic. Sunward, his first science-fiction novel for adults, was a finalist for the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year.

The novel makes room for questions sometimes lost in arguments about computing power. Knowledge does not automatically confer judgment, and the ability to respond does not guarantee an understanding of others. Alexander approaches AI through the intimate work of caring for someone still learning what their actions mean. A conversation and audience Q&A form part of UAlbany’s AI & Society series.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 4:30 PM

📍 Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, 135 Western Avenue, Albany

Telling the Truth in a Post-Truth World

Jonathan Alter and Devlin Barrett · UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute

The Writers Institute’s annual post-election discussion returns with journalists Jonathan Alter and Devlin Barrett. Both work in fields where the people supplying information often have a substantial interest in how the story is told. The challenge is to establish what happened when access is restricted, accounts conflict, and public loyalties have already hardened.

Alter’s writing combines political reporting with historical perspective. Barrett follows government, law enforcement, and the justice system. Their work depends on documents, corroboration, and the ability to distinguish what a source knows from what that source wants a reporter to believe.

Those practical decisions belong at the center of a discussion about truth. A reporter may have convincing evidence for one part of a story and unanswered questions about another; conveying that distinction is part of the job. The program includes audience questions, opening the conversation to the difficulties readers face when evaluating competing accounts of public events.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 7 PM

🎟️ Free

📍 Robert Kelly Multipurpose Room, Campus Center North, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

In Educated, the freedom to question comes with the possibility of losing the family whose account of the world Westover once shared.

A Reading with Tara Westover

Tara Westover · Bard College · Regional Extension

Tara Westover’s memoir Educated follows her journey from an isolated childhood in Idaho to university study and a doctorate at Cambridge. Its deepest conflicts concern what happens along the way: an education introduces unfamiliar subjects and institutions, but also the possibility that the explanations a child has inherited may be incomplete or wrong.

Westover writes about the strain that discovery places on family loyalty. To describe her own experiences honestly, she must question people she loves and reconsider events they remember differently. Academic success does not resolve those disagreements. It gives her a language for understanding them while making the distance from home more difficult to ignore.

The book’s treatment of memory is especially careful. Conflicting recollections remain part of the account, rather than obstacles conveniently removed from it. Westover’s reading at Bard offers the words themselves—the choices of emphasis, detail, and restraint through which she tells a story of intellectual independence and its personal cost.

📅 Monday, November 9 · 5:30 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public

📍 McDonough Sports Complex gymnasium, Hudson Valley Community College, Troy

The Art of an Athlete

Maxwell Pearce · Hudson Valley Community College

Maxwell Pearce’s working materials include objects familiar from the basketball court. Shoelaces and sports equipment become elements of mixed-media artwork, carrying the associations of practice, competition, preparation, and repetition into the studio. His career as a Harlem Globetrotter supplies more than a subject; it supplies materials and experiences.

Pearce played basketball at SUNY Purchase before developing his professional athletic career. His art brings that physical history into objects that ask to be looked at in another way. Equipment usually understood through use can acquire a different significance when its form, texture, or arrangement becomes the focus.

At HVCC, Pearce will discuss the relationship between those parts of his life. The overlap is a practical one: both depend on habits developed over time, repeated decisions, and an ability to respond to what is happening in front of him. His artwork makes the connection visible through the things an athlete handles every day.

📅 Monday, November 9 · 2–3 PM

🎟️ Open to the public · RSVP requested

📍 Collection Teaching Gallery, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

After Expertise: Art and Education in the Age of AI

Bard College / Center for Curatorial Studies · Regional Extension

An image can now be generated in seconds. Deciding whether it is any good, understanding what it draws upon, and knowing what to teach the person who made it remain much harder problems. Bard’s symposium addresses those questions through art, education, and the changing meaning of expertise.

Participants include Michelle Kuo of the Museum of Modern Art, Suzanne Kite of the Indigenous AI research community, and Catherine Griffiths of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Their different fields place them in different relationships to technology: collecting and interpreting art, developing approaches to AI, and teaching students whose tools are changing rapidly.

The program includes panels, a roundtable, and a reception. Questions of authorship and judgment run through the subject. Technical fluency once offered one way to recognize accomplishment; when software can supply a polished surface, teachers and artists face a more demanding task of distinguishing an informed choice from an impressive-looking result.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 11 AM–5 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public

📍 Payne Room, Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

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🎨 ART & ENCOUNTERS

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Behind a public art project are less visible decisions about collaborators, money, teaching, and the institutions willing to support an experiment.

Making a Life of Art

Nato Thompson · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum

Making art and making a life in art are related but different undertakings. Nato Thompson has worked on both sides of that distinction as a curator, writer, and educator. During his decade as chief curator at Creative Time, from 2007 to 2017, he helped develop projects that brought artists into public spaces and into direct contact with social and political questions.

His work also includes alternative education, publishing, and the organizations through which artists find collaborators and sustain a practice. Those activities involve decisions rarely visible in a finished exhibition: where people learn, who has access to a workspace, how a project is supported, and what happens when its ambitions do not fit an established institution.

Thompson’s talk draws on that experience. The title reaches beyond inspiration to the working conditions of a creative life—the time, relationships, and collective effort behind projects that may appear, from the outside, to be the product of an individual vision.

📅 Tuesday, November 10 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free

📍 Wachenheim Gallery, Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

Dunkerley Dialogue

Mark Thomas Gibson and Jennifer Delton · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum

Mark Thomas Gibson draws on comics, caricature, and history painting to address American public life. The combination gives his paintings several kinds of authority to work with—and against. A caricature exaggerates, a comic compresses action, and a history painting presents a scene as something worthy of collective memory.

Historian Jennifer Delton studies twentieth-century American political and social history, including race, civil rights, and business. Their conversation places her attention to institutions and historical circumstances beside Gibson’s use of figures, symbols, and visual narrative.

The setting matters here: the dialogue takes place in the gallery, with the paintings available as evidence. Broad questions about race, citizenship, and power can be tested against a particular gesture, arrangement, or image. Gibson’s choices invite the same scrutiny as any account of history: what occupies the foreground, who is pushed aside, and what the scene asks us to believe.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free

Tracing Time

Paul Mauren · Hudson Valley Community College / Teaching Gallery

Paul Mauren’s sculptures bring constructed forms into contact with materials and structures associated with the natural world. Their arrangements can suggest balance, pressure, or instability. Looking at them involves a physical reckoning: what supports a form, what threatens it, and how its apparent weight changes as the viewer moves.

Mauren taught at The College of Saint Rose from 1978 to 2018. Tracing Time, his second exhibition at HVCC, places a long regional career within the intimate setting of the Teaching Gallery. The exhibition title allows several readings, from the time spent making an object to the accumulated choices through which a sculptor’s work develops.

An artist’s talk precedes the opening reception. Together, they provide access to the work and to Mauren’s account of its construction. Materials that might initially seem incidental become easier to examine once the maker has explained what a particular joint, surface, or opposing form required.

📅 Thursday, November 12

Artist talk: 3–4 PM — Bulmer Telecommunications Center auditorium, HVCC, Troy

Opening reception: 4–6 PM — Teaching Gallery, Administration Building, HVCC, Troy

🎟️ Both free and open to the public

📍 Opalka Gallery, Russell Sage College, 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany

📅 Artist talk: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Reception: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

A flavor disappears almost as soon as it is experienced, but its associations can outlast the tasting—a fitting complication for an exhibition concerned with transient causes.

Light and Transient Causes: A Culinary Experience

Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery · Current-Week Must-Catch

Opalka adds taste and scent to the gallery experience with five artist-inspired tastings connected to Light and Transient Causes. The event includes a welcome drink and a sequence of small culinary encounters within the exhibition.

Food introduces a different kind of attention. An artwork can be revisited across the room; a flavor changes as it is tasted and then becomes a memory. Texture, aroma, and association enter the experience alongside the objects on view. The five tastings offer separate responses rather than a single interpretation of the exhibition.

The format leaves room for the visitor to make connections. A flavor may suggest a material, an aroma may summon an unexpected memory, or the contrast between two tastings may change the way a work is perceived. It is an exhibition visit with another set of senses involved in the looking.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 5:30–8:30 PM

🎟️ $50 · Includes a welcome drink and five tastings

Timed arrival windows in half-hour intervals from 5:30 through 7:30 PM · Allow approximately one hour · Culinary experience rather than a seated dinner

Limited capacity—advance ticket purchase strongly recommended.

📍 Tang Teaching Museum atrium, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

Tang Guide Tour

Isabelle Duperval ’28 · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum

Isabelle Duperval ’28 leads a student-guided visit through selected works at the Tang. With several exhibitions open, the tour offers a particular route through a museum that can otherwise pull a visitor in many directions at once.

The guide’s selections establish the route, but discussion makes a tour different from a solitary walk through the galleries. Someone notices a material, a figure, or an incongruous detail; another person reads it differently. Returning to the object often produces a better question than either person had at first.

This is a chance for sustained attention to a smaller number of works. Duperval’s perspective as a student adds another voice to the museum’s interpretation, while the conversation allows visitors to examine how an account of an artwork is built from what is actually there.

📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public

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🎬 FILM

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Princess Mononoke

Hayao Miyazaki · RPI / EMPAC

Ashitaka leaves home seeking a cure for a deadly curse and finds a conflict with no innocent side. Iron Town is consuming an ancient forest, but its leader, Lady Eboshi, also provides work and refuge to people excluded elsewhere. San, a human raised by wolves, defends the forest with a fury that leaves little room for sympathy toward its human enemies.

Miyazaki’s 1997 film gives that struggle an extraordinary physical world: mist-filled woods, enormous animal gods, industrial furnaces, and creatures whose transformations are both beautiful and terrifying. Joe Hisaishi’s score allows moments of stillness within a story capable of sudden violence. The hand-drawn images reward attention to small movements as much as spectacular ones.

Ashitaka’s task is to act without surrendering his judgment to either side’s hatred. That makes the film’s moral difficulty inseparable from its adventure. Protecting a community can mean damaging someone else’s home, and compassion does not erase the consequences. San and Eboshi remain formidable partly because each has reasons that the other cannot accept.

📅 Tuesday, November 10 · 7 PM

🎟️ $3 at the door

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🎭 PERFORMANCE & MUSIC

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An observer sees the completed movement; the dancer also knows the adjustments in perception, balance, and concentration that made it possible.

INTERFACE: Cognitive Science

Brett Fajen and Heidi Latsky · RPI / EMPAC

Moving through a room depends on a great deal that usually escapes notice: judging distance, processing visual information, anticipating an obstacle, and adjusting the body’s response. Cognitive scientist Brett Fajen studies those relationships among perception, action, and movement. Choreographer Heidi Latsky approaches related questions through the experience of dancers.

Their program includes a screening from Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey (2025), which shares dancers’ accounts of non-apparent neurological disabilities affecting information processing, movement control, and sensory input. The distinction between visible movement and invisible effort is central. An action that looks straightforward may depend on adjustments another person would never think to make.

Fajen and Latsky bring different kinds of knowledge to the subject: research into bodily learning and adaptation, and artistic work developed through the body itself. The film supplies specific experiences against which to consider the science, including the ways a change in perception can alter both daily movement and a creative practice.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6–7 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration

Limited capacity—EMPAC registrations often close well before the event. Register early.

📍 Beaudoin Theatre, Foy Hall, Siena University, Loudonville

Rent

Jonathan Larson · Siena University / Directed by Margaret E. Hall

The friends at the center of Rent have plenty to argue about: overdue bills, artistic compromises, romantic betrayals, and the obligations they owe one another. Their East Village community is noisy, untidy, affectionate, and often exasperating. The AIDS epidemic makes the possibility of loss immediate, but Larson gives the characters ambitions and irritations as well as illnesses.

The musical draws on Puccini’s La Bohème, carrying an older theatrical story about artists, poverty, and love into late twentieth-century New York. Its rock score moves between crowded ensemble numbers and moments when one voice admits a fear that conversation cannot accommodate. “Will I?” makes that fear communal; “Seasons of Love” asks how a life might be measured.

Siena’s production is directed by Margaret E. Hall. The show’s demands extend beyond its familiar songs: its friendships need the humor and friction of people who know one another too well. Without that unruly everyday life, the losses would be abstractions. Larson supplies both, allowing celebration and grief to occupy the same room.

📅 Thursday–Saturday, November 12–14 · 8 PM

📅 Sunday, November 15 · 3 PM

🎟️ Ticketed · Additional performances November 19–21

📍 Maureen Stapleton Theatre, Siek Campus Center, HVCC, Troy

📅 Thursday, November 12: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Friday, November 13: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Saturday, November 14: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Sunday, November 15: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

Indian Classical Music

Veena and Devesh Chandra · Hudson Valley Community College

Veena Chandra’s sitar and Devesh Chandra’s tabla produce very different kinds of sound. A sitar phrase can linger, bend, and gather ornament around a note; the tabla answers with a vocabulary of tones created through precise contact with its two drums. Their partnership places those resources within North Indian classical music and folk traditions.

Improvisation depends on the performers’ understanding of structure as much as their freedom within it. A phrase can be extended, answered, or returned to a rhythmic cycle with new emphasis. The listener hears both the established pattern and the decisions being made inside it.

Veena’s long performing and teaching career includes work at Skidmore and Williams. Devesh also works across several musical genres. Their shared experience supports the close listening required by this music, from the patient establishment of a melodic idea to exchanges in which rhythmic detail becomes increasingly intricate.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free

📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center, Union College, Schenectady

The cuatro’s paired strings add a ringing melodic voice to an evening drawing on jazz, Latin dance rhythms, and Puerto Rican jíbaro traditions.

Jazz Ensemble & Latin Percussion

Union College / With the Pedro José Pastrana Trio

Union’s Jazz Ensemble and Latin Percussion program share the evening with the Pedro José Pastrana Trio. Mambo, bossa nova, and bolero appear alongside Puerto Rican musical traditions associated with the cuatro and jíbaro music.

These styles ask different things of melody and rhythm. A bolero allows a tune to unfold with measured emphasis; a mambo gains force from coordinated rhythmic parts; bossa nova places its phrases against another kind of pulse. Pastrana’s Puerto Rican cuatro adds a bright, ringing string sound to the program’s range of textures.

The student ensembles and guest trio provide different scales of performance within one concert. Larger ensemble passages place the emphasis on coordinated parts, while a trio leaves individual lines more exposed. Across those settings, the rhythmic character of each tradition remains a defining part of the music.

📅 Wednesday, November 11 · 7:30 PM

🎟️ $20 · Free with Union ID · Tickets at the door

📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building, SUNY Schenectady, 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady

Ali Ryerson Quartet

A Place for Jazz · SUNY Schenectady

Ali Ryerson has spent five decades making the flute a leading jazz voice. Her more than two dozen albums and work with musicians including Kenny Barron, Roy Haynes, Stephane Grappelli, and Hubert Laws place her within a substantial history of small-group jazz. Her Jazz Flute Big Band extended that work to an ensemble built around an instrument often treated as a single color in a larger group.

Music was also a family business. Her father, guitarist Art Ryerson, worked with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and became a busy New York studio musician. Ali’s own training includes classical study, but her career has centered on the phrasing, harmonic knowledge, and rhythmic independence required of a jazz improviser.

At SUNY Schenectady, her quartet includes pianist Larry Ham, bassist Lou Pappas, and drummer Tom Melito. Ham’s background includes the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and Illinois Jacquet Big Band; Pappas and Melito bring extensive experience with jazz soloists and ensembles. Flute, piano, bass, and drums provide a relatively spare setting in which each musician’s choices are clearly audible.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 7 PM

🎟️ Advance $26.95 · At the door $25 · Students with ID $10

📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

Gershwin, Jazz, and the Music of Jewish Émigrés

JoAnn Falletta / The Orchestra Now · Bard College · Regional Extension

Gershwin’s An American in Paris is familiar concert-hall territory. The names surrounding it on this program—Ignatz Waghalter, Lazare Saminsky, Ernst Toch, and Louis Gruenberg—are much less familiar, although their careers belong to the same broad history of Jewish participation in American musical life.

