Capital Region Curated: October 26-November 1
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Lois Lowry, architect Billie Tsien, saxophonist Ernie Watts and more.
Alan Koslow
32
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
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LOIS LOWRY, BILLIE TSIEN, ERNIE WATTS & A WEEK OF STORIES THAT CHALLENGE EXPECTATIONS
A celebrated novelist imagines an America without books. An architect considers what it means to begin again. A Syrian journalist recounts the cost of defiance. A major saxophonist brings his quartet to Schenectady, and Anne Waldman brings poetry into the room through the force of the spoken voice.
Elsewhere this week: bird song and scientific collaboration, disability and American citizenship, public service, Halloween drumming, a haunted ship at EMPAC, and the opening of Grease.
From The Giver to Building 903, Lois Lowry asks what happens when obedience comes at the expense of freedom.
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🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks — Lois Lowry, Billie Tsien, Ernie Watts Quartet, Anne Waldman and Loubna Mrie.
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life — Ageism, disability and citizenship, the liberal arts, architecture, public service, and the history of bird research.
📚 Books, Writers & Ideas — Building 903, Defiance and Dharma Gaze.
🎭 Theater & Performance — Grease, Beckett’s short plays and a haunted maritime adventure at EMPAC.
🎨 Art & Visual Culture — PechaKucha Night, a student curator’s talk, a Tang Guide tour and continuing exhibitions.
🎶 Music, Sound & Technology — Ernie Watts, Union’s Jazz Ensemble, Zakuro-Daiko and UAlbany’s Fall Choral Hour.
🔥 Plan Ahead — Registration-based programs, visiting artists and ticketed performances worth arranging before their event week.
🔭 Long-Range Early Warning — Opera at Bard, robotics, mixed reality, Beethoven and Brahms.
📅 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.
📅 DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links below open an event ready to save.
📍 BEFORE YOU GO
Event schedules can change, and programs may be canceled or moved after publication. Check with the venue before traveling to confirm that the event is still taking place, along with its time, location and attendance requirements.
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask campus staff for assistance and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Check event pages for special registration, parking, accessibility or building-entry instructions.
💬 READER FIELD NOTES
Did you attend something listed in Capital Region Curated?
Leave a quick comment: what did you see, and would you recommend it? One sentence is enough.
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⭐ TOP PICKS
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📚 Lois Lowry — Fighting Tyranny with Books
UAlbany · Wednesday, October 28 · 7:30 PM
The author of The Giver and Number the Stars returns to questions of freedom, obedience and moral courage in Building 903. This time, a brother and sister struggle to survive in a near-future America where books and basic freedoms have been outlawed. Lowry’s two Newbery Medals recognize a career that has given generations of readers ways to think about injustice without making its choices easy.
See 📚 Books, Writers & Ideas below.
🏗️ Billie Tsien — Begin Again
RPI / EMPAC · Wednesday, October 28 · 5 PM
Billie Tsien’s architectural career includes museums, universities and major cultural projects, from the Barnes Foundation to David Geffen Hall and the Obama Presidential Center. Her RPI lecture, Begin Again, brings that experience to a conversation about architectural practice. For anyone interested in how buildings express the values of the institutions they serve, this is a chance to hear a designer whose work has helped shape important public spaces.
See 🏛️ Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz · Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
Ernie Watts’s saxophone has traveled through Buddy Rich’s band, Charlie Haden’s Quartet West, film scores and an extraordinary range of recordings. His two Grammy Awards are only one measure of that career. In Schenectady, he appears with pianist Marc Seales, bassist Bruce Lett and drummer Bob Leatherbarrow: a quartet built around sustained musical relationships and the freedom of live improvisation.
See 🎶 Music, Sound & Technology below.
✍️ Anne Waldman — Dharma Gaze
Skidmore / Tang Teaching Museum · Thursday, October 29 · 6 PM
Anne Waldman’s poetry lives in the voice as well as on the page. A co-founder of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she has spent decades connecting writing with performance, collaboration and the building of literary communities. Her free Tang reading offers an encounter with that practice, following last week’s screening of the documentary Outrider.
See 📚 Books, Writers & Ideas below.
📰 Loubna Mrie — Defiance
UAlbany · Thursday, October 29 · 4:30 PM
What happens when someone raised to support an authoritarian regime chooses rebellion instead? Syrian journalist Loubna Mrie addresses that question through her own life in Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria. Her appearance connects the public history of revolt with its intimate costs: family, loyalty, fear and the decision to act against the world one has inherited.
See 📚 Books, Writers & Ideas below.
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🏛️ IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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🏗️ Billie Tsien — Begin Again
Billie Tsien’s buildings have served museums, universities and cultural institutions whose purposes demand more than an impressive exterior. Formerly a founding partner of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, she is now a co-founder of Studio Tsien. Her work includes the Barnes Foundation, the Hood Museum of Art and the renovation of David Geffen Hall.
That experience gives Begin Again a substantial foundation. Buildings for learning, art and public gathering must answer practical questions about movement, materials and use while also expressing something about the institution’s values. Tsien’s practice has pursued an architecture described by RPI as serene and enduring.
Her Mike Wacholder Memorial Lecture brings a nationally significant architect to EMPAC. Readers interested in museums, campuses, public space or the relationship between design and civic life have a clear reason to attend.
📅 Wednesday, October 28 · 5 PM
📍 EMPAC Theater · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🧓 Together Against Ageism — How Bias Shapes Community Health
Dina Refki brings a public-policy perspective to a subject that often gets treated as a matter of manners. A clinical professor in UAlbany’s Department of Public Administration and Policy and director of its Center for Women in Government & Civil Society, she examines how institutions and communities respond to unequal treatment.
Her Aging Well Speaker Series presentation considers ageism in Albany County: how age-based assumptions take shape locally and how they affect health and wellbeing. The program moves beyond identifying stereotypes to consider strategies for addressing them.
Refki will also discuss the research methods used to evaluate those efforts and preliminary findings that may inform policy and program design. That makes the afternoon relevant to older adults, caregivers, educators and people working in health, government or community organizations.
📅 Monday, October 26 · 3:30–5 PM
📍 ETEC, Rooms 149/151 · University at Albany · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Registration link provided on the official event page
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Richard Rifkin Memorial Lecture — A Legacy of Public Service
Richard Rifkin spent more than four decades working in and around New York State government. His positions included deputy attorney general, executive director of the State Ethics Commission and special counsel to a governor. In 2020, he became legal director of Albany Law School’s Government Law Center, continuing to address questions facing state and local government until his death in 2024.
Those roles placed him where legal advice becomes public action: interpreting authority, weighing institutional responsibilities and helping government function. A memorial program devoted to that career offers an opportunity to consider the work behind the more visible acts of politics.
Former New York Attorney General Robert Abrams is among those participating. Albany Law lists a lecture followed by a reception, giving readers interested in law, public administration and New York government an evening centered on a consequential public-service career.
📅 Monday, October 26 · 6–7:30 PM; reception follows
🎟️ Advance registration requested
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📖 Nathan Hensley — The Liberal Arts in a Time of Monsters
Nathan Hensley studies nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory and the environmental humanities at Georgetown University. His recent book, Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse, examines how literature can help people think about action when changing the course of events feels difficult or impossible.
That background gives his Skidmore lecture a particular interest. The Liberal Arts in a Time of Monsters raises a question that reaches beyond a debate over college requirements: what can reading, interpretation and historical knowledge contribute in an unsettled world?
The announced lecture does not supply a detailed outline, so its specific arguments remain Hensley’s to make. His scholarship provides a reason to listen, however: he approaches literature as a way of examining power, responsibility and the limits of familiar stories about progress.
📅 Tuesday, October 27 · 5:30 PM
📍 Wyckoff Center · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Consult the presenting department for attendance arrangements
Official English Department Listing
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
♿ Welcoming the Stranger? — American Jews, Disability & Citizenship
Hannah Zaves-Greene works at the intersection of American Jewish history, disability studies and legal history. The founding president of the Society for Jewish & Disability Studies, she has also consulted for the National Museum of Immigration on Ellis Island. Her forthcoming book, Able to Be American, examines disability in U.S. immigration law and the American Jewish response.
Her annual Jewish Colonie Lecture considers how disability, immigration and citizenship became entangled. The question is not simply who arrived in the United States, but how law and public judgment determined who could belong.
The subject brings a less familiar dimension to American immigration history and to debates about communal responsibility. UAlbany’s Judaic Studies Program and Department of History present the lecture, with light refreshments and wheelchair-accessible arrangements.
📅 Tuesday, October 27 · 6 PM
📍 Science Library, Standish Room · University at Albany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public; light refreshments
🚗 Free parking listed in Dutch Faculty/Staff Lot #5
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
The eastern wood pewee’s familiar call became the focus of research sustained by collaboration when scientist Wallace Craig’s hearing faded.
🐦 Access & Insight — Wallace Craig and the Song of the Eastern Wood Pewee
The eastern wood pewee’s recognizable call makes it a familiar starting point for many beginning birders. Historian Kristoffer Whitney uses that sound to tell a less familiar story about scientific work, hearing loss and collaboration.
Wallace Craig studied the bird from the 1920s into the early 1940s. When his hearing faded, he turned to birders and other amateur ornithologists to continue his research. The resulting history challenges an image of science conducted by a solitary expert with all the necessary abilities and resources at hand.
Whitney’s talk considers how access and cooperation shape what researchers can learn. Presented through a partnership involving the New York State Museum, UAlbany and RPI, it offers an evening for bird enthusiasts, history readers and anyone interested in the contributions of amateur observers. Live ASL interpretation is provided.
📅 Tuesday, October 27 · 6–7:30 PM
📍 New York State Museum, Huxley Theater · 222 Madison Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public; live ASL interpretation
Museum Event Details · UAlbany Calendar Listing
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🔬 State of Grace 2026 — Women in STEAM
UAlbany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity hosts State of Grace, a program celebrating women in science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics.
The announced activities include conversations with professionals, hands-on workshops and sessions on networking and public speaking. The combination treats participation in STEAM as more than a matter of technical training: professional relationships, communication and opportunities to lead also affect who can build a career.
The one-day program takes place October 29, 9 AM–4 PM, at ETEC and the Campus Center. It is open to the public, bringing these conversations about participation, professional development and gender diversity beyond the university community.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · 9 AM–4 PM
📍 ETEC and Campus Center · University at Albany
🎟️ Open to the public
☎️ Organizer contact: 518-442-5258
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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📚 BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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📚 Lois Lowry — Building 903
Lois Lowry has repeatedly trusted young readers with difficult subjects. Number the Stars enters the history of Nazi-occupied Denmark; The Giver imagines a society whose apparent order depends on suppressing memory, emotion and choice. Both received the Newbery Medal.
Her new novel, Building 903, returns to authoritarianism through a brother and sister living in a near-future America where books and basic freedoms are outlawed. The premise places reading within a struggle over what people are allowed to know and imagine.
Lowry’s Writers Institute conversation offers an opportunity to hear how those concerns have developed across a long career. Readers who encountered her work in childhood can return to it with adult questions, while teachers, parents and younger readers can hear a writer who has helped make moral uncertainty a serious subject of literature for young people.
📅 Wednesday, October 28 · 7:30–8:30 PM
📍 Page Hall Auditorium · UAlbany Downtown Campus · 135 Western Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public; book signing
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
In Defiance, Loubna Mrie connects Syria’s uprising with the intimate costs of breaking inherited loyalties.
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📰 Loubna Mrie — Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria
Loubna Mrie is a journalist, photographer and commentator whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, The Nation and other publications. Her memoir brings that public work into contact with the personal history that preceded it.
Defiance follows a young woman raised to be loyal to Syria’s regime who chooses revolt at tremendous personal cost. Its subject is the process of dissent: how inherited loyalties begin to fracture, how people recognize what they have accepted, and what happens when they can no longer continue accepting it.
The Writers Institute conversation offers a perspective on authoritarianism grounded in lived experience. Mrie’s work makes the political intimate, connecting a country’s violence with family relationships and the choices through which a person attempts to claim a life of her own.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · 4:30–5:30 PM
📍 Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center · University at Albany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
✍️ Anne Waldman — Dharma Gaze
Anne Waldman’s career encompasses poetry, performance, recordings, collaboration and the creation of places where other writers can work. A co-founder of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she has helped sustain a literary culture in which the spoken voice is central.
Her work asks listeners to encounter poetry as an event unfolding in time. Breath, pace, repetition and physical presence can change how a poem is understood; hearing the writer gives access to choices that a printed page leaves open.
The Tang’s Dharma Gaze reading follows its screening of Alystyre Julian’s documentary Outrider. Readers who saw the film can now encounter its subject directly, while newcomers can begin with the work itself. The free Payne Room program offers a concentrated evening with an influential experimental poet.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · 6 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Payne Room · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎭 THEATER & PERFORMANCE
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🎭 BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain — Final Performances
Samuel Beckett’s short plays can make a theatrical world from a repeated movement, a voice, an object or a carefully arranged body. Skidmore’s collection brings together Act Without Words I & II, Rough for Theatre I & II, Quad, What Where and Rockaby.
Directed by Jared Klein, the production emphasizes the relationship between text and design. Light, movement and space carry dramatic weight alongside words. Presenting several works together gives audiences a chance to see how many different theatrical possibilities Beckett found within severe limits.
For readers who know him chiefly through Waiting for Godot, this is an opportunity to encounter physical comedy, unsettling repetition and concentrated images of dependence and persistence. The production’s announced run concludes October 28.
📅 Monday–Wednesday, October 26–28 · 8–10 PM
📍 Janet Kinghorn Bernhard Theater Building · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ $6.53 students / $11.83 non-students
📅 Monday, October 26: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Tuesday, October 27: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Wednesday, October 28: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🎶 Grease — TIS Teens Opens a New Run
The students of Rydell High inhabit a world of friendship, romance and the pressure to belong. Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s musical turns those adolescent negotiations into an ensemble story whose energy comes from the group as much as from its central couple.
Theatre Institute at Sage’s TIS Teens presents the production under the direction of Eddie Knight. The program identifies its fall project as the school edition, making this an opportunity to see young performers working through a musical closely associated with teenage identity.
Opening weekend offers one Friday evening performance and two afternoon performances. The presenting theater recommends the production for ages ten and older, and the $15 ticket price makes it a practical option for a family or group theater outing.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
📅 Saturday, October 31 · 2 PM
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 2 PM
📍 James Meader Little Theater · Russell Sage College, Troy campus
🎟️ $15; recommended for ages 10+
The run continues November 6–8.
Production & Season Details · Tickets
📅 Friday, October 30: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, October 31: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday, November 1: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🎃 Beneath the Hudson — A Haunted Ship Takes Over EMPAC
EMPAC turns Troy’s maritime past into a supernatural adventure built around a lost steamboat and the fog that seems to have brought it back. Visitors enter a haunted ship experience populated by ghostly sailors, river creatures and traces of a disaster that refuses to remain underwater.
The larger program spreads through the building. FlagSSSDay Collective leads mask-making, Proctors supplies theatrical props for a photo booth, and trick-or-treating and costume contests give families several ways to participate. Later, DJs and a cash bar shift the atmosphere toward an adult evening.
Two films provide distinct options: Muppet Treasure Island at 5 PM and Lake Placid at 8 PM. The haunted ship is recommended for ages nine and older; the films’ G and R ratings make their different audiences clear.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 3–10 PM
📍 EMPAC · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; food and drinks purchased separately
Selected schedule
3–10 PM: Haunted Ship Experience, recommended ages 9+; trick-or-treating; photo booth.
3–7 PM: Mask-making with FlagSSSDay Collective.
4–5 PM: Children’s costume contest.
5 PM: Muppet Treasure Island — rated G.
7 PM: Adult costume contest; beer and wine bar opens.
7–10 PM: Hellseeker Club DJs.
8 PM: Lake Placid — rated R.
Add the full afternoon and evening
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Or add a particular activity
4 PM — Children’s costume contest: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
5 PM — Muppet Treasure Island: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
7 PM — Adult costume contest: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
7–10 PM — Hellseeker Club DJs: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
8 PM — Lake Placid: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎨 ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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🗣️ PechaKucha Night — Albany Cats, Arcade Games & the Stories Inside a Place
Opalka’s PechaKucha Night gathers eight presenters whose subjects move across local history, photography, public art, preservation and popular culture. The short illustrated-talk format gives each speaker a compact opportunity to make a subject vivid.
Among the announced presentations are Maeve McEneny-Johnson on Albany’s 1905 cat show, Adam Williams on the 1987 arcade game The Ninja Warriors, and photographer Chet Boehlke Jr.’s ShutterBuggin. Chet Opalka discusses the Albany Waterway Canal Project, while Mount Ida Preservation Association director Michael Easterbrook considers the traces of a busier past.
The attraction is the range: a single evening can introduce a reader to an unfamiliar piece of Albany history, a way of looking through a camera and a preservation question close to home. Refreshments begin before the presentations, allowing time to visit the gallery.
📅 Friday, October 30 · Refreshments 6:30 PM; talks 7 PM
📍 Opalka Gallery · Russell Sage College · 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Public program; consult the event page for attendance details
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🖼️ Curator’s Talk — Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?!
Skidmore student curator Laila Carlton ’29 introduces an exhibition built around Glory, a painting by Jennifer Wynne Reeves from the Tang’s collection. The Hyde Cabinet series gives a small presentation the attention that can be difficult to sustain within a large museum survey.
