Capital Region Curated: October 5-11
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with American diplomacy at UAlbany, the Flaherty Film Seminar, EMPAC audio and more.
Alan Koslow
35
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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DIPLOMACY, FILM, IMMERSIVE SOUND & STORIES THAT MOVE
American diplomacy at UAlbany, three days of experimental film at the Tang, immersive audio at EMPAC, Nicholas Thompson on running and family—and much more across Capital Region campuses
All six programs from the 2026 Flaherty Film Seminar come to the Tang for three days of experimental and documentary film.
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🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks: American diplomacy, the Flaherty Film Seminar, immersive audio at EMPAC, and Nicholas Thompson on running, fathers and family
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life: AI policy, academic censorship, tariffs and presidential power, and a century of American diplomacy
📚 Books, Writers & Ideas: banned comics and graphic novels, Michael Lewis’s Who Is Government?, the history of bacon, and Nicholas Thompson’s The Running Ground
🎭 Theater & Performance: Lois Lowry’s The Giver brought to the stage by Literature to Life
🎬 Film & Media: all six programs from the 2026 Flaherty Film Seminar, Gestures of Refusal
🎨 Art & Visual Culture: poetry at Opalka Gallery, the Día de los Muertos altar at HVCC, Tang Family Saturday, the Tang Town Crier and a Sunday Tang Guide Tour
🎶 Music, Sound & Technology: Fiesta del Norte at HVCC and three days of immersive audio at EMPAC
🌎 Regional Extension: Gilles Vonsattel and the China Now Music Festival at Bard, plus original Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel at Williams
🔥 Plan Ahead: Pam Tanowitz, The Cookers, Compagnie Hervé Koubi, UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week, Garth Greenwell, Danielle Allen, Ernie Watts, and Raiders of the Lost Ark with live orchestra
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
One calendar file adds this week’s timed events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook.
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings now have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Evening events are generally held in buildings that are open and accessible for the program.
⭐ TOP PICKS
🌍 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
University at Albany · Tuesday, October 6 · 7–9 PM
Most of us encounter diplomacy only when it becomes news: a war, a summit meeting, a trade dispute, a hostage crisis. Engage America looks instead at the career diplomats who spend years representing the United States abroad, often far from public attention.
Recently retired Foreign Service Officer Tom Selinger draws on oral histories preserved by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, followed by a panel that includes retired ambassadors and regional academic leaders. It should be an unusually good opportunity to understand what diplomacy looks like from the people who have actually practiced it.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
🎬 Whole Grain: Flaherty Film Seminar — Gestures of Refusal
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Thursday–Saturday, October 8–10
The Tang becomes one of three international satellite sites for the 71st Flaherty Film Seminar, presenting all six programs from this year’s gathering. Under the theme Gestures of Refusal, the films examine memory, archives, erasure and resistance through experimental and documentary work.
Each 90-minute program is followed by discussion, an important part of the Flaherty tradition and one reason this is more than a weekend of screenings.
See Film & Media below.
🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio — Felix Deufel & Matthew Goodheart
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute / EMPAC · Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
EMPAC is particularly well suited to a subject that is difficult to understand without hearing it: sound that exists not simply in front of the listener but throughout three-dimensional space.
German sound artist and developer Felix Deufel and RPI composer and sound artist Matthew Goodheart begin a three-day sequence that continues with a hands-on spatial-audio workshop Friday and a four-hour drop-in installation using EMPAC’s 39-speaker ambisonic system Saturday.
See Music, Sound & Technology below.
🏃 Nicholas Thompson — The Running Ground
UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute · Friday, October 9 · 7 PM
Nicholas Thompson is CEO of The Atlantic, a journalist and an accomplished masters runner. His bestselling The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports uses running to examine ambition, memory, personal growth and his relationship with his father.
The Albany Running Exchange, which began as a UAlbany student club, is a cosponsor. Books will be available, with a signing after the conversation.
See Books, Writers & Ideas below.
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IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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🤖 AI Policy Town Hall
University at Albany
Generative AI has become part of college life faster than most colleges have been able to decide what to do with it. Students can use it to research, brainstorm, summarize, write, translate and produce computer code. Faculty members have to decide which uses are legitimate tools and which defeat the purpose of an assignment. Universities also face questions involving privacy, intellectual property, reliability and academic integrity.
UAlbany’s AI Policy Town Hall brings those questions together at the institutional level. Rather than another lecture predicting where artificial intelligence might be five or ten years from now, this is a discussion about the rules needed today.
That makes the program interesting beyond UAlbany. Colleges, businesses, professional organizations and governments are all confronting the same basic problem: AI is already being used, while the standards governing its use are still being written. A university is a particularly revealing place to watch that process because the decisions affect both how students learn and how their work is evaluated.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 1–2 PM
📍 Campus Center Ballroom CC 202, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Public discussion
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Amy Reid of PEN America examines academic censorship and the targeting of teaching on race and gender at UAlbany.
📚 Who’s Afraid of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies?
Academic Censorship and the Targeting of Teaching on Race and Gender
University at Albany
Arguments over race, gender and sexuality have increasingly moved from political debate into disputes over what colleges teach and who has authority over the curriculum. Amy Reid comes to UAlbany to examine that conflict as part of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies series “Teaching Gender, Race, and Feminism in Troubled Times.”
Reid directs PEN America’s Freedom to Learn Program, which opposes government restrictions on higher-education teaching and curriculum. Before joining PEN America, she was a professor of French language and literature and directed the Gender Studies Program at New College of Florida.
Her UAlbany lecture concentrates on what she describes as direct and indirect forms of academic censorship and their effects on teaching about race and gender. Reid approaches the subject from an academic-freedom advocacy perspective; the larger disputes over curriculum, government authority and the proper boundaries of academic freedom remain politically contested.
For a public audience, the value of the program is its focus on higher education itself. The argument is not simply over controversial ideas. It concerns who decides what belongs in a college classroom and how much control legislatures, administrators and faculty should have over those decisions.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 3–4:30 PM
📍 Humanities 354, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Public lecture · In person and online
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Trading Places: Tariffs, Trade, and Presidential Power
University at Albany
Tariffs are usually discussed as economic policy: what they do to prices, manufacturing, imports and international trade. Caitlain Devereaux Lewis, a professor at Albany Law School, approaches them from another direction—constitutional law and presidential authority.
The distinction matters. The Constitution gives Congress important powers over taxation and foreign commerce, while federal statutes have delegated substantial trade authority to the executive branch. Modern tariff disputes can therefore raise a second question alongside whether a particular tariff is good economic policy: Who has the legal power to impose it?
Lewis’s Anderson Lecture provides an opportunity to separate those legal questions from the daily political argument surrounding tariffs. That should be useful even for people who do not ordinarily attend law lectures, particularly because disputes over presidential power extend well beyond trade.
A networking period follows and is directed especially toward UAlbany students and alumni. The principal reason for a general reader to attend is the lecture: a timely issue examined through the constitutional structure behind it.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 6–8 PM
📍 Campus Center Multipurpose Room, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Public lecture
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🌍 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
University at Albany
Foreign policy is usually remembered through presidents, wars, treaties and summit meetings. The daily work behind it is performed by career diplomats whose names seldom enter the history books.
Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy puts those people at the center of the story.
Recently retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer Tom Selinger presents Portraits of American Diplomacy, drawing on oral histories preserved by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. The stories include diplomats with New York connections and careers that involved overseas crises, international markets, alliances and the less dramatic but essential work of maintaining relationships between governments.
The evening then broadens into a panel with retired ambassadors Robert Gosende and Donna Welton and Hudson Valley Community College President Michael Brophy, moderated by UAlbany President Havidán Rodríguez. A companion exhibition traces significant moments in American diplomatic history.
The timing gives the program another dimension. As the country approaches its 250th anniversary, much of the attention will naturally fall on domestic history. This program looks at the American story from the other direction—how the United States has dealt with the rest of the world and what representing the country overseas has required of the people assigned to do it.
For anyone whose picture of diplomacy begins and ends with ambassadors at negotiating tables, this should fill in a large part of the missing picture.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 7–9 PM · Doors 6:30 PM
📍 Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free · Registration required
Details | Register
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BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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📚 Wait…THAT Book Is Banned?
UAlbany Libraries
Comics and graphic novels occupy an interesting place in arguments over banned and challenged books. Their combination of words and images makes them unusually easy to excerpt: one panel can be photographed, circulated and judged without the pages that come before or after it.
UAlbany librarians Amanda Lowe and Kaci Wilson take that problem as the starting point for an interactive Banned Books Week program. They will look at frequently challenged works, why visual storytelling attracts censorship efforts and what those disputes say about intellectual freedom and control over what other people are permitted to read.
Graphic novels are no longer a narrow corner of publishing. They encompass memoir, journalism, history, literary fiction and books for readers of virtually every age. Challenges to the form therefore raise many of the same questions libraries and schools face with prose books, with the added complication that an isolated image can travel much farther and faster than an isolated paragraph.
The format is discussion rather than a formal lecture, making this one of the week’s more participatory events.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 1:30–3 PM
📍 Minerva Room, University Library, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🏛️ Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service
Albany Law School / Albany Public Library
Government is an enormous abstraction until you begin looking at the people who actually make it work.
That is the premise behind Michael Lewis’s Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, a collection of profiles that turns attention away from elected officials and toward federal employees whose work is generally invisible to the public. Lewis and the other writers involved focus on people working inside government agencies—scientists, analysts, investigators and administrators whose jobs rarely generate headlines unless something goes wrong.
Patrick Wildes ’16, director of Albany Law School’s Government Law Center, brings the book into a particularly appropriate setting. The Government Law Center studies the relationship between law, public institutions and the people who administer them, making the discussion less a conventional book review than an entry point into the machinery of public service.
The program is formally co-presented by the Government Law Center and the Friends & Foundation of Albany Public Library.
There is also an interesting local dimension. Albany is a government town. Thousands of Capital Region residents work in public agencies, courts, universities and institutions whose daily operations depend on exactly the kind of professional public service Lewis’s book examines.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 2–3 PM
📍 Large Auditorium, Albany Public Library, 161 Washington Ave., Albany
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🥓 American Bacon: A Conversation with Mark A. Johnson
Union College
Bacon has had a remarkably successful second career as an American cultural object. Beyond breakfast, it has become an advertising device, internet joke, restaurant obsession and recurring subject of nutritional debate.
Historian Mark A. Johnson takes the food seriously enough to ask how that happened.
His book American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon traces bacon from early modern Britain through American history, including the Civil War and Progressive Era. Along the way, an everyday food becomes a route into much larger subjects: industrialization, urbanization, reform movements, globalization, race, class and gender.
Johnson specializes in American history, particularly the South and African American history. His earlier work includes books on Alabama barbecue and Black political performance, which gives some indication of the way he uses popular culture to illuminate broader historical change.
Good food history is rarely just about food. What people eat can reveal how food was produced and marketed, who could afford it, how tastes changed and how businesses turned ordinary products into cultural symbols. Bacon happens to provide Johnson with an especially colorful example.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 4–5 PM
📍 Reamer Campus Center Auditorium, Union College · 807 Union St., Schenectady
🎟️ Free and open to all
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson comes to UAlbany with The Running Ground, his memoir of running, ambition, fathers and sons.
🏃 Nicholas Thompson — The Running Ground
UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute
Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic, a journalist and an accomplished masters runner. His book The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports brings those parts of his life together in a memoir about running, family and his relationship with his father.
Running gives Thompson an effective structure because it is both extremely simple and endlessly measurable. Distance, pace and improvement can be reduced to numbers. The reasons people keep running—and what they think about during all those miles—are considerably harder to quantify.
That is where the book becomes more than a sports memoir. Thompson uses running to examine memory, ambition, aging and the ways people understand themselves through their parents. His professional life, meanwhile, is spent in the rapid flow of contemporary journalism, making the repetitive physical discipline of distance running an interesting counterweight.
The Albany Running Exchange, which began as a UAlbany student club, is a cosponsor. That should give the conversation a strong local running audience without limiting it to runners.
Books will be available for purchase, and Thompson will sign them after the program.
📅 Friday, October 9 · 7 PM
📍 Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free · No registration required
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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THEATER & PERFORMANCE
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Literature to Life brings Lois Lowry’s Newbery Medal-winning The Giver to the stage at UAlbany.
🎭 Literature to Life: The Giver
UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute
Lois Lowry’s The Giver begins in a society that appears to have solved many of humanity’s most persistent problems. Poverty, conflict and disorder have largely disappeared. So have genuine choice, historical memory and much of what makes an individual life individual.
Twelve-year-old Jonas begins to understand the cost when he is selected to receive the memories held by the community’s Giver. The arrangement that once looked safe and orderly becomes increasingly disturbing as he discovers what has been sacrificed to create it.
Lowry’s Newbery Medal-winning novel has remained a fixture of young-adult literature because its moral argument grows more complicated as readers get older. The central bargain—security and stability in exchange for freedom, memory and choice—is simple enough for a young reader to understand and substantial enough to revisit decades later.
Literature to Life specializes in theatrical adaptations that stay close to important literary texts. This production is performed by Aurea Tomeski, adapted and directed by Elise Thoron, and relies on the performer and Lowry’s language rather than trying to reproduce the novel through a large cast and elaborate scenery.
Readers who first met Jonas in a school classroom may find that returning to his world as adults produces a very different experience.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 7 PM
📍 Main Theatre, UAlbany Performing Arts Center · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ $15
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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FILM & MEDIA
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🎬 Whole Grain: Flaherty Film Seminar — Gestures of Refusal
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum / MDOCS / Picture Lock One
The Flaherty Film Seminar has been challenging conventional ways of watching film for more than seven decades. One of its traditions is particularly unusual: programs are not announced in advance. Viewers encounter the work without reviews, reputations and expectations telling them what they are supposed to think.
This week, the Tang brings the complete six-program 2026 seminar to Saratoga Springs through its Whole Grain experimental-film series, working with Skidmore’s MDOCS and Troy’s Picture Lock One.
This year’s theme, Gestures of Refusal, gathers experimental and documentary films concerned with memory, archives, erasure and resistance. Some rework existing images; others use fragmented narrative or personal recollection. What connects them is an interest in how images preserve history, how history can be lost or altered, and what it means for an artist to refuse the conventional way a story has been told.
Each program runs about 90 minutes and is followed by moderated discussion. That conversation is central to the Flaherty model. The seminar has always treated the audience’s response as part of the experience rather than something that happens privately on the drive home.