Their routes to the United States were different. Saminsky and Gruenberg established American careers before the Nazi era. Waghalter and Toch fled persecution, leaving behind professional lives built in Europe. Migration could mean opportunity; exile meant the urgent task of beginning again after a world of colleagues, audiences, and institutions had been taken away.

Gershwin, born in America to Russian Jewish immigrants, represents another part of that story. His combination of concert forms with the sounds of American popular life became internationally recognizable. The other composers brought European training into a country whose music was changing through jazz, theater, recording, and the growth of orchestras.

JoAnn Falletta conducts The Orchestra Now in a program that places those histories beside one another. The familiar Gershwin work supplies a point of reference, but the lesser-heard composers make the larger claim: the Jewish contribution to the period extends well beyond the handful of names that remain on regular concert programs.

📅 Saturday, November 14 · 7–9:15 PM

📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2–4:15 PM

🎟️ Ticketed

📍 ETEC, UAlbany, 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany

📅 Saturday, November 14: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Sunday, November 15: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

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🔬 SCIENCE & FAMILY

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A material that behaves unexpectedly offers the beginning of an experiment: change the pressure, change the surface, and see whether the result changes too.

Nanovember: STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day

UAlbany / ETEC

Robots, LEGO challenges, unusual fluids, cybersecurity, and self-cleaning surfaces are among the subjects at UAlbany’s STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day. The activities, geared toward grades 2–8, range from objects children can build and handle to structures too small to examine with the unaided eye.

That range makes the scientific connections especially useful. A robot turns instructions into movement. A non-Newtonian fluid challenges the expectation that a liquid always responds to force in the same way. A thin film demonstrates how a nearly invisible change at a surface can alter an everyday property, such as the way water behaves on it.

Families can explore several subjects during the morning, with experiments and demonstrations providing a starting point for questions. The emphasis is on observable results: something moves, resists, changes, or responds differently than expected. From there, children have a reason to ask what caused it—and what might happen if they try something else.

📅 Saturday, November 14 · 9:30 AM–1:30 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration · Activities geared toward grades 2–8

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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD

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November 16–December 6

Biotech Connect

Hudson Valley Community College

Biotech Connect introduces participants to biotechnology through hands-on laboratory work and an examination of related career pathways. The five-hour program offers a practical encounter with work that depends on careful handling, measurement, and attention to procedure.

Laboratory tasks make the field’s demands concrete. Accuracy depends on a sequence of small actions, and consistency matters when a result must be reproduced. Participants can try that work directly while learning more about the occupations connected to it.

Participants who complete the full program receive a $100 stipend.

📅 Saturday, December 5 · 9 AM–2 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public · Registration required

Limited capacity—register early.

📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

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🔭 LONG-RANGE PLANNING

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December 7–March 7

Hansel and Gretel

Bard Conservatory / Fisher Center · Regional Extension

Humperdinck’s opera gives the familiar fairy tale a score that moves between folk-like melodies and a rich orchestral sound. The children’s hunger and quarrels establish a domestic world before the forest introduces its dangers, enchantments, and deceptive comforts.

Bard’s fully staged production features the Conservatory Orchestra under James Bagwell, graduate vocalists, and a children’s ensemble. The contrast between the simplicity of the children’s songs and the scale of the surrounding music is one of the opera’s pleasures: a small family story acquires the reach of a much larger imagined world.

📅 Friday, December 11 · 7 PM

📅 Sunday, December 13 · 2 PM

🎟️ Tickets from $20 · Sung in German with English supertitles · Advance ticket purchase recommended

📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC, RPI, 50 Eighth Street, Troy

Robotics makes questions about control and response physical: an instruction becomes a movement that someone else must interpret.

INTERFACE: Robotics

Qiujiang Levi Lu and John Wen · RPI / EMPAC

Qiujiang Levi Lu and John Wen bring artistic practice and robotics research into EMPAC’s INTERFACE series. The subject places machines’ physical actions at the center of an exchange between disciplines with different purposes and expectations.

Engineers work with control, response, and the conditions under which a system performs reliably. Artists may use those same capacities as material for an encounter with an audience. A machine’s movement belongs to both discussions: it can be measured as a technical result and interpreted as an action with expressive or social meaning.

📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration

Limited capacity—EMPAC registrations often close well before the event. Register early.

📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

Beethoven and Brahms: Part 1

Zachary Schwartzman / The Orchestra Now · Bard College · Regional Extension

Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica, and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony make a substantial pairing. Both demand close attention to the way a long orchestral argument develops, but they arrive at their conclusions through different kinds of tension and momentum.

Zachary Schwartzman conducts The Orchestra Now. Beethoven’s funeral march and variation finale occupy a different expressive world from the concentrated movement of Brahms’s final passacaglia. Hearing the two symphonies together places their orchestral weight, formal invention, and very different endings in direct comparison.

📅 Saturday, February 6, 2027 · 7 PM

📅 Sunday, February 7 · 2 PM

🎟️ Tickets from $15 · Purchase ahead of the performance weekend

📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC, RPI, 50 Eighth Street, Troy

INTERFACE: Mixed Reality

Lars Jan and Talis Reks · RPI / EMPAC

Mixed reality places digitally constructed information within an experience of physical space. Lars Jan and Talis Reks examine that overlap in another of EMPAC’s conversations between artistic and technological practice.

The subject involves more than what appears on a display. It includes where a participant looks, how a body moves, and what it means for several people to share a room while encountering an additional digital layer. Those practical questions also become artistic ones when the arrangement of attention and movement forms part of a work.

📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration

Limited capacity—EMPAC registrations often close well before the event. Register early.

📍 Arthur Zankel Music Center, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

A Well-Being Concert

Ensemble Connect · Skidmore College / Arthur Zankel Music Center

Ensemble Connect places the audience onstage around the musicians for a concert incorporating guided mindfulness. The arrangement changes a familiar concert-hall relationship: listeners occupy the performance space rather than looking toward it from rows of seats.

Close proximity makes the physical work of playing more apparent, from breath and preparation to the coordination among musicians. Guided portions direct attention toward listening itself. Chairs, mats, and cushions offer different ways to settle into a program concerned with concentration and the shared experience of music.

📅 Sunday, February 21, 2027 · 2 PM

🎟️ Ticketed · Seating options include chairs, mats, and cushions

The onstage format limits capacity. Advance ticket purchase recommended.

Fine Arts Building, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany · Hours and visiting information

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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS

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November 16, 2026–May 16, 2027

CORE CAMPUSES

Rent — Siena University, Loudonville — November 19–21, remaining performances — Details

This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs — November 20–December 5 — Details

Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — December 2–10 — Details

Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — February 24–March 3 — Details

The World Goes Round — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — March 18–21 — Details

The Country Wife — Siena University, Loudonville — April 8–17 — Details

🆕 NEW TO THE SIX-MONTH WINDOW — Seussical: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — May 5–13 — Details

🌎 REGIONAL EXTENSION THEATER

Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the Sun — Williams College, Williamstown — March 5, 2027 — Details

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🖼️ GALLERY LISTINGS

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UAlbany University Art Museum

Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core — Through April 2, 2027 — Details

mosie romney: ash whistle redress — Through April 2, 2027 — Details

Invitation to a Light Factory: Suzan Frecon / Marcella Durand — Through April 2, 2027 — Details

Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College

Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs · Hours and visiting information

Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2 B — Through November 29, 2026 — Details

Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are a Constellation — Through January 3, 2027 — Details

Julian LaVerdiere / Duke Riley — Through January 3, 2027 — Details

Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Through January 3, 2027 — Details

500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs — Through January 10, 2027 — Details

A Feeling of With — Through July 18, 2027 — Details

Sheila Pepe: When/Where We Rest — Through September 12, 2027 — Details

Art on Campus — Through October 3, 2027 — Details

Opalka Gallery, Russell Sage College

Light and Transient Causes — Through December 5, 2026 — Details

Crowell and West Galleries, Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts, Schenectady

Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, noon–5 PM; Thursday until 8 PM.

Union College

Practices — Through November 22, 2026 — Details

Audubon exhibition — Through November 25, 2026 — Details

Lally Reading Room, Schaffer Library, Union College, Schenectady · Visitor information

Conservation exhibition — Fall 2026; closing date not posted — Details

Beuth Atrium, Schaffer Library, Union College, Schenectady · Visitor information

Siena University

Midsemester exhibition — Through December 4, 2026 — Details

Hudson Valley Community College

Paul Mauren: Tracing Time — November 12–December 12, 2026 — Details

Hours: Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, 10 AM–4 PM; Wednesday, noon–7 PM; Saturday, noon–4 PM.

Thomas Lail: Garden — Ongoing — Details

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📅 YOUR WEEK, DAY BY DAY

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MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9

2–3 PM · Maxwell Pearce · HVCC · Details

5:30 PM · Tara Westover · Bard · Details

7:30 PM · Elliot Williams · UAlbany, Page Hall · Details

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10

6 PM · Nato Thompson · Skidmore, Tang · Details

7 PM · Princess Mononoke · RPI, EMPAC · Details

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11

7:30 PM · Jazz & Latin Percussion · Union · Details

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12

3–4 PM · Paul Mauren talk · HVCC · Details

4–6 PM · Mauren reception · HVCC · Details

4:30 PM · William Alexander · UAlbany · Details

6 PM · Gibson & Delton · Skidmore, Tang · Details

6 PM · Veena & Devesh Chandra · HVCC · Details

6–7 PM · Cognitive Science · RPI, EMPAC · Details

8 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13

11 AM–5 PM · Art, Education & AI · Bard · Details

5:30–8:30 PM · Culinary Experience · Opalka · Details

7 PM · Telling the Truth · UAlbany, Page Hall · Details

7 PM · Ali Ryerson · SUNY Schenectady · Details

8 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14

9:30 AM–1:30 PM · STEM Family Day · UAlbany · Details

7–9:15 PM · Gershwin & Jewish Émigrés · Bard · Details

8 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15

2 PM · Tang Guide Tour · Skidmore · Details

2–4:15 PM · Gershwin & Jewish Émigrés · Bard · Details

3 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

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What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.

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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.

Capital District

Lectures & Talks

Music

Theater

Art

Books

Alan Koslow

Nov 7, 2026

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Originally published at

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Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.

🏛️ 📚 🎶 🎭 🔬

What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.

The Goetz case exposed a divide between what prosecutors could establish in court and what Americans believed the shooting represented.

FIVE BULLETS, RENT, SITAR & TABLA—AND ART YOU CAN TASTE

Elliot Williams opens the week at UAlbany with a return to one of New York’s most divisive criminal cases. At Bard, Tara Westover reads from a body of work concerned with education, memory, and the cost of questioning the people who raised us. Thursday brings William Alexander’s science fiction about caring for young artificial intelligences, followed by a Friday symposium at Bard on what AI means for art and education.

There is plenty onstage as well. Siena opens Rent, Veena and Devesh Chandra perform on sitar and tabla at Hudson Valley Community College, and Ali Ryerson brings her jazz quartet to SUNY Schenectady. At Bard, JoAnn Falletta conducts a program placing Gershwin beside Jewish composers whose careers crossed Europe and America.

Art takes several forms this week: Paul Mauren discusses a new sculpture exhibition, Nato Thompson considers the work behind a creative life, and Opalka adds food to the gallery experience. Families can spend Saturday morning experimenting with robotics, unusual materials, and nanotechnology at UAlbany.

Opalka’s culinary event has limited timed-entry capacity. Advance ticket purchase is strongly recommended.

📣 HELP SPREAD THE WORD

It really helps when readers share Capital Region Curated.

If you work with a college department, program, gallery, museum, performing arts office, organization, campus newsletter or personal newsletter, I’d be grateful if you would share it with people who might want a weekly guide to public events on Capital Region campuses.

🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK

⭐ Top Picks — Elliot Williams, INTERFACE: Cognitive Science, Siena’s Rent, and Veena and Devesh Chandra.

📚 Ideas, Books & Conversation — Elliot Williams on the Bernie Goetz case, William Alexander on science fiction and AI, Tara Westover, truth and journalism, athlete and artist Maxwell Pearce, and art in the age of AI.

🎨 Art & Encounters — Nato Thompson, Mark Thomas Gibson in conversation with Jennifer Delton, Paul Mauren’s exhibition opening, Opalka’s culinary experience, and a student-led Tang tour.

🎬 Film — Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke at EMPAC.

🎭 Performance & Music — Movement and cognitive science, Rent, Indian classical music, Union’s jazz and Latin percussion concert, Ali Ryerson, and Gershwin alongside Jewish émigré composers.

🔬 Science & Family — UAlbany’s STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day.

🔥 Plan Ahead — HVCC’s hands-on Biotech Connect program.

🔭 Long-Range Planning — Opera and orchestral music at Bard, robotics and mixed reality at EMPAC, and Ensemble Connect’s onstage concert at Skidmore.

🎭 Future Theater — Upcoming campus productions through mid-May.

🖼️ Gallery Listings — Current exhibitions and installations, immediately after Future Theater.

📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK

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.

For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links open an event ready to save.

Where an organizer has not published an ending time, calendar entries use our standard 90-minute duration.

📍 BEFORE YOU GO

Event information is checked during preparation, but 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.

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⭐ TOP PICKS

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Five Bullets

Elliot Williams · UAlbany / Page Hall

Monday, November 9 · 7:30–8:30 PM

The Bernie Goetz subway shooting became much more than a criminal case. It exposed competing ideas about race, public safety, and self-defense in a city already divided by fear of crime. CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams revisits the shooting and its aftermath in Five Bullets, examining the evidence, the people involved, and the prosecution. His account follows the distance between what could be established in court and what Americans believed the case represented.

See Ideas, Books & Conversation below.

INTERFACE: Cognitive Science

Brett Fajen and Heidi Latsky · RPI / EMPAC

Thursday, November 12 · 6–7 PM

A dancer’s apparent ease can conceal substantial effort to process information, control movement, or respond to sensory changes. Choreographer Heidi Latsky and cognitive scientist Brett Fajen approach that experience through dance and research into perception. Their program includes a screening from Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey, which shares dancers’ experiences of non-apparent neurological disabilities. Fajen’s research into perception and action provides another way to examine the adaptations involved in moving through the world.

See Performance & Music below.

Rent

Siena University / Beaudoin Theatre

November 12–14 · 8 PM; November 15 · 3 PM

Jonathan Larson’s musical follows young artists and friends trying to pay the rent, make their work, and sustain their relationships in New York’s East Village during the AIDS epidemic. Its rock score gives voice to arguments about money, art, commitment, and the fear of losing people too soon. Directed by Margaret E. Hall, Siena’s production takes on a show in which the noise and humor of a makeshift community are inseparable from the grief behind “Seasons of Love” and “Will I?”

See Performance & Music below.

Indian Classical Music

Veena and Devesh Chandra · Hudson Valley Community College / Maureen Stapleton Theatre

Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM

Sitarist Veena Chandra and tabla player Devesh Chandra bring a long musical partnership to a program of North Indian classical music and folk traditions. The sitar’s sustained, ornamented lines and the tabla’s distinct tones support a detailed exchange between melody and rhythm. Veena’s teaching has included Skidmore and Williams, while Devesh’s work extends across several genres. Their shared experience provides the foundation for the improvisation through which each performance takes its particular form.

See Performance & Music below.