A talk centered on one work allows visitors to consider the decisions behind its selection and presentation. Carlton offers the curator’s perspective, giving listeners an opportunity to connect what they see with the questions that shaped the exhibition.
The noon program can also serve as the beginning of a longer museum visit. Other exhibitions on view include Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, A Feeling of With and 500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · Noon
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Atrium · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🖼️ Tang Guide Tour — With Felix Sloss ’29
A museum’s student guides offer another route into its exhibitions: a selection of works, a way of asking questions and a perspective shaped by their own encounters with the collection.
Felix Sloss ’29 leads this Sunday’s Tang Guide Tour. The museum’s current exhibitions range from American history and citizenship to ecology and the relationships through which people understand the world around them.
The guided format is useful for first-time visitors deciding where to begin, while returning visitors can compare another person’s choices with their own. The afternoon leaves time afterward to revisit a work or continue independently through the galleries.
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 2 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Atrium · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🌼 Final Week — HVCC’s Día de Muertos Altar Exhibition
HVCC’s Marvin Library Learning Commons hosts an altar exhibition celebrating Día de Muertos, the Mexican tradition of remembering departed loved ones and ancestors.
The altar gives remembrance a visible form. Objects and decorations become ways of sustaining relationships with those who have died, placing personal memory within a shared cultural practice.
October 30 is the exhibition’s final day. Visitors can use this last week to encounter the display, including those who missed the preceding discussion of the holiday’s traditions. The college’s listing includes the community among its intended audiences.
📅 On view through Friday, October 30
🎟️ Open to the community; check library visitor hours before traveling
🖼️ Continuing Exhibition — Light & Transient Causes
Opalka’s exhibition takes its title from the Declaration of Independence’s warning against changing governments for “light and transient causes.” Curator Marisa Espe turns that language toward a question about judgment: who gets to decide that someone else’s grievance is too minor to count?
The ten artists include Deborah Dancy, Sky Hopinka, Wendy Red Star, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter and Jean-Marc Superville Sovak. Their participation places the exhibition within a broader consideration of whose experiences receive public attention.
Readers attending PechaKucha Night can visit the exhibition as part of the evening, while a separate visit offers more time with the work. The show continues through December 5.
📅 Through December 5
🕒 Tuesday–Saturday, Noon–5 PM; Thursday until 8 PM; Monday by appointment
📍 Opalka Gallery · Russell Sage College · 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free
Exhibition Details · Visitor Information
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🎶 MUSIC, SOUND & TECHNOLOGY
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Ernie Watts brings decades of jazz, studio and film work to the freedom of his own quartet.
🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet — A Major Jazz Career in a Small-Group Setting
Ernie Watts’s musical history reaches from Buddy Rich’s big band to Charlie Haden’s Quartet West. His recording career includes film scores, popular music and two Grammy-winning albums produced by Quincy Jones. For many listeners, his playing may already be familiar even when his name is not.
The quartet places that experience in a setting shaped by live interaction. Pianist Marc Seales, bassist Bruce Lett and drummer Bob Leatherbarrow have longstanding relationships with Watts, giving the group a shared vocabulary without removing the discoveries of improvisation.
A Place for Jazz brings the quartet to SUNY Schenectady’s Carl B. Taylor Auditorium. The opportunity is to hear an artist whose studio work served countless projects now working at the center of his own ensemble.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building · SUNY Schenectady · 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady
🎟️ $25 at the door / $26.95 online; students with ID $10 at the door
Door purchases: cash or check
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🎙️ Union College Jazz Ensemble — Vocal Jazz!
Union’s Jazz Ensemble turns its attention to vocal jazz in a Wednesday evening concert at Emerson Auditorium. The program brings student musicians from across the college into a performance devoted to a form where words and instrumental phrasing meet.
Vocal jazz asks listeners to attend to how a melody is shaped: the placement of a phrase, the relationship between a singer and the ensemble, and the rhythmic choices that give familiar musical material a particular character.
The college has announced the concert title and schedule without a detailed repertoire list. Its appeal is the opportunity to hear the ensemble’s current work in an intimate campus setting, with suggested donations directly supporting Union’s music groups.
📅 Wednesday, October 28 · 8 PM
📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center · Union College · Schenectady
🎟️ Tickets at the door; suggested donations: $15 general / $10 Union faculty, staff and alumni / $5 students, seniors and children under 12
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🥁 Zakuro-Daiko — Happy Halloween!
Union’s Japanese drumming ensemble offers two Halloween performances at Emerson Auditorium. Zakuro-Daiko brings a different sound and physical presence to the college’s fall concert series.
Taiko performance makes coordination visible as well as audible. Listeners can follow the relationship between repeated patterns, collective timing and the movements through which the players produce the sound.
The announced program provides Friday evening and Saturday afternoon options. Union has not supplied a detailed repertoire, so the invitation is straightforward: hear the ensemble in performance and encounter a campus music practice that differs markedly from the week’s jazz and choral concerts.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
📅 Saturday, October 31 · 1 PM
📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center · Union College · Schenectady
🎟️ Tickets at the door; suggested donations: $15 general / $10 Union faculty, staff and alumni / $5 students, seniors and children under 12
📅 Friday, October 30: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, October 31: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🌙 Fall Choral Hour — Music in the Night
UAlbany’s Chamber Singers and Community Chorale share a program devoted to the mystery and possibilities of evening. Music in the Night moves across several centuries rather than approaching its subject through one composer or musical period.
The announced composers include Claudio Monteverdi, Camille Saint-Saëns, Eric Whitacre, Elaine Hagenberg and Andrew Lloyd Webber. That range brings early choral writing into conversation with contemporary concert music and musical theater.
The combined ensembles offer a Sunday-afternoon opportunity to hear how different composers have approached a shared imaginative space. Advance tickets provide a lower-cost option, particularly for students, whose advance admission is $3.
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 3 PM
📍 Main Theatre, Performing Arts Center · University at Albany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Advance: $10 general / $6 seniors and UAlbany faculty-staff / $3 students
🎟️ Day of performance: $15 / $11 / $8
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📍 BEFORE YOU GO: Programs may be canceled, moved or otherwise changed after publication. Check with the venue before traveling, especially when arranging a trip around a single performance.
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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD — NOVEMBER 2–22
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⚖️ Dorothy Roberts — The Mixed Marriage Project
Dorothy Roberts’s books, including Killing the Black Body, Fatal Invention and Torn Apart, have helped shape debates about race, reproductive justice and child welfare. The University of Pennsylvania scholar brings that work to Albany Law’s Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Memorial Lecture through The Mixed Marriage Project, examining interracial marriage, love and law.
The book connects intimate relationships with the legal and social rules governing racial identity. Roberts considers what the history of interracial marriage reveals about the reach of those rules into family life. In-person and online attendance options are offered.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · 5:30 PM; reception follows
📍 Albany Law School · 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Registration offered for in-person and online attendance
Lecture Background & Attendance Information
In Wakka Wakka’s underworld, a dodo growing feathers upsets the boundary between life and death.
🌎 Wakka Wakka — Dead as a Dodo
Two skeleton friends search for replacement bones in the underworld. Then the dodo begins to grow feathers, and an apparent miracle threatens the order around them. Wakka Wakka turns that premise into visual theater through puppetry, humor and a story of friendship caught between life and death.
As the bird’s transformation continues, the friends must flee a world that has become hostile to them. The production combines a darkly comic setting with the emotional stakes of staying together when everything familiar begins to change. Tickets are available for the single Williams performance.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 8 PM
📍 MainStage, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance · Williams College · Williamstown, Massachusetts
🎟️ Ticketed
🧠 INTERFACE: Cognitive Science — Brett Fajen & Heidi Latsky
Choreographer Heidi Latsky and RPI cognitive scientist Brett Fajen consider how perception connects with bodily action and how people adapt when those systems change. The program includes material from Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey, addressing dancers’ experiences of non-apparent neurological disabilities.
Fajen studies perception, movement and the visual control of action; Latsky approaches related questions through dancers’ bodies and creative practice. Their conversation explores where those methods meet and what each can reveal about learning, adaptation and the experience of moving through the world.
📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM; listed duration 60 minutes
📍 Studio 2 · EMPAC · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check the event page for attendance arrangements
🎭 Rent — Siena University
Jonathan Larson’s musical brings artists, friendship, love and the AIDS crisis into a story about making a life under economic and emotional pressure. Siena’s production is directed by Margaret E. Hall in the Beaudoin Theatre.
Its characters struggle to sustain relationships and creative work while confronting illness and insecurity. The ensemble structure places their different responses beside one another, making community both a source of support and a continuing challenge. Tickets are linked from the university’s official season page.
📅 November 12–14 and 19–21 · 8 PM; November 15 · 3 PM
📍 Beaudoin Theatre · Siena University · 515 Loudon Road, Loudonville
🎟️ Ticketed; purchase link on the official page
Ali Ryerson places the flute at the center of a jazz ensemble, exploring its range as an improvising voice.
🎷 Ali Ryerson Quartet
Ali Ryerson’s career places the flute at the center of a jazz ensemble. Her international appearances, recordings and Jazz Flute Big Band work demonstrate an instrumental voice that listeners may know more readily from orchestral music.
Her quartet includes pianist Larry Ham, bassist Lou Pappas and drummer Tom Melito. The combination offers the flexibility of a small jazz group with the flute’s distinctive colors at its center. This concert concludes A Place for Jazz’s announced fall series.
📅 Friday, November 13 · 7 PM
📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building · SUNY Schenectady · 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady
🎟️ $25 at the door / $26.95 online; students with ID $10 at the door
[PHOTO 7 — The Orchestra Now, from the Fisher Center’s Gershwin program page]
The Orchestra Now traces the Jazz Age’s varied influence on Jewish composers working across Europe and America.
🌎 Gershwin, Jazz & the Music of Jewish Émigrés
Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now, with violinist Mira Wang, in a program tracing different responses to the Jazz Age. Gershwin’s An American in Paris appears alongside works by Louis Gruenberg, Ignatz Waghalter, Lazare Saminsky and Ernst Toch.
Waghalter’s prewar Violin Concerto offers a European idiom before jazz’s ascendancy; Gruenberg’s Jazz Suite brings jazz into a classical form. Toch’s rhythmic wit and Saminsky’s contrasting musical outlook make the concert a study in differing responses rather than a single story of influence.
📅 Saturday, November 14 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater · Bard College · Annandale-on-Hudson
🎟️ Tickets start at $15
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🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING — NOVEMBER 23–FEBRUARY 22
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🌎 Hansel and Gretel — Bard Conservatory
Humperdinck’s opera brings the Brothers Grimm’s story into a musical world of folk-inspired melody and rich orchestral writing. Bard’s fully staged production combines the Conservatory Orchestra, Graduate Vocal Arts singers and participating choirs under Leon Botstein.
Sung in German with English supertitles, the opera follows the siblings from domestic troubles into a forest where wonder and danger become difficult to separate. Adult and children’s voices contribute to a production whose musical scale extends well beyond the apparent simplicity of its fairy tale.
📅 Friday, December 11 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, December 13 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater · Bard College
🎟️ Tickets start at $20
🤖 INTERFACE: Robotics — Qiujiang Levi Lu & John Wen
Musician, composer and instrument builder Qiujiang Levi Lu joins RPI robotics researcher John Wen to consider machines as instruments, collaborators and extensions of the body. Their conversation connects artistic experimentation with questions about control, perception and the design of new hardware.
Examples from their work explore how artistic projects can pose new questions for robotics, while technical developments create possibilities for performance. The discussion considers what changes when a machine becomes an active part of creative practice.
📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free; check the event page for attendance arrangements
Beethoven’s Eroica and Brahms’s Fourth give The Orchestra Now two contrasting journeys through grief, tension and transformation.
🌎 Beethoven & Brahms: Part 1
The Orchestra Now pairs Brahms’s Fourth Symphony with Beethoven’s Eroica. Both works build large musical arguments through variation, while their contrasting approaches to grief, tension and resolution make the pairing more than a collection of familiar titles.
Brahms’s finale develops a Bach-derived theme through a continuous sequence of variations. Beethoven’s symphony moves through its funeral march toward a finale that also transforms a theme on a large scale. Hearing the works together brings those shared techniques—and their very different expressive worlds—into focus.
📅 Saturday, February 6, 2027 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, February 7, 2027 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater · Bard College
🎟️ In-person tickets start at $15
🥽 INTERFACE: Mixed Reality — Lars Jan & Talis Reks
Artist Lars Jan and mixed-reality researcher Talis Reks discuss combining shared physical space with imagined environments. Their developing project, ROAM, involves live performance and synchronized virtual layers for groups moving across a large outdoor space.
The challenge is both technical and theatrical: how can people occupy the same imagined world while moving together through a real one? Jan’s narrative and performance practice meets Reks’s work on headsets, tracking, networking and synchronization for bodies in motion.
📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free; check the event page for attendance arrangements
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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS — NOVEMBER 2–MAY 2
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These are advance production dates. Consult the presenting theater for individual performances, ticket availability and schedule changes.
Core Campuses
DatesProductionCampusDetailsThrough November 8Grease — begins October 30Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageDetails & TicketsNovember 12–21RentSiena UniversityDetails & Ticket LinkNovember 18–22A Doll’s HouseUAlbanySeason DetailsNovember 20–December 5This Emancipation ThingSkidmore CollegeDetailsDecember 2–10Little Women: The MusicalRussell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageSeason & TicketsFebruary 24–March 3ClueRussell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageSeason & TicketsMarch 3–7UAlbany Theatre Program musical — title forthcomingUAlbanySeason DetailsMarch 18–21The World Goes RoundRussell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageDetails & Ticket LinkApril 8–17The Country WifeSiena UniversityDetails & Ticket LinkApril 14–17FRESH ACTS: A Festival of New PlaysUAlbanySeason Details
Regional Extension Theater
DateProductionCampusDetailsNovember 7Wakka Wakka: Dead as a DodoWilliams CollegeDetails & Ticket LinkMarch 5, 2027Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the SunWilliams CollegeDetails
📍 BEFORE YOU GO: A listing cannot guarantee that a program will take place. Confirm with the venue before traveling, including any last-minute change of room, time or admission arrangements.
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📅 BY DAY CALENDAR
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Monday, October 26
3:30–5 PM — Together Against Ageism · UAlbany / ETEC 149/151
6–7:30 PM — Richard Rifkin Memorial Lecture · Albany Law School; reception follows
8–10 PM — BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain · Skidmore
Tuesday, October 27
5:30 PM — Nathan Hensley: The Liberal Arts in a Time of Monsters · Skidmore / Wyckoff Center
6 PM — Hannah Zaves-Greene: Annual Jewish Colonie Lecture · UAlbany / Science Library, Standish Room
6–7:30 PM — Access & Insight: Wallace Craig and the Eastern Wood Pewee · New York State Museum
8–10 PM — BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain · Skidmore
Wednesday, October 28
5 PM — Billie Tsien: Begin Again · RPI / EMPAC Theater
7:30–8:30 PM — Lois Lowry: Building 903 · UAlbany / Page Hall
8 PM — Union College Jazz Ensemble: Vocal Jazz! · Emerson Auditorium
8–10 PM — BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain · Skidmore
Thursday, October 29
9 AM–4 PM — State of Grace 2026 · UAlbany / ETEC and Campus Center; open to the public
Noon — Curator’s Talk: Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?! · Skidmore / Tang
4:30–5:30 PM — Loubna Mrie: Defiance · UAlbany / PAC Recital Hall
6 PM — Anne Waldman: Dharma Gaze · Skidmore / Tang, Payne Room
Friday, October 30
3–10 PM — Beneath the Hudson · RPI / EMPAC
4–5 PM — Children’s costume contest · RPI / EMPAC
5 PM — Muppet Treasure Island screening · RPI / EMPAC
6:30 PM refreshments; 7 PM talks — PechaKucha Night · Russell Sage / Opalka
7 PM — Ernie Watts Quartet · SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz
7 PM — Zakuro-Daiko: Happy Halloween! · Union / Emerson Auditorium
7 PM — Grease · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
7 PM — Adult costume contest · RPI / EMPAC
7–10 PM — Hellseeker Club DJs · RPI / EMPAC
8 PM — Lake Placid screening · RPI / EMPAC
Saturday, October 31
1 PM — Zakuro-Daiko: Happy Halloween! · Union / Emerson Auditorium
2 PM — Grease · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
Sunday, November 1
2 PM — Tang Guide Tour with Felix Sloss ’29 · Skidmore / Tang
2 PM — Grease · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
3 PM — Fall Choral Hour: Music in the Night · UAlbany / Main Theatre
Also on view: HVCC’s Día de Muertos altar through October 30; Opalka’s Light & Transient Causes through December 5; current exhibitions at the Tang Teaching Museum.
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HELP SHAPE CAPITAL REGION CURATED
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What would you like to see more of—music, science, history, literature, visual art or public affairs? Have you attended something that deserves a reader’s recommendation?
Send suggestions, corrections and field notes to Alan Koslow. If you organize a substantial public campus event, please include its official event page, date, time, location and attendance requirements.
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What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
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Capital Region Curated: October 26-November 1
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Lois Lowry, architect Billie Tsien, saxophonist Ernie Watts and more.