The Tang is one of three international pods extending this year’s seminar beyond its principal gathering. For Capital Region viewers interested in documentary or experimental film, having all six programs presented locally over three days is a rare opportunity.
Attendance does not require committing to the entire weekend. Still, seeing several programs should reveal more of the connections within the theme—and give the discussions a chance to build on one another.
📍 Somers Classroom, Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Registration requested
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8
6 PM — Program 1
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9
6 PM — Program 2
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8 PM — Program 3
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10
1 PM — Program 4
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
3:30 PM — Program 5
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7 PM — Program 6
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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MUSIC, SOUND & TECHNOLOGY
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🎺 Fiesta del Norte
Hudson Valley Community College
Mariachi is one of Mexico’s most recognizable musical traditions, but Fiesta del Norte ranges considerably farther than the familiar image of trumpets, violins and charro suits.
The ensemble’s program moves among several regional Mexican traditions. There is mariachi music from Jalisco, the western Mexican state most closely associated with the form; Norteñas from Chihuahua, music shaped by northern Mexico and its distinctive accordion-driven traditions; and marimba music from Chiapas, where the instrument occupies a very different musical landscape.
That range is part of what makes the concert useful as more than lunchtime entertainment. Mexican music is no more stylistically uniform than American music, and hearing several traditions in the same program provides a quick introduction to the enormous regional variety hidden inside a broad label like “Mexican folk music.”
Director Dave Giardina adds stories and cultural context between selections, helping connect the music to the communities and regions from which it developed.
The concert is part of HVCC’s Hispanic Heritage Month programming and is free and open to the public.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · Noon
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium, HVCC · Troy
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Sound artists Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart open three days of immersive-audio exploration at EMPAC.
🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio — Felix Deufel & Matthew Goodheart
EMPAC spends three days this week examining a part of sound technology that is easier to experience than to describe.
Ordinary stereo gives sound a left and a right. Immersive audio adds space. Sounds can be positioned around a listener and moved through a room, allowing composers and sound designers to work with location almost as another musical element.
German sound artist and developer Felix Deufel comes to Troy for a sequence that approaches the subject from three directions.
Deufel joins RPI composer, improviser and sound artist Matthew Goodheart for a public conversation about spatial sound, acoustics, composition and the relationship between sound and the physical environment.
Deufel directs Leipzig’s ZiMMT — Center for Immersive Media Art, Music and Technology and develops systems for recording and producing three-dimensional audio. Goodheart’s work has long explored the relationship among performer, instrument and listener.
EMPAC gives that discussion a particularly appropriate setting. Its studios and performance spaces were designed for experimentation with acoustics and media technologies, so spatial sound is not merely an abstract subject here.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
💻 Grapes 3D Workshop — Felix Deufel
Friday moves from listening and discussion to making things.
Deufel introduces Grapes 3D Audio Control, software designed to position and move sound through three-dimensional environments. It can be used in music, film, theater and live performance and can communicate with other digital-audio systems.
The four-hour format is significant. This is a working session rather than a brief demonstration, giving musicians, filmmakers, theater artists and people interested in audio technology time to experiment with the software.
Participants should bring a Mac or Windows laptop.
📅 Friday, October 9 · Noon–4 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free · Registration required
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🔊 Audio from Lost in Liquid Noise
Saturday’s final Felix Deufel event takes immersive audio out of the realm of demonstration and turns it into an environmental experience.
Lost in Liquid Noise grew out of two Arctic expeditions in 2023 and 2024 by sound artist Felix Deufel and video artist Lucas Gutierrez. They gathered material from a landscape undergoing changes so enormous that their scale is difficult to comprehend. Greenland loses hundreds of millions of tons of ice each day, but statistics like that remain abstract. Deufel and Gutierrez set out to make some of those changes perceptible through sound, image and physical space.
The material ranges from tiny sounds within ice and water to glacial ruptures and underwater acoustic ecosystems beneath frozen seas. Water itself becomes part of the structure of the work as it shifts among ice, liquid and vapor.
At EMPAC, the audio is presented through Studio 1’s 39-speaker ambisonic system. Instead of hearing a soundtrack coming from the front of the room, listeners occupy the sound field. Sonic events can appear around them and move through the space, shifting between delicate crystalline sounds and the much larger physical force of breaking ice.
The work uses noise in two senses: as sound and as a condition of environmental instability. Deufel is interested in overload, continuous transformation and the loss of control that accompanies a system undergoing rapid change.
That is what makes this considerably more than a demonstration of EMPAC’s speaker system. The technology is being used to translate a planetary process into something a person can experience with the body. Rather than explaining climate change through another graph or statistic, Lost in Liquid Noise asks what happens when some of those changes become something you can actually hear around you.
This is a drop-in installation, not an 11 AM presentation. It remains open continuously for four hours, so visitors can enter when they wish and spend as much or as little time with the work as they choose.
The timing also makes it possible to combine this with the EMPAC tour. The tour runs from 11 AM–12:30 PM; Lost in Liquid Noise remains open until 3 PM.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 11 AM–3 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free · Drop-in
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🏛️ EMPAC Tour with Dena Beard
There are building tours that amount to walking around while someone points out architecture. An EMPAC tour can go considerably deeper because so much of the building was designed around things an audience normally never sees.
Saturday’s guide is particularly interesting: Dena Beard, EMPAC’s executive director.
Beard came to RPI after directing the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College and, before that, serving for nearly a decade as executive director of The Lab in San Francisco, a center known for experimental and avant-garde work.
That background should make her tour different from one led principally from an architectural or engineering perspective. EMPAC deliberately rotates guides among members of its staff, and the center says no two tours are quite the same.
Inside, visitors get behind-the-scenes access to a building in which the rooms themselves function as artistic and technical instruments. Depending on the route and what Beard chooses to emphasize, the tour can explore how a stage transforms, how light behaves inside a performance space and how reproduced sound changes not only what an audience hears but how it experiences a room.
That last subject is especially appropriate this Saturday. The tour takes place while Felix Deufel’s Lost in Liquid Noise is running in Studio 1, giving visitors the unusual opportunity to learn how EMPAC’s spaces are conceived and then experience one of them being used for a 39-speaker immersive installation.
For people who have attended performances at EMPAC but have never understood what is behind the walls, above the stages or inside the studios, this is a chance to see the building from the point of view of the people who actually use it to make work.
And with Beard leading, it is also an opportunity to hear from the person currently responsible for deciding what kind of artistic and research institution EMPAC is going to become.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 11 AM–12:30 PM
📍 Level 7 Lobby, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free · Registration recommended
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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📝 Poetry Reading — Susan Comninos, Janet Bowdan & Shira Dentz
Russell Sage College / Opalka Gallery
This is not simply three poets standing at a microphone and reading one after another.
Susan Comninos, Janet Bowdan and Shira Dentz are contributors to the new anthology The Color Wheel: Poems, published this year by Terrapin Books. The collection uses color as a point of departure, and the evening brings poetry into a gallery environment where visual and literary images can work against one another.
The three poets bring quite different bodies of work to the room.
Susan Comninos, who lives in the Capital Region, is the author of Out of Nowhere: Poems. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Harvard Review Online, Rattle, The Common, Prairie Schooner and North American Review. She has also taught writing in college and community settings.
Janet Bowdan is the author of Making Progress and editor of Common Ground Review. Her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review and elsewhere, with work moving through family, aging, identity and the accumulated meaning of ordinary experience.
Shira Dentz works across poetry, visual writing, nonfiction and hybrid forms. Her work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review and Ploughshares. Her books include Sisyphusina, which combines poetry, prose and visual elements in an exploration of female aging and received the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize.
That range should make the reading particularly well suited to Opalka. Comninos, Bowdan and Dentz do not represent a single poetic style, and the gallery provides a setting where written language and visual perception can overlap.
The reading also offers another reason to see Opalka’s current exhibition, Light and Transient Causes, which examines migration, displacement, memory and identity through the work of immigrant artists.
The program is supported in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 6:30–7:30 PM
📍 Opalka Gallery · 140 New Scotland Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
💀 Día de los Muertos Altar Exhibit
Hudson Valley Community College
The Mexican tradition of Día de los Muertos approaches remembrance in a way that can feel strikingly different from the solemnity usually associated with death in the United States.
Altars, or ofrendas, may include photographs, flowers, candles, favorite foods and personal objects associated with people who have died. The purpose is remembrance, but the visual language is often bright, abundant and celebratory rather than somber.
HVCC’s altar opens this week in the Marvin Library Learning Commons Atrium and remains on view through October 30 as part of the college’s Hispanic Heritage Month programming.
The college says there will be a free opening event with refreshments on Tuesday, October 6, but the published fall schedule does not provide a time.
📅 Opens Tuesday, October 6 · On view through October 30
📍 Marvin Library Learning Commons Atrium, HVCC · Troy
🎟️ Free
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📣 ONGOING THIS WEEK — Tang Town Crier
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Every afternoon from Tuesday through Sunday, a member of the Skidmore community steps into the Wachenheim Gallery, puts on a costume, rings a bell and briefly becomes a Town Crier.
The performance is part of Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, an exhibition that connects American history with contemporary civic life. Each appearance contains two announcements: news from the corresponding date 250 years ago and news from the present day.
The performances may last only a minute or two, but repetition is part of the idea. Across the run of the exhibition, the accumulated announcements create a kind of daily record, placing 1776 beside 2026 and asking how history is selected, narrated and remembered.
📅 Tuesday–Sunday · 2 PM
📍 Wachenheim Gallery, Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free
👨👩👧 Tang Family Saturday
Museums often tell families that children are welcome. Family Saturday goes a step farther by giving children something to make in response to what they have seen.
The Tang’s recurring family program begins with art on view in the museum or works from the collection and turns that encounter into a hands-on project. Children are not simply being occupied while adults look at the galleries; the making activity becomes another way of looking at and thinking about art.
That makes the program particularly useful for families who want to introduce younger children to contemporary art without expecting them to approach a museum in the same way an adult visitor would.
The session is designed for children ages 5 and older accompanied by adults. No advance registration is required, but materials are available first-come, first-served, so arriving near the beginning is sensible.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 2–3:30 PM
📍 Payne Room, Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free · Ages 5+ with adult companions
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🖼️ Tang Guide Tour
Sunday afternoon offers one of the easiest ways to become acquainted with the Tang’s fall exhibitions.
A student Tang Guide leads visitors through selected works and exhibitions currently on view. Because the guide chooses what to emphasize, the tour is less a comprehensive survey than a way into the museum through another person’s observations and questions.
There is plenty to choose from this fall, including A Feeling of With, Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest and Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move.
The tour is especially useful for people who enjoy museums but sometimes find contemporary art easier to enter with a little context. Afterward, visitors can go back through the galleries at their own pace.
📅 Sunday, October 11 · 2 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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REGIONAL EXTENSION PICKS
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😂 My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier — An Evening with Alan Zweibel
Regional Extension Pick — Williams College
Alan Zweibel was one of the original writers hired for Saturday Night Live. That alone gives him a remarkable vantage point on American comedy. His later collaborators make the story considerably larger: Gilda Radner, Billy Crystal, Garry Shandling, Larry David and Martin Short, among others.
Williams College brings Zweibel to the ’62 Center for an evening about the work behind those collaborations.
Comedy writers are often least visible when they are most successful. The audience remembers the performer, character or punch line; the process of shaping the material remains offstage. Zweibel has spent half a century working in that space, from SNL through television, books, theater and film.
The evening has a useful second half. After the conversation, Williams screens Here Today, the 2021 film Zweibel co-wrote with Billy Crystal, who directed and starred in it. The audience therefore gets to hear about Zweibel’s approach to collaboration and then see a later example of that collaboration on screen.
Former Saturday Night Live cast member Gary Kroeger hosts.
Williams, like Bard, has to clear a higher bar for this newsletter. An original SNL writer discussing a career with some of the most important comedy figures of the last fifty years, followed by one of his films, clears it.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 7–10 PM
📍 MainStage, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance, Williams College · Williamstown, MA
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
The China Now Music Festival brings Chinese and American musical traditions together at Bard in two programs spanning folk song, history and symphonic music.
🎶 China Now Music Festival — Chinese and American Folk Songs
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
The China Now Music Festival gives Capital Region readers two quite different reasons to make the trip to Bard this week.
Friday afternoon begins on a smaller human scale, with voices rather than an orchestra. Saturday expands dramatically into a program involving a full orchestra, approximately 120 choristers and six soloists, with music connecting Chinese immigration, the building of the Transcontinental Railroad and contemporary space exploration.
Together, the two programs make this more than an isolated destination concert.
The Choir of the Music Education Institute of the Central Conservatory of Music in China joins the Xinsheng Chinese Choir of New York in Bard’s Chapel of the Holy Innocents.
The program brings Chinese folk songs into conversation with North American ballads. That pairing suits the larger festival particularly well. Folk songs travel with people, change as communities move and often survive long after the circumstances that produced them have disappeared.
A Chinese conservatory choir singing alongside a New York Chinese choir adds another layer to that idea. One ensemble comes directly from one of China’s leading music institutions; the other represents a Chinese community making music in the United States.
The chapel setting should also make this a very different experience from Saturday’s large orchestral program at the Fisher Center.
📅 Friday, October 9 · 2 PM
📍 Chapel of the Holy Innocents, Bard College · Annandale-on-Hudson
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🎹 Gilles Vonsattel — Beethoven Piano Recital
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
A program containing Beethoven’s Waldstein and Hammerklavier sonatas would be substantial under almost any circumstances. Putting both on the same recital, alongside Beethoven’s first numbered piano sonata, turns the evening into a journey across a remarkable span of his writing for the instrument.
Gilles Vonsattel has received an Avery Fisher Career Grant and won the Naumburg International Piano Competition and the Geneva International Music Competition. At Bard he performs Piano Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1; Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53, “Waldstein”; and Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier.”
The first sonata comes from the young Beethoven establishing himself in Vienna. The Waldstein belongs to the expansive middle period, pushing the piano toward a larger scale and brilliance. The Hammerklavier is something else again: one of Beethoven’s most demanding late works and one of the monuments of the entire piano repertory.
Bard is outside our regular weekly coverage and has to justify the drive. A pianist of Vonsattel’s stature taking on this particular Beethoven program does.