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📚 IDEAS, BOOKS & CONVERSATION

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Five Bullets

Elliot Williams · UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute

In December 1984, Bernie Goetz shot four young Black men on a New York City subway. The shooting and the ensuing prosecution became a national argument about race, crime, fear, and self-defense. For some, Goetz embodied resistance to a city they believed had become ungovernable. For others, the sympathy he received revealed how readily racial assumptions could shape the public’s judgment.

CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams revisits the case in Five Bullets. His account examines the people behind the headlines, the evidence, and the legal decisions that helped turn a violent encounter into a defining controversy of the decade. The prosecution took place in a courtroom; the argument over what the shooting meant spread through newspapers, politics, and everyday conversations.

Williams brings experience in federal law enforcement to a story that requires attention to both legal standards and public emotion. At its center is a persistent problem: a criminal trial must decide a particular case, even when the public has made it stand for everything it fears or resents about the world outside.

📅 Monday, November 9 · 7:30–8:30 PM

📍 Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, 135 Western Avenue, Albany

🎟️ Free · Book sale and signing

📍 Campus Center Multipurpose Room, UAlbany Uptown Campus, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany

Science Fiction and AI

William Alexander · UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute

What does an artificial intelligence need to learn after it becomes intelligent? In William Alexander’s Sunward, that question falls to a human space traveler responsible for juvenile AI—adolescent “baby bots” learning how to live among others. Her assignment resembles foster parenting, with its mixture of attachment, instruction, uncertainty, and responsibility.

Alexander, a Cuban-American writer, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for Goblin Secrets, a fantasy about a boy searching for his missing brother in a world of masks, theater, and magic. Sunward, his first science-fiction novel for adults, was a finalist for the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year.

The novel makes room for questions sometimes lost in arguments about computing power. Knowledge does not automatically confer judgment, and the ability to respond does not guarantee an understanding of others. Alexander approaches AI through the intimate work of caring for someone still learning what their actions mean. A conversation and audience Q&A form part of UAlbany’s AI & Society series.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 4:30 PM

📍 Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, 135 Western Avenue, Albany

Telling the Truth in a Post-Truth World

Jonathan Alter and Devlin Barrett · UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute

The Writers Institute’s annual post-election discussion returns with journalists Jonathan Alter and Devlin Barrett. Both work in fields where the people supplying information often have a substantial interest in how the story is told. The challenge is to establish what happened when access is restricted, accounts conflict, and public loyalties have already hardened.

Alter’s writing combines political reporting with historical perspective. Barrett follows government, law enforcement, and the justice system. Their work depends on documents, corroboration, and the ability to distinguish what a source knows from what that source wants a reporter to believe.

Those practical decisions belong at the center of a discussion about truth. A reporter may have convincing evidence for one part of a story and unanswered questions about another; conveying that distinction is part of the job. The program includes audience questions, opening the conversation to the difficulties readers face when evaluating competing accounts of public events.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 7 PM

🎟️ Free

📍 Robert Kelly Multipurpose Room, Campus Center North, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

In Educated, the freedom to question comes with the possibility of losing the family whose account of the world Westover once shared.

A Reading with Tara Westover

Tara Westover · Bard College · Regional Extension

Tara Westover’s memoir Educated follows her journey from an isolated childhood in Idaho to university study and a doctorate at Cambridge. Its deepest conflicts concern what happens along the way: an education introduces unfamiliar subjects and institutions, but also the possibility that the explanations a child has inherited may be incomplete or wrong.

Westover writes about the strain that discovery places on family loyalty. To describe her own experiences honestly, she must question people she loves and reconsider events they remember differently. Academic success does not resolve those disagreements. It gives her a language for understanding them while making the distance from home more difficult to ignore.

The book’s treatment of memory is especially careful. Conflicting recollections remain part of the account, rather than obstacles conveniently removed from it. Westover’s reading at Bard offers the words themselves—the choices of emphasis, detail, and restraint through which she tells a story of intellectual independence and its personal cost.

📅 Monday, November 9 · 5:30 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public

📍 McDonough Sports Complex gymnasium, Hudson Valley Community College, Troy

The Art of an Athlete

Maxwell Pearce · Hudson Valley Community College

Maxwell Pearce’s working materials include objects familiar from the basketball court. Shoelaces and sports equipment become elements of mixed-media artwork, carrying the associations of practice, competition, preparation, and repetition into the studio. His career as a Harlem Globetrotter supplies more than a subject; it supplies materials and experiences.

Pearce played basketball at SUNY Purchase before developing his professional athletic career. His art brings that physical history into objects that ask to be looked at in another way. Equipment usually understood through use can acquire a different significance when its form, texture, or arrangement becomes the focus.

At HVCC, Pearce will discuss the relationship between those parts of his life. The overlap is a practical one: both depend on habits developed over time, repeated decisions, and an ability to respond to what is happening in front of him. His artwork makes the connection visible through the things an athlete handles every day.

📅 Monday, November 9 · 2–3 PM

🎟️ Open to the public · RSVP requested

📍 Collection Teaching Gallery, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

After Expertise: Art and Education in the Age of AI

Bard College / Center for Curatorial Studies · Regional Extension

An image can now be generated in seconds. Deciding whether it is any good, understanding what it draws upon, and knowing what to teach the person who made it remain much harder problems. Bard’s symposium addresses those questions through art, education, and the changing meaning of expertise.

Participants include Michelle Kuo of the Museum of Modern Art, Suzanne Kite of the Indigenous AI research community, and Catherine Griffiths of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Their different fields place them in different relationships to technology: collecting and interpreting art, developing approaches to AI, and teaching students whose tools are changing rapidly.

The program includes panels, a roundtable, and a reception. Questions of authorship and judgment run through the subject. Technical fluency once offered one way to recognize accomplishment; when software can supply a polished surface, teachers and artists face a more demanding task of distinguishing an informed choice from an impressive-looking result.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 11 AM–5 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public

📍 Payne Room, Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

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🎨 ART & ENCOUNTERS

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Behind a public art project are less visible decisions about collaborators, money, teaching, and the institutions willing to support an experiment.

Making a Life of Art

Nato Thompson · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum

Making art and making a life in art are related but different undertakings. Nato Thompson has worked on both sides of that distinction as a curator, writer, and educator. During his decade as chief curator at Creative Time, from 2007 to 2017, he helped develop projects that brought artists into public spaces and into direct contact with social and political questions.

His work also includes alternative education, publishing, and the organizations through which artists find collaborators and sustain a practice. Those activities involve decisions rarely visible in a finished exhibition: where people learn, who has access to a workspace, how a project is supported, and what happens when its ambitions do not fit an established institution.

Thompson’s talk draws on that experience. The title reaches beyond inspiration to the working conditions of a creative life—the time, relationships, and collective effort behind projects that may appear, from the outside, to be the product of an individual vision.

📅 Tuesday, November 10 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free

📍 Wachenheim Gallery, Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

Dunkerley Dialogue

Mark Thomas Gibson and Jennifer Delton · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum

Mark Thomas Gibson draws on comics, caricature, and history painting to address American public life. The combination gives his paintings several kinds of authority to work with—and against. A caricature exaggerates, a comic compresses action, and a history painting presents a scene as something worthy of collective memory.

Historian Jennifer Delton studies twentieth-century American political and social history, including race, civil rights, and business. Their conversation places her attention to institutions and historical circumstances beside Gibson’s use of figures, symbols, and visual narrative.

The setting matters here: the dialogue takes place in the gallery, with the paintings available as evidence. Broad questions about race, citizenship, and power can be tested against a particular gesture, arrangement, or image. Gibson’s choices invite the same scrutiny as any account of history: what occupies the foreground, who is pushed aside, and what the scene asks us to believe.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free

Tracing Time

Paul Mauren · Hudson Valley Community College / Teaching Gallery

Paul Mauren’s sculptures bring constructed forms into contact with materials and structures associated with the natural world. Their arrangements can suggest balance, pressure, or instability. Looking at them involves a physical reckoning: what supports a form, what threatens it, and how its apparent weight changes as the viewer moves.

Mauren taught at The College of Saint Rose from 1978 to 2018. Tracing Time, his second exhibition at HVCC, places a long regional career within the intimate setting of the Teaching Gallery. The exhibition title allows several readings, from the time spent making an object to the accumulated choices through which a sculptor’s work develops.

An artist’s talk precedes the opening reception. Together, they provide access to the work and to Mauren’s account of its construction. Materials that might initially seem incidental become easier to examine once the maker has explained what a particular joint, surface, or opposing form required.

📅 Thursday, November 12

Artist talk: 3–4 PM — Bulmer Telecommunications Center auditorium, HVCC, Troy

Opening reception: 4–6 PM — Teaching Gallery, Administration Building, HVCC, Troy

🎟️ Both free and open to the public

📍 Opalka Gallery, Russell Sage College, 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany

📅 Artist talk: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Reception: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

A flavor disappears almost as soon as it is experienced, but its associations can outlast the tasting—a fitting complication for an exhibition concerned with transient causes.

Light and Transient Causes: A Culinary Experience

Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery · Current-Week Must-Catch

Opalka adds taste and scent to the gallery experience with five artist-inspired tastings connected to Light and Transient Causes. The event includes a welcome drink and a sequence of small culinary encounters within the exhibition.

Food introduces a different kind of attention. An artwork can be revisited across the room; a flavor changes as it is tasted and then becomes a memory. Texture, aroma, and association enter the experience alongside the objects on view. The five tastings offer separate responses rather than a single interpretation of the exhibition.

The format leaves room for the visitor to make connections. A flavor may suggest a material, an aroma may summon an unexpected memory, or the contrast between two tastings may change the way a work is perceived. It is an exhibition visit with another set of senses involved in the looking.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 5:30–8:30 PM

🎟️ $50 · Includes a welcome drink and five tastings

Timed arrival windows in half-hour intervals from 5:30 through 7:30 PM · Allow approximately one hour · Culinary experience rather than a seated dinner

Limited capacity—advance ticket purchase strongly recommended.

📍 Tang Teaching Museum atrium, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

Tang Guide Tour

Isabelle Duperval ’28 · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum

Isabelle Duperval ’28 leads a student-guided visit through selected works at the Tang. With several exhibitions open, the tour offers a particular route through a museum that can otherwise pull a visitor in many directions at once.

The guide’s selections establish the route, but discussion makes a tour different from a solitary walk through the galleries. Someone notices a material, a figure, or an incongruous detail; another person reads it differently. Returning to the object often produces a better question than either person had at first.

This is a chance for sustained attention to a smaller number of works. Duperval’s perspective as a student adds another voice to the museum’s interpretation, while the conversation allows visitors to examine how an account of an artwork is built from what is actually there.

📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public

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🎬 FILM

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Princess Mononoke

Hayao Miyazaki · RPI / EMPAC

Ashitaka leaves home seeking a cure for a deadly curse and finds a conflict with no innocent side. Iron Town is consuming an ancient forest, but its leader, Lady Eboshi, also provides work and refuge to people excluded elsewhere. San, a human raised by wolves, defends the forest with a fury that leaves little room for sympathy toward its human enemies.

Miyazaki’s 1997 film gives that struggle an extraordinary physical world: mist-filled woods, enormous animal gods, industrial furnaces, and creatures whose transformations are both beautiful and terrifying. Joe Hisaishi’s score allows moments of stillness within a story capable of sudden violence. The hand-drawn images reward attention to small movements as much as spectacular ones.

Ashitaka’s task is to act without surrendering his judgment to either side’s hatred. That makes the film’s moral difficulty inseparable from its adventure. Protecting a community can mean damaging someone else’s home, and compassion does not erase the consequences. San and Eboshi remain formidable partly because each has reasons that the other cannot accept.

📅 Tuesday, November 10 · 7 PM

🎟️ $3 at the door

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🎭 PERFORMANCE & MUSIC

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An observer sees the completed movement; the dancer also knows the adjustments in perception, balance, and concentration that made it possible.

INTERFACE: Cognitive Science

Brett Fajen and Heidi Latsky · RPI / EMPAC

Moving through a room depends on a great deal that usually escapes notice: judging distance, processing visual information, anticipating an obstacle, and adjusting the body’s response. Cognitive scientist Brett Fajen studies those relationships among perception, action, and movement. Choreographer Heidi Latsky approaches related questions through the experience of dancers.

Their program includes a screening from Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey (2025), which shares dancers’ accounts of non-apparent neurological disabilities affecting information processing, movement control, and sensory input. The distinction between visible movement and invisible effort is central. An action that looks straightforward may depend on adjustments another person would never think to make.

Fajen and Latsky bring different kinds of knowledge to the subject: research into bodily learning and adaptation, and artistic work developed through the body itself. The film supplies specific experiences against which to consider the science, including the ways a change in perception can alter both daily movement and a creative practice.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6–7 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration

Limited capacity—EMPAC registrations often close well before the event. Register early.

📍 Beaudoin Theatre, Foy Hall, Siena University, Loudonville

Rent

Jonathan Larson · Siena University / Directed by Margaret E. Hall

The friends at the center of Rent have plenty to argue about: overdue bills, artistic compromises, romantic betrayals, and the obligations they owe one another. Their East Village community is noisy, untidy, affectionate, and often exasperating. The AIDS epidemic makes the possibility of loss immediate, but Larson gives the characters ambitions and irritations as well as illnesses.

The musical draws on Puccini’s La Bohème, carrying an older theatrical story about artists, poverty, and love into late twentieth-century New York. Its rock score moves between crowded ensemble numbers and moments when one voice admits a fear that conversation cannot accommodate. “Will I?” makes that fear communal; “Seasons of Love” asks how a life might be measured.

Siena’s production is directed by Margaret E. Hall. The show’s demands extend beyond its familiar songs: its friendships need the humor and friction of people who know one another too well. Without that unruly everyday life, the losses would be abstractions. Larson supplies both, allowing celebration and grief to occupy the same room.

📅 Thursday–Saturday, November 12–14 · 8 PM

📅 Sunday, November 15 · 3 PM

🎟️ Ticketed · Additional performances November 19–21

📍 Maureen Stapleton Theatre, Siek Campus Center, HVCC, Troy

📅 Thursday, November 12: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Friday, November 13: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Saturday, November 14: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Sunday, November 15: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

Indian Classical Music

Veena and Devesh Chandra · Hudson Valley Community College

Veena Chandra’s sitar and Devesh Chandra’s tabla produce very different kinds of sound. A sitar phrase can linger, bend, and gather ornament around a note; the tabla answers with a vocabulary of tones created through precise contact with its two drums. Their partnership places those resources within North Indian classical music and folk traditions.

Improvisation depends on the performers’ understanding of structure as much as their freedom within it. A phrase can be extended, answered, or returned to a rhythmic cycle with new emphasis. The listener hears both the established pattern and the decisions being made inside it.

Veena’s long performing and teaching career includes work at Skidmore and Williams. Devesh also works across several musical genres. Their shared experience supports the close listening required by this music, from the patient establishment of a melodic idea to exchanges in which rhythmic detail becomes increasingly intricate.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free

📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center, Union College, Schenectady

The cuatro’s paired strings add a ringing melodic voice to an evening drawing on jazz, Latin dance rhythms, and Puerto Rican jíbaro traditions.

Jazz Ensemble & Latin Percussion

Union College / With the Pedro José Pastrana Trio

Union’s Jazz Ensemble and Latin Percussion program share the evening with the Pedro José Pastrana Trio. Mambo, bossa nova, and bolero appear alongside Puerto Rican musical traditions associated with the cuatro and jíbaro music.

These styles ask different things of melody and rhythm. A bolero allows a tune to unfold with measured emphasis; a mambo gains force from coordinated rhythmic parts; bossa nova places its phrases against another kind of pulse. Pastrana’s Puerto Rican cuatro adds a bright, ringing string sound to the program’s range of textures.