Alan Koslow
32
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
🏛️ 📚 🎶 🎭 🔬
LOIS LOWRY, BILLIE TSIEN, ERNIE WATTS & A WEEK OF STORIES THAT CHALLENGE EXPECTATIONS
A celebrated novelist imagines an America without books. An architect considers what it means to begin again. A Syrian journalist recounts the cost of defiance. A major saxophonist brings his quartet to Schenectady, and Anne Waldman brings poetry into the room through the force of the spoken voice.
Elsewhere this week: bird song and scientific collaboration, disability and American citizenship, public service, Halloween drumming, a haunted ship at EMPAC, and the opening of Grease.
From The Giver to Building 903, Lois Lowry asks what happens when obedience comes at the expense of freedom.
📣 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.
Subscribe to Capital Region Curated
🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks — Lois Lowry, Billie Tsien, Ernie Watts Quartet, Anne Waldman and Loubna Mrie.
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life — Ageism, disability and citizenship, the liberal arts, architecture, public service, and the history of bird research.
📚 Books, Writers & Ideas — Building 903, Defiance and Dharma Gaze.
🎭 Theater & Performance — Grease, Beckett’s short plays and a haunted maritime adventure at EMPAC.
🎨 Art & Visual Culture — PechaKucha Night, a student curator’s talk, a Tang Guide tour and continuing exhibitions.
🎶 Music, Sound & Technology — Ernie Watts, Union’s Jazz Ensemble, Zakuro-Daiko and UAlbany’s Fall Choral Hour.
🔥 Plan Ahead — Registration-based programs, visiting artists and ticketed performances worth arranging before their event week.
🔭 Long-Range Early Warning — Opera at Bard, robotics, mixed reality, Beethoven and Brahms.
📅 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.
📅 DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links below open an event ready to save.
📍 BEFORE YOU GO
Event schedules can change, and programs may be canceled or moved after publication. Check with the venue before traveling to confirm that the event is still taking place, along with its time, location and attendance requirements.
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask campus staff for assistance and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Check event pages for special registration, parking, accessibility or building-entry instructions.
💬 READER FIELD NOTES
Did you attend something listed in Capital Region Curated?
Leave a quick comment: what did you see, and would you recommend it? One sentence is enough.
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⭐ TOP PICKS
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📚 Lois Lowry — Fighting Tyranny with Books
UAlbany · Wednesday, October 28 · 7:30 PM
The author of The Giver and Number the Stars returns to questions of freedom, obedience and moral courage in Building 903. This time, a brother and sister struggle to survive in a near-future America where books and basic freedoms have been outlawed. Lowry’s two Newbery Medals recognize a career that has given generations of readers ways to think about injustice without making its choices easy.
See 📚 Books, Writers & Ideas below.
🏗️ Billie Tsien — Begin Again
RPI / EMPAC · Wednesday, October 28 · 5 PM
Billie Tsien’s architectural career includes museums, universities and major cultural projects, from the Barnes Foundation to David Geffen Hall and the Obama Presidential Center. Her RPI lecture, Begin Again, brings that experience to a conversation about architectural practice. For anyone interested in how buildings express the values of the institutions they serve, this is a chance to hear a designer whose work has helped shape important public spaces.
See 🏛️ Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz · Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
Ernie Watts’s saxophone has traveled through Buddy Rich’s band, Charlie Haden’s Quartet West, film scores and an extraordinary range of recordings. His two Grammy Awards are only one measure of that career. In Schenectady, he appears with pianist Marc Seales, bassist Bruce Lett and drummer Bob Leatherbarrow: a quartet built around sustained musical relationships and the freedom of live improvisation.
See 🎶 Music, Sound & Technology below.
✍️ Anne Waldman — Dharma Gaze
Skidmore / Tang Teaching Museum · Thursday, October 29 · 6 PM
Anne Waldman’s poetry lives in the voice as well as on the page. A co-founder of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she has spent decades connecting writing with performance, collaboration and the building of literary communities. Her free Tang reading offers an encounter with that practice, following last week’s screening of the documentary Outrider.
See 📚 Books, Writers & Ideas below.
📰 Loubna Mrie — Defiance
UAlbany · Thursday, October 29 · 4:30 PM
What happens when someone raised to support an authoritarian regime chooses rebellion instead? Syrian journalist Loubna Mrie addresses that question through her own life in Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria. Her appearance connects the public history of revolt with its intimate costs: family, loyalty, fear and the decision to act against the world one has inherited.
See 📚 Books, Writers & Ideas below.
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🏛️ IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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🏗️ Billie Tsien — Begin Again
Billie Tsien’s buildings have served museums, universities and cultural institutions whose purposes demand more than an impressive exterior. Formerly a founding partner of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, she is now a co-founder of Studio Tsien. Her work includes the Barnes Foundation, the Hood Museum of Art and the renovation of David Geffen Hall.
That experience gives Begin Again a substantial foundation. Buildings for learning, art and public gathering must answer practical questions about movement, materials and use while also expressing something about the institution’s values. Tsien’s practice has pursued an architecture described by RPI as serene and enduring.
Her Mike Wacholder Memorial Lecture brings a nationally significant architect to EMPAC. Readers interested in museums, campuses, public space or the relationship between design and civic life have a clear reason to attend.
📅 Wednesday, October 28 · 5 PM
📍 EMPAC Theater · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🧓 Together Against Ageism — How Bias Shapes Community Health
Dina Refki brings a public-policy perspective to a subject that often gets treated as a matter of manners. A clinical professor in UAlbany’s Department of Public Administration and Policy and director of its Center for Women in Government & Civil Society, she examines how institutions and communities respond to unequal treatment.
Her Aging Well Speaker Series presentation considers ageism in Albany County: how age-based assumptions take shape locally and how they affect health and wellbeing. The program moves beyond identifying stereotypes to consider strategies for addressing them.
Refki will also discuss the research methods used to evaluate those efforts and preliminary findings that may inform policy and program design. That makes the afternoon relevant to older adults, caregivers, educators and people working in health, government or community organizations.
📅 Monday, October 26 · 3:30–5 PM
📍 ETEC, Rooms 149/151 · University at Albany · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Registration link provided on the official event page
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Richard Rifkin Memorial Lecture — A Legacy of Public Service
Richard Rifkin spent more than four decades working in and around New York State government. His positions included deputy attorney general, executive director of the State Ethics Commission and special counsel to a governor. In 2020, he became legal director of Albany Law School’s Government Law Center, continuing to address questions facing state and local government until his death in 2024.
Those roles placed him where legal advice becomes public action: interpreting authority, weighing institutional responsibilities and helping government function. A memorial program devoted to that career offers an opportunity to consider the work behind the more visible acts of politics.
Former New York Attorney General Robert Abrams is among those participating. Albany Law lists a lecture followed by a reception, giving readers interested in law, public administration and New York government an evening centered on a consequential public-service career.
📅 Monday, October 26 · 6–7:30 PM; reception follows
🎟️ Advance registration requested
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📖 Nathan Hensley — The Liberal Arts in a Time of Monsters
Nathan Hensley studies nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory and the environmental humanities at Georgetown University. His recent book, Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse, examines how literature can help people think about action when changing the course of events feels difficult or impossible.
That background gives his Skidmore lecture a particular interest. The Liberal Arts in a Time of Monsters raises a question that reaches beyond a debate over college requirements: what can reading, interpretation and historical knowledge contribute in an unsettled world?
The announced lecture does not supply a detailed outline, so its specific arguments remain Hensley’s to make. His scholarship provides a reason to listen, however: he approaches literature as a way of examining power, responsibility and the limits of familiar stories about progress.
📅 Tuesday, October 27 · 5:30 PM
📍 Wyckoff Center · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Consult the presenting department for attendance arrangements
Official English Department Listing
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
♿ Welcoming the Stranger? — American Jews, Disability & Citizenship
Hannah Zaves-Greene works at the intersection of American Jewish history, disability studies and legal history. The founding president of the Society for Jewish & Disability Studies, she has also consulted for the National Museum of Immigration on Ellis Island. Her forthcoming book, Able to Be American, examines disability in U.S. immigration law and the American Jewish response.
Her annual Jewish Colonie Lecture considers how disability, immigration and citizenship became entangled. The question is not simply who arrived in the United States, but how law and public judgment determined who could belong.
The subject brings a less familiar dimension to American immigration history and to debates about communal responsibility. UAlbany’s Judaic Studies Program and Department of History present the lecture, with light refreshments and wheelchair-accessible arrangements.
📅 Tuesday, October 27 · 6 PM
📍 Science Library, Standish Room · University at Albany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public; light refreshments
🚗 Free parking listed in Dutch Faculty/Staff Lot #5
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
The eastern wood pewee’s familiar call became the focus of research sustained by collaboration when scientist Wallace Craig’s hearing faded.
🐦 Access & Insight — Wallace Craig and the Song of the Eastern Wood Pewee
The eastern wood pewee’s recognizable call makes it a familiar starting point for many beginning birders. Historian Kristoffer Whitney uses that sound to tell a less familiar story about scientific work, hearing loss and collaboration.
Wallace Craig studied the bird from the 1920s into the early 1940s. When his hearing faded, he turned to birders and other amateur ornithologists to continue his research. The resulting history challenges an image of science conducted by a solitary expert with all the necessary abilities and resources at hand.
Whitney’s talk considers how access and cooperation shape what researchers can learn. Presented through a partnership involving the New York State Museum, UAlbany and RPI, it offers an evening for bird enthusiasts, history readers and anyone interested in the contributions of amateur observers. Live ASL interpretation is provided.
📅 Tuesday, October 27 · 6–7:30 PM
📍 New York State Museum, Huxley Theater · 222 Madison Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public; live ASL interpretation
Museum Event Details · UAlbany Calendar Listing
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🔬 State of Grace 2026 — Women in STEAM
UAlbany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity hosts State of Grace, a program celebrating women in science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics.
The announced activities include conversations with professionals, hands-on workshops and sessions on networking and public speaking. The combination treats participation in STEAM as more than a matter of technical training: professional relationships, communication and opportunities to lead also affect who can build a career.
The one-day program takes place October 29, 9 AM–4 PM, at ETEC and the Campus Center. It is open to the public, bringing these conversations about participation, professional development and gender diversity beyond the university community.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · 9 AM–4 PM
📍 ETEC and Campus Center · University at Albany
🎟️ Open to the public
☎️ Organizer contact: 518-442-5258
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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📚 BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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📚 Lois Lowry — Building 903
Lois Lowry has repeatedly trusted young readers with difficult subjects. Number the Stars enters the history of Nazi-occupied Denmark; The Giver imagines a society whose apparent order depends on suppressing memory, emotion and choice. Both received the Newbery Medal.
Her new novel, Building 903, returns to authoritarianism through a brother and sister living in a near-future America where books and basic freedoms are outlawed. The premise places reading within a struggle over what people are allowed to know and imagine.
Lowry’s Writers Institute conversation offers an opportunity to hear how those concerns have developed across a long career. Readers who encountered her work in childhood can return to it with adult questions, while teachers, parents and younger readers can hear a writer who has helped make moral uncertainty a serious subject of literature for young people.
📅 Wednesday, October 28 · 7:30–8:30 PM
📍 Page Hall Auditorium · UAlbany Downtown Campus · 135 Western Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public; book signing
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
In Defiance, Loubna Mrie connects Syria’s uprising with the intimate costs of breaking inherited loyalties.
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📰 Loubna Mrie — Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria
Loubna Mrie is a journalist, photographer and commentator whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, The Nation and other publications. Her memoir brings that public work into contact with the personal history that preceded it.
Defiance follows a young woman raised to be loyal to Syria’s regime who chooses revolt at tremendous personal cost. Its subject is the process of dissent: how inherited loyalties begin to fracture, how people recognize what they have accepted, and what happens when they can no longer continue accepting it.
The Writers Institute conversation offers a perspective on authoritarianism grounded in lived experience. Mrie’s work makes the political intimate, connecting a country’s violence with family relationships and the choices through which a person attempts to claim a life of her own.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · 4:30–5:30 PM
📍 Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center · University at Albany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
✍️ Anne Waldman — Dharma Gaze
Anne Waldman’s career encompasses poetry, performance, recordings, collaboration and the creation of places where other writers can work. A co-founder of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she has helped sustain a literary culture in which the spoken voice is central.
Her work asks listeners to encounter poetry as an event unfolding in time. Breath, pace, repetition and physical presence can change how a poem is understood; hearing the writer gives access to choices that a printed page leaves open.
The Tang’s Dharma Gaze reading follows its screening of Alystyre Julian’s documentary Outrider. Readers who saw the film can now encounter its subject directly, while newcomers can begin with the work itself. The free Payne Room program offers a concentrated evening with an influential experimental poet.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · 6 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Payne Room · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎭 THEATER & PERFORMANCE
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🎭 BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain — Final Performances
Samuel Beckett’s short plays can make a theatrical world from a repeated movement, a voice, an object or a carefully arranged body. Skidmore’s collection brings together Act Without Words I & II, Rough for Theatre I & II, Quad, What Where and Rockaby.
Directed by Jared Klein, the production emphasizes the relationship between text and design. Light, movement and space carry dramatic weight alongside words. Presenting several works together gives audiences a chance to see how many different theatrical possibilities Beckett found within severe limits.
For readers who know him chiefly through Waiting for Godot, this is an opportunity to encounter physical comedy, unsettling repetition and concentrated images of dependence and persistence. The production’s announced run concludes October 28.
📅 Monday–Wednesday, October 26–28 · 8–10 PM
📍 Janet Kinghorn Bernhard Theater Building · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ $6.53 students / $11.83 non-students
📅 Monday, October 26: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Tuesday, October 27: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Wednesday, October 28: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🎶 Grease — TIS Teens Opens a New Run
The students of Rydell High inhabit a world of friendship, romance and the pressure to belong. Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s musical turns those adolescent negotiations into an ensemble story whose energy comes from the group as much as from its central couple.
Theatre Institute at Sage’s TIS Teens presents the production under the direction of Eddie Knight. The program identifies its fall project as the school edition, making this an opportunity to see young performers working through a musical closely associated with teenage identity.
Opening weekend offers one Friday evening performance and two afternoon performances. The presenting theater recommends the production for ages ten and older, and the $15 ticket price makes it a practical option for a family or group theater outing.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
📅 Saturday, October 31 · 2 PM
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 2 PM
📍 James Meader Little Theater · Russell Sage College, Troy campus
🎟️ $15; recommended for ages 10+
The run continues November 6–8.
Production & Season Details · Tickets
📅 Friday, October 30: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, October 31: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday, November 1: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🎃 Beneath the Hudson — A Haunted Ship Takes Over EMPAC
EMPAC turns Troy’s maritime past into a supernatural adventure built around a lost steamboat and the fog that seems to have brought it back. Visitors enter a haunted ship experience populated by ghostly sailors, river creatures and traces of a disaster that refuses to remain underwater.
The larger program spreads through the building. FlagSSSDay Collective leads mask-making, Proctors supplies theatrical props for a photo booth, and trick-or-treating and costume contests give families several ways to participate. Later, DJs and a cash bar shift the atmosphere toward an adult evening.
Two films provide distinct options: Muppet Treasure Island at 5 PM and Lake Placid at 8 PM. The haunted ship is recommended for ages nine and older; the films’ G and R ratings make their different audiences clear.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 3–10 PM
📍 EMPAC · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; food and drinks purchased separately
Selected schedule
3–10 PM: Haunted Ship Experience, recommended ages 9+; trick-or-treating; photo booth.
3–7 PM: Mask-making with FlagSSSDay Collective.
4–5 PM: Children’s costume contest.
5 PM: Muppet Treasure Island — rated G.
7 PM: Adult costume contest; beer and wine bar opens.
7–10 PM: Hellseeker Club DJs.
8 PM: Lake Placid — rated R.
Add the full afternoon and evening
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Or add a particular activity
4 PM — Children’s costume contest: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
5 PM — Muppet Treasure Island: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
7 PM — Adult costume contest: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
7–10 PM — Hellseeker Club DJs: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
8 PM — Lake Placid: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎨 ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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🗣️ PechaKucha Night — Albany Cats, Arcade Games & the Stories Inside a Place
Opalka’s PechaKucha Night gathers eight presenters whose subjects move across local history, photography, public art, preservation and popular culture. The short illustrated-talk format gives each speaker a compact opportunity to make a subject vivid.
Among the announced presentations are Maeve McEneny-Johnson on Albany’s 1905 cat show, Adam Williams on the 1987 arcade game The Ninja Warriors, and photographer Chet Boehlke Jr.’s ShutterBuggin. Chet Opalka discusses the Albany Waterway Canal Project, while Mount Ida Preservation Association director Michael Easterbrook considers the traces of a busier past.
The attraction is the range: a single evening can introduce a reader to an unfamiliar piece of Albany history, a way of looking through a camera and a preservation question close to home. Refreshments begin before the presentations, allowing time to visit the gallery.
📅 Friday, October 30 · Refreshments 6:30 PM; talks 7 PM
📍 Opalka Gallery · Russell Sage College · 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Public program; consult the event page for attendance details
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🖼️ Curator’s Talk — Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?!
Skidmore student curator Laila Carlton ’29 introduces an exhibition built around Glory, a painting by Jennifer Wynne Reeves from the Tang’s collection. The Hyde Cabinet series gives a small presentation the attention that can be difficult to sustain within a large museum survey.