📅 Friday, October 9 · 7 PM
📍 Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space · 30 Campus Road, Annandale-on-Hudson
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🎼 China Now Music Festival: Chasing Dreams
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
The historical center of Saturday’s concert is Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Zhou Long’s Men of Iron and the Golden Spike. The symphonic oratorio remembers the thousands of Chinese laborers who came to the United States in the 1860s and helped construct the Transcontinental Railroad.
Their role was enormous. Chinese workers made up a major part of the Central Pacific Railroad labor force and took on some of the most dangerous construction through the Sierra Nevada. Their contribution sits uneasily beside the discrimination Chinese immigrants subsequently faced in the United States.
Zhou’s work gives that history a large musical canvas: full orchestra, approximately 120 choristers and six soloists.
The second major work turns from nineteenth-century railroad construction to space exploration. Bard presents the U.S. premiere of Li Shaosheng’s five-movement symphonic suite Chasing the Sky.
The pairing gives the concert a coherent idea rather than simply assembling unrelated Chinese orchestral music. Both works concern people pushing beyond familiar boundaries, but from radically different historical positions.
The Orchestra Now performs under conductor and festival artistic director Jindong Cai.
Bard is outside our normal Capital Region coverage, so routine campus concerts do not make the newsletter. This two-day festival program does: its scale, historical subject, U.S. premiere and unusual repertoire make it worth considering as a destination event.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 3–5 PM
📍 Fisher Center at Bard · Annandale-on-Hudson
🎟️ Ticketed
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD
October 12–November 1
💃 Pam Tanowitz and the Pastoral: Artists in Conversation
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Wednesday, October 14 · 5:30 PM · Free
🎷 The Cookers
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, October 16 · 7 PM · Ticketed
💃 Compagnie Hervé Koubi
Friday, October 16 — Union College
5–6:15 PM — Master class
6:30–7:30 PM — Lecture/demonstration
Free and open to the public · No registration
Saturday, October 17 — The Egg
6:15 PM — Pre-show talk
7 PM — Sol Invictus
Ticketed
🔬 UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week
October 19–23
The Albany Nanotechnology Symposium, October 22–23, is part of the week.
🚀 RPI Entrepreneur of the Year
Wednesday, October 21 · 1–3 PM · EMPAC Theater
Award ceremony, fireside chat with President Marty Schmidt, startup pitch competition and poster presentations.
📖 Garth Greenwell — Steloff Lecture
Skidmore College · Thursday, October 22 · 8 PM
🏛️ Danielle Allen — Kuroda Symposium
Skidmore College · Friday, October 23 · 5 PM
⚠️ CONFIRMED EVENT — PUBLIC ACCESS BEING VERIFIED — State of Grace 2026
UAlbany · Thursday, October 29 · 9 AM–4 PM · ETEC + Campus Center
The event, date, time and location are confirmed. Explicit 2026 general-public eligibility remains under verification.
🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, October 30 · 7 PM · Ticketed
🎬 Raiders of the Lost Ark in Concert
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College · October 31–November 1
Saturday · 7 PM
Sunday · 2 PM
🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
🧠 INTERFACE: Cognitive Science — Brett Fajen & Heidi Latsky
RPI / EMPAC · Thursday, November 12
Limited capacity · Reservations required
🎷 Ali Ryerson Quartet
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, November 13 · Ticketed
🎼 Gershwin, Jazz, and the Music of Jewish Émigrés
Regional Extension Watch — Bard College · November 14–15
🎄 Hansel and Gretel
Regional Extension Watch — Bard College · December 11 & 13
🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
CORE CAMPUSES
The Drunken City — UAlbany — Oct. 21–25 — Details
BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain — Skidmore College — Oct. 23–28 — Details / Tickets
Grease — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — Oct. 30–Nov. 8 — Details / Tickets
Rent — Siena University — Nov. 12–21 — Details / Tickets
A Doll’s House — UAlbany — Nov. 18–22 — Details / Tickets
This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — Nov. 20–Dec. 5 — Details / Tickets
Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — Dec. 2–10 — Details / Tickets
Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — Feb. 24–Mar. 3 — Details / Tickets
UAlbany Theatre Program Musical — title forthcoming — Mar. 3–7
REGIONAL EXTENSION
Rossum’s Universal Robots — Bard College — Oct. 23–25 — Details / Tickets
Wakka Wakka: Dead as a Dodo — Williams College — Nov. 7 — Details
Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play — Williams College — Nov. 19–21 — Details
📅 BY DAY CALENDAR
MONDAY — OCTOBER 5
1–2 PM — 🤖 AI Policy Town Hall — UAlbany
3–4:30 PM — 📚 Amy Reid — UAlbany
6–8 PM — ⚖️ Trading Places — UAlbany
7 PM — 🎭 The Giver — UAlbany
TUESDAY — OCTOBER 6
1:30–3 PM — 📚 Wait…THAT Book Is Banned? — UAlbany
2–3 PM — 🏛️ Who Is Government? — Albany Law / Albany Public Library
4–5 PM — 🥓 American Bacon — Union
7–9 PM — 🌍 Engage America — UAlbany
WEDNESDAY — OCTOBER 7
No qualifying timed events.
THURSDAY — OCTOBER 8
Noon — 🎺 Fiesta del Norte — HVCC
6 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 1 — Tang
6–7 PM — 🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio — EMPAC
6:30–7:30 PM — 📝 Susan Comninos, Janet Bowdan & Shira Dentz — Opalka
7–10 PM — 😂 Alan Zweibel — Williams
FRIDAY — OCTOBER 9
Noon–4 PM — 💻 Grapes 3D Workshop — EMPAC
2 PM — 🎶 Chinese and American Folk Songs — Bard
6 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 2 — Tang
7 PM — 🏃 Nicholas Thompson — UAlbany
7 PM — 🎹 Gilles Vonsattel — Bard
8 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 3 — Tang
SATURDAY — OCTOBER 10
11 AM–3 PM — 🔊 Lost in Liquid Noise — EMPAC
11 AM–12:30 PM — 🏛️ EMPAC Tour with Dena Beard
1 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 4 — Tang
2–3:30 PM — 👨👩👧 Tang Family Saturday
3–5 PM — 🎼 China Now: Chasing Dreams — Bard
3:30 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 5 — Tang
7 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 6 — Tang
SUNDAY — OCTOBER 11
2 PM — 🖼️ Tang Guide Tour
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CAPITAL REGION CURATED
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
Edited by Alan Koslow
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Capital Region Curated: October 5-11
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with American diplomacy at UAlbany, the Flaherty Film Seminar, EMPAC audio and more.
Alan Koslow
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Originally published at
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Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
🌍 🎬 🎧 📚 🎭
DIPLOMACY, FILM, IMMERSIVE SOUND & STORIES THAT MOVE
American diplomacy at UAlbany, three days of experimental film at the Tang, immersive audio at EMPAC, Nicholas Thompson on running and family—and much more across Capital Region campuses
All six programs from the 2026 Flaherty Film Seminar come to the Tang for three days of experimental and documentary film.
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If you work with a college department, program, gallery, museum, performing arts office, 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.
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🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks: American diplomacy, the Flaherty Film Seminar, immersive audio at EMPAC, and Nicholas Thompson on running, fathers and family
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life: AI policy, academic censorship, tariffs and presidential power, and a century of American diplomacy
📚 Books, Writers & Ideas: banned comics and graphic novels, Michael Lewis’s Who Is Government?, the history of bacon, and Nicholas Thompson’s The Running Ground
🎭 Theater & Performance: Lois Lowry’s The Giver brought to the stage by Literature to Life
🎬 Film & Media: all six programs from the 2026 Flaherty Film Seminar, Gestures of Refusal
🎨 Art & Visual Culture: poetry at Opalka Gallery, the Día de los Muertos altar at HVCC, Tang Family Saturday, the Tang Town Crier and a Sunday Tang Guide Tour
🎶 Music, Sound & Technology: Fiesta del Norte at HVCC and three days of immersive audio at EMPAC
🌎 Regional Extension: Gilles Vonsattel and the China Now Music Festival at Bard, plus original Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel at Williams
🔥 Plan Ahead: Pam Tanowitz, The Cookers, Compagnie Hervé Koubi, UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week, Garth Greenwell, Danielle Allen, Ernie Watts, and Raiders of the Lost Ark with live orchestra
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
One calendar file adds this week’s timed events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook.
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings now have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Evening events are generally held in buildings that are open and accessible for the program.
⭐ TOP PICKS
🌍 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
University at Albany · Tuesday, October 6 · 7–9 PM
Most of us encounter diplomacy only when it becomes news: a war, a summit meeting, a trade dispute, a hostage crisis. Engage America looks instead at the career diplomats who spend years representing the United States abroad, often far from public attention.
Recently retired Foreign Service Officer Tom Selinger draws on oral histories preserved by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, followed by a panel that includes retired ambassadors and regional academic leaders. It should be an unusually good opportunity to understand what diplomacy looks like from the people who have actually practiced it.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
🎬 Whole Grain: Flaherty Film Seminar — Gestures of Refusal
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Thursday–Saturday, October 8–10
The Tang becomes one of three international satellite sites for the 71st Flaherty Film Seminar, presenting all six programs from this year’s gathering. Under the theme Gestures of Refusal, the films examine memory, archives, erasure and resistance through experimental and documentary work.
Each 90-minute program is followed by discussion, an important part of the Flaherty tradition and one reason this is more than a weekend of screenings.
See Film & Media below.
🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio — Felix Deufel & Matthew Goodheart
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute / EMPAC · Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
EMPAC is particularly well suited to a subject that is difficult to understand without hearing it: sound that exists not simply in front of the listener but throughout three-dimensional space.
German sound artist and developer Felix Deufel and RPI composer and sound artist Matthew Goodheart begin a three-day sequence that continues with a hands-on spatial-audio workshop Friday and a four-hour drop-in installation using EMPAC’s 39-speaker ambisonic system Saturday.
See Music, Sound & Technology below.
🏃 Nicholas Thompson — The Running Ground
UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute · Friday, October 9 · 7 PM
Nicholas Thompson is CEO of The Atlantic, a journalist and an accomplished masters runner. His bestselling The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports uses running to examine ambition, memory, personal growth and his relationship with his father.
The Albany Running Exchange, which began as a UAlbany student club, is a cosponsor. Books will be available, with a signing after the conversation.
See Books, Writers & Ideas below.
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IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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🤖 AI Policy Town Hall
University at Albany
Generative AI has become part of college life faster than most colleges have been able to decide what to do with it. Students can use it to research, brainstorm, summarize, write, translate and produce computer code. Faculty members have to decide which uses are legitimate tools and which defeat the purpose of an assignment. Universities also face questions involving privacy, intellectual property, reliability and academic integrity.
UAlbany’s AI Policy Town Hall brings those questions together at the institutional level. Rather than another lecture predicting where artificial intelligence might be five or ten years from now, this is a discussion about the rules needed today.
That makes the program interesting beyond UAlbany. Colleges, businesses, professional organizations and governments are all confronting the same basic problem: AI is already being used, while the standards governing its use are still being written. A university is a particularly revealing place to watch that process because the decisions affect both how students learn and how their work is evaluated.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 1–2 PM
📍 Campus Center Ballroom CC 202, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Public discussion
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Amy Reid of PEN America examines academic censorship and the targeting of teaching on race and gender at UAlbany.
📚 Who’s Afraid of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies?
Academic Censorship and the Targeting of Teaching on Race and Gender
University at Albany
Arguments over race, gender and sexuality have increasingly moved from political debate into disputes over what colleges teach and who has authority over the curriculum. Amy Reid comes to UAlbany to examine that conflict as part of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies series “Teaching Gender, Race, and Feminism in Troubled Times.”
Reid directs PEN America’s Freedom to Learn Program, which opposes government restrictions on higher-education teaching and curriculum. Before joining PEN America, she was a professor of French language and literature and directed the Gender Studies Program at New College of Florida.
Her UAlbany lecture concentrates on what she describes as direct and indirect forms of academic censorship and their effects on teaching about race and gender. Reid approaches the subject from an academic-freedom advocacy perspective; the larger disputes over curriculum, government authority and the proper boundaries of academic freedom remain politically contested.
For a public audience, the value of the program is its focus on higher education itself. The argument is not simply over controversial ideas. It concerns who decides what belongs in a college classroom and how much control legislatures, administrators and faculty should have over those decisions.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 3–4:30 PM
📍 Humanities 354, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Public lecture · In person and online
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Trading Places: Tariffs, Trade, and Presidential Power
University at Albany
Tariffs are usually discussed as economic policy: what they do to prices, manufacturing, imports and international trade. Caitlain Devereaux Lewis, a professor at Albany Law School, approaches them from another direction—constitutional law and presidential authority.
The distinction matters. The Constitution gives Congress important powers over taxation and foreign commerce, while federal statutes have delegated substantial trade authority to the executive branch. Modern tariff disputes can therefore raise a second question alongside whether a particular tariff is good economic policy: Who has the legal power to impose it?
Lewis’s Anderson Lecture provides an opportunity to separate those legal questions from the daily political argument surrounding tariffs. That should be useful even for people who do not ordinarily attend law lectures, particularly because disputes over presidential power extend well beyond trade.
A networking period follows and is directed especially toward UAlbany students and alumni. The principal reason for a general reader to attend is the lecture: a timely issue examined through the constitutional structure behind it.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 6–8 PM
📍 Campus Center Multipurpose Room, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Public lecture
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🌍 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
University at Albany
Foreign policy is usually remembered through presidents, wars, treaties and summit meetings. The daily work behind it is performed by career diplomats whose names seldom enter the history books.
Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy puts those people at the center of the story.
Recently retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer Tom Selinger presents Portraits of American Diplomacy, drawing on oral histories preserved by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. The stories include diplomats with New York connections and careers that involved overseas crises, international markets, alliances and the less dramatic but essential work of maintaining relationships between governments.
The evening then broadens into a panel with retired ambassadors Robert Gosende and Donna Welton and Hudson Valley Community College President Michael Brophy, moderated by UAlbany President Havidán Rodríguez. A companion exhibition traces significant moments in American diplomatic history.
The timing gives the program another dimension. As the country approaches its 250th anniversary, much of the attention will naturally fall on domestic history. This program looks at the American story from the other direction—how the United States has dealt with the rest of the world and what representing the country overseas has required of the people assigned to do it.
For anyone whose picture of diplomacy begins and ends with ambassadors at negotiating tables, this should fill in a large part of the missing picture.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 7–9 PM · Doors 6:30 PM
📍 Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free · Registration required
Details | Register
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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📚 Wait…THAT Book Is Banned?