The student ensembles and guest trio provide different scales of performance within one concert. Larger ensemble passages place the emphasis on coordinated parts, while a trio leaves individual lines more exposed. Across those settings, the rhythmic character of each tradition remains a defining part of the music.

📅 Wednesday, November 11 · 7:30 PM

🎟️ $20 · Free with Union ID · Tickets at the door

📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building, SUNY Schenectady, 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady

Ali Ryerson Quartet

A Place for Jazz · SUNY Schenectady

Ali Ryerson has spent five decades making the flute a leading jazz voice. Her more than two dozen albums and work with musicians including Kenny Barron, Roy Haynes, Stephane Grappelli, and Hubert Laws place her within a substantial history of small-group jazz. Her Jazz Flute Big Band extended that work to an ensemble built around an instrument often treated as a single color in a larger group.

Music was also a family business. Her father, guitarist Art Ryerson, worked with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and became a busy New York studio musician. Ali’s own training includes classical study, but her career has centered on the phrasing, harmonic knowledge, and rhythmic independence required of a jazz improviser.

At SUNY Schenectady, her quartet includes pianist Larry Ham, bassist Lou Pappas, and drummer Tom Melito. Ham’s background includes the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and Illinois Jacquet Big Band; Pappas and Melito bring extensive experience with jazz soloists and ensembles. Flute, piano, bass, and drums provide a relatively spare setting in which each musician’s choices are clearly audible.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 7 PM

🎟️ Advance $26.95 · At the door $25 · Students with ID $10

📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

Gershwin, Jazz, and the Music of Jewish Émigrés

JoAnn Falletta / The Orchestra Now · Bard College · Regional Extension

Gershwin’s An American in Paris is familiar concert-hall territory. The names surrounding it on this program—Ignatz Waghalter, Lazare Saminsky, Ernst Toch, and Louis Gruenberg—are much less familiar, although their careers belong to the same broad history of Jewish participation in American musical life.

Their routes to the United States were different. Saminsky and Gruenberg established American careers before the Nazi era. Waghalter and Toch fled persecution, leaving behind professional lives built in Europe. Migration could mean opportunity; exile meant the urgent task of beginning again after a world of colleagues, audiences, and institutions had been taken away.

Gershwin, born in America to Russian Jewish immigrants, represents another part of that story. His combination of concert forms with the sounds of American popular life became internationally recognizable. The other composers brought European training into a country whose music was changing through jazz, theater, recording, and the growth of orchestras.

JoAnn Falletta conducts The Orchestra Now in a program that places those histories beside one another. The familiar Gershwin work supplies a point of reference, but the lesser-heard composers make the larger claim: the Jewish contribution to the period extends well beyond the handful of names that remain on regular concert programs.

📅 Saturday, November 14 · 7–9:15 PM

📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2–4:15 PM

🎟️ Ticketed

📍 ETEC, UAlbany, 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany

📅 Saturday, November 14: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Sunday, November 15: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

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🔬 SCIENCE & FAMILY

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A material that behaves unexpectedly offers the beginning of an experiment: change the pressure, change the surface, and see whether the result changes too.

Nanovember: STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day

UAlbany / ETEC

Robots, LEGO challenges, unusual fluids, cybersecurity, and self-cleaning surfaces are among the subjects at UAlbany’s STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day. The activities, geared toward grades 2–8, range from objects children can build and handle to structures too small to examine with the unaided eye.

That range makes the scientific connections especially useful. A robot turns instructions into movement. A non-Newtonian fluid challenges the expectation that a liquid always responds to force in the same way. A thin film demonstrates how a nearly invisible change at a surface can alter an everyday property, such as the way water behaves on it.

Families can explore several subjects during the morning, with experiments and demonstrations providing a starting point for questions. The emphasis is on observable results: something moves, resists, changes, or responds differently than expected. From there, children have a reason to ask what caused it—and what might happen if they try something else.

📅 Saturday, November 14 · 9:30 AM–1:30 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration · Activities geared toward grades 2–8

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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD

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November 16–December 6

Biotech Connect

Hudson Valley Community College

Biotech Connect introduces participants to biotechnology through hands-on laboratory work and an examination of related career pathways. The five-hour program offers a practical encounter with work that depends on careful handling, measurement, and attention to procedure.

Laboratory tasks make the field’s demands concrete. Accuracy depends on a sequence of small actions, and consistency matters when a result must be reproduced. Participants can try that work directly while learning more about the occupations connected to it.

Participants who complete the full program receive a $100 stipend.

📅 Saturday, December 5 · 9 AM–2 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public · Registration required

Limited capacity—register early.

📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

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🔭 LONG-RANGE PLANNING

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December 7–March 7

Hansel and Gretel

Bard Conservatory / Fisher Center · Regional Extension

Humperdinck’s opera gives the familiar fairy tale a score that moves between folk-like melodies and a rich orchestral sound. The children’s hunger and quarrels establish a domestic world before the forest introduces its dangers, enchantments, and deceptive comforts.

Bard’s fully staged production features the Conservatory Orchestra under James Bagwell, graduate vocalists, and a children’s ensemble. The contrast between the simplicity of the children’s songs and the scale of the surrounding music is one of the opera’s pleasures: a small family story acquires the reach of a much larger imagined world.

📅 Friday, December 11 · 7 PM

📅 Sunday, December 13 · 2 PM

🎟️ Tickets from $20 · Sung in German with English supertitles · Advance ticket purchase recommended

📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC, RPI, 50 Eighth Street, Troy

Robotics makes questions about control and response physical: an instruction becomes a movement that someone else must interpret.

INTERFACE: Robotics

Qiujiang Levi Lu and John Wen · RPI / EMPAC

Qiujiang Levi Lu and John Wen bring artistic practice and robotics research into EMPAC’s INTERFACE series. The subject places machines’ physical actions at the center of an exchange between disciplines with different purposes and expectations.

Engineers work with control, response, and the conditions under which a system performs reliably. Artists may use those same capacities as material for an encounter with an audience. A machine’s movement belongs to both discussions: it can be measured as a technical result and interpreted as an action with expressive or social meaning.

📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration

Limited capacity—EMPAC registrations often close well before the event. Register early.

📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

Beethoven and Brahms: Part 1

Zachary Schwartzman / The Orchestra Now · Bard College · Regional Extension

Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica, and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony make a substantial pairing. Both demand close attention to the way a long orchestral argument develops, but they arrive at their conclusions through different kinds of tension and momentum.

Zachary Schwartzman conducts The Orchestra Now. Beethoven’s funeral march and variation finale occupy a different expressive world from the concentrated movement of Brahms’s final passacaglia. Hearing the two symphonies together places their orchestral weight, formal invention, and very different endings in direct comparison.

📅 Saturday, February 6, 2027 · 7 PM

📅 Sunday, February 7 · 2 PM

🎟️ Tickets from $15 · Purchase ahead of the performance weekend

📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC, RPI, 50 Eighth Street, Troy

INTERFACE: Mixed Reality

Lars Jan and Talis Reks · RPI / EMPAC

Mixed reality places digitally constructed information within an experience of physical space. Lars Jan and Talis Reks examine that overlap in another of EMPAC’s conversations between artistic and technological practice.

The subject involves more than what appears on a display. It includes where a participant looks, how a body moves, and what it means for several people to share a room while encountering an additional digital layer. Those practical questions also become artistic ones when the arrangement of attention and movement forms part of a work.

📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration

Limited capacity—EMPAC registrations often close well before the event. Register early.

📍 Arthur Zankel Music Center, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

A Well-Being Concert

Ensemble Connect · Skidmore College / Arthur Zankel Music Center

Ensemble Connect places the audience onstage around the musicians for a concert incorporating guided mindfulness. The arrangement changes a familiar concert-hall relationship: listeners occupy the performance space rather than looking toward it from rows of seats.

Close proximity makes the physical work of playing more apparent, from breath and preparation to the coordination among musicians. Guided portions direct attention toward listening itself. Chairs, mats, and cushions offer different ways to settle into a program concerned with concentration and the shared experience of music.

📅 Sunday, February 21, 2027 · 2 PM

🎟️ Ticketed · Seating options include chairs, mats, and cushions

The onstage format limits capacity. Advance ticket purchase recommended.

Fine Arts Building, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany · Hours and visiting information

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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS

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November 16, 2026–May 16, 2027

CORE CAMPUSES

Rent — Siena University, Loudonville — November 19–21, remaining performances — Details

This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs — November 20–December 5 — Details

Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — December 2–10 — Details

Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — February 24–March 3 — Details

The World Goes Round — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — March 18–21 — Details

The Country Wife — Siena University, Loudonville — April 8–17 — Details

🆕 NEW TO THE SIX-MONTH WINDOW — Seussical: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — May 5–13 — Details

🌎 REGIONAL EXTENSION THEATER

Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the Sun — Williams College, Williamstown — March 5, 2027 — Details

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🖼️ GALLERY LISTINGS

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UAlbany University Art Museum

Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core — Through April 2, 2027 — Details

mosie romney: ash whistle redress — Through April 2, 2027 — Details

Invitation to a Light Factory: Suzan Frecon / Marcella Durand — Through April 2, 2027 — Details

Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College

Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs · Hours and visiting information

Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2 B — Through November 29, 2026 — Details

Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are a Constellation — Through January 3, 2027 — Details

Julian LaVerdiere / Duke Riley — Through January 3, 2027 — Details

Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Through January 3, 2027 — Details

500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs — Through January 10, 2027 — Details

A Feeling of With — Through July 18, 2027 — Details

Sheila Pepe: When/Where We Rest — Through September 12, 2027 — Details

Art on Campus — Through October 3, 2027 — Details

Opalka Gallery, Russell Sage College

Light and Transient Causes — Through December 5, 2026 — Details

Crowell and West Galleries, Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts, Schenectady

Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, noon–5 PM; Thursday until 8 PM.

Union College

Practices — Through November 22, 2026 — Details

Audubon exhibition — Through November 25, 2026 — Details

Lally Reading Room, Schaffer Library, Union College, Schenectady · Visitor information

Conservation exhibition — Fall 2026; closing date not posted — Details

Beuth Atrium, Schaffer Library, Union College, Schenectady · Visitor information

Siena University

Midsemester exhibition — Through December 4, 2026 — Details

Hudson Valley Community College

Paul Mauren: Tracing Time — November 12–December 12, 2026 — Details

Hours: Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, 10 AM–4 PM; Wednesday, noon–7 PM; Saturday, noon–4 PM.

Thomas Lail: Garden — Ongoing — Details

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📅 YOUR WEEK, DAY BY DAY

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MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9

2–3 PM · Maxwell Pearce · HVCC · Details

5:30 PM · Tara Westover · Bard · Details

7:30 PM · Elliot Williams · UAlbany, Page Hall · Details

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10

6 PM · Nato Thompson · Skidmore, Tang · Details

7 PM · Princess Mononoke · RPI, EMPAC · Details

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11

7:30 PM · Jazz & Latin Percussion · Union · Details

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12

3–4 PM · Paul Mauren talk · HVCC · Details

4–6 PM · Mauren reception · HVCC · Details

4:30 PM · William Alexander · UAlbany · Details

6 PM · Gibson & Delton · Skidmore, Tang · Details

6 PM · Veena & Devesh Chandra · HVCC · Details

6–7 PM · Cognitive Science · RPI, EMPAC · Details

8 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13

11 AM–5 PM · Art, Education & AI · Bard · Details

5:30–8:30 PM · Culinary Experience · Opalka · Details

7 PM · Telling the Truth · UAlbany, Page Hall · Details

7 PM · Ali Ryerson · SUNY Schenectady · Details

8 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14

9:30 AM–1:30 PM · STEM Family Day · UAlbany · Details

7–9:15 PM · Gershwin & Jewish Émigrés · Bard · Details

8 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15

2 PM · Tang Guide Tour · Skidmore · Details

2–4:15 PM · Gershwin & Jewish Émigrés · Bard · Details

3 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

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💬 HELP SHAPE THE NEXT ISSUE

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Have a campus event to suggest, a correction, or a report from something you attended? Write to Alan Koslow.

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🤝 COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER PARTNERS

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A local source for Jewish community news, culture, events and stories.

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A guide to Capital Region events, arts and culture, food and music.

Interested in becoming a community newsletter partner? Contact Alan Koslow.

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Capital Region Curated — Edited by Alan Koslow

What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.

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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.

Capital District

Lectures & Talks

Music

Theater

Art

Books

Alan Koslow

Nov 7, 2026

32

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Originally published at

Substack: Capital Region Curated

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Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.

🏛️ 📚 🎶 🎭 🔬

What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.

The Goetz case exposed a divide between what prosecutors could establish in court and what Americans believed the shooting represented.

FIVE BULLETS, RENT, SITAR & TABLA—AND ART YOU CAN TASTE

Elliot Williams opens the week at UAlbany with a return to one of New York’s most divisive criminal cases. At Bard, Tara Westover reads from a body of work concerned with education, memory, and the cost of questioning the people who raised us. Thursday brings William Alexander’s science fiction about caring for young artificial intelligences, followed by a Friday symposium at Bard on what AI means for art and education.

There is plenty onstage as well. Siena opens Rent, Veena and Devesh Chandra perform on sitar and tabla at Hudson Valley Community College, and Ali Ryerson brings her jazz quartet to SUNY Schenectady. At Bard, JoAnn Falletta conducts a program placing Gershwin beside Jewish composers whose careers crossed Europe and America.

Art takes several forms this week: Paul Mauren discusses a new sculpture exhibition, Nato Thompson considers the work behind a creative life, and Opalka adds food to the gallery experience. Families can spend Saturday morning experimenting with robotics, unusual materials, and nanotechnology at UAlbany.

Opalka’s culinary event has limited timed-entry capacity. Advance ticket purchase is strongly recommended.

📣 HELP SPREAD THE WORD

It really helps when readers share Capital Region Curated.

If you work with a college department, program, gallery, museum, performing arts office, organization, campus newsletter or personal newsletter, I’d be grateful if you would share it with people who might want a weekly guide to public events on Capital Region campuses.

🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK

⭐ Top Picks — Elliot Williams, INTERFACE: Cognitive Science, Siena’s Rent, and Veena and Devesh Chandra.

📚 Ideas, Books & Conversation — Elliot Williams on the Bernie Goetz case, William Alexander on science fiction and AI, Tara Westover, truth and journalism, athlete and artist Maxwell Pearce, and art in the age of AI.

🎨 Art & Encounters — Nato Thompson, Mark Thomas Gibson in conversation with Jennifer Delton, Paul Mauren’s exhibition opening, Opalka’s culinary experience, and a student-led Tang tour.

🎬 Film — Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke at EMPAC.

🎭 Performance & Music — Movement and cognitive science, Rent, Indian classical music, Union’s jazz and Latin percussion concert, Ali Ryerson, and Gershwin alongside Jewish émigré composers.

🔬 Science & Family — UAlbany’s STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day.

🔥 Plan Ahead — HVCC’s hands-on Biotech Connect program.

🔭 Long-Range Planning — Opera and orchestral music at Bard, robotics and mixed reality at EMPAC, and Ensemble Connect’s onstage concert at Skidmore.

🎭 Future Theater — Upcoming campus productions through mid-May.

🖼️ Gallery Listings — Current exhibitions and installations, immediately after Future Theater.

📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK

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.

For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links open an event ready to save.

Where an organizer has not published an ending time, calendar entries use our standard 90-minute duration.

📍 BEFORE YOU GO

Event information is checked during preparation, but 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.

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⭐ TOP PICKS

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Five Bullets

Elliot Williams · UAlbany / Page Hall

Monday, November 9 · 7:30–8:30 PM

The Bernie Goetz subway shooting became much more than a criminal case. It exposed competing ideas about race, public safety, and self-defense in a city already divided by fear of crime. CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams revisits the shooting and its aftermath in Five Bullets, examining the evidence, the people involved, and the prosecution. His account follows the distance between what could be established in court and what Americans believed the case represented.