A talk centered on one work allows visitors to consider the decisions behind its selection and presentation. Carlton offers the curator’s perspective, giving listeners an opportunity to connect what they see with the questions that shaped the exhibition.
The noon program can also serve as the beginning of a longer museum visit. Other exhibitions on view include Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, A Feeling of With and 500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · Noon
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Atrium · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🖼️ Tang Guide Tour — With Felix Sloss ’29
A museum’s student guides offer another route into its exhibitions: a selection of works, a way of asking questions and a perspective shaped by their own encounters with the collection.
Felix Sloss ’29 leads this Sunday’s Tang Guide Tour. The museum’s current exhibitions range from American history and citizenship to ecology and the relationships through which people understand the world around them.
The guided format is useful for first-time visitors deciding where to begin, while returning visitors can compare another person’s choices with their own. The afternoon leaves time afterward to revisit a work or continue independently through the galleries.
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 2 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Atrium · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🌼 Final Week — HVCC’s Día de Muertos Altar Exhibition
HVCC’s Marvin Library Learning Commons hosts an altar exhibition celebrating Día de Muertos, the Mexican tradition of remembering departed loved ones and ancestors.
The altar gives remembrance a visible form. Objects and decorations become ways of sustaining relationships with those who have died, placing personal memory within a shared cultural practice.
October 30 is the exhibition’s final day. Visitors can use this last week to encounter the display, including those who missed the preceding discussion of the holiday’s traditions. The college’s listing includes the community among its intended audiences.
📅 On view through Friday, October 30
🎟️ Open to the community; check library visitor hours before traveling
🖼️ Continuing Exhibition — Light & Transient Causes
Opalka’s exhibition takes its title from the Declaration of Independence’s warning against changing governments for “light and transient causes.” Curator Marisa Espe turns that language toward a question about judgment: who gets to decide that someone else’s grievance is too minor to count?
The ten artists include Deborah Dancy, Sky Hopinka, Wendy Red Star, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter and Jean-Marc Superville Sovak. Their participation places the exhibition within a broader consideration of whose experiences receive public attention.
Readers attending PechaKucha Night can visit the exhibition as part of the evening, while a separate visit offers more time with the work. The show continues through December 5.
📅 Through December 5
🕒 Tuesday–Saturday, Noon–5 PM; Thursday until 8 PM; Monday by appointment
📍 Opalka Gallery · Russell Sage College · 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free
Exhibition Details · Visitor Information
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🎶 MUSIC, SOUND & TECHNOLOGY
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Ernie Watts brings decades of jazz, studio and film work to the freedom of his own quartet.
🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet — A Major Jazz Career in a Small-Group Setting
Ernie Watts’s musical history reaches from Buddy Rich’s big band to Charlie Haden’s Quartet West. His recording career includes film scores, popular music and two Grammy-winning albums produced by Quincy Jones. For many listeners, his playing may already be familiar even when his name is not.
The quartet places that experience in a setting shaped by live interaction. Pianist Marc Seales, bassist Bruce Lett and drummer Bob Leatherbarrow have longstanding relationships with Watts, giving the group a shared vocabulary without removing the discoveries of improvisation.
A Place for Jazz brings the quartet to SUNY Schenectady’s Carl B. Taylor Auditorium. The opportunity is to hear an artist whose studio work served countless projects now working at the center of his own ensemble.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building · SUNY Schenectady · 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady
🎟️ $25 at the door / $26.95 online; students with ID $10 at the door
Door purchases: cash or check
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🎙️ Union College Jazz Ensemble — Vocal Jazz!
Union’s Jazz Ensemble turns its attention to vocal jazz in a Wednesday evening concert at Emerson Auditorium. The program brings student musicians from across the college into a performance devoted to a form where words and instrumental phrasing meet.
Vocal jazz asks listeners to attend to how a melody is shaped: the placement of a phrase, the relationship between a singer and the ensemble, and the rhythmic choices that give familiar musical material a particular character.
The college has announced the concert title and schedule without a detailed repertoire list. Its appeal is the opportunity to hear the ensemble’s current work in an intimate campus setting, with suggested donations directly supporting Union’s music groups.
📅 Wednesday, October 28 · 8 PM
📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center · Union College · Schenectady
🎟️ Tickets at the door; suggested donations: $15 general / $10 Union faculty, staff and alumni / $5 students, seniors and children under 12
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🥁 Zakuro-Daiko — Happy Halloween!
Union’s Japanese drumming ensemble offers two Halloween performances at Emerson Auditorium. Zakuro-Daiko brings a different sound and physical presence to the college’s fall concert series.
Taiko performance makes coordination visible as well as audible. Listeners can follow the relationship between repeated patterns, collective timing and the movements through which the players produce the sound.
The announced program provides Friday evening and Saturday afternoon options. Union has not supplied a detailed repertoire, so the invitation is straightforward: hear the ensemble in performance and encounter a campus music practice that differs markedly from the week’s jazz and choral concerts.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
📅 Saturday, October 31 · 1 PM
📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center · Union College · Schenectady
🎟️ Tickets at the door; suggested donations: $15 general / $10 Union faculty, staff and alumni / $5 students, seniors and children under 12
📅 Friday, October 30: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, October 31: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
ADVERTISEMENT
🌙 Fall Choral Hour — Music in the Night
UAlbany’s Chamber Singers and Community Chorale share a program devoted to the mystery and possibilities of evening. Music in the Night moves across several centuries rather than approaching its subject through one composer or musical period.
The announced composers include Claudio Monteverdi, Camille Saint-Saëns, Eric Whitacre, Elaine Hagenberg and Andrew Lloyd Webber. That range brings early choral writing into conversation with contemporary concert music and musical theater.
The combined ensembles offer a Sunday-afternoon opportunity to hear how different composers have approached a shared imaginative space. Advance tickets provide a lower-cost option, particularly for students, whose advance admission is $3.
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 3 PM
📍 Main Theatre, Performing Arts Center · University at Albany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Advance: $10 general / $6 seniors and UAlbany faculty-staff / $3 students
🎟️ Day of performance: $15 / $11 / $8
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📍 BEFORE YOU GO: Programs may be canceled, moved or otherwise changed after publication. Check with the venue before traveling, especially when arranging a trip around a single performance.
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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD — NOVEMBER 2–22
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⚖️ Dorothy Roberts — The Mixed Marriage Project
Dorothy Roberts’s books, including Killing the Black Body, Fatal Invention and Torn Apart, have helped shape debates about race, reproductive justice and child welfare. The University of Pennsylvania scholar brings that work to Albany Law’s Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Memorial Lecture through The Mixed Marriage Project, examining interracial marriage, love and law.
The book connects intimate relationships with the legal and social rules governing racial identity. Roberts considers what the history of interracial marriage reveals about the reach of those rules into family life. In-person and online attendance options are offered.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · 5:30 PM; reception follows
📍 Albany Law School · 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Registration offered for in-person and online attendance
Lecture Background & Attendance Information
In Wakka Wakka’s underworld, a dodo growing feathers upsets the boundary between life and death.
🌎 Wakka Wakka — Dead as a Dodo
Two skeleton friends search for replacement bones in the underworld. Then the dodo begins to grow feathers, and an apparent miracle threatens the order around them. Wakka Wakka turns that premise into visual theater through puppetry, humor and a story of friendship caught between life and death.
As the bird’s transformation continues, the friends must flee a world that has become hostile to them. The production combines a darkly comic setting with the emotional stakes of staying together when everything familiar begins to change. Tickets are available for the single Williams performance.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 8 PM
📍 MainStage, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance · Williams College · Williamstown, Massachusetts
🎟️ Ticketed
🧠 INTERFACE: Cognitive Science — Brett Fajen & Heidi Latsky
Choreographer Heidi Latsky and RPI cognitive scientist Brett Fajen consider how perception connects with bodily action and how people adapt when those systems change. The program includes material from Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey, addressing dancers’ experiences of non-apparent neurological disabilities.
Fajen studies perception, movement and the visual control of action; Latsky approaches related questions through dancers’ bodies and creative practice. Their conversation explores where those methods meet and what each can reveal about learning, adaptation and the experience of moving through the world.
📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM; listed duration 60 minutes
📍 Studio 2 · EMPAC · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check the event page for attendance arrangements
🎭 Rent — Siena University
Jonathan Larson’s musical brings artists, friendship, love and the AIDS crisis into a story about making a life under economic and emotional pressure. Siena’s production is directed by Margaret E. Hall in the Beaudoin Theatre.
Its characters struggle to sustain relationships and creative work while confronting illness and insecurity. The ensemble structure places their different responses beside one another, making community both a source of support and a continuing challenge. Tickets are linked from the university’s official season page.
📅 November 12–14 and 19–21 · 8 PM; November 15 · 3 PM
📍 Beaudoin Theatre · Siena University · 515 Loudon Road, Loudonville
🎟️ Ticketed; purchase link on the official page
Ali Ryerson places the flute at the center of a jazz ensemble, exploring its range as an improvising voice.
🎷 Ali Ryerson Quartet
Ali Ryerson’s career places the flute at the center of a jazz ensemble. Her international appearances, recordings and Jazz Flute Big Band work demonstrate an instrumental voice that listeners may know more readily from orchestral music.
Her quartet includes pianist Larry Ham, bassist Lou Pappas and drummer Tom Melito. The combination offers the flexibility of a small jazz group with the flute’s distinctive colors at its center. This concert concludes A Place for Jazz’s announced fall series.
📅 Friday, November 13 · 7 PM
📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building · SUNY Schenectady · 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady
🎟️ $25 at the door / $26.95 online; students with ID $10 at the door
[PHOTO 7 — The Orchestra Now, from the Fisher Center’s Gershwin program page]
The Orchestra Now traces the Jazz Age’s varied influence on Jewish composers working across Europe and America.
🌎 Gershwin, Jazz & the Music of Jewish Émigrés
Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now, with violinist Mira Wang, in a program tracing different responses to the Jazz Age. Gershwin’s An American in Paris appears alongside works by Louis Gruenberg, Ignatz Waghalter, Lazare Saminsky and Ernst Toch.
Waghalter’s prewar Violin Concerto offers a European idiom before jazz’s ascendancy; Gruenberg’s Jazz Suite brings jazz into a classical form. Toch’s rhythmic wit and Saminsky’s contrasting musical outlook make the concert a study in differing responses rather than a single story of influence.
📅 Saturday, November 14 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater · Bard College · Annandale-on-Hudson
🎟️ Tickets start at $15
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🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING — NOVEMBER 23–FEBRUARY 22
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🌎 Hansel and Gretel — Bard Conservatory
Humperdinck’s opera brings the Brothers Grimm’s story into a musical world of folk-inspired melody and rich orchestral writing. Bard’s fully staged production combines the Conservatory Orchestra, Graduate Vocal Arts singers and participating choirs under Leon Botstein.
Sung in German with English supertitles, the opera follows the siblings from domestic troubles into a forest where wonder and danger become difficult to separate. Adult and children’s voices contribute to a production whose musical scale extends well beyond the apparent simplicity of its fairy tale.
📅 Friday, December 11 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, December 13 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater · Bard College
🎟️ Tickets start at $20
🤖 INTERFACE: Robotics — Qiujiang Levi Lu & John Wen
Musician, composer and instrument builder Qiujiang Levi Lu joins RPI robotics researcher John Wen to consider machines as instruments, collaborators and extensions of the body. Their conversation connects artistic experimentation with questions about control, perception and the design of new hardware.
Examples from their work explore how artistic projects can pose new questions for robotics, while technical developments create possibilities for performance. The discussion considers what changes when a machine becomes an active part of creative practice.
📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free; check the event page for attendance arrangements
Beethoven’s Eroica and Brahms’s Fourth give The Orchestra Now two contrasting journeys through grief, tension and transformation.
🌎 Beethoven & Brahms: Part 1
The Orchestra Now pairs Brahms’s Fourth Symphony with Beethoven’s Eroica. Both works build large musical arguments through variation, while their contrasting approaches to grief, tension and resolution make the pairing more than a collection of familiar titles.
Brahms’s finale develops a Bach-derived theme through a continuous sequence of variations. Beethoven’s symphony moves through its funeral march toward a finale that also transforms a theme on a large scale. Hearing the works together brings those shared techniques—and their very different expressive worlds—into focus.
📅 Saturday, February 6, 2027 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, February 7, 2027 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater · Bard College
🎟️ In-person tickets start at $15
🥽 INTERFACE: Mixed Reality — Lars Jan & Talis Reks
Artist Lars Jan and mixed-reality researcher Talis Reks discuss combining shared physical space with imagined environments. Their developing project, ROAM, involves live performance and synchronized virtual layers for groups moving across a large outdoor space.
The challenge is both technical and theatrical: how can people occupy the same imagined world while moving together through a real one? Jan’s narrative and performance practice meets Reks’s work on headsets, tracking, networking and synchronization for bodies in motion.
📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free; check the event page for attendance arrangements
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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS — NOVEMBER 2–MAY 2
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These are advance production dates. Consult the presenting theater for individual performances, ticket availability and schedule changes.
Core Campuses
DatesProductionCampusDetailsThrough November 8Grease — begins October 30Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageDetails & TicketsNovember 12–21RentSiena UniversityDetails & Ticket LinkNovember 18–22A Doll’s HouseUAlbanySeason DetailsNovember 20–December 5This Emancipation ThingSkidmore CollegeDetailsDecember 2–10Little Women: The MusicalRussell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageSeason & TicketsFebruary 24–March 3ClueRussell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageSeason & TicketsMarch 3–7UAlbany Theatre Program musical — title forthcomingUAlbanySeason DetailsMarch 18–21The World Goes RoundRussell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageDetails & Ticket LinkApril 8–17The Country WifeSiena UniversityDetails & Ticket LinkApril 14–17FRESH ACTS: A Festival of New PlaysUAlbanySeason Details
Regional Extension Theater
DateProductionCampusDetailsNovember 7Wakka Wakka: Dead as a DodoWilliams CollegeDetails & Ticket LinkMarch 5, 2027Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the SunWilliams CollegeDetails
📍 BEFORE YOU GO: A listing cannot guarantee that a program will take place. Confirm with the venue before traveling, including any last-minute change of room, time or admission arrangements.
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📅 BY DAY CALENDAR
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Monday, October 26
3:30–5 PM — Together Against Ageism · UAlbany / ETEC 149/151
6–7:30 PM — Richard Rifkin Memorial Lecture · Albany Law School; reception follows
8–10 PM — BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain · Skidmore
Tuesday, October 27
5:30 PM — Nathan Hensley: The Liberal Arts in a Time of Monsters · Skidmore / Wyckoff Center
6 PM — Hannah Zaves-Greene: Annual Jewish Colonie Lecture · UAlbany / Science Library, Standish Room
6–7:30 PM — Access & Insight: Wallace Craig and the Eastern Wood Pewee · New York State Museum
8–10 PM — BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain · Skidmore
Wednesday, October 28
5 PM — Billie Tsien: Begin Again · RPI / EMPAC Theater
7:30–8:30 PM — Lois Lowry: Building 903 · UAlbany / Page Hall
8 PM — Union College Jazz Ensemble: Vocal Jazz! · Emerson Auditorium
8–10 PM — BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain · Skidmore
Thursday, October 29
9 AM–4 PM — State of Grace 2026 · UAlbany / ETEC and Campus Center; open to the public
Noon — Curator’s Talk: Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?! · Skidmore / Tang
4:30–5:30 PM — Loubna Mrie: Defiance · UAlbany / PAC Recital Hall
6 PM — Anne Waldman: Dharma Gaze · Skidmore / Tang, Payne Room
Friday, October 30
3–10 PM — Beneath the Hudson · RPI / EMPAC
4–5 PM — Children’s costume contest · RPI / EMPAC
5 PM — Muppet Treasure Island screening · RPI / EMPAC
6:30 PM refreshments; 7 PM talks — PechaKucha Night · Russell Sage / Opalka
7 PM — Ernie Watts Quartet · SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz
7 PM — Zakuro-Daiko: Happy Halloween! · Union / Emerson Auditorium
7 PM — Grease · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
7 PM — Adult costume contest · RPI / EMPAC
7–10 PM — Hellseeker Club DJs · RPI / EMPAC
8 PM — Lake Placid screening · RPI / EMPAC
Saturday, October 31
1 PM — Zakuro-Daiko: Happy Halloween! · Union / Emerson Auditorium
2 PM — Grease · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
Sunday, November 1
2 PM — Tang Guide Tour with Felix Sloss ’29 · Skidmore / Tang
2 PM — Grease · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
3 PM — Fall Choral Hour: Music in the Night · UAlbany / Main Theatre
Also on view: HVCC’s Día de Muertos altar through October 30; Opalka’s Light & Transient Causes through December 5; current exhibitions at the Tang Teaching Museum.
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HELP SHAPE CAPITAL REGION CURATED
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What would you like to see more of—music, science, history, literature, visual art or public affairs? Have you attended something that deserves a reader’s recommendation?
Send suggestions, corrections and field notes to Alan Koslow. If you organize a substantial public campus event, please include its official event page, date, time, location and attendance requirements.
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Capital Region Curated — Edited by Alan Koslow
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
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Capital Region Curated: October 26-November 1
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Lois Lowry, architect Billie Tsien, saxophonist Ernie Watts and more.