UAlbany Libraries
Comics and graphic novels occupy an interesting place in arguments over banned and challenged books. Their combination of words and images makes them unusually easy to excerpt: one panel can be photographed, circulated and judged without the pages that come before or after it.
UAlbany librarians Amanda Lowe and Kaci Wilson take that problem as the starting point for an interactive Banned Books Week program. They will look at frequently challenged works, why visual storytelling attracts censorship efforts and what those disputes say about intellectual freedom and control over what other people are permitted to read.
Graphic novels are no longer a narrow corner of publishing. They encompass memoir, journalism, history, literary fiction and books for readers of virtually every age. Challenges to the form therefore raise many of the same questions libraries and schools face with prose books, with the added complication that an isolated image can travel much farther and faster than an isolated paragraph.
The format is discussion rather than a formal lecture, making this one of the week’s more participatory events.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 1:30–3 PM
📍 Minerva Room, University Library, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🏛️ Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service
Albany Law School / Albany Public Library
Government is an enormous abstraction until you begin looking at the people who actually make it work.
That is the premise behind Michael Lewis’s Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, a collection of profiles that turns attention away from elected officials and toward federal employees whose work is generally invisible to the public. Lewis and the other writers involved focus on people working inside government agencies—scientists, analysts, investigators and administrators whose jobs rarely generate headlines unless something goes wrong.
Patrick Wildes ’16, director of Albany Law School’s Government Law Center, brings the book into a particularly appropriate setting. The Government Law Center studies the relationship between law, public institutions and the people who administer them, making the discussion less a conventional book review than an entry point into the machinery of public service.
The program is formally co-presented by the Government Law Center and the Friends & Foundation of Albany Public Library.
There is also an interesting local dimension. Albany is a government town. Thousands of Capital Region residents work in public agencies, courts, universities and institutions whose daily operations depend on exactly the kind of professional public service Lewis’s book examines.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 2–3 PM
📍 Large Auditorium, Albany Public Library, 161 Washington Ave., Albany
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🥓 American Bacon: A Conversation with Mark A. Johnson
Union College
Bacon has had a remarkably successful second career as an American cultural object. Beyond breakfast, it has become an advertising device, internet joke, restaurant obsession and recurring subject of nutritional debate.
Historian Mark A. Johnson takes the food seriously enough to ask how that happened.
His book American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon traces bacon from early modern Britain through American history, including the Civil War and Progressive Era. Along the way, an everyday food becomes a route into much larger subjects: industrialization, urbanization, reform movements, globalization, race, class and gender.
Johnson specializes in American history, particularly the South and African American history. His earlier work includes books on Alabama barbecue and Black political performance, which gives some indication of the way he uses popular culture to illuminate broader historical change.
Good food history is rarely just about food. What people eat can reveal how food was produced and marketed, who could afford it, how tastes changed and how businesses turned ordinary products into cultural symbols. Bacon happens to provide Johnson with an especially colorful example.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 4–5 PM
📍 Reamer Campus Center Auditorium, Union College · 807 Union St., Schenectady
🎟️ Free and open to all
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson comes to UAlbany with The Running Ground, his memoir of running, ambition, fathers and sons.
🏃 Nicholas Thompson — The Running Ground
UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute
Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic, a journalist and an accomplished masters runner. His book The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports brings those parts of his life together in a memoir about running, family and his relationship with his father.
Running gives Thompson an effective structure because it is both extremely simple and endlessly measurable. Distance, pace and improvement can be reduced to numbers. The reasons people keep running—and what they think about during all those miles—are considerably harder to quantify.
That is where the book becomes more than a sports memoir. Thompson uses running to examine memory, ambition, aging and the ways people understand themselves through their parents. His professional life, meanwhile, is spent in the rapid flow of contemporary journalism, making the repetitive physical discipline of distance running an interesting counterweight.
The Albany Running Exchange, which began as a UAlbany student club, is a cosponsor. That should give the conversation a strong local running audience without limiting it to runners.
Books will be available for purchase, and Thompson will sign them after the program.
📅 Friday, October 9 · 7 PM
📍 Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free · No registration required
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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THEATER & PERFORMANCE
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Literature to Life brings Lois Lowry’s Newbery Medal-winning The Giver to the stage at UAlbany.
🎭 Literature to Life: The Giver
UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute
Lois Lowry’s The Giver begins in a society that appears to have solved many of humanity’s most persistent problems. Poverty, conflict and disorder have largely disappeared. So have genuine choice, historical memory and much of what makes an individual life individual.
Twelve-year-old Jonas begins to understand the cost when he is selected to receive the memories held by the community’s Giver. The arrangement that once looked safe and orderly becomes increasingly disturbing as he discovers what has been sacrificed to create it.
Lowry’s Newbery Medal-winning novel has remained a fixture of young-adult literature because its moral argument grows more complicated as readers get older. The central bargain—security and stability in exchange for freedom, memory and choice—is simple enough for a young reader to understand and substantial enough to revisit decades later.
Literature to Life specializes in theatrical adaptations that stay close to important literary texts. This production is performed by Aurea Tomeski, adapted and directed by Elise Thoron, and relies on the performer and Lowry’s language rather than trying to reproduce the novel through a large cast and elaborate scenery.
Readers who first met Jonas in a school classroom may find that returning to his world as adults produces a very different experience.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 7 PM
📍 Main Theatre, UAlbany Performing Arts Center · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ $15
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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FILM & MEDIA
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🎬 Whole Grain: Flaherty Film Seminar — Gestures of Refusal
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum / MDOCS / Picture Lock One
The Flaherty Film Seminar has been challenging conventional ways of watching film for more than seven decades. One of its traditions is particularly unusual: programs are not announced in advance. Viewers encounter the work without reviews, reputations and expectations telling them what they are supposed to think.
This week, the Tang brings the complete six-program 2026 seminar to Saratoga Springs through its Whole Grain experimental-film series, working with Skidmore’s MDOCS and Troy’s Picture Lock One.
This year’s theme, Gestures of Refusal, gathers experimental and documentary films concerned with memory, archives, erasure and resistance. Some rework existing images; others use fragmented narrative or personal recollection. What connects them is an interest in how images preserve history, how history can be lost or altered, and what it means for an artist to refuse the conventional way a story has been told.
Each program runs about 90 minutes and is followed by moderated discussion. That conversation is central to the Flaherty model. The seminar has always treated the audience’s response as part of the experience rather than something that happens privately on the drive home.
The Tang is one of three international pods extending this year’s seminar beyond its principal gathering. For Capital Region viewers interested in documentary or experimental film, having all six programs presented locally over three days is a rare opportunity.
Attendance does not require committing to the entire weekend. Still, seeing several programs should reveal more of the connections within the theme—and give the discussions a chance to build on one another.
📍 Somers Classroom, Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Registration requested
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8
6 PM — Program 1
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9
6 PM — Program 2
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
8 PM — Program 3
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10
1 PM — Program 4
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
3:30 PM — Program 5
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
7 PM — Program 6
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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MUSIC, SOUND & TECHNOLOGY
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🎺 Fiesta del Norte
Hudson Valley Community College
Mariachi is one of Mexico’s most recognizable musical traditions, but Fiesta del Norte ranges considerably farther than the familiar image of trumpets, violins and charro suits.
The ensemble’s program moves among several regional Mexican traditions. There is mariachi music from Jalisco, the western Mexican state most closely associated with the form; Norteñas from Chihuahua, music shaped by northern Mexico and its distinctive accordion-driven traditions; and marimba music from Chiapas, where the instrument occupies a very different musical landscape.
That range is part of what makes the concert useful as more than lunchtime entertainment. Mexican music is no more stylistically uniform than American music, and hearing several traditions in the same program provides a quick introduction to the enormous regional variety hidden inside a broad label like “Mexican folk music.”
Director Dave Giardina adds stories and cultural context between selections, helping connect the music to the communities and regions from which it developed.
The concert is part of HVCC’s Hispanic Heritage Month programming and is free and open to the public.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · Noon
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium, HVCC · Troy
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Sound artists Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart open three days of immersive-audio exploration at EMPAC.
🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio — Felix Deufel & Matthew Goodheart
EMPAC spends three days this week examining a part of sound technology that is easier to experience than to describe.
Ordinary stereo gives sound a left and a right. Immersive audio adds space. Sounds can be positioned around a listener and moved through a room, allowing composers and sound designers to work with location almost as another musical element.
German sound artist and developer Felix Deufel comes to Troy for a sequence that approaches the subject from three directions.
Deufel joins RPI composer, improviser and sound artist Matthew Goodheart for a public conversation about spatial sound, acoustics, composition and the relationship between sound and the physical environment.
Deufel directs Leipzig’s ZiMMT — Center for Immersive Media Art, Music and Technology and develops systems for recording and producing three-dimensional audio. Goodheart’s work has long explored the relationship among performer, instrument and listener.
EMPAC gives that discussion a particularly appropriate setting. Its studios and performance spaces were designed for experimentation with acoustics and media technologies, so spatial sound is not merely an abstract subject here.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
💻 Grapes 3D Workshop — Felix Deufel
Friday moves from listening and discussion to making things.
Deufel introduces Grapes 3D Audio Control, software designed to position and move sound through three-dimensional environments. It can be used in music, film, theater and live performance and can communicate with other digital-audio systems.
The four-hour format is significant. This is a working session rather than a brief demonstration, giving musicians, filmmakers, theater artists and people interested in audio technology time to experiment with the software.
Participants should bring a Mac or Windows laptop.
📅 Friday, October 9 · Noon–4 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free · Registration required
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🔊 Audio from Lost in Liquid Noise
Saturday’s final Felix Deufel event takes immersive audio out of the realm of demonstration and turns it into an environmental experience.
Lost in Liquid Noise grew out of two Arctic expeditions in 2023 and 2024 by sound artist Felix Deufel and video artist Lucas Gutierrez. They gathered material from a landscape undergoing changes so enormous that their scale is difficult to comprehend. Greenland loses hundreds of millions of tons of ice each day, but statistics like that remain abstract. Deufel and Gutierrez set out to make some of those changes perceptible through sound, image and physical space.
The material ranges from tiny sounds within ice and water to glacial ruptures and underwater acoustic ecosystems beneath frozen seas. Water itself becomes part of the structure of the work as it shifts among ice, liquid and vapor.
At EMPAC, the audio is presented through Studio 1’s 39-speaker ambisonic system. Instead of hearing a soundtrack coming from the front of the room, listeners occupy the sound field. Sonic events can appear around them and move through the space, shifting between delicate crystalline sounds and the much larger physical force of breaking ice.
The work uses noise in two senses: as sound and as a condition of environmental instability. Deufel is interested in overload, continuous transformation and the loss of control that accompanies a system undergoing rapid change.
That is what makes this considerably more than a demonstration of EMPAC’s speaker system. The technology is being used to translate a planetary process into something a person can experience with the body. Rather than explaining climate change through another graph or statistic, Lost in Liquid Noise asks what happens when some of those changes become something you can actually hear around you.
This is a drop-in installation, not an 11 AM presentation. It remains open continuously for four hours, so visitors can enter when they wish and spend as much or as little time with the work as they choose.
The timing also makes it possible to combine this with the EMPAC tour. The tour runs from 11 AM–12:30 PM; Lost in Liquid Noise remains open until 3 PM.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 11 AM–3 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free · Drop-in
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🏛️ EMPAC Tour with Dena Beard
There are building tours that amount to walking around while someone points out architecture. An EMPAC tour can go considerably deeper because so much of the building was designed around things an audience normally never sees.
Saturday’s guide is particularly interesting: Dena Beard, EMPAC’s executive director.
Beard came to RPI after directing the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College and, before that, serving for nearly a decade as executive director of The Lab in San Francisco, a center known for experimental and avant-garde work.
That background should make her tour different from one led principally from an architectural or engineering perspective. EMPAC deliberately rotates guides among members of its staff, and the center says no two tours are quite the same.
Inside, visitors get behind-the-scenes access to a building in which the rooms themselves function as artistic and technical instruments. Depending on the route and what Beard chooses to emphasize, the tour can explore how a stage transforms, how light behaves inside a performance space and how reproduced sound changes not only what an audience hears but how it experiences a room.
That last subject is especially appropriate this Saturday. The tour takes place while Felix Deufel’s Lost in Liquid Noise is running in Studio 1, giving visitors the unusual opportunity to learn how EMPAC’s spaces are conceived and then experience one of them being used for a 39-speaker immersive installation.
For people who have attended performances at EMPAC but have never understood what is behind the walls, above the stages or inside the studios, this is a chance to see the building from the point of view of the people who actually use it to make work.
And with Beard leading, it is also an opportunity to hear from the person currently responsible for deciding what kind of artistic and research institution EMPAC is going to become.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 11 AM–12:30 PM
📍 Level 7 Lobby, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free · Registration recommended
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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📝 Poetry Reading — Susan Comninos, Janet Bowdan & Shira Dentz
Russell Sage College / Opalka Gallery
This is not simply three poets standing at a microphone and reading one after another.
Susan Comninos, Janet Bowdan and Shira Dentz are contributors to the new anthology The Color Wheel: Poems, published this year by Terrapin Books. The collection uses color as a point of departure, and the evening brings poetry into a gallery environment where visual and literary images can work against one another.
The three poets bring quite different bodies of work to the room.
Susan Comninos, who lives in the Capital Region, is the author of Out of Nowhere: Poems. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Harvard Review Online, Rattle, The Common, Prairie Schooner and North American Review. She has also taught writing in college and community settings.
Janet Bowdan is the author of Making Progress and editor of Common Ground Review. Her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review and elsewhere, with work moving through family, aging, identity and the accumulated meaning of ordinary experience.
Shira Dentz works across poetry, visual writing, nonfiction and hybrid forms. Her work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review and Ploughshares. Her books include Sisyphusina, which combines poetry, prose and visual elements in an exploration of female aging and received the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize.
That range should make the reading particularly well suited to Opalka. Comninos, Bowdan and Dentz do not represent a single poetic style, and the gallery provides a setting where written language and visual perception can overlap.
The reading also offers another reason to see Opalka’s current exhibition, Light and Transient Causes, which examines migration, displacement, memory and identity through the work of immigrant artists.
The program is supported in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 6:30–7:30 PM
📍 Opalka Gallery · 140 New Scotland Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
💀 Día de los Muertos Altar Exhibit
Hudson Valley Community College
The Mexican tradition of Día de los Muertos approaches remembrance in a way that can feel strikingly different from the solemnity usually associated with death in the United States.