See Ideas, Books & Conversation below.

INTERFACE: Cognitive Science

Brett Fajen and Heidi Latsky · RPI / EMPAC

Thursday, November 12 · 6–7 PM

A dancer’s apparent ease can conceal substantial effort to process information, control movement, or respond to sensory changes. Choreographer Heidi Latsky and cognitive scientist Brett Fajen approach that experience through dance and research into perception. Their program includes a screening from Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey, which shares dancers’ experiences of non-apparent neurological disabilities. Fajen’s research into perception and action provides another way to examine the adaptations involved in moving through the world.

See Performance & Music below.

Rent

Siena University / Beaudoin Theatre

November 12–14 · 8 PM; November 15 · 3 PM

Jonathan Larson’s musical follows young artists and friends trying to pay the rent, make their work, and sustain their relationships in New York’s East Village during the AIDS epidemic. Its rock score gives voice to arguments about money, art, commitment, and the fear of losing people too soon. Directed by Margaret E. Hall, Siena’s production takes on a show in which the noise and humor of a makeshift community are inseparable from the grief behind “Seasons of Love” and “Will I?”

See Performance & Music below.

Indian Classical Music

Veena and Devesh Chandra · Hudson Valley Community College / Maureen Stapleton Theatre

Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM

Sitarist Veena Chandra and tabla player Devesh Chandra bring a long musical partnership to a program of North Indian classical music and folk traditions. The sitar’s sustained, ornamented lines and the tabla’s distinct tones support a detailed exchange between melody and rhythm. Veena’s teaching has included Skidmore and Williams, while Devesh’s work extends across several genres. Their shared experience provides the foundation for the improvisation through which each performance takes its particular form.

See Performance & Music below.

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📚 IDEAS, BOOKS & CONVERSATION

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Five Bullets

Elliot Williams · UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute

In December 1984, Bernie Goetz shot four young Black men on a New York City subway. The shooting and the ensuing prosecution became a national argument about race, crime, fear, and self-defense. For some, Goetz embodied resistance to a city they believed had become ungovernable. For others, the sympathy he received revealed how readily racial assumptions could shape the public’s judgment.

CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams revisits the case in Five Bullets. His account examines the people behind the headlines, the evidence, and the legal decisions that helped turn a violent encounter into a defining controversy of the decade. The prosecution took place in a courtroom; the argument over what the shooting meant spread through newspapers, politics, and everyday conversations.

Williams brings experience in federal law enforcement to a story that requires attention to both legal standards and public emotion. At its center is a persistent problem: a criminal trial must decide a particular case, even when the public has made it stand for everything it fears or resents about the world outside.

📅 Monday, November 9 · 7:30–8:30 PM

📍 Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, 135 Western Avenue, Albany

🎟️ Free · Book sale and signing

📍 Campus Center Multipurpose Room, UAlbany Uptown Campus, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany

Science Fiction and AI

William Alexander · UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute

What does an artificial intelligence need to learn after it becomes intelligent? In William Alexander’s Sunward, that question falls to a human space traveler responsible for juvenile AI—adolescent “baby bots” learning how to live among others. Her assignment resembles foster parenting, with its mixture of attachment, instruction, uncertainty, and responsibility.

Alexander, a Cuban-American writer, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for Goblin Secrets, a fantasy about a boy searching for his missing brother in a world of masks, theater, and magic. Sunward, his first science-fiction novel for adults, was a finalist for the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year.

The novel makes room for questions sometimes lost in arguments about computing power. Knowledge does not automatically confer judgment, and the ability to respond does not guarantee an understanding of others. Alexander approaches AI through the intimate work of caring for someone still learning what their actions mean. A conversation and audience Q&A form part of UAlbany’s AI & Society series.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 4:30 PM

📍 Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, 135 Western Avenue, Albany

Telling the Truth in a Post-Truth World

Jonathan Alter and Devlin Barrett · UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute

The Writers Institute’s annual post-election discussion returns with journalists Jonathan Alter and Devlin Barrett. Both work in fields where the people supplying information often have a substantial interest in how the story is told. The challenge is to establish what happened when access is restricted, accounts conflict, and public loyalties have already hardened.

Alter’s writing combines political reporting with historical perspective. Barrett follows government, law enforcement, and the justice system. Their work depends on documents, corroboration, and the ability to distinguish what a source knows from what that source wants a reporter to believe.

Those practical decisions belong at the center of a discussion about truth. A reporter may have convincing evidence for one part of a story and unanswered questions about another; conveying that distinction is part of the job. The program includes audience questions, opening the conversation to the difficulties readers face when evaluating competing accounts of public events.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 7 PM

🎟️ Free

📍 Robert Kelly Multipurpose Room, Campus Center North, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

In Educated, the freedom to question comes with the possibility of losing the family whose account of the world Westover once shared.

A Reading with Tara Westover

Tara Westover · Bard College · Regional Extension

Tara Westover’s memoir Educated follows her journey from an isolated childhood in Idaho to university study and a doctorate at Cambridge. Its deepest conflicts concern what happens along the way: an education introduces unfamiliar subjects and institutions, but also the possibility that the explanations a child has inherited may be incomplete or wrong.

Westover writes about the strain that discovery places on family loyalty. To describe her own experiences honestly, she must question people she loves and reconsider events they remember differently. Academic success does not resolve those disagreements. It gives her a language for understanding them while making the distance from home more difficult to ignore.

The book’s treatment of memory is especially careful. Conflicting recollections remain part of the account, rather than obstacles conveniently removed from it. Westover’s reading at Bard offers the words themselves—the choices of emphasis, detail, and restraint through which she tells a story of intellectual independence and its personal cost.

📅 Monday, November 9 · 5:30 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public

📍 McDonough Sports Complex gymnasium, Hudson Valley Community College, Troy

The Art of an Athlete

Maxwell Pearce · Hudson Valley Community College

Maxwell Pearce’s working materials include objects familiar from the basketball court. Shoelaces and sports equipment become elements of mixed-media artwork, carrying the associations of practice, competition, preparation, and repetition into the studio. His career as a Harlem Globetrotter supplies more than a subject; it supplies materials and experiences.

Pearce played basketball at SUNY Purchase before developing his professional athletic career. His art brings that physical history into objects that ask to be looked at in another way. Equipment usually understood through use can acquire a different significance when its form, texture, or arrangement becomes the focus.

At HVCC, Pearce will discuss the relationship between those parts of his life. The overlap is a practical one: both depend on habits developed over time, repeated decisions, and an ability to respond to what is happening in front of him. His artwork makes the connection visible through the things an athlete handles every day.

📅 Monday, November 9 · 2–3 PM

🎟️ Open to the public · RSVP requested

📍 Collection Teaching Gallery, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

After Expertise: Art and Education in the Age of AI

Bard College / Center for Curatorial Studies · Regional Extension

An image can now be generated in seconds. Deciding whether it is any good, understanding what it draws upon, and knowing what to teach the person who made it remain much harder problems. Bard’s symposium addresses those questions through art, education, and the changing meaning of expertise.

Participants include Michelle Kuo of the Museum of Modern Art, Suzanne Kite of the Indigenous AI research community, and Catherine Griffiths of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Their different fields place them in different relationships to technology: collecting and interpreting art, developing approaches to AI, and teaching students whose tools are changing rapidly.

The program includes panels, a roundtable, and a reception. Questions of authorship and judgment run through the subject. Technical fluency once offered one way to recognize accomplishment; when software can supply a polished surface, teachers and artists face a more demanding task of distinguishing an informed choice from an impressive-looking result.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 11 AM–5 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public

📍 Payne Room, Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

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🎨 ART & ENCOUNTERS

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Behind a public art project are less visible decisions about collaborators, money, teaching, and the institutions willing to support an experiment.

Making a Life of Art

Nato Thompson · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum

Making art and making a life in art are related but different undertakings. Nato Thompson has worked on both sides of that distinction as a curator, writer, and educator. During his decade as chief curator at Creative Time, from 2007 to 2017, he helped develop projects that brought artists into public spaces and into direct contact with social and political questions.

His work also includes alternative education, publishing, and the organizations through which artists find collaborators and sustain a practice. Those activities involve decisions rarely visible in a finished exhibition: where people learn, who has access to a workspace, how a project is supported, and what happens when its ambitions do not fit an established institution.

Thompson’s talk draws on that experience. The title reaches beyond inspiration to the working conditions of a creative life—the time, relationships, and collective effort behind projects that may appear, from the outside, to be the product of an individual vision.

📅 Tuesday, November 10 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free

📍 Wachenheim Gallery, Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

Dunkerley Dialogue

Mark Thomas Gibson and Jennifer Delton · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum

Mark Thomas Gibson draws on comics, caricature, and history painting to address American public life. The combination gives his paintings several kinds of authority to work with—and against. A caricature exaggerates, a comic compresses action, and a history painting presents a scene as something worthy of collective memory.

Historian Jennifer Delton studies twentieth-century American political and social history, including race, civil rights, and business. Their conversation places her attention to institutions and historical circumstances beside Gibson’s use of figures, symbols, and visual narrative.

The setting matters here: the dialogue takes place in the gallery, with the paintings available as evidence. Broad questions about race, citizenship, and power can be tested against a particular gesture, arrangement, or image. Gibson’s choices invite the same scrutiny as any account of history: what occupies the foreground, who is pushed aside, and what the scene asks us to believe.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free

Tracing Time

Paul Mauren · Hudson Valley Community College / Teaching Gallery

Paul Mauren’s sculptures bring constructed forms into contact with materials and structures associated with the natural world. Their arrangements can suggest balance, pressure, or instability. Looking at them involves a physical reckoning: what supports a form, what threatens it, and how its apparent weight changes as the viewer moves.

Mauren taught at The College of Saint Rose from 1978 to 2018. Tracing Time, his second exhibition at HVCC, places a long regional career within the intimate setting of the Teaching Gallery. The exhibition title allows several readings, from the time spent making an object to the accumulated choices through which a sculptor’s work develops.

An artist’s talk precedes the opening reception. Together, they provide access to the work and to Mauren’s account of its construction. Materials that might initially seem incidental become easier to examine once the maker has explained what a particular joint, surface, or opposing form required.

📅 Thursday, November 12

Artist talk: 3–4 PM — Bulmer Telecommunications Center auditorium, HVCC, Troy

Opening reception: 4–6 PM — Teaching Gallery, Administration Building, HVCC, Troy

🎟️ Both free and open to the public

📍 Opalka Gallery, Russell Sage College, 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany

📅 Artist talk: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Reception: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

A flavor disappears almost as soon as it is experienced, but its associations can outlast the tasting—a fitting complication for an exhibition concerned with transient causes.

Light and Transient Causes: A Culinary Experience

Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery · Current-Week Must-Catch

Opalka adds taste and scent to the gallery experience with five artist-inspired tastings connected to Light and Transient Causes. The event includes a welcome drink and a sequence of small culinary encounters within the exhibition.

Food introduces a different kind of attention. An artwork can be revisited across the room; a flavor changes as it is tasted and then becomes a memory. Texture, aroma, and association enter the experience alongside the objects on view. The five tastings offer separate responses rather than a single interpretation of the exhibition.

The format leaves room for the visitor to make connections. A flavor may suggest a material, an aroma may summon an unexpected memory, or the contrast between two tastings may change the way a work is perceived. It is an exhibition visit with another set of senses involved in the looking.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 5:30–8:30 PM

🎟️ $50 · Includes a welcome drink and five tastings

Timed arrival windows in half-hour intervals from 5:30 through 7:30 PM · Allow approximately one hour · Culinary experience rather than a seated dinner

Limited capacity—advance ticket purchase strongly recommended.

📍 Tang Teaching Museum atrium, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

Tang Guide Tour

Isabelle Duperval ’28 · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum

Isabelle Duperval ’28 leads a student-guided visit through selected works at the Tang. With several exhibitions open, the tour offers a particular route through a museum that can otherwise pull a visitor in many directions at once.

The guide’s selections establish the route, but discussion makes a tour different from a solitary walk through the galleries. Someone notices a material, a figure, or an incongruous detail; another person reads it differently. Returning to the object often produces a better question than either person had at first.

This is a chance for sustained attention to a smaller number of works. Duperval’s perspective as a student adds another voice to the museum’s interpretation, while the conversation allows visitors to examine how an account of an artwork is built from what is actually there.

📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public

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🎬 FILM

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Princess Mononoke

Hayao Miyazaki · RPI / EMPAC

Ashitaka leaves home seeking a cure for a deadly curse and finds a conflict with no innocent side. Iron Town is consuming an ancient forest, but its leader, Lady Eboshi, also provides work and refuge to people excluded elsewhere. San, a human raised by wolves, defends the forest with a fury that leaves little room for sympathy toward its human enemies.

Miyazaki’s 1997 film gives that struggle an extraordinary physical world: mist-filled woods, enormous animal gods, industrial furnaces, and creatures whose transformations are both beautiful and terrifying. Joe Hisaishi’s score allows moments of stillness within a story capable of sudden violence. The hand-drawn images reward attention to small movements as much as spectacular ones.

Ashitaka’s task is to act without surrendering his judgment to either side’s hatred. That makes the film’s moral difficulty inseparable from its adventure. Protecting a community can mean damaging someone else’s home, and compassion does not erase the consequences. San and Eboshi remain formidable partly because each has reasons that the other cannot accept.

📅 Tuesday, November 10 · 7 PM

🎟️ $3 at the door

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🎭 PERFORMANCE & MUSIC

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An observer sees the completed movement; the dancer also knows the adjustments in perception, balance, and concentration that made it possible.

INTERFACE: Cognitive Science

Brett Fajen and Heidi Latsky · RPI / EMPAC

Moving through a room depends on a great deal that usually escapes notice: judging distance, processing visual information, anticipating an obstacle, and adjusting the body’s response. Cognitive scientist Brett Fajen studies those relationships among perception, action, and movement. Choreographer Heidi Latsky approaches related questions through the experience of dancers.

Their program includes a screening from Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey (2025), which shares dancers’ accounts of non-apparent neurological disabilities affecting information processing, movement control, and sensory input. The distinction between visible movement and invisible effort is central. An action that looks straightforward may depend on adjustments another person would never think to make.

Fajen and Latsky bring different kinds of knowledge to the subject: research into bodily learning and adaptation, and artistic work developed through the body itself. The film supplies specific experiences against which to consider the science, including the ways a change in perception can alter both daily movement and a creative practice.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6–7 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration

Limited capacity—EMPAC registrations often close well before the event. Register early.

📍 Beaudoin Theatre, Foy Hall, Siena University, Loudonville

Rent

Jonathan Larson · Siena University / Directed by Margaret E. Hall

The friends at the center of Rent have plenty to argue about: overdue bills, artistic compromises, romantic betrayals, and the obligations they owe one another. Their East Village community is noisy, untidy, affectionate, and often exasperating. The AIDS epidemic makes the possibility of loss immediate, but Larson gives the characters ambitions and irritations as well as illnesses.

The musical draws on Puccini’s La Bohème, carrying an older theatrical story about artists, poverty, and love into late twentieth-century New York. Its rock score moves between crowded ensemble numbers and moments when one voice admits a fear that conversation cannot accommodate. “Will I?” makes that fear communal; “Seasons of Love” asks how a life might be measured.

Siena’s production is directed by Margaret E. Hall. The show’s demands extend beyond its familiar songs: its friendships need the humor and friction of people who know one another too well. Without that unruly everyday life, the losses would be abstractions. Larson supplies both, allowing celebration and grief to occupy the same room.