Alan Koslow
32
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
🏛️ 📚 🎶 🎭 🔬
LOIS LOWRY, BILLIE TSIEN, ERNIE WATTS & A WEEK OF STORIES THAT CHALLENGE EXPECTATIONS
A celebrated novelist imagines an America without books. An architect considers what it means to begin again. A Syrian journalist recounts the cost of defiance. A major saxophonist brings his quartet to Schenectady, and Anne Waldman brings poetry into the room through the force of the spoken voice.
Elsewhere this week: bird song and scientific collaboration, disability and American citizenship, public service, Halloween drumming, a haunted ship at EMPAC, and the opening of Grease.
From The Giver to Building 903, Lois Lowry asks what happens when obedience comes at the expense of freedom.
📣 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.
Subscribe to Capital Region Curated
🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks — Lois Lowry, Billie Tsien, Ernie Watts Quartet, Anne Waldman and Loubna Mrie.
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life — Ageism, disability and citizenship, the liberal arts, architecture, public service, and the history of bird research.
📚 Books, Writers & Ideas — Building 903, Defiance and Dharma Gaze.
🎭 Theater & Performance — Grease, Beckett’s short plays and a haunted maritime adventure at EMPAC.
🎨 Art & Visual Culture — PechaKucha Night, a student curator’s talk, a Tang Guide tour and continuing exhibitions.
🎶 Music, Sound & Technology — Ernie Watts, Union’s Jazz Ensemble, Zakuro-Daiko and UAlbany’s Fall Choral Hour.
🔥 Plan Ahead — Registration-based programs, visiting artists and ticketed performances worth arranging before their event week.
🔭 Long-Range Early Warning — Opera at Bard, robotics, mixed reality, Beethoven and Brahms.
📅 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.
📅 DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links below open an event ready to save.
📍 BEFORE YOU GO
Event schedules can change, and programs may be canceled or moved after publication. Check with the venue before traveling to confirm that the event is still taking place, along with its time, location and attendance requirements.
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask campus staff for assistance and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Check event pages for special registration, parking, accessibility or building-entry instructions.
💬 READER FIELD NOTES
Did you attend something listed in Capital Region Curated?
Leave a quick comment: what did you see, and would you recommend it? One sentence is enough.
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⭐ TOP PICKS
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📚 Lois Lowry — Fighting Tyranny with Books
UAlbany · Wednesday, October 28 · 7:30 PM
The author of The Giver and Number the Stars returns to questions of freedom, obedience and moral courage in Building 903. This time, a brother and sister struggle to survive in a near-future America where books and basic freedoms have been outlawed. Lowry’s two Newbery Medals recognize a career that has given generations of readers ways to think about injustice without making its choices easy.
See 📚 Books, Writers & Ideas below.
🏗️ Billie Tsien — Begin Again
RPI / EMPAC · Wednesday, October 28 · 5 PM
Billie Tsien’s architectural career includes museums, universities and major cultural projects, from the Barnes Foundation to David Geffen Hall and the Obama Presidential Center. Her RPI lecture, Begin Again, brings that experience to a conversation about architectural practice. For anyone interested in how buildings express the values of the institutions they serve, this is a chance to hear a designer whose work has helped shape important public spaces.
See 🏛️ Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz · Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
Ernie Watts’s saxophone has traveled through Buddy Rich’s band, Charlie Haden’s Quartet West, film scores and an extraordinary range of recordings. His two Grammy Awards are only one measure of that career. In Schenectady, he appears with pianist Marc Seales, bassist Bruce Lett and drummer Bob Leatherbarrow: a quartet built around sustained musical relationships and the freedom of live improvisation.
See 🎶 Music, Sound & Technology below.
✍️ Anne Waldman — Dharma Gaze
Skidmore / Tang Teaching Museum · Thursday, October 29 · 6 PM
Anne Waldman’s poetry lives in the voice as well as on the page. A co-founder of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she has spent decades connecting writing with performance, collaboration and the building of literary communities. Her free Tang reading offers an encounter with that practice, following last week’s screening of the documentary Outrider.
See 📚 Books, Writers & Ideas below.
📰 Loubna Mrie — Defiance
UAlbany · Thursday, October 29 · 4:30 PM
What happens when someone raised to support an authoritarian regime chooses rebellion instead? Syrian journalist Loubna Mrie addresses that question through her own life in Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria. Her appearance connects the public history of revolt with its intimate costs: family, loyalty, fear and the decision to act against the world one has inherited.
See 📚 Books, Writers & Ideas below.
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🏛️ IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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🏗️ Billie Tsien — Begin Again
Billie Tsien’s buildings have served museums, universities and cultural institutions whose purposes demand more than an impressive exterior. Formerly a founding partner of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, she is now a co-founder of Studio Tsien. Her work includes the Barnes Foundation, the Hood Museum of Art and the renovation of David Geffen Hall.
That experience gives Begin Again a substantial foundation. Buildings for learning, art and public gathering must answer practical questions about movement, materials and use while also expressing something about the institution’s values. Tsien’s practice has pursued an architecture described by RPI as serene and enduring.
Her Mike Wacholder Memorial Lecture brings a nationally significant architect to EMPAC. Readers interested in museums, campuses, public space or the relationship between design and civic life have a clear reason to attend.
📅 Wednesday, October 28 · 5 PM
📍 EMPAC Theater · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🧓 Together Against Ageism — How Bias Shapes Community Health
Dina Refki brings a public-policy perspective to a subject that often gets treated as a matter of manners. A clinical professor in UAlbany’s Department of Public Administration and Policy and director of its Center for Women in Government & Civil Society, she examines how institutions and communities respond to unequal treatment.
Her Aging Well Speaker Series presentation considers ageism in Albany County: how age-based assumptions take shape locally and how they affect health and wellbeing. The program moves beyond identifying stereotypes to consider strategies for addressing them.
Refki will also discuss the research methods used to evaluate those efforts and preliminary findings that may inform policy and program design. That makes the afternoon relevant to older adults, caregivers, educators and people working in health, government or community organizations.
📅 Monday, October 26 · 3:30–5 PM
📍 ETEC, Rooms 149/151 · University at Albany · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Registration link provided on the official event page
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Richard Rifkin Memorial Lecture — A Legacy of Public Service
Richard Rifkin spent more than four decades working in and around New York State government. His positions included deputy attorney general, executive director of the State Ethics Commission and special counsel to a governor. In 2020, he became legal director of Albany Law School’s Government Law Center, continuing to address questions facing state and local government until his death in 2024.
Those roles placed him where legal advice becomes public action: interpreting authority, weighing institutional responsibilities and helping government function. A memorial program devoted to that career offers an opportunity to consider the work behind the more visible acts of politics.
Former New York Attorney General Robert Abrams is among those participating. Albany Law lists a lecture followed by a reception, giving readers interested in law, public administration and New York government an evening centered on a consequential public-service career.
📅 Monday, October 26 · 6–7:30 PM; reception follows
🎟️ Advance registration requested
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📖 Nathan Hensley — The Liberal Arts in a Time of Monsters
Nathan Hensley studies nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory and the environmental humanities at Georgetown University. His recent book, Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse, examines how literature can help people think about action when changing the course of events feels difficult or impossible.
That background gives his Skidmore lecture a particular interest. The Liberal Arts in a Time of Monsters raises a question that reaches beyond a debate over college requirements: what can reading, interpretation and historical knowledge contribute in an unsettled world?
The announced lecture does not supply a detailed outline, so its specific arguments remain Hensley’s to make. His scholarship provides a reason to listen, however: he approaches literature as a way of examining power, responsibility and the limits of familiar stories about progress.
📅 Tuesday, October 27 · 5:30 PM
📍 Wyckoff Center · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Consult the presenting department for attendance arrangements
Official English Department Listing
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
♿ Welcoming the Stranger? — American Jews, Disability & Citizenship
Hannah Zaves-Greene works at the intersection of American Jewish history, disability studies and legal history. The founding president of the Society for Jewish & Disability Studies, she has also consulted for the National Museum of Immigration on Ellis Island. Her forthcoming book, Able to Be American, examines disability in U.S. immigration law and the American Jewish response.
Her annual Jewish Colonie Lecture considers how disability, immigration and citizenship became entangled. The question is not simply who arrived in the United States, but how law and public judgment determined who could belong.
The subject brings a less familiar dimension to American immigration history and to debates about communal responsibility. UAlbany’s Judaic Studies Program and Department of History present the lecture, with light refreshments and wheelchair-accessible arrangements.
📅 Tuesday, October 27 · 6 PM
📍 Science Library, Standish Room · University at Albany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public; light refreshments
🚗 Free parking listed in Dutch Faculty/Staff Lot #5
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
The eastern wood pewee’s familiar call became the focus of research sustained by collaboration when scientist Wallace Craig’s hearing faded.
🐦 Access & Insight — Wallace Craig and the Song of the Eastern Wood Pewee
The eastern wood pewee’s recognizable call makes it a familiar starting point for many beginning birders. Historian Kristoffer Whitney uses that sound to tell a less familiar story about scientific work, hearing loss and collaboration.
Wallace Craig studied the bird from the 1920s into the early 1940s. When his hearing faded, he turned to birders and other amateur ornithologists to continue his research. The resulting history challenges an image of science conducted by a solitary expert with all the necessary abilities and resources at hand.
Whitney’s talk considers how access and cooperation shape what researchers can learn. Presented through a partnership involving the New York State Museum, UAlbany and RPI, it offers an evening for bird enthusiasts, history readers and anyone interested in the contributions of amateur observers. Live ASL interpretation is provided.
📅 Tuesday, October 27 · 6–7:30 PM
📍 New York State Museum, Huxley Theater · 222 Madison Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public; live ASL interpretation
Museum Event Details · UAlbany Calendar Listing
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🔬 State of Grace 2026 — Women in STEAM
UAlbany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity hosts State of Grace, a program celebrating women in science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics.
The announced activities include conversations with professionals, hands-on workshops and sessions on networking and public speaking. The combination treats participation in STEAM as more than a matter of technical training: professional relationships, communication and opportunities to lead also affect who can build a career.
The one-day program takes place October 29, 9 AM–4 PM, at ETEC and the Campus Center. It is open to the public, bringing these conversations about participation, professional development and gender diversity beyond the university community.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · 9 AM–4 PM
📍 ETEC and Campus Center · University at Albany
🎟️ Open to the public
☎️ Organizer contact: 518-442-5258
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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📚 BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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📚 Lois Lowry — Building 903
Lois Lowry has repeatedly trusted young readers with difficult subjects. Number the Stars enters the history of Nazi-occupied Denmark; The Giver imagines a society whose apparent order depends on suppressing memory, emotion and choice. Both received the Newbery Medal.
Her new novel, Building 903, returns to authoritarianism through a brother and sister living in a near-future America where books and basic freedoms are outlawed. The premise places reading within a struggle over what people are allowed to know and imagine.
Lowry’s Writers Institute conversation offers an opportunity to hear how those concerns have developed across a long career. Readers who encountered her work in childhood can return to it with adult questions, while teachers, parents and younger readers can hear a writer who has helped make moral uncertainty a serious subject of literature for young people.
📅 Wednesday, October 28 · 7:30–8:30 PM
📍 Page Hall Auditorium · UAlbany Downtown Campus · 135 Western Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public; book signing
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
In Defiance, Loubna Mrie connects Syria’s uprising with the intimate costs of breaking inherited loyalties.
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📰 Loubna Mrie — Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria
Loubna Mrie is a journalist, photographer and commentator whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, The Nation and other publications. Her memoir brings that public work into contact with the personal history that preceded it.
Defiance follows a young woman raised to be loyal to Syria’s regime who chooses revolt at tremendous personal cost. Its subject is the process of dissent: how inherited loyalties begin to fracture, how people recognize what they have accepted, and what happens when they can no longer continue accepting it.
The Writers Institute conversation offers a perspective on authoritarianism grounded in lived experience. Mrie’s work makes the political intimate, connecting a country’s violence with family relationships and the choices through which a person attempts to claim a life of her own.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · 4:30–5:30 PM
📍 Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center · University at Albany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
✍️ Anne Waldman — Dharma Gaze
Anne Waldman’s career encompasses poetry, performance, recordings, collaboration and the creation of places where other writers can work. A co-founder of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she has helped sustain a literary culture in which the spoken voice is central.
Her work asks listeners to encounter poetry as an event unfolding in time. Breath, pace, repetition and physical presence can change how a poem is understood; hearing the writer gives access to choices that a printed page leaves open.
The Tang’s Dharma Gaze reading follows its screening of Alystyre Julian’s documentary Outrider. Readers who saw the film can now encounter its subject directly, while newcomers can begin with the work itself. The free Payne Room program offers a concentrated evening with an influential experimental poet.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · 6 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Payne Room · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎭 THEATER & PERFORMANCE
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🎭 BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain — Final Performances
Samuel Beckett’s short plays can make a theatrical world from a repeated movement, a voice, an object or a carefully arranged body. Skidmore’s collection brings together Act Without Words I & II, Rough for Theatre I & II, Quad, What Where and Rockaby.
Directed by Jared Klein, the production emphasizes the relationship between text and design. Light, movement and space carry dramatic weight alongside words. Presenting several works together gives audiences a chance to see how many different theatrical possibilities Beckett found within severe limits.
For readers who know him chiefly through Waiting for Godot, this is an opportunity to encounter physical comedy, unsettling repetition and concentrated images of dependence and persistence. The production’s announced run concludes October 28.
📅 Monday–Wednesday, October 26–28 · 8–10 PM
📍 Janet Kinghorn Bernhard Theater Building · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ $6.53 students / $11.83 non-students
📅 Monday, October 26: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Tuesday, October 27: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Wednesday, October 28: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🎶 Grease — TIS Teens Opens a New Run
The students of Rydell High inhabit a world of friendship, romance and the pressure to belong. Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s musical turns those adolescent negotiations into an ensemble story whose energy comes from the group as much as from its central couple.
Theatre Institute at Sage’s TIS Teens presents the production under the direction of Eddie Knight. The program identifies its fall project as the school edition, making this an opportunity to see young performers working through a musical closely associated with teenage identity.
Opening weekend offers one Friday evening performance and two afternoon performances. The presenting theater recommends the production for ages ten and older, and the $15 ticket price makes it a practical option for a family or group theater outing.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
📅 Saturday, October 31 · 2 PM
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 2 PM
📍 James Meader Little Theater · Russell Sage College, Troy campus
🎟️ $15; recommended for ages 10+
The run continues November 6–8.
Production & Season Details · Tickets
📅 Friday, October 30: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, October 31: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday, November 1: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🎃 Beneath the Hudson — A Haunted Ship Takes Over EMPAC
EMPAC turns Troy’s maritime past into a supernatural adventure built around a lost steamboat and the fog that seems to have brought it back. Visitors enter a haunted ship experience populated by ghostly sailors, river creatures and traces of a disaster that refuses to remain underwater.
The larger program spreads through the building. FlagSSSDay Collective leads mask-making, Proctors supplies theatrical props for a photo booth, and trick-or-treating and costume contests give families several ways to participate. Later, DJs and a cash bar shift the atmosphere toward an adult evening.
Two films provide distinct options: Muppet Treasure Island at 5 PM and Lake Placid at 8 PM. The haunted ship is recommended for ages nine and older; the films’ G and R ratings make their different audiences clear.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 3–10 PM
📍 EMPAC · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; food and drinks purchased separately
Selected schedule
3–10 PM: Haunted Ship Experience, recommended ages 9+; trick-or-treating; photo booth.
3–7 PM: Mask-making with FlagSSSDay Collective.
4–5 PM: Children’s costume contest.
5 PM: Muppet Treasure Island — rated G.
7 PM: Adult costume contest; beer and wine bar opens.
7–10 PM: Hellseeker Club DJs.
8 PM: Lake Placid — rated R.
Add the full afternoon and evening
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Or add a particular activity
4 PM — Children’s costume contest: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
5 PM — Muppet Treasure Island: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
7 PM — Adult costume contest: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
7–10 PM — Hellseeker Club DJs: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
8 PM — Lake Placid: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎨 ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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🗣️ PechaKucha Night — Albany Cats, Arcade Games & the Stories Inside a Place
Opalka’s PechaKucha Night gathers eight presenters whose subjects move across local history, photography, public art, preservation and popular culture. The short illustrated-talk format gives each speaker a compact opportunity to make a subject vivid.
Among the announced presentations are Maeve McEneny-Johnson on Albany’s 1905 cat show, Adam Williams on the 1987 arcade game The Ninja Warriors, and photographer Chet Boehlke Jr.’s ShutterBuggin. Chet Opalka discusses the Albany Waterway Canal Project, while Mount Ida Preservation Association director Michael Easterbrook considers the traces of a busier past.
The attraction is the range: a single evening can introduce a reader to an unfamiliar piece of Albany history, a way of looking through a camera and a preservation question close to home. Refreshments begin before the presentations, allowing time to visit the gallery.
📅 Friday, October 30 · Refreshments 6:30 PM; talks 7 PM
📍 Opalka Gallery · Russell Sage College · 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Public program; consult the event page for attendance details
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🖼️ Curator’s Talk — Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?!
Skidmore student curator Laila Carlton ’29 introduces an exhibition built around Glory, a painting by Jennifer Wynne Reeves from the Tang’s collection. The Hyde Cabinet series gives a small presentation the attention that can be difficult to sustain within a large museum survey.
A talk centered on one work allows visitors to consider the decisions behind its selection and presentation. Carlton offers the curator’s perspective, giving listeners an opportunity to connect what they see with the questions that shaped the exhibition.