Altars, or ofrendas, may include photographs, flowers, candles, favorite foods and personal objects associated with people who have died. The purpose is remembrance, but the visual language is often bright, abundant and celebratory rather than somber.
HVCC’s altar opens this week in the Marvin Library Learning Commons Atrium and remains on view through October 30 as part of the college’s Hispanic Heritage Month programming.
The college says there will be a free opening event with refreshments on Tuesday, October 6, but the published fall schedule does not provide a time.
📅 Opens Tuesday, October 6 · On view through October 30
📍 Marvin Library Learning Commons Atrium, HVCC · Troy
🎟️ Free
ADVERTISEMENT
📣 ONGOING THIS WEEK — Tang Town Crier
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Every afternoon from Tuesday through Sunday, a member of the Skidmore community steps into the Wachenheim Gallery, puts on a costume, rings a bell and briefly becomes a Town Crier.
The performance is part of Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, an exhibition that connects American history with contemporary civic life. Each appearance contains two announcements: news from the corresponding date 250 years ago and news from the present day.
The performances may last only a minute or two, but repetition is part of the idea. Across the run of the exhibition, the accumulated announcements create a kind of daily record, placing 1776 beside 2026 and asking how history is selected, narrated and remembered.
📅 Tuesday–Sunday · 2 PM
📍 Wachenheim Gallery, Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free
👨👩👧 Tang Family Saturday
Museums often tell families that children are welcome. Family Saturday goes a step farther by giving children something to make in response to what they have seen.
The Tang’s recurring family program begins with art on view in the museum or works from the collection and turns that encounter into a hands-on project. Children are not simply being occupied while adults look at the galleries; the making activity becomes another way of looking at and thinking about art.
That makes the program particularly useful for families who want to introduce younger children to contemporary art without expecting them to approach a museum in the same way an adult visitor would.
The session is designed for children ages 5 and older accompanied by adults. No advance registration is required, but materials are available first-come, first-served, so arriving near the beginning is sensible.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 2–3:30 PM
📍 Payne Room, Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free · Ages 5+ with adult companions
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🖼️ Tang Guide Tour
Sunday afternoon offers one of the easiest ways to become acquainted with the Tang’s fall exhibitions.
A student Tang Guide leads visitors through selected works and exhibitions currently on view. Because the guide chooses what to emphasize, the tour is less a comprehensive survey than a way into the museum through another person’s observations and questions.
There is plenty to choose from this fall, including A Feeling of With, Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest and Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move.
The tour is especially useful for people who enjoy museums but sometimes find contemporary art easier to enter with a little context. Afterward, visitors can go back through the galleries at their own pace.
📅 Sunday, October 11 · 2 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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REGIONAL EXTENSION PICKS
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😂 My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier — An Evening with Alan Zweibel
Regional Extension Pick — Williams College
Alan Zweibel was one of the original writers hired for Saturday Night Live. That alone gives him a remarkable vantage point on American comedy. His later collaborators make the story considerably larger: Gilda Radner, Billy Crystal, Garry Shandling, Larry David and Martin Short, among others.
Williams College brings Zweibel to the ’62 Center for an evening about the work behind those collaborations.
Comedy writers are often least visible when they are most successful. The audience remembers the performer, character or punch line; the process of shaping the material remains offstage. Zweibel has spent half a century working in that space, from SNL through television, books, theater and film.
The evening has a useful second half. After the conversation, Williams screens Here Today, the 2021 film Zweibel co-wrote with Billy Crystal, who directed and starred in it. The audience therefore gets to hear about Zweibel’s approach to collaboration and then see a later example of that collaboration on screen.
Former Saturday Night Live cast member Gary Kroeger hosts.
Williams, like Bard, has to clear a higher bar for this newsletter. An original SNL writer discussing a career with some of the most important comedy figures of the last fifty years, followed by one of his films, clears it.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 7–10 PM
📍 MainStage, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance, Williams College · Williamstown, MA
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
The China Now Music Festival brings Chinese and American musical traditions together at Bard in two programs spanning folk song, history and symphonic music.
🎶 China Now Music Festival — Chinese and American Folk Songs
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
The China Now Music Festival gives Capital Region readers two quite different reasons to make the trip to Bard this week.
Friday afternoon begins on a smaller human scale, with voices rather than an orchestra. Saturday expands dramatically into a program involving a full orchestra, approximately 120 choristers and six soloists, with music connecting Chinese immigration, the building of the Transcontinental Railroad and contemporary space exploration.
Together, the two programs make this more than an isolated destination concert.
The Choir of the Music Education Institute of the Central Conservatory of Music in China joins the Xinsheng Chinese Choir of New York in Bard’s Chapel of the Holy Innocents.
The program brings Chinese folk songs into conversation with North American ballads. That pairing suits the larger festival particularly well. Folk songs travel with people, change as communities move and often survive long after the circumstances that produced them have disappeared.
A Chinese conservatory choir singing alongside a New York Chinese choir adds another layer to that idea. One ensemble comes directly from one of China’s leading music institutions; the other represents a Chinese community making music in the United States.
The chapel setting should also make this a very different experience from Saturday’s large orchestral program at the Fisher Center.
📅 Friday, October 9 · 2 PM
📍 Chapel of the Holy Innocents, Bard College · Annandale-on-Hudson
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🎹 Gilles Vonsattel — Beethoven Piano Recital
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
A program containing Beethoven’s Waldstein and Hammerklavier sonatas would be substantial under almost any circumstances. Putting both on the same recital, alongside Beethoven’s first numbered piano sonata, turns the evening into a journey across a remarkable span of his writing for the instrument.
Gilles Vonsattel has received an Avery Fisher Career Grant and won the Naumburg International Piano Competition and the Geneva International Music Competition. At Bard he performs Piano Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1; Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53, “Waldstein”; and Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier.”
The first sonata comes from the young Beethoven establishing himself in Vienna. The Waldstein belongs to the expansive middle period, pushing the piano toward a larger scale and brilliance. The Hammerklavier is something else again: one of Beethoven’s most demanding late works and one of the monuments of the entire piano repertory.
Bard is outside our regular weekly coverage and has to justify the drive. A pianist of Vonsattel’s stature taking on this particular Beethoven program does.
📅 Friday, October 9 · 7 PM
📍 Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space · 30 Campus Road, Annandale-on-Hudson
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🎼 China Now Music Festival: Chasing Dreams
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
The historical center of Saturday’s concert is Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Zhou Long’s Men of Iron and the Golden Spike. The symphonic oratorio remembers the thousands of Chinese laborers who came to the United States in the 1860s and helped construct the Transcontinental Railroad.
Their role was enormous. Chinese workers made up a major part of the Central Pacific Railroad labor force and took on some of the most dangerous construction through the Sierra Nevada. Their contribution sits uneasily beside the discrimination Chinese immigrants subsequently faced in the United States.
Zhou’s work gives that history a large musical canvas: full orchestra, approximately 120 choristers and six soloists.
The second major work turns from nineteenth-century railroad construction to space exploration. Bard presents the U.S. premiere of Li Shaosheng’s five-movement symphonic suite Chasing the Sky.
The pairing gives the concert a coherent idea rather than simply assembling unrelated Chinese orchestral music. Both works concern people pushing beyond familiar boundaries, but from radically different historical positions.
The Orchestra Now performs under conductor and festival artistic director Jindong Cai.
Bard is outside our normal Capital Region coverage, so routine campus concerts do not make the newsletter. This two-day festival program does: its scale, historical subject, U.S. premiere and unusual repertoire make it worth considering as a destination event.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 3–5 PM
📍 Fisher Center at Bard · Annandale-on-Hudson
🎟️ Ticketed
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD
October 12–November 1
💃 Pam Tanowitz and the Pastoral: Artists in Conversation
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Wednesday, October 14 · 5:30 PM · Free
🎷 The Cookers
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, October 16 · 7 PM · Ticketed
💃 Compagnie Hervé Koubi
Friday, October 16 — Union College
5–6:15 PM — Master class
6:30–7:30 PM — Lecture/demonstration
Free and open to the public · No registration
Saturday, October 17 — The Egg
6:15 PM — Pre-show talk
7 PM — Sol Invictus
Ticketed
🔬 UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week
October 19–23
The Albany Nanotechnology Symposium, October 22–23, is part of the week.
🚀 RPI Entrepreneur of the Year
Wednesday, October 21 · 1–3 PM · EMPAC Theater
Award ceremony, fireside chat with President Marty Schmidt, startup pitch competition and poster presentations.
📖 Garth Greenwell — Steloff Lecture
Skidmore College · Thursday, October 22 · 8 PM
🏛️ Danielle Allen — Kuroda Symposium
Skidmore College · Friday, October 23 · 5 PM
⚠️ CONFIRMED EVENT — PUBLIC ACCESS BEING VERIFIED — State of Grace 2026
UAlbany · Thursday, October 29 · 9 AM–4 PM · ETEC + Campus Center
The event, date, time and location are confirmed. Explicit 2026 general-public eligibility remains under verification.
🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, October 30 · 7 PM · Ticketed
🎬 Raiders of the Lost Ark in Concert
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College · October 31–November 1
Saturday · 7 PM
Sunday · 2 PM
🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
🧠 INTERFACE: Cognitive Science — Brett Fajen & Heidi Latsky
RPI / EMPAC · Thursday, November 12
Limited capacity · Reservations required
🎷 Ali Ryerson Quartet
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, November 13 · Ticketed
🎼 Gershwin, Jazz, and the Music of Jewish Émigrés
Regional Extension Watch — Bard College · November 14–15
🎄 Hansel and Gretel
Regional Extension Watch — Bard College · December 11 & 13
🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
CORE CAMPUSES
The Drunken City — UAlbany — Oct. 21–25 — Details
BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain — Skidmore College — Oct. 23–28 — Details / Tickets
Grease — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — Oct. 30–Nov. 8 — Details / Tickets
Rent — Siena University — Nov. 12–21 — Details / Tickets
A Doll’s House — UAlbany — Nov. 18–22 — Details / Tickets
This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — Nov. 20–Dec. 5 — Details / Tickets
Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — Dec. 2–10 — Details / Tickets
Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — Feb. 24–Mar. 3 — Details / Tickets
UAlbany Theatre Program Musical — title forthcoming — Mar. 3–7
REGIONAL EXTENSION
Rossum’s Universal Robots — Bard College — Oct. 23–25 — Details / Tickets
Wakka Wakka: Dead as a Dodo — Williams College — Nov. 7 — Details
Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play — Williams College — Nov. 19–21 — Details
📅 BY DAY CALENDAR
MONDAY — OCTOBER 5
1–2 PM — 🤖 AI Policy Town Hall — UAlbany
3–4:30 PM — 📚 Amy Reid — UAlbany
6–8 PM — ⚖️ Trading Places — UAlbany
7 PM — 🎭 The Giver — UAlbany
TUESDAY — OCTOBER 6
1:30–3 PM — 📚 Wait…THAT Book Is Banned? — UAlbany
2–3 PM — 🏛️ Who Is Government? — Albany Law / Albany Public Library
4–5 PM — 🥓 American Bacon — Union
7–9 PM — 🌍 Engage America — UAlbany
WEDNESDAY — OCTOBER 7
No qualifying timed events.
THURSDAY — OCTOBER 8
Noon — 🎺 Fiesta del Norte — HVCC
6 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 1 — Tang
6–7 PM — 🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio — EMPAC
6:30–7:30 PM — 📝 Susan Comninos, Janet Bowdan & Shira Dentz — Opalka
7–10 PM — 😂 Alan Zweibel — Williams
FRIDAY — OCTOBER 9
Noon–4 PM — 💻 Grapes 3D Workshop — EMPAC
2 PM — 🎶 Chinese and American Folk Songs — Bard
6 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 2 — Tang
7 PM — 🏃 Nicholas Thompson — UAlbany
7 PM — 🎹 Gilles Vonsattel — Bard
8 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 3 — Tang
SATURDAY — OCTOBER 10
11 AM–3 PM — 🔊 Lost in Liquid Noise — EMPAC
11 AM–12:30 PM — 🏛️ EMPAC Tour with Dena Beard
1 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 4 — Tang
2–3:30 PM — 👨👩👧 Tang Family Saturday
3–5 PM — 🎼 China Now: Chasing Dreams — Bard
3:30 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 5 — Tang
7 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 6 — Tang
SUNDAY — OCTOBER 11
2 PM — 🖼️ Tang Guide Tour
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CAPITAL REGION CURATED
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
Edited by Alan Koslow
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Capital Region Curated: October 5-11
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with American diplomacy at UAlbany, the Flaherty Film Seminar, EMPAC audio and more.
Alan Koslow
35
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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.
🌍 🎬 🎧 📚 🎭
DIPLOMACY, FILM, IMMERSIVE SOUND & STORIES THAT MOVE
American diplomacy at UAlbany, three days of experimental film at the Tang, immersive audio at EMPAC, Nicholas Thompson on running and family—and much more across Capital Region campuses
All six programs from the 2026 Flaherty Film Seminar come to the Tang for three days of experimental and documentary film.
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If you work with a college department, program, gallery, museum, performing arts office, 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 here: Capital Region Curated
🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks: American diplomacy, the Flaherty Film Seminar, immersive audio at EMPAC, and Nicholas Thompson on running, fathers and family
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life: AI policy, academic censorship, tariffs and presidential power, and a century of American diplomacy
📚 Books, Writers & Ideas: banned comics and graphic novels, Michael Lewis’s Who Is Government?, the history of bacon, and Nicholas Thompson’s The Running Ground
🎭 Theater & Performance: Lois Lowry’s The Giver brought to the stage by Literature to Life
🎬 Film & Media: all six programs from the 2026 Flaherty Film Seminar, Gestures of Refusal
🎨 Art & Visual Culture: poetry at Opalka Gallery, the Día de los Muertos altar at HVCC, Tang Family Saturday, the Tang Town Crier and a Sunday Tang Guide Tour
🎶 Music, Sound & Technology: Fiesta del Norte at HVCC and three days of immersive audio at EMPAC
🌎 Regional Extension: Gilles Vonsattel and the China Now Music Festival at Bard, plus original Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel at Williams
🔥 Plan Ahead: Pam Tanowitz, The Cookers, Compagnie Hervé Koubi, UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week, Garth Greenwell, Danielle Allen, Ernie Watts, and Raiders of the Lost Ark with live orchestra
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
One calendar file adds this week’s timed events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook.