📅 Thursday–Saturday, November 12–14 · 8 PM

📅 Sunday, November 15 · 3 PM

🎟️ Ticketed · Additional performances November 19–21

📍 Maureen Stapleton Theatre, Siek Campus Center, HVCC, Troy

📅 Thursday, November 12: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Friday, November 13: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Saturday, November 14: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Sunday, November 15: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

Indian Classical Music

Veena and Devesh Chandra · Hudson Valley Community College

Veena Chandra’s sitar and Devesh Chandra’s tabla produce very different kinds of sound. A sitar phrase can linger, bend, and gather ornament around a note; the tabla answers with a vocabulary of tones created through precise contact with its two drums. Their partnership places those resources within North Indian classical music and folk traditions.

Improvisation depends on the performers’ understanding of structure as much as their freedom within it. A phrase can be extended, answered, or returned to a rhythmic cycle with new emphasis. The listener hears both the established pattern and the decisions being made inside it.

Veena’s long performing and teaching career includes work at Skidmore and Williams. Devesh also works across several musical genres. Their shared experience supports the close listening required by this music, from the patient establishment of a melodic idea to exchanges in which rhythmic detail becomes increasingly intricate.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free

📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center, Union College, Schenectady

The cuatro’s paired strings add a ringing melodic voice to an evening drawing on jazz, Latin dance rhythms, and Puerto Rican jíbaro traditions.

Jazz Ensemble & Latin Percussion

Union College / With the Pedro José Pastrana Trio

Union’s Jazz Ensemble and Latin Percussion program share the evening with the Pedro José Pastrana Trio. Mambo, bossa nova, and bolero appear alongside Puerto Rican musical traditions associated with the cuatro and jíbaro music.

These styles ask different things of melody and rhythm. A bolero allows a tune to unfold with measured emphasis; a mambo gains force from coordinated rhythmic parts; bossa nova places its phrases against another kind of pulse. Pastrana’s Puerto Rican cuatro adds a bright, ringing string sound to the program’s range of textures.

The student ensembles and guest trio provide different scales of performance within one concert. Larger ensemble passages place the emphasis on coordinated parts, while a trio leaves individual lines more exposed. Across those settings, the rhythmic character of each tradition remains a defining part of the music.

📅 Wednesday, November 11 · 7:30 PM

🎟️ $20 · Free with Union ID · Tickets at the door

📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building, SUNY Schenectady, 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady

Ali Ryerson Quartet

A Place for Jazz · SUNY Schenectady

Ali Ryerson has spent five decades making the flute a leading jazz voice. Her more than two dozen albums and work with musicians including Kenny Barron, Roy Haynes, Stephane Grappelli, and Hubert Laws place her within a substantial history of small-group jazz. Her Jazz Flute Big Band extended that work to an ensemble built around an instrument often treated as a single color in a larger group.

Music was also a family business. Her father, guitarist Art Ryerson, worked with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and became a busy New York studio musician. Ali’s own training includes classical study, but her career has centered on the phrasing, harmonic knowledge, and rhythmic independence required of a jazz improviser.

At SUNY Schenectady, her quartet includes pianist Larry Ham, bassist Lou Pappas, and drummer Tom Melito. Ham’s background includes the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and Illinois Jacquet Big Band; Pappas and Melito bring extensive experience with jazz soloists and ensembles. Flute, piano, bass, and drums provide a relatively spare setting in which each musician’s choices are clearly audible.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 7 PM

🎟️ Advance $26.95 · At the door $25 · Students with ID $10

📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

Gershwin, Jazz, and the Music of Jewish Émigrés

JoAnn Falletta / The Orchestra Now · Bard College · Regional Extension

Gershwin’s An American in Paris is familiar concert-hall territory. The names surrounding it on this program—Ignatz Waghalter, Lazare Saminsky, Ernst Toch, and Louis Gruenberg—are much less familiar, although their careers belong to the same broad history of Jewish participation in American musical life.

Their routes to the United States were different. Saminsky and Gruenberg established American careers before the Nazi era. Waghalter and Toch fled persecution, leaving behind professional lives built in Europe. Migration could mean opportunity; exile meant the urgent task of beginning again after a world of colleagues, audiences, and institutions had been taken away.

Gershwin, born in America to Russian Jewish immigrants, represents another part of that story. His combination of concert forms with the sounds of American popular life became internationally recognizable. The other composers brought European training into a country whose music was changing through jazz, theater, recording, and the growth of orchestras.

JoAnn Falletta conducts The Orchestra Now in a program that places those histories beside one another. The familiar Gershwin work supplies a point of reference, but the lesser-heard composers make the larger claim: the Jewish contribution to the period extends well beyond the handful of names that remain on regular concert programs.

📅 Saturday, November 14 · 7–9:15 PM

📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2–4:15 PM

🎟️ Ticketed

📍 ETEC, UAlbany, 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany

📅 Saturday, November 14: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Sunday, November 15: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

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🔬 SCIENCE & FAMILY

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A material that behaves unexpectedly offers the beginning of an experiment: change the pressure, change the surface, and see whether the result changes too.

Nanovember: STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day

UAlbany / ETEC

Robots, LEGO challenges, unusual fluids, cybersecurity, and self-cleaning surfaces are among the subjects at UAlbany’s STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day. The activities, geared toward grades 2–8, range from objects children can build and handle to structures too small to examine with the unaided eye.

That range makes the scientific connections especially useful. A robot turns instructions into movement. A non-Newtonian fluid challenges the expectation that a liquid always responds to force in the same way. A thin film demonstrates how a nearly invisible change at a surface can alter an everyday property, such as the way water behaves on it.

Families can explore several subjects during the morning, with experiments and demonstrations providing a starting point for questions. The emphasis is on observable results: something moves, resists, changes, or responds differently than expected. From there, children have a reason to ask what caused it—and what might happen if they try something else.

📅 Saturday, November 14 · 9:30 AM–1:30 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration · Activities geared toward grades 2–8

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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD

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November 16–December 6

Biotech Connect

Hudson Valley Community College

Biotech Connect introduces participants to biotechnology through hands-on laboratory work and an examination of related career pathways. The five-hour program offers a practical encounter with work that depends on careful handling, measurement, and attention to procedure.

Laboratory tasks make the field’s demands concrete. Accuracy depends on a sequence of small actions, and consistency matters when a result must be reproduced. Participants can try that work directly while learning more about the occupations connected to it.

Participants who complete the full program receive a $100 stipend.

📅 Saturday, December 5 · 9 AM–2 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public · Registration required

Limited capacity—register early.

📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

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🔭 LONG-RANGE PLANNING

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December 7–March 7

Hansel and Gretel

Bard Conservatory / Fisher Center · Regional Extension

Humperdinck’s opera gives the familiar fairy tale a score that moves between folk-like melodies and a rich orchestral sound. The children’s hunger and quarrels establish a domestic world before the forest introduces its dangers, enchantments, and deceptive comforts.

Bard’s fully staged production features the Conservatory Orchestra under James Bagwell, graduate vocalists, and a children’s ensemble. The contrast between the simplicity of the children’s songs and the scale of the surrounding music is one of the opera’s pleasures: a small family story acquires the reach of a much larger imagined world.

📅 Friday, December 11 · 7 PM

📅 Sunday, December 13 · 2 PM

🎟️ Tickets from $20 · Sung in German with English supertitles · Advance ticket purchase recommended

📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC, RPI, 50 Eighth Street, Troy

Robotics makes questions about control and response physical: an instruction becomes a movement that someone else must interpret.

INTERFACE: Robotics

Qiujiang Levi Lu and John Wen · RPI / EMPAC

Qiujiang Levi Lu and John Wen bring artistic practice and robotics research into EMPAC’s INTERFACE series. The subject places machines’ physical actions at the center of an exchange between disciplines with different purposes and expectations.

Engineers work with control, response, and the conditions under which a system performs reliably. Artists may use those same capacities as material for an encounter with an audience. A machine’s movement belongs to both discussions: it can be measured as a technical result and interpreted as an action with expressive or social meaning.

📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration

Limited capacity—EMPAC registrations often close well before the event. Register early.

📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

Beethoven and Brahms: Part 1

Zachary Schwartzman / The Orchestra Now · Bard College · Regional Extension

Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica, and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony make a substantial pairing. Both demand close attention to the way a long orchestral argument develops, but they arrive at their conclusions through different kinds of tension and momentum.

Zachary Schwartzman conducts The Orchestra Now. Beethoven’s funeral march and variation finale occupy a different expressive world from the concentrated movement of Brahms’s final passacaglia. Hearing the two symphonies together places their orchestral weight, formal invention, and very different endings in direct comparison.

📅 Saturday, February 6, 2027 · 7 PM

📅 Sunday, February 7 · 2 PM

🎟️ Tickets from $15 · Purchase ahead of the performance weekend

📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC, RPI, 50 Eighth Street, Troy

INTERFACE: Mixed Reality

Lars Jan and Talis Reks · RPI / EMPAC

Mixed reality places digitally constructed information within an experience of physical space. Lars Jan and Talis Reks examine that overlap in another of EMPAC’s conversations between artistic and technological practice.

The subject involves more than what appears on a display. It includes where a participant looks, how a body moves, and what it means for several people to share a room while encountering an additional digital layer. Those practical questions also become artistic ones when the arrangement of attention and movement forms part of a work.

📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration

Limited capacity—EMPAC registrations often close well before the event. Register early.

📍 Arthur Zankel Music Center, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

A Well-Being Concert

Ensemble Connect · Skidmore College / Arthur Zankel Music Center

Ensemble Connect places the audience onstage around the musicians for a concert incorporating guided mindfulness. The arrangement changes a familiar concert-hall relationship: listeners occupy the performance space rather than looking toward it from rows of seats.

Close proximity makes the physical work of playing more apparent, from breath and preparation to the coordination among musicians. Guided portions direct attention toward listening itself. Chairs, mats, and cushions offer different ways to settle into a program concerned with concentration and the shared experience of music.

📅 Sunday, February 21, 2027 · 2 PM

🎟️ Ticketed · Seating options include chairs, mats, and cushions

The onstage format limits capacity. Advance ticket purchase recommended.

Fine Arts Building, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany · Hours and visiting information

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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS

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November 16, 2026–May 16, 2027

CORE CAMPUSES

Rent — Siena University, Loudonville — November 19–21, remaining performances — Details

This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs — November 20–December 5 — Details

Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — December 2–10 — Details

Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — February 24–March 3 — Details

The World Goes Round — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — March 18–21 — Details

The Country Wife — Siena University, Loudonville — April 8–17 — Details

🆕 NEW TO THE SIX-MONTH WINDOW — Seussical: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — May 5–13 — Details

🌎 REGIONAL EXTENSION THEATER

Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the Sun — Williams College, Williamstown — March 5, 2027 — Details

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🖼️ GALLERY LISTINGS

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UAlbany University Art Museum

Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core — Through April 2, 2027 — Details

mosie romney: ash whistle redress — Through April 2, 2027 — Details

Invitation to a Light Factory: Suzan Frecon / Marcella Durand — Through April 2, 2027 — Details

Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College

Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs · Hours and visiting information

Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2 B — Through November 29, 2026 — Details

Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are a Constellation — Through January 3, 2027 — Details

Julian LaVerdiere / Duke Riley — Through January 3, 2027 — Details

Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Through January 3, 2027 — Details

500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs — Through January 10, 2027 — Details

A Feeling of With — Through July 18, 2027 — Details

Sheila Pepe: When/Where We Rest — Through September 12, 2027 — Details

Art on Campus — Through October 3, 2027 — Details

Opalka Gallery, Russell Sage College

Light and Transient Causes — Through December 5, 2026 — Details

Crowell and West Galleries, Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts, Schenectady

Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, noon–5 PM; Thursday until 8 PM.

Union College

Practices — Through November 22, 2026 — Details

Audubon exhibition — Through November 25, 2026 — Details

Lally Reading Room, Schaffer Library, Union College, Schenectady · Visitor information

Conservation exhibition — Fall 2026; closing date not posted — Details

Beuth Atrium, Schaffer Library, Union College, Schenectady · Visitor information

Siena University

Midsemester exhibition — Through December 4, 2026 — Details

Hudson Valley Community College

Paul Mauren: Tracing Time — November 12–December 12, 2026 — Details

Hours: Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, 10 AM–4 PM; Wednesday, noon–7 PM; Saturday, noon–4 PM.

Thomas Lail: Garden — Ongoing — Details

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📅 YOUR WEEK, DAY BY DAY

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MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9

2–3 PM · Maxwell Pearce · HVCC · Details

5:30 PM · Tara Westover · Bard · Details

7:30 PM · Elliot Williams · UAlbany, Page Hall · Details

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10

6 PM · Nato Thompson · Skidmore, Tang · Details

7 PM · Princess Mononoke · RPI, EMPAC · Details

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11

7:30 PM · Jazz & Latin Percussion · Union · Details

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12

3–4 PM · Paul Mauren talk · HVCC · Details

4–6 PM · Mauren reception · HVCC · Details

4:30 PM · William Alexander · UAlbany · Details

6 PM · Gibson & Delton · Skidmore, Tang · Details

6 PM · Veena & Devesh Chandra · HVCC · Details

6–7 PM · Cognitive Science · RPI, EMPAC · Details

8 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13

11 AM–5 PM · Art, Education & AI · Bard · Details

5:30–8:30 PM · Culinary Experience · Opalka · Details

7 PM · Telling the Truth · UAlbany, Page Hall · Details

7 PM · Ali Ryerson · SUNY Schenectady · Details

8 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14

9:30 AM–1:30 PM · STEM Family Day · UAlbany · Details

7–9:15 PM · Gershwin & Jewish Émigrés · Bard · Details

8 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15

2 PM · Tang Guide Tour · Skidmore · Details

2–4:15 PM · Gershwin & Jewish Émigrés · Bard · Details

3 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

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💬 HELP SHAPE THE NEXT ISSUE

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Have a campus event to suggest, a correction, or a report from something you attended? Write to Alan Koslow.

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🤝 COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER PARTNERS

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A local source for Jewish community news, culture, events and stories.

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A guide to Capital Region events, arts and culture, food and music.

Interested in becoming a community newsletter partner? Contact Alan Koslow.

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Capital Region Curated — Edited by Alan Koslow

What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.

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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.

Capital District

Lectures & Talks

Music

Theater

Art

Books

Alan Koslow

Nov 7, 2026

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Originally published at

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Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.

🏛️ 📚 🎶 🎭 🔬

What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.

The Goetz case exposed a divide between what prosecutors could establish in court and what Americans believed the shooting represented.

FIVE BULLETS, RENT, SITAR & TABLA—AND ART YOU CAN TASTE

Elliot Williams opens the week at UAlbany with a return to one of New York’s most divisive criminal cases. At Bard, Tara Westover reads from a body of work concerned with education, memory, and the cost of questioning the people who raised us. Thursday brings William Alexander’s science fiction about caring for young artificial intelligences, followed by a Friday symposium at Bard on what AI means for art and education.

There is plenty onstage as well. Siena opens Rent, Veena and Devesh Chandra perform on sitar and tabla at Hudson Valley Community College, and Ali Ryerson brings her jazz quartet to SUNY Schenectady. At Bard, JoAnn Falletta conducts a program placing Gershwin beside Jewish composers whose careers crossed Europe and America.

Art takes several forms this week: Paul Mauren discusses a new sculpture exhibition, Nato Thompson considers the work behind a creative life, and Opalka adds food to the gallery experience. Families can spend Saturday morning experimenting with robotics, unusual materials, and nanotechnology at UAlbany.

Opalka’s culinary event has limited timed-entry capacity. Advance ticket purchase is strongly recommended.

📣 HELP SPREAD THE WORD

It really helps when readers share Capital Region Curated.

If you work with a college department, program, gallery, museum, performing arts office, organization, campus newsletter or personal newsletter, I’d be grateful if you would share it with people who might want a weekly guide to public events on Capital Region campuses.

🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK

⭐ Top Picks — Elliot Williams, INTERFACE: Cognitive Science, Siena’s Rent, and Veena and Devesh Chandra.

📚 Ideas, Books & Conversation — Elliot Williams on the Bernie Goetz case, William Alexander on science fiction and AI, Tara Westover, truth and journalism, athlete and artist Maxwell Pearce, and art in the age of AI.

🎨 Art & Encounters — Nato Thompson, Mark Thomas Gibson in conversation with Jennifer Delton, Paul Mauren’s exhibition opening, Opalka’s culinary experience, and a student-led Tang tour.

🎬 Film — Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke at EMPAC.

🎭 Performance & Music — Movement and cognitive science, Rent, Indian classical music, Union’s jazz and Latin percussion concert, Ali Ryerson, and Gershwin alongside Jewish émigré composers.

🔬 Science & Family — UAlbany’s STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day.

🔥 Plan Ahead — HVCC’s hands-on Biotech Connect program.

🔭 Long-Range Planning — Opera and orchestral music at Bard, robotics and mixed reality at EMPAC, and Ensemble Connect’s onstage concert at Skidmore.

🎭 Future Theater — Upcoming campus productions through mid-May.

🖼️ Gallery Listings — Current exhibitions and installations, immediately after Future Theater.

📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK

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.

For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links open an event ready to save.

Where an organizer has not published an ending time, calendar entries use our standard 90-minute duration.

📍 BEFORE YOU GO

Event information is checked during preparation, but 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.

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⭐ TOP PICKS

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Five Bullets

Elliot Williams · UAlbany / Page Hall

Monday, November 9 · 7:30–8:30 PM

The Bernie Goetz subway shooting became much more than a criminal case. It exposed competing ideas about race, public safety, and self-defense in a city already divided by fear of crime. CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams revisits the shooting and its aftermath in Five Bullets, examining the evidence, the people involved, and the prosecution. His account follows the distance between what could be established in court and what Americans believed the case represented.

See Ideas, Books & Conversation below.

INTERFACE: Cognitive Science

Brett Fajen and Heidi Latsky · RPI / EMPAC

Thursday, November 12 · 6–7 PM

A dancer’s apparent ease can conceal substantial effort to process information, control movement, or respond to sensory changes. Choreographer Heidi Latsky and cognitive scientist Brett Fajen approach that experience through dance and research into perception. Their program includes a screening from Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey, which shares dancers’ experiences of non-apparent neurological disabilities. Fajen’s research into perception and action provides another way to examine the adaptations involved in moving through the world.

See Performance & Music below.

Rent

Siena University / Beaudoin Theatre

November 12–14 · 8 PM; November 15 · 3 PM

Jonathan Larson’s musical follows young artists and friends trying to pay the rent, make their work, and sustain their relationships in New York’s East Village during the AIDS epidemic. Its rock score gives voice to arguments about money, art, commitment, and the fear of losing people too soon. Directed by Margaret E. Hall, Siena’s production takes on a show in which the noise and humor of a makeshift community are inseparable from the grief behind “Seasons of Love” and “Will I?”

See Performance & Music below.

Indian Classical Music

Veena and Devesh Chandra · Hudson Valley Community College / Maureen Stapleton Theatre

Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM

Sitarist Veena Chandra and tabla player Devesh Chandra bring a long musical partnership to a program of North Indian classical music and folk traditions. The sitar’s sustained, ornamented lines and the tabla’s distinct tones support a detailed exchange between melody and rhythm. Veena’s teaching has included Skidmore and Williams, while Devesh’s work extends across several genres. Their shared experience provides the foundation for the improvisation through which each performance takes its particular form.

See Performance & Music below.

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📚 IDEAS, BOOKS & CONVERSATION

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Five Bullets

Elliot Williams · UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute

In December 1984, Bernie Goetz shot four young Black men on a New York City subway. The shooting and the ensuing prosecution became a national argument about race, crime, fear, and self-defense. For some, Goetz embodied resistance to a city they believed had become ungovernable. For others, the sympathy he received revealed how readily racial assumptions could shape the public’s judgment.

CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams revisits the case in Five Bullets. His account examines the people behind the headlines, the evidence, and the legal decisions that helped turn a violent encounter into a defining controversy of the decade. The prosecution took place in a courtroom; the argument over what the shooting meant spread through newspapers, politics, and everyday conversations.

Williams brings experience in federal law enforcement to a story that requires attention to both legal standards and public emotion. At its center is a persistent problem: a criminal trial must decide a particular case, even when the public has made it stand for everything it fears or resents about the world outside.

📅 Monday, November 9 · 7:30–8:30 PM

📍 Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, 135 Western Avenue, Albany

🎟️ Free · Book sale and signing

📍 Campus Center Multipurpose Room, UAlbany Uptown Campus, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany

Science Fiction and AI

William Alexander · UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute

What does an artificial intelligence need to learn after it becomes intelligent? In William Alexander’s Sunward, that question falls to a human space traveler responsible for juvenile AI—adolescent “baby bots” learning how to live among others. Her assignment resembles foster parenting, with its mixture of attachment, instruction, uncertainty, and responsibility.

Alexander, a Cuban-American writer, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for Goblin Secrets, a fantasy about a boy searching for his missing brother in a world of masks, theater, and magic. Sunward, his first science-fiction novel for adults, was a finalist for the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year.

The novel makes room for questions sometimes lost in arguments about computing power. Knowledge does not automatically confer judgment, and the ability to respond does not guarantee an understanding of others. Alexander approaches AI through the intimate work of caring for someone still learning what their actions mean. A conversation and audience Q&A form part of UAlbany’s AI & Society series.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 4:30 PM

📍 Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, 135 Western Avenue, Albany

Telling the Truth in a Post-Truth World

Jonathan Alter and Devlin Barrett · UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute

The Writers Institute’s annual post-election discussion returns with journalists Jonathan Alter and Devlin Barrett. Both work in fields where the people supplying information often have a substantial interest in how the story is told. The challenge is to establish what happened when access is restricted, accounts conflict, and public loyalties have already hardened.

Alter’s writing combines political reporting with historical perspective. Barrett follows government, law enforcement, and the justice system. Their work depends on documents, corroboration, and the ability to distinguish what a source knows from what that source wants a reporter to believe.

Those practical decisions belong at the center of a discussion about truth. A reporter may have convincing evidence for one part of a story and unanswered questions about another; conveying that distinction is part of the job. The program includes audience questions, opening the conversation to the difficulties readers face when evaluating competing accounts of public events.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 7 PM

🎟️ Free

📍 Robert Kelly Multipurpose Room, Campus Center North, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

In Educated, the freedom to question comes with the possibility of losing the family whose account of the world Westover once shared.

A Reading with Tara Westover

Tara Westover · Bard College · Regional Extension

Tara Westover’s memoir Educated follows her journey from an isolated childhood in Idaho to university study and a doctorate at Cambridge. Its deepest conflicts concern what happens along the way: an education introduces unfamiliar subjects and institutions, but also the possibility that the explanations a child has inherited may be incomplete or wrong.

Westover writes about the strain that discovery places on family loyalty. To describe her own experiences honestly, she must question people she loves and reconsider events they remember differently. Academic success does not resolve those disagreements. It gives her a language for understanding them while making the distance from home more difficult to ignore.

The book’s treatment of memory is especially careful. Conflicting recollections remain part of the account, rather than obstacles conveniently removed from it. Westover’s reading at Bard offers the words themselves—the choices of emphasis, detail, and restraint through which she tells a story of intellectual independence and its personal cost.

📅 Monday, November 9 · 5:30 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public

📍 McDonough Sports Complex gymnasium, Hudson Valley Community College, Troy

The Art of an Athlete

Maxwell Pearce · Hudson Valley Community College

Maxwell Pearce’s working materials include objects familiar from the basketball court. Shoelaces and sports equipment become elements of mixed-media artwork, carrying the associations of practice, competition, preparation, and repetition into the studio. His career as a Harlem Globetrotter supplies more than a subject; it supplies materials and experiences.

Pearce played basketball at SUNY Purchase before developing his professional athletic career. His art brings that physical history into objects that ask to be looked at in another way. Equipment usually understood through use can acquire a different significance when its form, texture, or arrangement becomes the focus.

At HVCC, Pearce will discuss the relationship between those parts of his life. The overlap is a practical one: both depend on habits developed over time, repeated decisions, and an ability to respond to what is happening in front of him. His artwork makes the connection visible through the things an athlete handles every day.

📅 Monday, November 9 · 2–3 PM

🎟️ Open to the public · RSVP requested

📍 Collection Teaching Gallery, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

After Expertise: Art and Education in the Age of AI

Bard College / Center for Curatorial Studies · Regional Extension

An image can now be generated in seconds. Deciding whether it is any good, understanding what it draws upon, and knowing what to teach the person who made it remain much harder problems. Bard’s symposium addresses those questions through art, education, and the changing meaning of expertise.

Participants include Michelle Kuo of the Museum of Modern Art, Suzanne Kite of the Indigenous AI research community, and Catherine Griffiths of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Their different fields place them in different relationships to technology: collecting and interpreting art, developing approaches to AI, and teaching students whose tools are changing rapidly.

The program includes panels, a roundtable, and a reception. Questions of authorship and judgment run through the subject. Technical fluency once offered one way to recognize accomplishment; when software can supply a polished surface, teachers and artists face a more demanding task of distinguishing an informed choice from an impressive-looking result.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 11 AM–5 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public

📍 Payne Room, Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

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🎨 ART & ENCOUNTERS

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Behind a public art project are less visible decisions about collaborators, money, teaching, and the institutions willing to support an experiment.

Making a Life of Art

Nato Thompson · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum

Making art and making a life in art are related but different undertakings. Nato Thompson has worked on both sides of that distinction as a curator, writer, and educator. During his decade as chief curator at Creative Time, from 2007 to 2017, he helped develop projects that brought artists into public spaces and into direct contact with social and political questions.

His work also includes alternative education, publishing, and the organizations through which artists find collaborators and sustain a practice. Those activities involve decisions rarely visible in a finished exhibition: where people learn, who has access to a workspace, how a project is supported, and what happens when its ambitions do not fit an established institution.

Thompson’s talk draws on that experience. The title reaches beyond inspiration to the working conditions of a creative life—the time, relationships, and collective effort behind projects that may appear, from the outside, to be the product of an individual vision.

📅 Tuesday, November 10 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free

📍 Wachenheim Gallery, Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

Dunkerley Dialogue

Mark Thomas Gibson and Jennifer Delton · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum

Mark Thomas Gibson draws on comics, caricature, and history painting to address American public life. The combination gives his paintings several kinds of authority to work with—and against. A caricature exaggerates, a comic compresses action, and a history painting presents a scene as something worthy of collective memory.

Historian Jennifer Delton studies twentieth-century American political and social history, including race, civil rights, and business. Their conversation places her attention to institutions and historical circumstances beside Gibson’s use of figures, symbols, and visual narrative.

The setting matters here: the dialogue takes place in the gallery, with the paintings available as evidence. Broad questions about race, citizenship, and power can be tested against a particular gesture, arrangement, or image. Gibson’s choices invite the same scrutiny as any account of history: what occupies the foreground, who is pushed aside, and what the scene asks us to believe.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free

Tracing Time

Paul Mauren · Hudson Valley Community College / Teaching Gallery

Paul Mauren’s sculptures bring constructed forms into contact with materials and structures associated with the natural world. Their arrangements can suggest balance, pressure, or instability. Looking at them involves a physical reckoning: what supports a form, what threatens it, and how its apparent weight changes as the viewer moves.

Mauren taught at The College of Saint Rose from 1978 to 2018. Tracing Time, his second exhibition at HVCC, places a long regional career within the intimate setting of the Teaching Gallery. The exhibition title allows several readings, from the time spent making an object to the accumulated choices through which a sculptor’s work develops.

An artist’s talk precedes the opening reception. Together, they provide access to the work and to Mauren’s account of its construction. Materials that might initially seem incidental become easier to examine once the maker has explained what a particular joint, surface, or opposing form required.

📅 Thursday, November 12

Artist talk: 3–4 PM — Bulmer Telecommunications Center auditorium, HVCC, Troy

Opening reception: 4–6 PM — Teaching Gallery, Administration Building, HVCC, Troy

🎟️ Both free and open to the public

📍 Opalka Gallery, Russell Sage College, 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany

📅 Artist talk: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Reception: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

A flavor disappears almost as soon as it is experienced, but its associations can outlast the tasting—a fitting complication for an exhibition concerned with transient causes.

Light and Transient Causes: A Culinary Experience

Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery · Current-Week Must-Catch

Opalka adds taste and scent to the gallery experience with five artist-inspired tastings connected to Light and Transient Causes. The event includes a welcome drink and a sequence of small culinary encounters within the exhibition.

Food introduces a different kind of attention. An artwork can be revisited across the room; a flavor changes as it is tasted and then becomes a memory. Texture, aroma, and association enter the experience alongside the objects on view. The five tastings offer separate responses rather than a single interpretation of the exhibition.

The format leaves room for the visitor to make connections. A flavor may suggest a material, an aroma may summon an unexpected memory, or the contrast between two tastings may change the way a work is perceived. It is an exhibition visit with another set of senses involved in the looking.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 5:30–8:30 PM

🎟️ $50 · Includes a welcome drink and five tastings

Timed arrival windows in half-hour intervals from 5:30 through 7:30 PM · Allow approximately one hour · Culinary experience rather than a seated dinner

Limited capacity—advance ticket purchase strongly recommended.

📍 Tang Teaching Museum atrium, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

Tang Guide Tour

Isabelle Duperval ’28 · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum

Isabelle Duperval ’28 leads a student-guided visit through selected works at the Tang. With several exhibitions open, the tour offers a particular route through a museum that can otherwise pull a visitor in many directions at once.

The guide’s selections establish the route, but discussion makes a tour different from a solitary walk through the galleries. Someone notices a material, a figure, or an incongruous detail; another person reads it differently. Returning to the object often produces a better question than either person had at first.

This is a chance for sustained attention to a smaller number of works. Duperval’s perspective as a student adds another voice to the museum’s interpretation, while the conversation allows visitors to examine how an account of an artwork is built from what is actually there.

📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public

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🎬 FILM

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Princess Mononoke

Hayao Miyazaki · RPI / EMPAC

Ashitaka leaves home seeking a cure for a deadly curse and finds a conflict with no innocent side. Iron Town is consuming an ancient forest, but its leader, Lady Eboshi, also provides work and refuge to people excluded elsewhere. San, a human raised by wolves, defends the forest with a fury that leaves little room for sympathy toward its human enemies.

Miyazaki’s 1997 film gives that struggle an extraordinary physical world: mist-filled woods, enormous animal gods, industrial furnaces, and creatures whose transformations are both beautiful and terrifying. Joe Hisaishi’s score allows moments of stillness within a story capable of sudden violence. The hand-drawn images reward attention to small movements as much as spectacular ones.

Ashitaka’s task is to act without surrendering his judgment to either side’s hatred. That makes the film’s moral difficulty inseparable from its adventure. Protecting a community can mean damaging someone else’s home, and compassion does not erase the consequences. San and Eboshi remain formidable partly because each has reasons that the other cannot accept.

📅 Tuesday, November 10 · 7 PM

🎟️ $3 at the door

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🎭 PERFORMANCE & MUSIC

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An observer sees the completed movement; the dancer also knows the adjustments in perception, balance, and concentration that made it possible.

INTERFACE: Cognitive Science

Brett Fajen and Heidi Latsky · RPI / EMPAC

Moving through a room depends on a great deal that usually escapes notice: judging distance, processing visual information, anticipating an obstacle, and adjusting the body’s response. Cognitive scientist Brett Fajen studies those relationships among perception, action, and movement. Choreographer Heidi Latsky approaches related questions through the experience of dancers.