The noon program can also serve as the beginning of a longer museum visit. Other exhibitions on view include Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, A Feeling of With and 500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · Noon
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Atrium · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🖼️ Tang Guide Tour — With Felix Sloss ’29
A museum’s student guides offer another route into its exhibitions: a selection of works, a way of asking questions and a perspective shaped by their own encounters with the collection.
Felix Sloss ’29 leads this Sunday’s Tang Guide Tour. The museum’s current exhibitions range from American history and citizenship to ecology and the relationships through which people understand the world around them.
The guided format is useful for first-time visitors deciding where to begin, while returning visitors can compare another person’s choices with their own. The afternoon leaves time afterward to revisit a work or continue independently through the galleries.
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 2 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Atrium · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🌼 Final Week — HVCC’s Día de Muertos Altar Exhibition
HVCC’s Marvin Library Learning Commons hosts an altar exhibition celebrating Día de Muertos, the Mexican tradition of remembering departed loved ones and ancestors.
The altar gives remembrance a visible form. Objects and decorations become ways of sustaining relationships with those who have died, placing personal memory within a shared cultural practice.
October 30 is the exhibition’s final day. Visitors can use this last week to encounter the display, including those who missed the preceding discussion of the holiday’s traditions. The college’s listing includes the community among its intended audiences.
📅 On view through Friday, October 30
🎟️ Open to the community; check library visitor hours before traveling
🖼️ Continuing Exhibition — Light & Transient Causes
Opalka’s exhibition takes its title from the Declaration of Independence’s warning against changing governments for “light and transient causes.” Curator Marisa Espe turns that language toward a question about judgment: who gets to decide that someone else’s grievance is too minor to count?
The ten artists include Deborah Dancy, Sky Hopinka, Wendy Red Star, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter and Jean-Marc Superville Sovak. Their participation places the exhibition within a broader consideration of whose experiences receive public attention.
Readers attending PechaKucha Night can visit the exhibition as part of the evening, while a separate visit offers more time with the work. The show continues through December 5.
📅 Through December 5
🕒 Tuesday–Saturday, Noon–5 PM; Thursday until 8 PM; Monday by appointment
📍 Opalka Gallery · Russell Sage College · 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free
Exhibition Details · Visitor Information
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🎶 MUSIC, SOUND & TECHNOLOGY
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Ernie Watts brings decades of jazz, studio and film work to the freedom of his own quartet.
🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet — A Major Jazz Career in a Small-Group Setting
Ernie Watts’s musical history reaches from Buddy Rich’s big band to Charlie Haden’s Quartet West. His recording career includes film scores, popular music and two Grammy-winning albums produced by Quincy Jones. For many listeners, his playing may already be familiar even when his name is not.
The quartet places that experience in a setting shaped by live interaction. Pianist Marc Seales, bassist Bruce Lett and drummer Bob Leatherbarrow have longstanding relationships with Watts, giving the group a shared vocabulary without removing the discoveries of improvisation.
A Place for Jazz brings the quartet to SUNY Schenectady’s Carl B. Taylor Auditorium. The opportunity is to hear an artist whose studio work served countless projects now working at the center of his own ensemble.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building · SUNY Schenectady · 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady
🎟️ $25 at the door / $26.95 online; students with ID $10 at the door
Door purchases: cash or check
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🎙️ Union College Jazz Ensemble — Vocal Jazz!
Union’s Jazz Ensemble turns its attention to vocal jazz in a Wednesday evening concert at Emerson Auditorium. The program brings student musicians from across the college into a performance devoted to a form where words and instrumental phrasing meet.
Vocal jazz asks listeners to attend to how a melody is shaped: the placement of a phrase, the relationship between a singer and the ensemble, and the rhythmic choices that give familiar musical material a particular character.
The college has announced the concert title and schedule without a detailed repertoire list. Its appeal is the opportunity to hear the ensemble’s current work in an intimate campus setting, with suggested donations directly supporting Union’s music groups.
📅 Wednesday, October 28 · 8 PM
📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center · Union College · Schenectady
🎟️ Tickets at the door; suggested donations: $15 general / $10 Union faculty, staff and alumni / $5 students, seniors and children under 12
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🥁 Zakuro-Daiko — Happy Halloween!
Union’s Japanese drumming ensemble offers two Halloween performances at Emerson Auditorium. Zakuro-Daiko brings a different sound and physical presence to the college’s fall concert series.
Taiko performance makes coordination visible as well as audible. Listeners can follow the relationship between repeated patterns, collective timing and the movements through which the players produce the sound.
The announced program provides Friday evening and Saturday afternoon options. Union has not supplied a detailed repertoire, so the invitation is straightforward: hear the ensemble in performance and encounter a campus music practice that differs markedly from the week’s jazz and choral concerts.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
📅 Saturday, October 31 · 1 PM
📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center · Union College · Schenectady
🎟️ Tickets at the door; suggested donations: $15 general / $10 Union faculty, staff and alumni / $5 students, seniors and children under 12
📅 Friday, October 30: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, October 31: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🌙 Fall Choral Hour — Music in the Night
UAlbany’s Chamber Singers and Community Chorale share a program devoted to the mystery and possibilities of evening. Music in the Night moves across several centuries rather than approaching its subject through one composer or musical period.
The announced composers include Claudio Monteverdi, Camille Saint-Saëns, Eric Whitacre, Elaine Hagenberg and Andrew Lloyd Webber. That range brings early choral writing into conversation with contemporary concert music and musical theater.
The combined ensembles offer a Sunday-afternoon opportunity to hear how different composers have approached a shared imaginative space. Advance tickets provide a lower-cost option, particularly for students, whose advance admission is $3.
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 3 PM
📍 Main Theatre, Performing Arts Center · University at Albany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Advance: $10 general / $6 seniors and UAlbany faculty-staff / $3 students
🎟️ Day of performance: $15 / $11 / $8
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📍 BEFORE YOU GO: Programs may be canceled, moved or otherwise changed after publication. Check with the venue before traveling, especially when arranging a trip around a single performance.
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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD — NOVEMBER 2–22
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⚖️ Dorothy Roberts — The Mixed Marriage Project
Dorothy Roberts’s books, including Killing the Black Body, Fatal Invention and Torn Apart, have helped shape debates about race, reproductive justice and child welfare. The University of Pennsylvania scholar brings that work to Albany Law’s Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Memorial Lecture through The Mixed Marriage Project, examining interracial marriage, love and law.
The book connects intimate relationships with the legal and social rules governing racial identity. Roberts considers what the history of interracial marriage reveals about the reach of those rules into family life. In-person and online attendance options are offered.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · 5:30 PM; reception follows
📍 Albany Law School · 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Registration offered for in-person and online attendance
Lecture Background & Attendance Information
In Wakka Wakka’s underworld, a dodo growing feathers upsets the boundary between life and death.
🌎 Wakka Wakka — Dead as a Dodo
Two skeleton friends search for replacement bones in the underworld. Then the dodo begins to grow feathers, and an apparent miracle threatens the order around them. Wakka Wakka turns that premise into visual theater through puppetry, humor and a story of friendship caught between life and death.
As the bird’s transformation continues, the friends must flee a world that has become hostile to them. The production combines a darkly comic setting with the emotional stakes of staying together when everything familiar begins to change. Tickets are available for the single Williams performance.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 8 PM
📍 MainStage, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance · Williams College · Williamstown, Massachusetts
🎟️ Ticketed
🧠 INTERFACE: Cognitive Science — Brett Fajen & Heidi Latsky
Choreographer Heidi Latsky and RPI cognitive scientist Brett Fajen consider how perception connects with bodily action and how people adapt when those systems change. The program includes material from Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey, addressing dancers’ experiences of non-apparent neurological disabilities.
Fajen studies perception, movement and the visual control of action; Latsky approaches related questions through dancers’ bodies and creative practice. Their conversation explores where those methods meet and what each can reveal about learning, adaptation and the experience of moving through the world.
📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM; listed duration 60 minutes
📍 Studio 2 · EMPAC · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check the event page for attendance arrangements
🎭 Rent — Siena University
Jonathan Larson’s musical brings artists, friendship, love and the AIDS crisis into a story about making a life under economic and emotional pressure. Siena’s production is directed by Margaret E. Hall in the Beaudoin Theatre.
Its characters struggle to sustain relationships and creative work while confronting illness and insecurity. The ensemble structure places their different responses beside one another, making community both a source of support and a continuing challenge. Tickets are linked from the university’s official season page.
📅 November 12–14 and 19–21 · 8 PM; November 15 · 3 PM
📍 Beaudoin Theatre · Siena University · 515 Loudon Road, Loudonville
🎟️ Ticketed; purchase link on the official page
Ali Ryerson places the flute at the center of a jazz ensemble, exploring its range as an improvising voice.
🎷 Ali Ryerson Quartet
Ali Ryerson’s career places the flute at the center of a jazz ensemble. Her international appearances, recordings and Jazz Flute Big Band work demonstrate an instrumental voice that listeners may know more readily from orchestral music.
Her quartet includes pianist Larry Ham, bassist Lou Pappas and drummer Tom Melito. The combination offers the flexibility of a small jazz group with the flute’s distinctive colors at its center. This concert concludes A Place for Jazz’s announced fall series.
📅 Friday, November 13 · 7 PM
📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building · SUNY Schenectady · 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady
🎟️ $25 at the door / $26.95 online; students with ID $10 at the door
[PHOTO 7 — The Orchestra Now, from the Fisher Center’s Gershwin program page]
The Orchestra Now traces the Jazz Age’s varied influence on Jewish composers working across Europe and America.
🌎 Gershwin, Jazz & the Music of Jewish Émigrés
Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now, with violinist Mira Wang, in a program tracing different responses to the Jazz Age. Gershwin’s An American in Paris appears alongside works by Louis Gruenberg, Ignatz Waghalter, Lazare Saminsky and Ernst Toch.
Waghalter’s prewar Violin Concerto offers a European idiom before jazz’s ascendancy; Gruenberg’s Jazz Suite brings jazz into a classical form. Toch’s rhythmic wit and Saminsky’s contrasting musical outlook make the concert a study in differing responses rather than a single story of influence.
📅 Saturday, November 14 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater · Bard College · Annandale-on-Hudson
🎟️ Tickets start at $15
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🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING — NOVEMBER 23–FEBRUARY 22
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🌎 Hansel and Gretel — Bard Conservatory
Humperdinck’s opera brings the Brothers Grimm’s story into a musical world of folk-inspired melody and rich orchestral writing. Bard’s fully staged production combines the Conservatory Orchestra, Graduate Vocal Arts singers and participating choirs under Leon Botstein.
Sung in German with English supertitles, the opera follows the siblings from domestic troubles into a forest where wonder and danger become difficult to separate. Adult and children’s voices contribute to a production whose musical scale extends well beyond the apparent simplicity of its fairy tale.
📅 Friday, December 11 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, December 13 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater · Bard College
🎟️ Tickets start at $20
🤖 INTERFACE: Robotics — Qiujiang Levi Lu & John Wen
Musician, composer and instrument builder Qiujiang Levi Lu joins RPI robotics researcher John Wen to consider machines as instruments, collaborators and extensions of the body. Their conversation connects artistic experimentation with questions about control, perception and the design of new hardware.
Examples from their work explore how artistic projects can pose new questions for robotics, while technical developments create possibilities for performance. The discussion considers what changes when a machine becomes an active part of creative practice.
📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free; check the event page for attendance arrangements
Beethoven’s Eroica and Brahms’s Fourth give The Orchestra Now two contrasting journeys through grief, tension and transformation.
🌎 Beethoven & Brahms: Part 1
The Orchestra Now pairs Brahms’s Fourth Symphony with Beethoven’s Eroica. Both works build large musical arguments through variation, while their contrasting approaches to grief, tension and resolution make the pairing more than a collection of familiar titles.
Brahms’s finale develops a Bach-derived theme through a continuous sequence of variations. Beethoven’s symphony moves through its funeral march toward a finale that also transforms a theme on a large scale. Hearing the works together brings those shared techniques—and their very different expressive worlds—into focus.
📅 Saturday, February 6, 2027 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, February 7, 2027 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater · Bard College
🎟️ In-person tickets start at $15
🥽 INTERFACE: Mixed Reality — Lars Jan & Talis Reks
Artist Lars Jan and mixed-reality researcher Talis Reks discuss combining shared physical space with imagined environments. Their developing project, ROAM, involves live performance and synchronized virtual layers for groups moving across a large outdoor space.
The challenge is both technical and theatrical: how can people occupy the same imagined world while moving together through a real one? Jan’s narrative and performance practice meets Reks’s work on headsets, tracking, networking and synchronization for bodies in motion.
📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free; check the event page for attendance arrangements
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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS — NOVEMBER 2–MAY 2
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These are advance production dates. Consult the presenting theater for individual performances, ticket availability and schedule changes.
Core Campuses
DatesProductionCampusDetailsThrough November 8Grease — begins October 30Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageDetails & TicketsNovember 12–21RentSiena UniversityDetails & Ticket LinkNovember 18–22A Doll’s HouseUAlbanySeason DetailsNovember 20–December 5This Emancipation ThingSkidmore CollegeDetailsDecember 2–10Little Women: The MusicalRussell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageSeason & TicketsFebruary 24–March 3ClueRussell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageSeason & TicketsMarch 3–7UAlbany Theatre Program musical — title forthcomingUAlbanySeason DetailsMarch 18–21The World Goes RoundRussell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageDetails & Ticket LinkApril 8–17The Country WifeSiena UniversityDetails & Ticket LinkApril 14–17FRESH ACTS: A Festival of New PlaysUAlbanySeason Details
Regional Extension Theater
DateProductionCampusDetailsNovember 7Wakka Wakka: Dead as a DodoWilliams CollegeDetails & Ticket LinkMarch 5, 2027Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the SunWilliams CollegeDetails
📍 BEFORE YOU GO: A listing cannot guarantee that a program will take place. Confirm with the venue before traveling, including any last-minute change of room, time or admission arrangements.
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📅 BY DAY CALENDAR
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Monday, October 26
3:30–5 PM — Together Against Ageism · UAlbany / ETEC 149/151
6–7:30 PM — Richard Rifkin Memorial Lecture · Albany Law School; reception follows
8–10 PM — BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain · Skidmore
Tuesday, October 27
5:30 PM — Nathan Hensley: The Liberal Arts in a Time of Monsters · Skidmore / Wyckoff Center
6 PM — Hannah Zaves-Greene: Annual Jewish Colonie Lecture · UAlbany / Science Library, Standish Room
6–7:30 PM — Access & Insight: Wallace Craig and the Eastern Wood Pewee · New York State Museum
8–10 PM — BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain · Skidmore
Wednesday, October 28
5 PM — Billie Tsien: Begin Again · RPI / EMPAC Theater
7:30–8:30 PM — Lois Lowry: Building 903 · UAlbany / Page Hall
8 PM — Union College Jazz Ensemble: Vocal Jazz! · Emerson Auditorium
8–10 PM — BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain · Skidmore
Thursday, October 29
9 AM–4 PM — State of Grace 2026 · UAlbany / ETEC and Campus Center; open to the public
Noon — Curator’s Talk: Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?! · Skidmore / Tang
4:30–5:30 PM — Loubna Mrie: Defiance · UAlbany / PAC Recital Hall
6 PM — Anne Waldman: Dharma Gaze · Skidmore / Tang, Payne Room
Friday, October 30
3–10 PM — Beneath the Hudson · RPI / EMPAC
4–5 PM — Children’s costume contest · RPI / EMPAC
5 PM — Muppet Treasure Island screening · RPI / EMPAC
6:30 PM refreshments; 7 PM talks — PechaKucha Night · Russell Sage / Opalka
7 PM — Ernie Watts Quartet · SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz
7 PM — Zakuro-Daiko: Happy Halloween! · Union / Emerson Auditorium
7 PM — Grease · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
7 PM — Adult costume contest · RPI / EMPAC
7–10 PM — Hellseeker Club DJs · RPI / EMPAC
8 PM — Lake Placid screening · RPI / EMPAC
Saturday, October 31
1 PM — Zakuro-Daiko: Happy Halloween! · Union / Emerson Auditorium
2 PM — Grease · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
Sunday, November 1
2 PM — Tang Guide Tour with Felix Sloss ’29 · Skidmore / Tang
2 PM — Grease · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
3 PM — Fall Choral Hour: Music in the Night · UAlbany / Main Theatre
Also on view: HVCC’s Día de Muertos altar through October 30; Opalka’s Light & Transient Causes through December 5; current exhibitions at the Tang Teaching Museum.
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HELP SHAPE CAPITAL REGION CURATED
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What would you like to see more of—music, science, history, literature, visual art or public affairs? Have you attended something that deserves a reader’s recommendation?
Send suggestions, corrections and field notes to Alan Koslow. If you organize a substantial public campus event, please include its official event page, date, time, location and attendance requirements.
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What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
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Capital Region Curated: October 26-November 1
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Lois Lowry, architect Billie Tsien, saxophonist Ernie Watts and more.