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings now have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Evening events are generally held in buildings that are open and accessible for the program.
⭐ TOP PICKS
🌍 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
University at Albany · Tuesday, October 6 · 7–9 PM
Most of us encounter diplomacy only when it becomes news: a war, a summit meeting, a trade dispute, a hostage crisis. Engage America looks instead at the career diplomats who spend years representing the United States abroad, often far from public attention.
Recently retired Foreign Service Officer Tom Selinger draws on oral histories preserved by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, followed by a panel that includes retired ambassadors and regional academic leaders. It should be an unusually good opportunity to understand what diplomacy looks like from the people who have actually practiced it.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
🎬 Whole Grain: Flaherty Film Seminar — Gestures of Refusal
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Thursday–Saturday, October 8–10
The Tang becomes one of three international satellite sites for the 71st Flaherty Film Seminar, presenting all six programs from this year’s gathering. Under the theme Gestures of Refusal, the films examine memory, archives, erasure and resistance through experimental and documentary work.
Each 90-minute program is followed by discussion, an important part of the Flaherty tradition and one reason this is more than a weekend of screenings.
See Film & Media below.
🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio — Felix Deufel & Matthew Goodheart
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute / EMPAC · Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
EMPAC is particularly well suited to a subject that is difficult to understand without hearing it: sound that exists not simply in front of the listener but throughout three-dimensional space.
German sound artist and developer Felix Deufel and RPI composer and sound artist Matthew Goodheart begin a three-day sequence that continues with a hands-on spatial-audio workshop Friday and a four-hour drop-in installation using EMPAC’s 39-speaker ambisonic system Saturday.
See Music, Sound & Technology below.
🏃 Nicholas Thompson — The Running Ground
UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute · Friday, October 9 · 7 PM
Nicholas Thompson is CEO of The Atlantic, a journalist and an accomplished masters runner. His bestselling The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports uses running to examine ambition, memory, personal growth and his relationship with his father.
The Albany Running Exchange, which began as a UAlbany student club, is a cosponsor. Books will be available, with a signing after the conversation.
See Books, Writers & Ideas below.
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IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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🤖 AI Policy Town Hall
University at Albany
Generative AI has become part of college life faster than most colleges have been able to decide what to do with it. Students can use it to research, brainstorm, summarize, write, translate and produce computer code. Faculty members have to decide which uses are legitimate tools and which defeat the purpose of an assignment. Universities also face questions involving privacy, intellectual property, reliability and academic integrity.
UAlbany’s AI Policy Town Hall brings those questions together at the institutional level. Rather than another lecture predicting where artificial intelligence might be five or ten years from now, this is a discussion about the rules needed today.
That makes the program interesting beyond UAlbany. Colleges, businesses, professional organizations and governments are all confronting the same basic problem: AI is already being used, while the standards governing its use are still being written. A university is a particularly revealing place to watch that process because the decisions affect both how students learn and how their work is evaluated.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 1–2 PM
📍 Campus Center Ballroom CC 202, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Public discussion
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Amy Reid of PEN America examines academic censorship and the targeting of teaching on race and gender at UAlbany.
📚 Who’s Afraid of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies?
Academic Censorship and the Targeting of Teaching on Race and Gender
University at Albany
Arguments over race, gender and sexuality have increasingly moved from political debate into disputes over what colleges teach and who has authority over the curriculum. Amy Reid comes to UAlbany to examine that conflict as part of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies series “Teaching Gender, Race, and Feminism in Troubled Times.”
Reid directs PEN America’s Freedom to Learn Program, which opposes government restrictions on higher-education teaching and curriculum. Before joining PEN America, she was a professor of French language and literature and directed the Gender Studies Program at New College of Florida.
Her UAlbany lecture concentrates on what she describes as direct and indirect forms of academic censorship and their effects on teaching about race and gender. Reid approaches the subject from an academic-freedom advocacy perspective; the larger disputes over curriculum, government authority and the proper boundaries of academic freedom remain politically contested.
For a public audience, the value of the program is its focus on higher education itself. The argument is not simply over controversial ideas. It concerns who decides what belongs in a college classroom and how much control legislatures, administrators and faculty should have over those decisions.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 3–4:30 PM
📍 Humanities 354, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Public lecture · In person and online
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Trading Places: Tariffs, Trade, and Presidential Power
University at Albany
Tariffs are usually discussed as economic policy: what they do to prices, manufacturing, imports and international trade. Caitlain Devereaux Lewis, a professor at Albany Law School, approaches them from another direction—constitutional law and presidential authority.
The distinction matters. The Constitution gives Congress important powers over taxation and foreign commerce, while federal statutes have delegated substantial trade authority to the executive branch. Modern tariff disputes can therefore raise a second question alongside whether a particular tariff is good economic policy: Who has the legal power to impose it?
Lewis’s Anderson Lecture provides an opportunity to separate those legal questions from the daily political argument surrounding tariffs. That should be useful even for people who do not ordinarily attend law lectures, particularly because disputes over presidential power extend well beyond trade.
A networking period follows and is directed especially toward UAlbany students and alumni. The principal reason for a general reader to attend is the lecture: a timely issue examined through the constitutional structure behind it.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 6–8 PM
📍 Campus Center Multipurpose Room, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Public lecture
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🌍 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
University at Albany
Foreign policy is usually remembered through presidents, wars, treaties and summit meetings. The daily work behind it is performed by career diplomats whose names seldom enter the history books.
Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy puts those people at the center of the story.
Recently retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer Tom Selinger presents Portraits of American Diplomacy, drawing on oral histories preserved by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. The stories include diplomats with New York connections and careers that involved overseas crises, international markets, alliances and the less dramatic but essential work of maintaining relationships between governments.
The evening then broadens into a panel with retired ambassadors Robert Gosende and Donna Welton and Hudson Valley Community College President Michael Brophy, moderated by UAlbany President Havidán Rodríguez. A companion exhibition traces significant moments in American diplomatic history.
The timing gives the program another dimension. As the country approaches its 250th anniversary, much of the attention will naturally fall on domestic history. This program looks at the American story from the other direction—how the United States has dealt with the rest of the world and what representing the country overseas has required of the people assigned to do it.
For anyone whose picture of diplomacy begins and ends with ambassadors at negotiating tables, this should fill in a large part of the missing picture.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 7–9 PM · Doors 6:30 PM
📍 Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free · Registration required
Details | Register
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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📚 Wait…THAT Book Is Banned?
UAlbany Libraries
Comics and graphic novels occupy an interesting place in arguments over banned and challenged books. Their combination of words and images makes them unusually easy to excerpt: one panel can be photographed, circulated and judged without the pages that come before or after it.
UAlbany librarians Amanda Lowe and Kaci Wilson take that problem as the starting point for an interactive Banned Books Week program. They will look at frequently challenged works, why visual storytelling attracts censorship efforts and what those disputes say about intellectual freedom and control over what other people are permitted to read.
Graphic novels are no longer a narrow corner of publishing. They encompass memoir, journalism, history, literary fiction and books for readers of virtually every age. Challenges to the form therefore raise many of the same questions libraries and schools face with prose books, with the added complication that an isolated image can travel much farther and faster than an isolated paragraph.
The format is discussion rather than a formal lecture, making this one of the week’s more participatory events.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 1:30–3 PM
📍 Minerva Room, University Library, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🏛️ Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service
Albany Law School / Albany Public Library
Government is an enormous abstraction until you begin looking at the people who actually make it work.
That is the premise behind Michael Lewis’s Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, a collection of profiles that turns attention away from elected officials and toward federal employees whose work is generally invisible to the public. Lewis and the other writers involved focus on people working inside government agencies—scientists, analysts, investigators and administrators whose jobs rarely generate headlines unless something goes wrong.
Patrick Wildes ’16, director of Albany Law School’s Government Law Center, brings the book into a particularly appropriate setting. The Government Law Center studies the relationship between law, public institutions and the people who administer them, making the discussion less a conventional book review than an entry point into the machinery of public service.
The program is formally co-presented by the Government Law Center and the Friends & Foundation of Albany Public Library.
There is also an interesting local dimension. Albany is a government town. Thousands of Capital Region residents work in public agencies, courts, universities and institutions whose daily operations depend on exactly the kind of professional public service Lewis’s book examines.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 2–3 PM
📍 Large Auditorium, Albany Public Library, 161 Washington Ave., Albany
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🥓 American Bacon: A Conversation with Mark A. Johnson
Union College
Bacon has had a remarkably successful second career as an American cultural object. Beyond breakfast, it has become an advertising device, internet joke, restaurant obsession and recurring subject of nutritional debate.
Historian Mark A. Johnson takes the food seriously enough to ask how that happened.
His book American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon traces bacon from early modern Britain through American history, including the Civil War and Progressive Era. Along the way, an everyday food becomes a route into much larger subjects: industrialization, urbanization, reform movements, globalization, race, class and gender.
Johnson specializes in American history, particularly the South and African American history. His earlier work includes books on Alabama barbecue and Black political performance, which gives some indication of the way he uses popular culture to illuminate broader historical change.
Good food history is rarely just about food. What people eat can reveal how food was produced and marketed, who could afford it, how tastes changed and how businesses turned ordinary products into cultural symbols. Bacon happens to provide Johnson with an especially colorful example.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 4–5 PM
📍 Reamer Campus Center Auditorium, Union College · 807 Union St., Schenectady
🎟️ Free and open to all
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson comes to UAlbany with The Running Ground, his memoir of running, ambition, fathers and sons.
🏃 Nicholas Thompson — The Running Ground
UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute
Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic, a journalist and an accomplished masters runner. His book The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports brings those parts of his life together in a memoir about running, family and his relationship with his father.
Running gives Thompson an effective structure because it is both extremely simple and endlessly measurable. Distance, pace and improvement can be reduced to numbers. The reasons people keep running—and what they think about during all those miles—are considerably harder to quantify.
That is where the book becomes more than a sports memoir. Thompson uses running to examine memory, ambition, aging and the ways people understand themselves through their parents. His professional life, meanwhile, is spent in the rapid flow of contemporary journalism, making the repetitive physical discipline of distance running an interesting counterweight.
The Albany Running Exchange, which began as a UAlbany student club, is a cosponsor. That should give the conversation a strong local running audience without limiting it to runners.
Books will be available for purchase, and Thompson will sign them after the program.
📅 Friday, October 9 · 7 PM
📍 Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free · No registration required
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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THEATER & PERFORMANCE
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Literature to Life brings Lois Lowry’s Newbery Medal-winning The Giver to the stage at UAlbany.
🎭 Literature to Life: The Giver
UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute
Lois Lowry’s The Giver begins in a society that appears to have solved many of humanity’s most persistent problems. Poverty, conflict and disorder have largely disappeared. So have genuine choice, historical memory and much of what makes an individual life individual.
Twelve-year-old Jonas begins to understand the cost when he is selected to receive the memories held by the community’s Giver. The arrangement that once looked safe and orderly becomes increasingly disturbing as he discovers what has been sacrificed to create it.
Lowry’s Newbery Medal-winning novel has remained a fixture of young-adult literature because its moral argument grows more complicated as readers get older. The central bargain—security and stability in exchange for freedom, memory and choice—is simple enough for a young reader to understand and substantial enough to revisit decades later.
Literature to Life specializes in theatrical adaptations that stay close to important literary texts. This production is performed by Aurea Tomeski, adapted and directed by Elise Thoron, and relies on the performer and Lowry’s language rather than trying to reproduce the novel through a large cast and elaborate scenery.
Readers who first met Jonas in a school classroom may find that returning to his world as adults produces a very different experience.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 7 PM
📍 Main Theatre, UAlbany Performing Arts Center · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ $15
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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FILM & MEDIA
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🎬 Whole Grain: Flaherty Film Seminar — Gestures of Refusal
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum / MDOCS / Picture Lock One
The Flaherty Film Seminar has been challenging conventional ways of watching film for more than seven decades. One of its traditions is particularly unusual: programs are not announced in advance. Viewers encounter the work without reviews, reputations and expectations telling them what they are supposed to think.
This week, the Tang brings the complete six-program 2026 seminar to Saratoga Springs through its Whole Grain experimental-film series, working with Skidmore’s MDOCS and Troy’s Picture Lock One.
This year’s theme, Gestures of Refusal, gathers experimental and documentary films concerned with memory, archives, erasure and resistance. Some rework existing images; others use fragmented narrative or personal recollection. What connects them is an interest in how images preserve history, how history can be lost or altered, and what it means for an artist to refuse the conventional way a story has been told.
Each program runs about 90 minutes and is followed by moderated discussion. That conversation is central to the Flaherty model. The seminar has always treated the audience’s response as part of the experience rather than something that happens privately on the drive home.
The Tang is one of three international pods extending this year’s seminar beyond its principal gathering. For Capital Region viewers interested in documentary or experimental film, having all six programs presented locally over three days is a rare opportunity.
Attendance does not require committing to the entire weekend. Still, seeing several programs should reveal more of the connections within the theme—and give the discussions a chance to build on one another.
📍 Somers Classroom, Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Registration requested
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8
6 PM — Program 1
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9
6 PM — Program 2
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8 PM — Program 3
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10
1 PM — Program 4
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3:30 PM — Program 5
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7 PM — Program 6
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MUSIC, SOUND & TECHNOLOGY
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🎺 Fiesta del Norte
Hudson Valley Community College
Mariachi is one of Mexico’s most recognizable musical traditions, but Fiesta del Norte ranges considerably farther than the familiar image of trumpets, violins and charro suits.
The ensemble’s program moves among several regional Mexican traditions. There is mariachi music from Jalisco, the western Mexican state most closely associated with the form; Norteñas from Chihuahua, music shaped by northern Mexico and its distinctive accordion-driven traditions; and marimba music from Chiapas, where the instrument occupies a very different musical landscape.
That range is part of what makes the concert useful as more than lunchtime entertainment. Mexican music is no more stylistically uniform than American music, and hearing several traditions in the same program provides a quick introduction to the enormous regional variety hidden inside a broad label like “Mexican folk music.”
Director Dave Giardina adds stories and cultural context between selections, helping connect the music to the communities and regions from which it developed.
The concert is part of HVCC’s Hispanic Heritage Month programming and is free and open to the public.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · Noon
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium, HVCC · Troy
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Sound artists Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart open three days of immersive-audio exploration at EMPAC.
🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio — Felix Deufel & Matthew Goodheart
EMPAC spends three days this week examining a part of sound technology that is easier to experience than to describe.