Their program includes a screening from Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey (2025), which shares dancers’ accounts of non-apparent neurological disabilities affecting information processing, movement control, and sensory input. The distinction between visible movement and invisible effort is central. An action that looks straightforward may depend on adjustments another person would never think to make.

Fajen and Latsky bring different kinds of knowledge to the subject: research into bodily learning and adaptation, and artistic work developed through the body itself. The film supplies specific experiences against which to consider the science, including the ways a change in perception can alter both daily movement and a creative practice.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6–7 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration

Limited capacity—EMPAC registrations often close well before the event. Register early.

📍 Beaudoin Theatre, Foy Hall, Siena University, Loudonville

Rent

Jonathan Larson · Siena University / Directed by Margaret E. Hall

The friends at the center of Rent have plenty to argue about: overdue bills, artistic compromises, romantic betrayals, and the obligations they owe one another. Their East Village community is noisy, untidy, affectionate, and often exasperating. The AIDS epidemic makes the possibility of loss immediate, but Larson gives the characters ambitions and irritations as well as illnesses.

The musical draws on Puccini’s La Bohème, carrying an older theatrical story about artists, poverty, and love into late twentieth-century New York. Its rock score moves between crowded ensemble numbers and moments when one voice admits a fear that conversation cannot accommodate. “Will I?” makes that fear communal; “Seasons of Love” asks how a life might be measured.

Siena’s production is directed by Margaret E. Hall. The show’s demands extend beyond its familiar songs: its friendships need the humor and friction of people who know one another too well. Without that unruly everyday life, the losses would be abstractions. Larson supplies both, allowing celebration and grief to occupy the same room.

📅 Thursday–Saturday, November 12–14 · 8 PM

📅 Sunday, November 15 · 3 PM

🎟️ Ticketed · Additional performances November 19–21

📍 Maureen Stapleton Theatre, Siek Campus Center, HVCC, Troy

📅 Thursday, November 12: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Friday, November 13: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Saturday, November 14: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Sunday, November 15: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

Indian Classical Music

Veena and Devesh Chandra · Hudson Valley Community College

Veena Chandra’s sitar and Devesh Chandra’s tabla produce very different kinds of sound. A sitar phrase can linger, bend, and gather ornament around a note; the tabla answers with a vocabulary of tones created through precise contact with its two drums. Their partnership places those resources within North Indian classical music and folk traditions.

Improvisation depends on the performers’ understanding of structure as much as their freedom within it. A phrase can be extended, answered, or returned to a rhythmic cycle with new emphasis. The listener hears both the established pattern and the decisions being made inside it.

Veena’s long performing and teaching career includes work at Skidmore and Williams. Devesh also works across several musical genres. Their shared experience supports the close listening required by this music, from the patient establishment of a melodic idea to exchanges in which rhythmic detail becomes increasingly intricate.

📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free

📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center, Union College, Schenectady

The cuatro’s paired strings add a ringing melodic voice to an evening drawing on jazz, Latin dance rhythms, and Puerto Rican jíbaro traditions.

Jazz Ensemble & Latin Percussion

Union College / With the Pedro José Pastrana Trio

Union’s Jazz Ensemble and Latin Percussion program share the evening with the Pedro José Pastrana Trio. Mambo, bossa nova, and bolero appear alongside Puerto Rican musical traditions associated with the cuatro and jíbaro music.

These styles ask different things of melody and rhythm. A bolero allows a tune to unfold with measured emphasis; a mambo gains force from coordinated rhythmic parts; bossa nova places its phrases against another kind of pulse. Pastrana’s Puerto Rican cuatro adds a bright, ringing string sound to the program’s range of textures.

The student ensembles and guest trio provide different scales of performance within one concert. Larger ensemble passages place the emphasis on coordinated parts, while a trio leaves individual lines more exposed. Across those settings, the rhythmic character of each tradition remains a defining part of the music.

📅 Wednesday, November 11 · 7:30 PM

🎟️ $20 · Free with Union ID · Tickets at the door

📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building, SUNY Schenectady, 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady

Ali Ryerson Quartet

A Place for Jazz · SUNY Schenectady

Ali Ryerson has spent five decades making the flute a leading jazz voice. Her more than two dozen albums and work with musicians including Kenny Barron, Roy Haynes, Stephane Grappelli, and Hubert Laws place her within a substantial history of small-group jazz. Her Jazz Flute Big Band extended that work to an ensemble built around an instrument often treated as a single color in a larger group.

Music was also a family business. Her father, guitarist Art Ryerson, worked with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and became a busy New York studio musician. Ali’s own training includes classical study, but her career has centered on the phrasing, harmonic knowledge, and rhythmic independence required of a jazz improviser.

At SUNY Schenectady, her quartet includes pianist Larry Ham, bassist Lou Pappas, and drummer Tom Melito. Ham’s background includes the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and Illinois Jacquet Big Band; Pappas and Melito bring extensive experience with jazz soloists and ensembles. Flute, piano, bass, and drums provide a relatively spare setting in which each musician’s choices are clearly audible.

📅 Friday, November 13 · 7 PM

🎟️ Advance $26.95 · At the door $25 · Students with ID $10

📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

Gershwin, Jazz, and the Music of Jewish Émigrés

JoAnn Falletta / The Orchestra Now · Bard College · Regional Extension

Gershwin’s An American in Paris is familiar concert-hall territory. The names surrounding it on this program—Ignatz Waghalter, Lazare Saminsky, Ernst Toch, and Louis Gruenberg—are much less familiar, although their careers belong to the same broad history of Jewish participation in American musical life.

Their routes to the United States were different. Saminsky and Gruenberg established American careers before the Nazi era. Waghalter and Toch fled persecution, leaving behind professional lives built in Europe. Migration could mean opportunity; exile meant the urgent task of beginning again after a world of colleagues, audiences, and institutions had been taken away.

Gershwin, born in America to Russian Jewish immigrants, represents another part of that story. His combination of concert forms with the sounds of American popular life became internationally recognizable. The other composers brought European training into a country whose music was changing through jazz, theater, recording, and the growth of orchestras.

JoAnn Falletta conducts The Orchestra Now in a program that places those histories beside one another. The familiar Gershwin work supplies a point of reference, but the lesser-heard composers make the larger claim: the Jewish contribution to the period extends well beyond the handful of names that remain on regular concert programs.

📅 Saturday, November 14 · 7–9:15 PM

📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2–4:15 PM

🎟️ Ticketed

📍 ETEC, UAlbany, 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany

📅 Saturday, November 14: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

📅 Sunday, November 15: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook

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🔬 SCIENCE & FAMILY

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A material that behaves unexpectedly offers the beginning of an experiment: change the pressure, change the surface, and see whether the result changes too.

Nanovember: STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day

UAlbany / ETEC

Robots, LEGO challenges, unusual fluids, cybersecurity, and self-cleaning surfaces are among the subjects at UAlbany’s STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day. The activities, geared toward grades 2–8, range from objects children can build and handle to structures too small to examine with the unaided eye.

That range makes the scientific connections especially useful. A robot turns instructions into movement. A non-Newtonian fluid challenges the expectation that a liquid always responds to force in the same way. A thin film demonstrates how a nearly invisible change at a surface can alter an everyday property, such as the way water behaves on it.

Families can explore several subjects during the morning, with experiments and demonstrations providing a starting point for questions. The emphasis is on observable results: something moves, resists, changes, or responds differently than expected. From there, children have a reason to ask what caused it—and what might happen if they try something else.

📅 Saturday, November 14 · 9:30 AM–1:30 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration · Activities geared toward grades 2–8

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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD

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November 16–December 6

Biotech Connect

Hudson Valley Community College

Biotech Connect introduces participants to biotechnology through hands-on laboratory work and an examination of related career pathways. The five-hour program offers a practical encounter with work that depends on careful handling, measurement, and attention to procedure.

Laboratory tasks make the field’s demands concrete. Accuracy depends on a sequence of small actions, and consistency matters when a result must be reproduced. Participants can try that work directly while learning more about the occupations connected to it.

Participants who complete the full program receive a $100 stipend.

📅 Saturday, December 5 · 9 AM–2 PM

🎟️ Free · Open to the public · Registration required

Limited capacity—register early.

📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

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🔭 LONG-RANGE PLANNING

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December 7–March 7

Hansel and Gretel

Bard Conservatory / Fisher Center · Regional Extension

Humperdinck’s opera gives the familiar fairy tale a score that moves between folk-like melodies and a rich orchestral sound. The children’s hunger and quarrels establish a domestic world before the forest introduces its dangers, enchantments, and deceptive comforts.

Bard’s fully staged production features the Conservatory Orchestra under James Bagwell, graduate vocalists, and a children’s ensemble. The contrast between the simplicity of the children’s songs and the scale of the surrounding music is one of the opera’s pleasures: a small family story acquires the reach of a much larger imagined world.

📅 Friday, December 11 · 7 PM

📅 Sunday, December 13 · 2 PM

🎟️ Tickets from $20 · Sung in German with English supertitles · Advance ticket purchase recommended

📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC, RPI, 50 Eighth Street, Troy

Robotics makes questions about control and response physical: an instruction becomes a movement that someone else must interpret.

INTERFACE: Robotics

Qiujiang Levi Lu and John Wen · RPI / EMPAC

Qiujiang Levi Lu and John Wen bring artistic practice and robotics research into EMPAC’s INTERFACE series. The subject places machines’ physical actions at the center of an exchange between disciplines with different purposes and expectations.

Engineers work with control, response, and the conditions under which a system performs reliably. Artists may use those same capacities as material for an encounter with an audience. A machine’s movement belongs to both discussions: it can be measured as a technical result and interpreted as an action with expressive or social meaning.

📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration

Limited capacity—EMPAC registrations often close well before the event. Register early.

📍 Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

Beethoven and Brahms: Part 1

Zachary Schwartzman / The Orchestra Now · Bard College · Regional Extension

Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica, and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony make a substantial pairing. Both demand close attention to the way a long orchestral argument develops, but they arrive at their conclusions through different kinds of tension and momentum.

Zachary Schwartzman conducts The Orchestra Now. Beethoven’s funeral march and variation finale occupy a different expressive world from the concentrated movement of Brahms’s final passacaglia. Hearing the two symphonies together places their orchestral weight, formal invention, and very different endings in direct comparison.

📅 Saturday, February 6, 2027 · 7 PM

📅 Sunday, February 7 · 2 PM

🎟️ Tickets from $15 · Purchase ahead of the performance weekend

📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC, RPI, 50 Eighth Street, Troy

INTERFACE: Mixed Reality

Lars Jan and Talis Reks · RPI / EMPAC

Mixed reality places digitally constructed information within an experience of physical space. Lars Jan and Talis Reks examine that overlap in another of EMPAC’s conversations between artistic and technological practice.

The subject involves more than what appears on a display. It includes where a participant looks, how a body moves, and what it means for several people to share a room while encountering an additional digital layer. Those practical questions also become artistic ones when the arrangement of attention and movement forms part of a work.

📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6 PM

🎟️ Free · Advance registration

Limited capacity—EMPAC registrations often close well before the event. Register early.

📍 Arthur Zankel Music Center, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs

A Well-Being Concert

Ensemble Connect · Skidmore College / Arthur Zankel Music Center

Ensemble Connect places the audience onstage around the musicians for a concert incorporating guided mindfulness. The arrangement changes a familiar concert-hall relationship: listeners occupy the performance space rather than looking toward it from rows of seats.

Close proximity makes the physical work of playing more apparent, from breath and preparation to the coordination among musicians. Guided portions direct attention toward listening itself. Chairs, mats, and cushions offer different ways to settle into a program concerned with concentration and the shared experience of music.

📅 Sunday, February 21, 2027 · 2 PM

🎟️ Ticketed · Seating options include chairs, mats, and cushions

The onstage format limits capacity. Advance ticket purchase recommended.

Fine Arts Building, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany · Hours and visiting information

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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS

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November 16, 2026–May 16, 2027

CORE CAMPUSES

Rent — Siena University, Loudonville — November 19–21, remaining performances — Details

This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs — November 20–December 5 — Details

Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — December 2–10 — Details

Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — February 24–March 3 — Details

The World Goes Round — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — March 18–21 — Details

The Country Wife — Siena University, Loudonville — April 8–17 — Details

🆕 NEW TO THE SIX-MONTH WINDOW — Seussical: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage, Troy — May 5–13 — Details

🌎 REGIONAL EXTENSION THEATER

Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the Sun — Williams College, Williamstown — March 5, 2027 — Details

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🖼️ GALLERY LISTINGS

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UAlbany University Art Museum

Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core — Through April 2, 2027 — Details

mosie romney: ash whistle redress — Through April 2, 2027 — Details

Invitation to a Light Factory: Suzan Frecon / Marcella Durand — Through April 2, 2027 — Details

Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College

Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs · Hours and visiting information

Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2 B — Through November 29, 2026 — Details

Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are a Constellation — Through January 3, 2027 — Details

Julian LaVerdiere / Duke Riley — Through January 3, 2027 — Details

Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Through January 3, 2027 — Details

500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs — Through January 10, 2027 — Details

A Feeling of With — Through July 18, 2027 — Details

Sheila Pepe: When/Where We Rest — Through September 12, 2027 — Details

Art on Campus — Through October 3, 2027 — Details

Opalka Gallery, Russell Sage College

Light and Transient Causes — Through December 5, 2026 — Details

Crowell and West Galleries, Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts, Schenectady

Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, noon–5 PM; Thursday until 8 PM.

Union College

Practices — Through November 22, 2026 — Details

Audubon exhibition — Through November 25, 2026 — Details

Lally Reading Room, Schaffer Library, Union College, Schenectady · Visitor information

Conservation exhibition — Fall 2026; closing date not posted — Details

Beuth Atrium, Schaffer Library, Union College, Schenectady · Visitor information

Siena University

Midsemester exhibition — Through December 4, 2026 — Details

Hudson Valley Community College

Paul Mauren: Tracing Time — November 12–December 12, 2026 — Details

Hours: Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, 10 AM–4 PM; Wednesday, noon–7 PM; Saturday, noon–4 PM.

Thomas Lail: Garden — Ongoing — Details

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📅 YOUR WEEK, DAY BY DAY

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MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9

2–3 PM · Maxwell Pearce · HVCC · Details

5:30 PM · Tara Westover · Bard · Details

7:30 PM · Elliot Williams · UAlbany, Page Hall · Details

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10

6 PM · Nato Thompson · Skidmore, Tang · Details

7 PM · Princess Mononoke · RPI, EMPAC · Details

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11

7:30 PM · Jazz & Latin Percussion · Union · Details

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12

3–4 PM · Paul Mauren talk · HVCC · Details

4–6 PM · Mauren reception · HVCC · Details

4:30 PM · William Alexander · UAlbany · Details

6 PM · Gibson & Delton · Skidmore, Tang · Details

6 PM · Veena & Devesh Chandra · HVCC · Details

6–7 PM · Cognitive Science · RPI, EMPAC · Details

8 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13

11 AM–5 PM · Art, Education & AI · Bard · Details

5:30–8:30 PM · Culinary Experience · Opalka · Details

7 PM · Telling the Truth · UAlbany, Page Hall · Details

7 PM · Ali Ryerson · SUNY Schenectady · Details

8 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14

9:30 AM–1:30 PM · STEM Family Day · UAlbany · Details

7–9:15 PM · Gershwin & Jewish Émigrés · Bard · Details

8 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15

2 PM · Tang Guide Tour · Skidmore · Details

2–4:15 PM · Gershwin & Jewish Émigrés · Bard · Details

3 PM · Rent · Siena · Details

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Capital Region Curated — Edited by Alan Koslow

What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.