Alan Koslow
32
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
🏛️ 📚 🎶 🎭 🔬
LOIS LOWRY, BILLIE TSIEN, ERNIE WATTS & A WEEK OF STORIES THAT CHALLENGE EXPECTATIONS
A celebrated novelist imagines an America without books. An architect considers what it means to begin again. A Syrian journalist recounts the cost of defiance. A major saxophonist brings his quartet to Schenectady, and Anne Waldman brings poetry into the room through the force of the spoken voice.
Elsewhere this week: bird song and scientific collaboration, disability and American citizenship, public service, Halloween drumming, a haunted ship at EMPAC, and the opening of Grease.
From The Giver to Building 903, Lois Lowry asks what happens when obedience comes at the expense of freedom.
📣 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.
Subscribe to Capital Region Curated
🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks — Lois Lowry, Billie Tsien, Ernie Watts Quartet, Anne Waldman and Loubna Mrie.
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life — Ageism, disability and citizenship, the liberal arts, architecture, public service, and the history of bird research.
📚 Books, Writers & Ideas — Building 903, Defiance and Dharma Gaze.
🎭 Theater & Performance — Grease, Beckett’s short plays and a haunted maritime adventure at EMPAC.
🎨 Art & Visual Culture — PechaKucha Night, a student curator’s talk, a Tang Guide tour and continuing exhibitions.
🎶 Music, Sound & Technology — Ernie Watts, Union’s Jazz Ensemble, Zakuro-Daiko and UAlbany’s Fall Choral Hour.
🔥 Plan Ahead — Registration-based programs, visiting artists and ticketed performances worth arranging before their event week.
🔭 Long-Range Early Warning — Opera at Bard, robotics, mixed reality, Beethoven and Brahms.
📅 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.
📅 DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links below open an event ready to save.
📍 BEFORE YOU GO
Event schedules can change, and programs may be canceled or moved after publication. Check with the venue before traveling to confirm that the event is still taking place, along with its time, location and attendance requirements.
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask campus staff for assistance and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Check event pages for special registration, parking, accessibility or building-entry instructions.
💬 READER FIELD NOTES
Did you attend something listed in Capital Region Curated?
Leave a quick comment: what did you see, and would you recommend it? One sentence is enough.
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⭐ TOP PICKS
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📚 Lois Lowry — Fighting Tyranny with Books
UAlbany · Wednesday, October 28 · 7:30 PM
The author of The Giver and Number the Stars returns to questions of freedom, obedience and moral courage in Building 903. This time, a brother and sister struggle to survive in a near-future America where books and basic freedoms have been outlawed. Lowry’s two Newbery Medals recognize a career that has given generations of readers ways to think about injustice without making its choices easy.
See 📚 Books, Writers & Ideas below.
🏗️ Billie Tsien — Begin Again
RPI / EMPAC · Wednesday, October 28 · 5 PM
Billie Tsien’s architectural career includes museums, universities and major cultural projects, from the Barnes Foundation to David Geffen Hall and the Obama Presidential Center. Her RPI lecture, Begin Again, brings that experience to a conversation about architectural practice. For anyone interested in how buildings express the values of the institutions they serve, this is a chance to hear a designer whose work has helped shape important public spaces.
See 🏛️ Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz · Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
Ernie Watts’s saxophone has traveled through Buddy Rich’s band, Charlie Haden’s Quartet West, film scores and an extraordinary range of recordings. His two Grammy Awards are only one measure of that career. In Schenectady, he appears with pianist Marc Seales, bassist Bruce Lett and drummer Bob Leatherbarrow: a quartet built around sustained musical relationships and the freedom of live improvisation.
See 🎶 Music, Sound & Technology below.
✍️ Anne Waldman — Dharma Gaze
Skidmore / Tang Teaching Museum · Thursday, October 29 · 6 PM
Anne Waldman’s poetry lives in the voice as well as on the page. A co-founder of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she has spent decades connecting writing with performance, collaboration and the building of literary communities. Her free Tang reading offers an encounter with that practice, following last week’s screening of the documentary Outrider.
See 📚 Books, Writers & Ideas below.
📰 Loubna Mrie — Defiance
UAlbany · Thursday, October 29 · 4:30 PM
What happens when someone raised to support an authoritarian regime chooses rebellion instead? Syrian journalist Loubna Mrie addresses that question through her own life in Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria. Her appearance connects the public history of revolt with its intimate costs: family, loyalty, fear and the decision to act against the world one has inherited.
See 📚 Books, Writers & Ideas below.
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🏛️ IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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🏗️ Billie Tsien — Begin Again
Billie Tsien’s buildings have served museums, universities and cultural institutions whose purposes demand more than an impressive exterior. Formerly a founding partner of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, she is now a co-founder of Studio Tsien. Her work includes the Barnes Foundation, the Hood Museum of Art and the renovation of David Geffen Hall.
That experience gives Begin Again a substantial foundation. Buildings for learning, art and public gathering must answer practical questions about movement, materials and use while also expressing something about the institution’s values. Tsien’s practice has pursued an architecture described by RPI as serene and enduring.
Her Mike Wacholder Memorial Lecture brings a nationally significant architect to EMPAC. Readers interested in museums, campuses, public space or the relationship between design and civic life have a clear reason to attend.
📅 Wednesday, October 28 · 5 PM
📍 EMPAC Theater · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🧓 Together Against Ageism — How Bias Shapes Community Health
Dina Refki brings a public-policy perspective to a subject that often gets treated as a matter of manners. A clinical professor in UAlbany’s Department of Public Administration and Policy and director of its Center for Women in Government & Civil Society, she examines how institutions and communities respond to unequal treatment.
Her Aging Well Speaker Series presentation considers ageism in Albany County: how age-based assumptions take shape locally and how they affect health and wellbeing. The program moves beyond identifying stereotypes to consider strategies for addressing them.
Refki will also discuss the research methods used to evaluate those efforts and preliminary findings that may inform policy and program design. That makes the afternoon relevant to older adults, caregivers, educators and people working in health, government or community organizations.
📅 Monday, October 26 · 3:30–5 PM
📍 ETEC, Rooms 149/151 · University at Albany · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Registration link provided on the official event page
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Richard Rifkin Memorial Lecture — A Legacy of Public Service
Richard Rifkin spent more than four decades working in and around New York State government. His positions included deputy attorney general, executive director of the State Ethics Commission and special counsel to a governor. In 2020, he became legal director of Albany Law School’s Government Law Center, continuing to address questions facing state and local government until his death in 2024.
Those roles placed him where legal advice becomes public action: interpreting authority, weighing institutional responsibilities and helping government function. A memorial program devoted to that career offers an opportunity to consider the work behind the more visible acts of politics.
Former New York Attorney General Robert Abrams is among those participating. Albany Law lists a lecture followed by a reception, giving readers interested in law, public administration and New York government an evening centered on a consequential public-service career.
📅 Monday, October 26 · 6–7:30 PM; reception follows
🎟️ Advance registration requested
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📖 Nathan Hensley — The Liberal Arts in a Time of Monsters
Nathan Hensley studies nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory and the environmental humanities at Georgetown University. His recent book, Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse, examines how literature can help people think about action when changing the course of events feels difficult or impossible.
That background gives his Skidmore lecture a particular interest. The Liberal Arts in a Time of Monsters raises a question that reaches beyond a debate over college requirements: what can reading, interpretation and historical knowledge contribute in an unsettled world?
The announced lecture does not supply a detailed outline, so its specific arguments remain Hensley’s to make. His scholarship provides a reason to listen, however: he approaches literature as a way of examining power, responsibility and the limits of familiar stories about progress.
📅 Tuesday, October 27 · 5:30 PM
📍 Wyckoff Center · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Consult the presenting department for attendance arrangements
Official English Department Listing
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
♿ Welcoming the Stranger? — American Jews, Disability & Citizenship
Hannah Zaves-Greene works at the intersection of American Jewish history, disability studies and legal history. The founding president of the Society for Jewish & Disability Studies, she has also consulted for the National Museum of Immigration on Ellis Island. Her forthcoming book, Able to Be American, examines disability in U.S. immigration law and the American Jewish response.
Her annual Jewish Colonie Lecture considers how disability, immigration and citizenship became entangled. The question is not simply who arrived in the United States, but how law and public judgment determined who could belong.
The subject brings a less familiar dimension to American immigration history and to debates about communal responsibility. UAlbany’s Judaic Studies Program and Department of History present the lecture, with light refreshments and wheelchair-accessible arrangements.
📅 Tuesday, October 27 · 6 PM
📍 Science Library, Standish Room · University at Albany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public; light refreshments
🚗 Free parking listed in Dutch Faculty/Staff Lot #5
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
The eastern wood pewee’s familiar call became the focus of research sustained by collaboration when scientist Wallace Craig’s hearing faded.
🐦 Access & Insight — Wallace Craig and the Song of the Eastern Wood Pewee
The eastern wood pewee’s recognizable call makes it a familiar starting point for many beginning birders. Historian Kristoffer Whitney uses that sound to tell a less familiar story about scientific work, hearing loss and collaboration.
Wallace Craig studied the bird from the 1920s into the early 1940s. When his hearing faded, he turned to birders and other amateur ornithologists to continue his research. The resulting history challenges an image of science conducted by a solitary expert with all the necessary abilities and resources at hand.
Whitney’s talk considers how access and cooperation shape what researchers can learn. Presented through a partnership involving the New York State Museum, UAlbany and RPI, it offers an evening for bird enthusiasts, history readers and anyone interested in the contributions of amateur observers. Live ASL interpretation is provided.
📅 Tuesday, October 27 · 6–7:30 PM
📍 New York State Museum, Huxley Theater · 222 Madison Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public; live ASL interpretation
Museum Event Details · UAlbany Calendar Listing
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🔬 State of Grace 2026 — Women in STEAM
UAlbany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity hosts State of Grace, a program celebrating women in science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics.
The announced activities include conversations with professionals, hands-on workshops and sessions on networking and public speaking. The combination treats participation in STEAM as more than a matter of technical training: professional relationships, communication and opportunities to lead also affect who can build a career.
The one-day program takes place October 29, 9 AM–4 PM, at ETEC and the Campus Center. It is open to the public, bringing these conversations about participation, professional development and gender diversity beyond the university community.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · 9 AM–4 PM
📍 ETEC and Campus Center · University at Albany
🎟️ Open to the public
☎️ Organizer contact: 518-442-5258
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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📚 BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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📚 Lois Lowry — Building 903
Lois Lowry has repeatedly trusted young readers with difficult subjects. Number the Stars enters the history of Nazi-occupied Denmark; The Giver imagines a society whose apparent order depends on suppressing memory, emotion and choice. Both received the Newbery Medal.
Her new novel, Building 903, returns to authoritarianism through a brother and sister living in a near-future America where books and basic freedoms are outlawed. The premise places reading within a struggle over what people are allowed to know and imagine.
Lowry’s Writers Institute conversation offers an opportunity to hear how those concerns have developed across a long career. Readers who encountered her work in childhood can return to it with adult questions, while teachers, parents and younger readers can hear a writer who has helped make moral uncertainty a serious subject of literature for young people.
📅 Wednesday, October 28 · 7:30–8:30 PM
📍 Page Hall Auditorium · UAlbany Downtown Campus · 135 Western Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public; book signing
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
In Defiance, Loubna Mrie connects Syria’s uprising with the intimate costs of breaking inherited loyalties.
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📰 Loubna Mrie — Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria
Loubna Mrie is a journalist, photographer and commentator whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, The Nation and other publications. Her memoir brings that public work into contact with the personal history that preceded it.
Defiance follows a young woman raised to be loyal to Syria’s regime who chooses revolt at tremendous personal cost. Its subject is the process of dissent: how inherited loyalties begin to fracture, how people recognize what they have accepted, and what happens when they can no longer continue accepting it.
The Writers Institute conversation offers a perspective on authoritarianism grounded in lived experience. Mrie’s work makes the political intimate, connecting a country’s violence with family relationships and the choices through which a person attempts to claim a life of her own.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · 4:30–5:30 PM
📍 Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center · University at Albany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
✍️ Anne Waldman — Dharma Gaze
Anne Waldman’s career encompasses poetry, performance, recordings, collaboration and the creation of places where other writers can work. A co-founder of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she has helped sustain a literary culture in which the spoken voice is central.
Her work asks listeners to encounter poetry as an event unfolding in time. Breath, pace, repetition and physical presence can change how a poem is understood; hearing the writer gives access to choices that a printed page leaves open.
The Tang’s Dharma Gaze reading follows its screening of Alystyre Julian’s documentary Outrider. Readers who saw the film can now encounter its subject directly, while newcomers can begin with the work itself. The free Payne Room program offers a concentrated evening with an influential experimental poet.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · 6 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Payne Room · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎭 THEATER & PERFORMANCE
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🎭 BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain — Final Performances
Samuel Beckett’s short plays can make a theatrical world from a repeated movement, a voice, an object or a carefully arranged body. Skidmore’s collection brings together Act Without Words I & II, Rough for Theatre I & II, Quad, What Where and Rockaby.
Directed by Jared Klein, the production emphasizes the relationship between text and design. Light, movement and space carry dramatic weight alongside words. Presenting several works together gives audiences a chance to see how many different theatrical possibilities Beckett found within severe limits.
For readers who know him chiefly through Waiting for Godot, this is an opportunity to encounter physical comedy, unsettling repetition and concentrated images of dependence and persistence. The production’s announced run concludes October 28.
📅 Monday–Wednesday, October 26–28 · 8–10 PM
📍 Janet Kinghorn Bernhard Theater Building · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ $6.53 students / $11.83 non-students
📅 Monday, October 26: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Tuesday, October 27: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Wednesday, October 28: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🎶 Grease — TIS Teens Opens a New Run
The students of Rydell High inhabit a world of friendship, romance and the pressure to belong. Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s musical turns those adolescent negotiations into an ensemble story whose energy comes from the group as much as from its central couple.
Theatre Institute at Sage’s TIS Teens presents the production under the direction of Eddie Knight. The program identifies its fall project as the school edition, making this an opportunity to see young performers working through a musical closely associated with teenage identity.
Opening weekend offers one Friday evening performance and two afternoon performances. The presenting theater recommends the production for ages ten and older, and the $15 ticket price makes it a practical option for a family or group theater outing.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
📅 Saturday, October 31 · 2 PM
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 2 PM
📍 James Meader Little Theater · Russell Sage College, Troy campus
🎟️ $15; recommended for ages 10+
The run continues November 6–8.
Production & Season Details · Tickets
📅 Friday, October 30: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, October 31: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday, November 1: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🎃 Beneath the Hudson — A Haunted Ship Takes Over EMPAC
EMPAC turns Troy’s maritime past into a supernatural adventure built around a lost steamboat and the fog that seems to have brought it back. Visitors enter a haunted ship experience populated by ghostly sailors, river creatures and traces of a disaster that refuses to remain underwater.
The larger program spreads through the building. FlagSSSDay Collective leads mask-making, Proctors supplies theatrical props for a photo booth, and trick-or-treating and costume contests give families several ways to participate. Later, DJs and a cash bar shift the atmosphere toward an adult evening.
Two films provide distinct options: Muppet Treasure Island at 5 PM and Lake Placid at 8 PM. The haunted ship is recommended for ages nine and older; the films’ G and R ratings make their different audiences clear.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 3–10 PM
📍 EMPAC · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; food and drinks purchased separately
Selected schedule
3–10 PM: Haunted Ship Experience, recommended ages 9+; trick-or-treating; photo booth.
3–7 PM: Mask-making with FlagSSSDay Collective.
4–5 PM: Children’s costume contest.
5 PM: Muppet Treasure Island — rated G.
7 PM: Adult costume contest; beer and wine bar opens.
7–10 PM: Hellseeker Club DJs.
8 PM: Lake Placid — rated R.
Add the full afternoon and evening
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Or add a particular activity
4 PM — Children’s costume contest: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
5 PM — Muppet Treasure Island: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
7 PM — Adult costume contest: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
7–10 PM — Hellseeker Club DJs: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
8 PM — Lake Placid: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎨 ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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🗣️ PechaKucha Night — Albany Cats, Arcade Games & the Stories Inside a Place
Opalka’s PechaKucha Night gathers eight presenters whose subjects move across local history, photography, public art, preservation and popular culture. The short illustrated-talk format gives each speaker a compact opportunity to make a subject vivid.
Among the announced presentations are Maeve McEneny-Johnson on Albany’s 1905 cat show, Adam Williams on the 1987 arcade game The Ninja Warriors, and photographer Chet Boehlke Jr.’s ShutterBuggin. Chet Opalka discusses the Albany Waterway Canal Project, while Mount Ida Preservation Association director Michael Easterbrook considers the traces of a busier past.
The attraction is the range: a single evening can introduce a reader to an unfamiliar piece of Albany history, a way of looking through a camera and a preservation question close to home. Refreshments begin before the presentations, allowing time to visit the gallery.
📅 Friday, October 30 · Refreshments 6:30 PM; talks 7 PM
📍 Opalka Gallery · Russell Sage College · 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Public program; consult the event page for attendance details
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🖼️ Curator’s Talk — Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?!
Skidmore student curator Laila Carlton ’29 introduces an exhibition built around Glory, a painting by Jennifer Wynne Reeves from the Tang’s collection. The Hyde Cabinet series gives a small presentation the attention that can be difficult to sustain within a large museum survey.
A talk centered on one work allows visitors to consider the decisions behind its selection and presentation. Carlton offers the curator’s perspective, giving listeners an opportunity to connect what they see with the questions that shaped the exhibition.