Ordinary stereo gives sound a left and a right. Immersive audio adds space. Sounds can be positioned around a listener and moved through a room, allowing composers and sound designers to work with location almost as another musical element.
German sound artist and developer Felix Deufel comes to Troy for a sequence that approaches the subject from three directions.
Deufel joins RPI composer, improviser and sound artist Matthew Goodheart for a public conversation about spatial sound, acoustics, composition and the relationship between sound and the physical environment.
Deufel directs Leipzig’s ZiMMT — Center for Immersive Media Art, Music and Technology and develops systems for recording and producing three-dimensional audio. Goodheart’s work has long explored the relationship among performer, instrument and listener.
EMPAC gives that discussion a particularly appropriate setting. Its studios and performance spaces were designed for experimentation with acoustics and media technologies, so spatial sound is not merely an abstract subject here.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
💻 Grapes 3D Workshop — Felix Deufel
Friday moves from listening and discussion to making things.
Deufel introduces Grapes 3D Audio Control, software designed to position and move sound through three-dimensional environments. It can be used in music, film, theater and live performance and can communicate with other digital-audio systems.
The four-hour format is significant. This is a working session rather than a brief demonstration, giving musicians, filmmakers, theater artists and people interested in audio technology time to experiment with the software.
Participants should bring a Mac or Windows laptop.
📅 Friday, October 9 · Noon–4 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free · Registration required
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🔊 Audio from Lost in Liquid Noise
Saturday’s final Felix Deufel event takes immersive audio out of the realm of demonstration and turns it into an environmental experience.
Lost in Liquid Noise grew out of two Arctic expeditions in 2023 and 2024 by sound artist Felix Deufel and video artist Lucas Gutierrez. They gathered material from a landscape undergoing changes so enormous that their scale is difficult to comprehend. Greenland loses hundreds of millions of tons of ice each day, but statistics like that remain abstract. Deufel and Gutierrez set out to make some of those changes perceptible through sound, image and physical space.
The material ranges from tiny sounds within ice and water to glacial ruptures and underwater acoustic ecosystems beneath frozen seas. Water itself becomes part of the structure of the work as it shifts among ice, liquid and vapor.
At EMPAC, the audio is presented through Studio 1’s 39-speaker ambisonic system. Instead of hearing a soundtrack coming from the front of the room, listeners occupy the sound field. Sonic events can appear around them and move through the space, shifting between delicate crystalline sounds and the much larger physical force of breaking ice.
The work uses noise in two senses: as sound and as a condition of environmental instability. Deufel is interested in overload, continuous transformation and the loss of control that accompanies a system undergoing rapid change.
That is what makes this considerably more than a demonstration of EMPAC’s speaker system. The technology is being used to translate a planetary process into something a person can experience with the body. Rather than explaining climate change through another graph or statistic, Lost in Liquid Noise asks what happens when some of those changes become something you can actually hear around you.
This is a drop-in installation, not an 11 AM presentation. It remains open continuously for four hours, so visitors can enter when they wish and spend as much or as little time with the work as they choose.
The timing also makes it possible to combine this with the EMPAC tour. The tour runs from 11 AM–12:30 PM; Lost in Liquid Noise remains open until 3 PM.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 11 AM–3 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free · Drop-in
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🏛️ EMPAC Tour with Dena Beard
There are building tours that amount to walking around while someone points out architecture. An EMPAC tour can go considerably deeper because so much of the building was designed around things an audience normally never sees.
Saturday’s guide is particularly interesting: Dena Beard, EMPAC’s executive director.
Beard came to RPI after directing the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College and, before that, serving for nearly a decade as executive director of The Lab in San Francisco, a center known for experimental and avant-garde work.
That background should make her tour different from one led principally from an architectural or engineering perspective. EMPAC deliberately rotates guides among members of its staff, and the center says no two tours are quite the same.
Inside, visitors get behind-the-scenes access to a building in which the rooms themselves function as artistic and technical instruments. Depending on the route and what Beard chooses to emphasize, the tour can explore how a stage transforms, how light behaves inside a performance space and how reproduced sound changes not only what an audience hears but how it experiences a room.
That last subject is especially appropriate this Saturday. The tour takes place while Felix Deufel’s Lost in Liquid Noise is running in Studio 1, giving visitors the unusual opportunity to learn how EMPAC’s spaces are conceived and then experience one of them being used for a 39-speaker immersive installation.
For people who have attended performances at EMPAC but have never understood what is behind the walls, above the stages or inside the studios, this is a chance to see the building from the point of view of the people who actually use it to make work.
And with Beard leading, it is also an opportunity to hear from the person currently responsible for deciding what kind of artistic and research institution EMPAC is going to become.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 11 AM–12:30 PM
📍 Level 7 Lobby, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free · Registration recommended
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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📝 Poetry Reading — Susan Comninos, Janet Bowdan & Shira Dentz
Russell Sage College / Opalka Gallery
This is not simply three poets standing at a microphone and reading one after another.
Susan Comninos, Janet Bowdan and Shira Dentz are contributors to the new anthology The Color Wheel: Poems, published this year by Terrapin Books. The collection uses color as a point of departure, and the evening brings poetry into a gallery environment where visual and literary images can work against one another.
The three poets bring quite different bodies of work to the room.
Susan Comninos, who lives in the Capital Region, is the author of Out of Nowhere: Poems. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Harvard Review Online, Rattle, The Common, Prairie Schooner and North American Review. She has also taught writing in college and community settings.
Janet Bowdan is the author of Making Progress and editor of Common Ground Review. Her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review and elsewhere, with work moving through family, aging, identity and the accumulated meaning of ordinary experience.
Shira Dentz works across poetry, visual writing, nonfiction and hybrid forms. Her work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review and Ploughshares. Her books include Sisyphusina, which combines poetry, prose and visual elements in an exploration of female aging and received the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize.
That range should make the reading particularly well suited to Opalka. Comninos, Bowdan and Dentz do not represent a single poetic style, and the gallery provides a setting where written language and visual perception can overlap.
The reading also offers another reason to see Opalka’s current exhibition, Light and Transient Causes, which examines migration, displacement, memory and identity through the work of immigrant artists.
The program is supported in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 6:30–7:30 PM
📍 Opalka Gallery · 140 New Scotland Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
💀 Día de los Muertos Altar Exhibit
Hudson Valley Community College
The Mexican tradition of Día de los Muertos approaches remembrance in a way that can feel strikingly different from the solemnity usually associated with death in the United States.
Altars, or ofrendas, may include photographs, flowers, candles, favorite foods and personal objects associated with people who have died. The purpose is remembrance, but the visual language is often bright, abundant and celebratory rather than somber.
HVCC’s altar opens this week in the Marvin Library Learning Commons Atrium and remains on view through October 30 as part of the college’s Hispanic Heritage Month programming.
The college says there will be a free opening event with refreshments on Tuesday, October 6, but the published fall schedule does not provide a time.
📅 Opens Tuesday, October 6 · On view through October 30
📍 Marvin Library Learning Commons Atrium, HVCC · Troy
🎟️ Free
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📣 ONGOING THIS WEEK — Tang Town Crier
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Every afternoon from Tuesday through Sunday, a member of the Skidmore community steps into the Wachenheim Gallery, puts on a costume, rings a bell and briefly becomes a Town Crier.
The performance is part of Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, an exhibition that connects American history with contemporary civic life. Each appearance contains two announcements: news from the corresponding date 250 years ago and news from the present day.
The performances may last only a minute or two, but repetition is part of the idea. Across the run of the exhibition, the accumulated announcements create a kind of daily record, placing 1776 beside 2026 and asking how history is selected, narrated and remembered.
📅 Tuesday–Sunday · 2 PM
📍 Wachenheim Gallery, Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free
👨👩👧 Tang Family Saturday
Museums often tell families that children are welcome. Family Saturday goes a step farther by giving children something to make in response to what they have seen.
The Tang’s recurring family program begins with art on view in the museum or works from the collection and turns that encounter into a hands-on project. Children are not simply being occupied while adults look at the galleries; the making activity becomes another way of looking at and thinking about art.
That makes the program particularly useful for families who want to introduce younger children to contemporary art without expecting them to approach a museum in the same way an adult visitor would.
The session is designed for children ages 5 and older accompanied by adults. No advance registration is required, but materials are available first-come, first-served, so arriving near the beginning is sensible.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 2–3:30 PM
📍 Payne Room, Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free · Ages 5+ with adult companions
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🖼️ Tang Guide Tour
Sunday afternoon offers one of the easiest ways to become acquainted with the Tang’s fall exhibitions.
A student Tang Guide leads visitors through selected works and exhibitions currently on view. Because the guide chooses what to emphasize, the tour is less a comprehensive survey than a way into the museum through another person’s observations and questions.
There is plenty to choose from this fall, including A Feeling of With, Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest and Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move.
The tour is especially useful for people who enjoy museums but sometimes find contemporary art easier to enter with a little context. Afterward, visitors can go back through the galleries at their own pace.
📅 Sunday, October 11 · 2 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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REGIONAL EXTENSION PICKS
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😂 My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier — An Evening with Alan Zweibel
Regional Extension Pick — Williams College
Alan Zweibel was one of the original writers hired for Saturday Night Live. That alone gives him a remarkable vantage point on American comedy. His later collaborators make the story considerably larger: Gilda Radner, Billy Crystal, Garry Shandling, Larry David and Martin Short, among others.
Williams College brings Zweibel to the ’62 Center for an evening about the work behind those collaborations.
Comedy writers are often least visible when they are most successful. The audience remembers the performer, character or punch line; the process of shaping the material remains offstage. Zweibel has spent half a century working in that space, from SNL through television, books, theater and film.
The evening has a useful second half. After the conversation, Williams screens Here Today, the 2021 film Zweibel co-wrote with Billy Crystal, who directed and starred in it. The audience therefore gets to hear about Zweibel’s approach to collaboration and then see a later example of that collaboration on screen.
Former Saturday Night Live cast member Gary Kroeger hosts.
Williams, like Bard, has to clear a higher bar for this newsletter. An original SNL writer discussing a career with some of the most important comedy figures of the last fifty years, followed by one of his films, clears it.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 7–10 PM
📍 MainStage, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance, Williams College · Williamstown, MA
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
The China Now Music Festival brings Chinese and American musical traditions together at Bard in two programs spanning folk song, history and symphonic music.
🎶 China Now Music Festival — Chinese and American Folk Songs
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
The China Now Music Festival gives Capital Region readers two quite different reasons to make the trip to Bard this week.
Friday afternoon begins on a smaller human scale, with voices rather than an orchestra. Saturday expands dramatically into a program involving a full orchestra, approximately 120 choristers and six soloists, with music connecting Chinese immigration, the building of the Transcontinental Railroad and contemporary space exploration.
Together, the two programs make this more than an isolated destination concert.
The Choir of the Music Education Institute of the Central Conservatory of Music in China joins the Xinsheng Chinese Choir of New York in Bard’s Chapel of the Holy Innocents.
The program brings Chinese folk songs into conversation with North American ballads. That pairing suits the larger festival particularly well. Folk songs travel with people, change as communities move and often survive long after the circumstances that produced them have disappeared.
A Chinese conservatory choir singing alongside a New York Chinese choir adds another layer to that idea. One ensemble comes directly from one of China’s leading music institutions; the other represents a Chinese community making music in the United States.
The chapel setting should also make this a very different experience from Saturday’s large orchestral program at the Fisher Center.
📅 Friday, October 9 · 2 PM
📍 Chapel of the Holy Innocents, Bard College · Annandale-on-Hudson
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🎹 Gilles Vonsattel — Beethoven Piano Recital
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
A program containing Beethoven’s Waldstein and Hammerklavier sonatas would be substantial under almost any circumstances. Putting both on the same recital, alongside Beethoven’s first numbered piano sonata, turns the evening into a journey across a remarkable span of his writing for the instrument.
Gilles Vonsattel has received an Avery Fisher Career Grant and won the Naumburg International Piano Competition and the Geneva International Music Competition. At Bard he performs Piano Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1; Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53, “Waldstein”; and Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier.”
The first sonata comes from the young Beethoven establishing himself in Vienna. The Waldstein belongs to the expansive middle period, pushing the piano toward a larger scale and brilliance. The Hammerklavier is something else again: one of Beethoven’s most demanding late works and one of the monuments of the entire piano repertory.
Bard is outside our regular weekly coverage and has to justify the drive. A pianist of Vonsattel’s stature taking on this particular Beethoven program does.
📅 Friday, October 9 · 7 PM
📍 Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space · 30 Campus Road, Annandale-on-Hudson
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🎼 China Now Music Festival: Chasing Dreams
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
The historical center of Saturday’s concert is Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Zhou Long’s Men of Iron and the Golden Spike. The symphonic oratorio remembers the thousands of Chinese laborers who came to the United States in the 1860s and helped construct the Transcontinental Railroad.
Their role was enormous. Chinese workers made up a major part of the Central Pacific Railroad labor force and took on some of the most dangerous construction through the Sierra Nevada. Their contribution sits uneasily beside the discrimination Chinese immigrants subsequently faced in the United States.
Zhou’s work gives that history a large musical canvas: full orchestra, approximately 120 choristers and six soloists.
The second major work turns from nineteenth-century railroad construction to space exploration. Bard presents the U.S. premiere of Li Shaosheng’s five-movement symphonic suite Chasing the Sky.
The pairing gives the concert a coherent idea rather than simply assembling unrelated Chinese orchestral music. Both works concern people pushing beyond familiar boundaries, but from radically different historical positions.
The Orchestra Now performs under conductor and festival artistic director Jindong Cai.
Bard is outside our normal Capital Region coverage, so routine campus concerts do not make the newsletter. This two-day festival program does: its scale, historical subject, U.S. premiere and unusual repertoire make it worth considering as a destination event.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 3–5 PM
📍 Fisher Center at Bard · Annandale-on-Hudson
🎟️ Ticketed
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD
October 12–November 1
💃 Pam Tanowitz and the Pastoral: Artists in Conversation
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Wednesday, October 14 · 5:30 PM · Free
🎷 The Cookers
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, October 16 · 7 PM · Ticketed
💃 Compagnie Hervé Koubi
Friday, October 16 — Union College
5–6:15 PM — Master class
6:30–7:30 PM — Lecture/demonstration
Free and open to the public · No registration
Saturday, October 17 — The Egg
6:15 PM — Pre-show talk
7 PM — Sol Invictus
Ticketed
🔬 UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week
October 19–23
The Albany Nanotechnology Symposium, October 22–23, is part of the week.