The noon program can also serve as the beginning of a longer museum visit. Other exhibitions on view include Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, A Feeling of With and 500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs.
📅 Thursday, October 29 · Noon
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Atrium · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🖼️ Tang Guide Tour — With Felix Sloss ’29
A museum’s student guides offer another route into its exhibitions: a selection of works, a way of asking questions and a perspective shaped by their own encounters with the collection.
Felix Sloss ’29 leads this Sunday’s Tang Guide Tour. The museum’s current exhibitions range from American history and citizenship to ecology and the relationships through which people understand the world around them.
The guided format is useful for first-time visitors deciding where to begin, while returning visitors can compare another person’s choices with their own. The afternoon leaves time afterward to revisit a work or continue independently through the galleries.
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 2 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Atrium · Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🌼 Final Week — HVCC’s Día de Muertos Altar Exhibition
HVCC’s Marvin Library Learning Commons hosts an altar exhibition celebrating Día de Muertos, the Mexican tradition of remembering departed loved ones and ancestors.
The altar gives remembrance a visible form. Objects and decorations become ways of sustaining relationships with those who have died, placing personal memory within a shared cultural practice.
October 30 is the exhibition’s final day. Visitors can use this last week to encounter the display, including those who missed the preceding discussion of the holiday’s traditions. The college’s listing includes the community among its intended audiences.
📅 On view through Friday, October 30
🎟️ Open to the community; check library visitor hours before traveling
🖼️ Continuing Exhibition — Light & Transient Causes
Opalka’s exhibition takes its title from the Declaration of Independence’s warning against changing governments for “light and transient causes.” Curator Marisa Espe turns that language toward a question about judgment: who gets to decide that someone else’s grievance is too minor to count?
The ten artists include Deborah Dancy, Sky Hopinka, Wendy Red Star, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter and Jean-Marc Superville Sovak. Their participation places the exhibition within a broader consideration of whose experiences receive public attention.
Readers attending PechaKucha Night can visit the exhibition as part of the evening, while a separate visit offers more time with the work. The show continues through December 5.
📅 Through December 5
🕒 Tuesday–Saturday, Noon–5 PM; Thursday until 8 PM; Monday by appointment
📍 Opalka Gallery · Russell Sage College · 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free
Exhibition Details · Visitor Information
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🎶 MUSIC, SOUND & TECHNOLOGY
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Ernie Watts brings decades of jazz, studio and film work to the freedom of his own quartet.
🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet — A Major Jazz Career in a Small-Group Setting
Ernie Watts’s musical history reaches from Buddy Rich’s big band to Charlie Haden’s Quartet West. His recording career includes film scores, popular music and two Grammy-winning albums produced by Quincy Jones. For many listeners, his playing may already be familiar even when his name is not.
The quartet places that experience in a setting shaped by live interaction. Pianist Marc Seales, bassist Bruce Lett and drummer Bob Leatherbarrow have longstanding relationships with Watts, giving the group a shared vocabulary without removing the discoveries of improvisation.
A Place for Jazz brings the quartet to SUNY Schenectady’s Carl B. Taylor Auditorium. The opportunity is to hear an artist whose studio work served countless projects now working at the center of his own ensemble.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building · SUNY Schenectady · 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady
🎟️ $25 at the door / $26.95 online; students with ID $10 at the door
Door purchases: cash or check
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🎙️ Union College Jazz Ensemble — Vocal Jazz!
Union’s Jazz Ensemble turns its attention to vocal jazz in a Wednesday evening concert at Emerson Auditorium. The program brings student musicians from across the college into a performance devoted to a form where words and instrumental phrasing meet.
Vocal jazz asks listeners to attend to how a melody is shaped: the placement of a phrase, the relationship between a singer and the ensemble, and the rhythmic choices that give familiar musical material a particular character.
The college has announced the concert title and schedule without a detailed repertoire list. Its appeal is the opportunity to hear the ensemble’s current work in an intimate campus setting, with suggested donations directly supporting Union’s music groups.
📅 Wednesday, October 28 · 8 PM
📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center · Union College · Schenectady
🎟️ Tickets at the door; suggested donations: $15 general / $10 Union faculty, staff and alumni / $5 students, seniors and children under 12
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
🥁 Zakuro-Daiko — Happy Halloween!
Union’s Japanese drumming ensemble offers two Halloween performances at Emerson Auditorium. Zakuro-Daiko brings a different sound and physical presence to the college’s fall concert series.
Taiko performance makes coordination visible as well as audible. Listeners can follow the relationship between repeated patterns, collective timing and the movements through which the players produce the sound.
The announced program provides Friday evening and Saturday afternoon options. Union has not supplied a detailed repertoire, so the invitation is straightforward: hear the ensemble in performance and encounter a campus music practice that differs markedly from the week’s jazz and choral concerts.
📅 Friday, October 30 · 7 PM
📅 Saturday, October 31 · 1 PM
📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center · Union College · Schenectady
🎟️ Tickets at the door; suggested donations: $15 general / $10 Union faculty, staff and alumni / $5 students, seniors and children under 12
📅 Friday, October 30: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday, October 31: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🌙 Fall Choral Hour — Music in the Night
UAlbany’s Chamber Singers and Community Chorale share a program devoted to the mystery and possibilities of evening. Music in the Night moves across several centuries rather than approaching its subject through one composer or musical period.
The announced composers include Claudio Monteverdi, Camille Saint-Saëns, Eric Whitacre, Elaine Hagenberg and Andrew Lloyd Webber. That range brings early choral writing into conversation with contemporary concert music and musical theater.
The combined ensembles offer a Sunday-afternoon opportunity to hear how different composers have approached a shared imaginative space. Advance tickets provide a lower-cost option, particularly for students, whose advance admission is $3.
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 3 PM
📍 Main Theatre, Performing Arts Center · University at Albany · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Advance: $10 general / $6 seniors and UAlbany faculty-staff / $3 students
🎟️ Day of performance: $15 / $11 / $8
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
📍 BEFORE YOU GO: Programs may be canceled, moved or otherwise changed after publication. Check with the venue before traveling, especially when arranging a trip around a single performance.
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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD — NOVEMBER 2–22
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⚖️ Dorothy Roberts — The Mixed Marriage Project
Dorothy Roberts’s books, including Killing the Black Body, Fatal Invention and Torn Apart, have helped shape debates about race, reproductive justice and child welfare. The University of Pennsylvania scholar brings that work to Albany Law’s Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Memorial Lecture through The Mixed Marriage Project, examining interracial marriage, love and law.
The book connects intimate relationships with the legal and social rules governing racial identity. Roberts considers what the history of interracial marriage reveals about the reach of those rules into family life. In-person and online attendance options are offered.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · 5:30 PM; reception follows
📍 Albany Law School · 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Registration offered for in-person and online attendance
Lecture Background & Attendance Information
In Wakka Wakka’s underworld, a dodo growing feathers upsets the boundary between life and death.
🌎 Wakka Wakka — Dead as a Dodo
Two skeleton friends search for replacement bones in the underworld. Then the dodo begins to grow feathers, and an apparent miracle threatens the order around them. Wakka Wakka turns that premise into visual theater through puppetry, humor and a story of friendship caught between life and death.
As the bird’s transformation continues, the friends must flee a world that has become hostile to them. The production combines a darkly comic setting with the emotional stakes of staying together when everything familiar begins to change. Tickets are available for the single Williams performance.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 8 PM
📍 MainStage, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance · Williams College · Williamstown, Massachusetts
🎟️ Ticketed
🧠 INTERFACE: Cognitive Science — Brett Fajen & Heidi Latsky
Choreographer Heidi Latsky and RPI cognitive scientist Brett Fajen consider how perception connects with bodily action and how people adapt when those systems change. The program includes material from Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey, addressing dancers’ experiences of non-apparent neurological disabilities.
Fajen studies perception, movement and the visual control of action; Latsky approaches related questions through dancers’ bodies and creative practice. Their conversation explores where those methods meet and what each can reveal about learning, adaptation and the experience of moving through the world.
📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM; listed duration 60 minutes
📍 Studio 2 · EMPAC · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check the event page for attendance arrangements
🎭 Rent — Siena University
Jonathan Larson’s musical brings artists, friendship, love and the AIDS crisis into a story about making a life under economic and emotional pressure. Siena’s production is directed by Margaret E. Hall in the Beaudoin Theatre.
Its characters struggle to sustain relationships and creative work while confronting illness and insecurity. The ensemble structure places their different responses beside one another, making community both a source of support and a continuing challenge. Tickets are linked from the university’s official season page.
📅 November 12–14 and 19–21 · 8 PM; November 15 · 3 PM
📍 Beaudoin Theatre · Siena University · 515 Loudon Road, Loudonville
🎟️ Ticketed; purchase link on the official page
Ali Ryerson places the flute at the center of a jazz ensemble, exploring its range as an improvising voice.
🎷 Ali Ryerson Quartet
Ali Ryerson’s career places the flute at the center of a jazz ensemble. Her international appearances, recordings and Jazz Flute Big Band work demonstrate an instrumental voice that listeners may know more readily from orchestral music.
Her quartet includes pianist Larry Ham, bassist Lou Pappas and drummer Tom Melito. The combination offers the flexibility of a small jazz group with the flute’s distinctive colors at its center. This concert concludes A Place for Jazz’s announced fall series.
📅 Friday, November 13 · 7 PM
📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building · SUNY Schenectady · 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady
🎟️ $25 at the door / $26.95 online; students with ID $10 at the door
[PHOTO 7 — The Orchestra Now, from the Fisher Center’s Gershwin program page]
The Orchestra Now traces the Jazz Age’s varied influence on Jewish composers working across Europe and America.
🌎 Gershwin, Jazz & the Music of Jewish Émigrés
Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now, with violinist Mira Wang, in a program tracing different responses to the Jazz Age. Gershwin’s An American in Paris appears alongside works by Louis Gruenberg, Ignatz Waghalter, Lazare Saminsky and Ernst Toch.
Waghalter’s prewar Violin Concerto offers a European idiom before jazz’s ascendancy; Gruenberg’s Jazz Suite brings jazz into a classical form. Toch’s rhythmic wit and Saminsky’s contrasting musical outlook make the concert a study in differing responses rather than a single story of influence.
📅 Saturday, November 14 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater · Bard College · Annandale-on-Hudson
🎟️ Tickets start at $15
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🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING — NOVEMBER 23–FEBRUARY 22
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🌎 Hansel and Gretel — Bard Conservatory
Humperdinck’s opera brings the Brothers Grimm’s story into a musical world of folk-inspired melody and rich orchestral writing. Bard’s fully staged production combines the Conservatory Orchestra, Graduate Vocal Arts singers and participating choirs under Leon Botstein.
Sung in German with English supertitles, the opera follows the siblings from domestic troubles into a forest where wonder and danger become difficult to separate. Adult and children’s voices contribute to a production whose musical scale extends well beyond the apparent simplicity of its fairy tale.
📅 Friday, December 11 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, December 13 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater · Bard College
🎟️ Tickets start at $20
🤖 INTERFACE: Robotics — Qiujiang Levi Lu & John Wen
Musician, composer and instrument builder Qiujiang Levi Lu joins RPI robotics researcher John Wen to consider machines as instruments, collaborators and extensions of the body. Their conversation connects artistic experimentation with questions about control, perception and the design of new hardware.
Examples from their work explore how artistic projects can pose new questions for robotics, while technical developments create possibilities for performance. The discussion considers what changes when a machine becomes an active part of creative practice.
📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free; check the event page for attendance arrangements
Beethoven’s Eroica and Brahms’s Fourth give The Orchestra Now two contrasting journeys through grief, tension and transformation.
🌎 Beethoven & Brahms: Part 1
The Orchestra Now pairs Brahms’s Fourth Symphony with Beethoven’s Eroica. Both works build large musical arguments through variation, while their contrasting approaches to grief, tension and resolution make the pairing more than a collection of familiar titles.
Brahms’s finale develops a Bach-derived theme through a continuous sequence of variations. Beethoven’s symphony moves through its funeral march toward a finale that also transforms a theme on a large scale. Hearing the works together brings those shared techniques—and their very different expressive worlds—into focus.
📅 Saturday, February 6, 2027 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, February 7, 2027 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater · Bard College
🎟️ In-person tickets start at $15
🥽 INTERFACE: Mixed Reality — Lars Jan & Talis Reks
Artist Lars Jan and mixed-reality researcher Talis Reks discuss combining shared physical space with imagined environments. Their developing project, ROAM, involves live performance and synchronized virtual layers for groups moving across a large outdoor space.
The challenge is both technical and theatrical: how can people occupy the same imagined world while moving together through a real one? Jan’s narrative and performance practice meets Reks’s work on headsets, tracking, networking and synchronization for bodies in motion.
📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman · EMPAC · RPI
🎟️ Free; check the event page for attendance arrangements
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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS — NOVEMBER 2–MAY 2
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These are advance production dates. Consult the presenting theater for individual performances, ticket availability and schedule changes.
Core Campuses
DatesProductionCampusDetailsThrough November 8Grease — begins October 30Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageDetails & TicketsNovember 12–21RentSiena UniversityDetails & Ticket LinkNovember 18–22A Doll’s HouseUAlbanySeason DetailsNovember 20–December 5This Emancipation ThingSkidmore CollegeDetailsDecember 2–10Little Women: The MusicalRussell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageSeason & TicketsFebruary 24–March 3ClueRussell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageSeason & TicketsMarch 3–7UAlbany Theatre Program musical — title forthcomingUAlbanySeason DetailsMarch 18–21The World Goes RoundRussell Sage College / Theatre Institute at SageDetails & Ticket LinkApril 8–17The Country WifeSiena UniversityDetails & Ticket LinkApril 14–17FRESH ACTS: A Festival of New PlaysUAlbanySeason Details
Regional Extension Theater
DateProductionCampusDetailsNovember 7Wakka Wakka: Dead as a DodoWilliams CollegeDetails & Ticket LinkMarch 5, 2027Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the SunWilliams CollegeDetails
📍 BEFORE YOU GO: A listing cannot guarantee that a program will take place. Confirm with the venue before traveling, including any last-minute change of room, time or admission arrangements.
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📅 BY DAY CALENDAR
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Monday, October 26
3:30–5 PM — Together Against Ageism · UAlbany / ETEC 149/151
6–7:30 PM — Richard Rifkin Memorial Lecture · Albany Law School; reception follows
8–10 PM — BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain · Skidmore
Tuesday, October 27
5:30 PM — Nathan Hensley: The Liberal Arts in a Time of Monsters · Skidmore / Wyckoff Center
6 PM — Hannah Zaves-Greene: Annual Jewish Colonie Lecture · UAlbany / Science Library, Standish Room
6–7:30 PM — Access & Insight: Wallace Craig and the Eastern Wood Pewee · New York State Museum
8–10 PM — BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain · Skidmore
Wednesday, October 28
5 PM — Billie Tsien: Begin Again · RPI / EMPAC Theater
7:30–8:30 PM — Lois Lowry: Building 903 · UAlbany / Page Hall
8 PM — Union College Jazz Ensemble: Vocal Jazz! · Emerson Auditorium
8–10 PM — BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain · Skidmore
Thursday, October 29
9 AM–4 PM — State of Grace 2026 · UAlbany / ETEC and Campus Center; open to the public
Noon — Curator’s Talk: Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?! · Skidmore / Tang
4:30–5:30 PM — Loubna Mrie: Defiance · UAlbany / PAC Recital Hall
6 PM — Anne Waldman: Dharma Gaze · Skidmore / Tang, Payne Room
Friday, October 30
3–10 PM — Beneath the Hudson · RPI / EMPAC
4–5 PM — Children’s costume contest · RPI / EMPAC
5 PM — Muppet Treasure Island screening · RPI / EMPAC
6:30 PM refreshments; 7 PM talks — PechaKucha Night · Russell Sage / Opalka
7 PM — Ernie Watts Quartet · SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz
7 PM — Zakuro-Daiko: Happy Halloween! · Union / Emerson Auditorium
7 PM — Grease · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
7 PM — Adult costume contest · RPI / EMPAC
7–10 PM — Hellseeker Club DJs · RPI / EMPAC
8 PM — Lake Placid screening · RPI / EMPAC
Saturday, October 31
1 PM — Zakuro-Daiko: Happy Halloween! · Union / Emerson Auditorium
2 PM — Grease · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
Sunday, November 1
2 PM — Tang Guide Tour with Felix Sloss ’29 · Skidmore / Tang
2 PM — Grease · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
3 PM — Fall Choral Hour: Music in the Night · UAlbany / Main Theatre
Also on view: HVCC’s Día de Muertos altar through October 30; Opalka’s Light & Transient Causes through December 5; current exhibitions at the Tang Teaching Museum.
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HELP SHAPE CAPITAL REGION CURATED
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What would you like to see more of—music, science, history, literature, visual art or public affairs? Have you attended something that deserves a reader’s recommendation?
Send suggestions, corrections and field notes to Alan Koslow. If you organize a substantial public campus event, please include its official event page, date, time, location and attendance requirements.
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A guide to Capital Region events, arts and culture, food and music.
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© 2026 The Jewish World · Since 1965 - The Capital Region's gateway to Jewish life
Designed and Developed by Ta-Da Studios
© 2026 The Jewish World · Since 1965 - The Capital Region's gateway to Jewish life
Designed and Developed by Ta-Da Studios