🚀 RPI Entrepreneur of the Year
Wednesday, October 21 · 1–3 PM · EMPAC Theater
Award ceremony, fireside chat with President Marty Schmidt, startup pitch competition and poster presentations.
📖 Garth Greenwell — Steloff Lecture
Skidmore College · Thursday, October 22 · 8 PM
🏛️ Danielle Allen — Kuroda Symposium
Skidmore College · Friday, October 23 · 5 PM
⚠️ CONFIRMED EVENT — PUBLIC ACCESS BEING VERIFIED — State of Grace 2026
UAlbany · Thursday, October 29 · 9 AM–4 PM · ETEC + Campus Center
The event, date, time and location are confirmed. Explicit 2026 general-public eligibility remains under verification.
🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, October 30 · 7 PM · Ticketed
🎬 Raiders of the Lost Ark in Concert
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College · October 31–November 1
Saturday · 7 PM
Sunday · 2 PM
🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
🧠 INTERFACE: Cognitive Science — Brett Fajen & Heidi Latsky
RPI / EMPAC · Thursday, November 12
Limited capacity · Reservations required
🎷 Ali Ryerson Quartet
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, November 13 · Ticketed
🎼 Gershwin, Jazz, and the Music of Jewish Émigrés
Regional Extension Watch — Bard College · November 14–15
🎄 Hansel and Gretel
Regional Extension Watch — Bard College · December 11 & 13
🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
CORE CAMPUSES
The Drunken City — UAlbany — Oct. 21–25 — Details
BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain — Skidmore College — Oct. 23–28 — Details / Tickets
Grease — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — Oct. 30–Nov. 8 — Details / Tickets
Rent — Siena University — Nov. 12–21 — Details / Tickets
A Doll’s House — UAlbany — Nov. 18–22 — Details / Tickets
This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — Nov. 20–Dec. 5 — Details / Tickets
Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — Dec. 2–10 — Details / Tickets
Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — Feb. 24–Mar. 3 — Details / Tickets
UAlbany Theatre Program Musical — title forthcoming — Mar. 3–7
REGIONAL EXTENSION
Rossum’s Universal Robots — Bard College — Oct. 23–25 — Details / Tickets
Wakka Wakka: Dead as a Dodo — Williams College — Nov. 7 — Details
Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play — Williams College — Nov. 19–21 — Details
📅 BY DAY CALENDAR
MONDAY — OCTOBER 5
1–2 PM — 🤖 AI Policy Town Hall — UAlbany
3–4:30 PM — 📚 Amy Reid — UAlbany
6–8 PM — ⚖️ Trading Places — UAlbany
7 PM — 🎭 The Giver — UAlbany
TUESDAY — OCTOBER 6
1:30–3 PM — 📚 Wait…THAT Book Is Banned? — UAlbany
2–3 PM — 🏛️ Who Is Government? — Albany Law / Albany Public Library
4–5 PM — 🥓 American Bacon — Union
7–9 PM — 🌍 Engage America — UAlbany
WEDNESDAY — OCTOBER 7
No qualifying timed events.
THURSDAY — OCTOBER 8
Noon — 🎺 Fiesta del Norte — HVCC
6 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 1 — Tang
6–7 PM — 🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio — EMPAC
6:30–7:30 PM — 📝 Susan Comninos, Janet Bowdan & Shira Dentz — Opalka
7–10 PM — 😂 Alan Zweibel — Williams
FRIDAY — OCTOBER 9
Noon–4 PM — 💻 Grapes 3D Workshop — EMPAC
2 PM — 🎶 Chinese and American Folk Songs — Bard
6 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 2 — Tang
7 PM — 🏃 Nicholas Thompson — UAlbany
7 PM — 🎹 Gilles Vonsattel — Bard
8 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 3 — Tang
SATURDAY — OCTOBER 10
11 AM–3 PM — 🔊 Lost in Liquid Noise — EMPAC
11 AM–12:30 PM — 🏛️ EMPAC Tour with Dena Beard
1 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 4 — Tang
2–3:30 PM — 👨👩👧 Tang Family Saturday
3–5 PM — 🎼 China Now: Chasing Dreams — Bard
3:30 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 5 — Tang
7 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 6 — Tang
SUNDAY — OCTOBER 11
2 PM — 🖼️ Tang Guide Tour
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CAPITAL REGION CURATED
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
Edited by Alan Koslow
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Capital Region Curated: October 5-11
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with American diplomacy at UAlbany, the Flaherty Film Seminar, EMPAC audio and more.
Alan Koslow
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Originally published at
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Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
🌍 🎬 🎧 📚 🎭
DIPLOMACY, FILM, IMMERSIVE SOUND & STORIES THAT MOVE
American diplomacy at UAlbany, three days of experimental film at the Tang, immersive audio at EMPAC, Nicholas Thompson on running and family—and much more across Capital Region campuses
All six programs from the 2026 Flaherty Film Seminar come to the Tang for three days of experimental and documentary film.
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If you work with a college department, program, gallery, museum, performing arts office, 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.
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🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks: American diplomacy, the Flaherty Film Seminar, immersive audio at EMPAC, and Nicholas Thompson on running, fathers and family
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life: AI policy, academic censorship, tariffs and presidential power, and a century of American diplomacy
📚 Books, Writers & Ideas: banned comics and graphic novels, Michael Lewis’s Who Is Government?, the history of bacon, and Nicholas Thompson’s The Running Ground
🎭 Theater & Performance: Lois Lowry’s The Giver brought to the stage by Literature to Life
🎬 Film & Media: all six programs from the 2026 Flaherty Film Seminar, Gestures of Refusal
🎨 Art & Visual Culture: poetry at Opalka Gallery, the Día de los Muertos altar at HVCC, Tang Family Saturday, the Tang Town Crier and a Sunday Tang Guide Tour
🎶 Music, Sound & Technology: Fiesta del Norte at HVCC and three days of immersive audio at EMPAC
🌎 Regional Extension: Gilles Vonsattel and the China Now Music Festival at Bard, plus original Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel at Williams
🔥 Plan Ahead: Pam Tanowitz, The Cookers, Compagnie Hervé Koubi, UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week, Garth Greenwell, Danielle Allen, Ernie Watts, and Raiders of the Lost Ark with live orchestra
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
One calendar file adds this week’s timed events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook.
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings now have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Evening events are generally held in buildings that are open and accessible for the program.
⭐ TOP PICKS
🌍 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
University at Albany · Tuesday, October 6 · 7–9 PM
Most of us encounter diplomacy only when it becomes news: a war, a summit meeting, a trade dispute, a hostage crisis. Engage America looks instead at the career diplomats who spend years representing the United States abroad, often far from public attention.
Recently retired Foreign Service Officer Tom Selinger draws on oral histories preserved by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, followed by a panel that includes retired ambassadors and regional academic leaders. It should be an unusually good opportunity to understand what diplomacy looks like from the people who have actually practiced it.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
🎬 Whole Grain: Flaherty Film Seminar — Gestures of Refusal
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Thursday–Saturday, October 8–10
The Tang becomes one of three international satellite sites for the 71st Flaherty Film Seminar, presenting all six programs from this year’s gathering. Under the theme Gestures of Refusal, the films examine memory, archives, erasure and resistance through experimental and documentary work.
Each 90-minute program is followed by discussion, an important part of the Flaherty tradition and one reason this is more than a weekend of screenings.
See Film & Media below.
🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio — Felix Deufel & Matthew Goodheart
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute / EMPAC · Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
EMPAC is particularly well suited to a subject that is difficult to understand without hearing it: sound that exists not simply in front of the listener but throughout three-dimensional space.
German sound artist and developer Felix Deufel and RPI composer and sound artist Matthew Goodheart begin a three-day sequence that continues with a hands-on spatial-audio workshop Friday and a four-hour drop-in installation using EMPAC’s 39-speaker ambisonic system Saturday.
See Music, Sound & Technology below.
🏃 Nicholas Thompson — The Running Ground
UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute · Friday, October 9 · 7 PM
Nicholas Thompson is CEO of The Atlantic, a journalist and an accomplished masters runner. His bestselling The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports uses running to examine ambition, memory, personal growth and his relationship with his father.
The Albany Running Exchange, which began as a UAlbany student club, is a cosponsor. Books will be available, with a signing after the conversation.
See Books, Writers & Ideas below.
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IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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🤖 AI Policy Town Hall
University at Albany
Generative AI has become part of college life faster than most colleges have been able to decide what to do with it. Students can use it to research, brainstorm, summarize, write, translate and produce computer code. Faculty members have to decide which uses are legitimate tools and which defeat the purpose of an assignment. Universities also face questions involving privacy, intellectual property, reliability and academic integrity.
UAlbany’s AI Policy Town Hall brings those questions together at the institutional level. Rather than another lecture predicting where artificial intelligence might be five or ten years from now, this is a discussion about the rules needed today.
That makes the program interesting beyond UAlbany. Colleges, businesses, professional organizations and governments are all confronting the same basic problem: AI is already being used, while the standards governing its use are still being written. A university is a particularly revealing place to watch that process because the decisions affect both how students learn and how their work is evaluated.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 1–2 PM
📍 Campus Center Ballroom CC 202, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Public discussion
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Amy Reid of PEN America examines academic censorship and the targeting of teaching on race and gender at UAlbany.
📚 Who’s Afraid of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies?
Academic Censorship and the Targeting of Teaching on Race and Gender
University at Albany
Arguments over race, gender and sexuality have increasingly moved from political debate into disputes over what colleges teach and who has authority over the curriculum. Amy Reid comes to UAlbany to examine that conflict as part of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies series “Teaching Gender, Race, and Feminism in Troubled Times.”
Reid directs PEN America’s Freedom to Learn Program, which opposes government restrictions on higher-education teaching and curriculum. Before joining PEN America, she was a professor of French language and literature and directed the Gender Studies Program at New College of Florida.
Her UAlbany lecture concentrates on what she describes as direct and indirect forms of academic censorship and their effects on teaching about race and gender. Reid approaches the subject from an academic-freedom advocacy perspective; the larger disputes over curriculum, government authority and the proper boundaries of academic freedom remain politically contested.
For a public audience, the value of the program is its focus on higher education itself. The argument is not simply over controversial ideas. It concerns who decides what belongs in a college classroom and how much control legislatures, administrators and faculty should have over those decisions.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 3–4:30 PM
📍 Humanities 354, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Public lecture · In person and online
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Trading Places: Tariffs, Trade, and Presidential Power
University at Albany
Tariffs are usually discussed as economic policy: what they do to prices, manufacturing, imports and international trade. Caitlain Devereaux Lewis, a professor at Albany Law School, approaches them from another direction—constitutional law and presidential authority.
The distinction matters. The Constitution gives Congress important powers over taxation and foreign commerce, while federal statutes have delegated substantial trade authority to the executive branch. Modern tariff disputes can therefore raise a second question alongside whether a particular tariff is good economic policy: Who has the legal power to impose it?
Lewis’s Anderson Lecture provides an opportunity to separate those legal questions from the daily political argument surrounding tariffs. That should be useful even for people who do not ordinarily attend law lectures, particularly because disputes over presidential power extend well beyond trade.
A networking period follows and is directed especially toward UAlbany students and alumni. The principal reason for a general reader to attend is the lecture: a timely issue examined through the constitutional structure behind it.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 6–8 PM
📍 Campus Center Multipurpose Room, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Public lecture
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🌍 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
University at Albany
Foreign policy is usually remembered through presidents, wars, treaties and summit meetings. The daily work behind it is performed by career diplomats whose names seldom enter the history books.
Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy puts those people at the center of the story.
Recently retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer Tom Selinger presents Portraits of American Diplomacy, drawing on oral histories preserved by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. The stories include diplomats with New York connections and careers that involved overseas crises, international markets, alliances and the less dramatic but essential work of maintaining relationships between governments.
The evening then broadens into a panel with retired ambassadors Robert Gosende and Donna Welton and Hudson Valley Community College President Michael Brophy, moderated by UAlbany President Havidán Rodríguez. A companion exhibition traces significant moments in American diplomatic history.
The timing gives the program another dimension. As the country approaches its 250th anniversary, much of the attention will naturally fall on domestic history. This program looks at the American story from the other direction—how the United States has dealt with the rest of the world and what representing the country overseas has required of the people assigned to do it.
For anyone whose picture of diplomacy begins and ends with ambassadors at negotiating tables, this should fill in a large part of the missing picture.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 7–9 PM · Doors 6:30 PM
📍 Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free · Registration required
Details | Register
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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📚 Wait…THAT Book Is Banned?
UAlbany Libraries
Comics and graphic novels occupy an interesting place in arguments over banned and challenged books. Their combination of words and images makes them unusually easy to excerpt: one panel can be photographed, circulated and judged without the pages that come before or after it.
UAlbany librarians Amanda Lowe and Kaci Wilson take that problem as the starting point for an interactive Banned Books Week program. They will look at frequently challenged works, why visual storytelling attracts censorship efforts and what those disputes say about intellectual freedom and control over what other people are permitted to read.
Graphic novels are no longer a narrow corner of publishing. They encompass memoir, journalism, history, literary fiction and books for readers of virtually every age. Challenges to the form therefore raise many of the same questions libraries and schools face with prose books, with the added complication that an isolated image can travel much farther and faster than an isolated paragraph.
The format is discussion rather than a formal lecture, making this one of the week’s more participatory events.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 1:30–3 PM
📍 Minerva Room, University Library, UAlbany · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🏛️ Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service
Albany Law School / Albany Public Library
Government is an enormous abstraction until you begin looking at the people who actually make it work.
That is the premise behind Michael Lewis’s Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, a collection of profiles that turns attention away from elected officials and toward federal employees whose work is generally invisible to the public. Lewis and the other writers involved focus on people working inside government agencies—scientists, analysts, investigators and administrators whose jobs rarely generate headlines unless something goes wrong.
Patrick Wildes ’16, director of Albany Law School’s Government Law Center, brings the book into a particularly appropriate setting. The Government Law Center studies the relationship between law, public institutions and the people who administer them, making the discussion less a conventional book review than an entry point into the machinery of public service.
The program is formally co-presented by the Government Law Center and the Friends & Foundation of Albany Public Library.
There is also an interesting local dimension. Albany is a government town. Thousands of Capital Region residents work in public agencies, courts, universities and institutions whose daily operations depend on exactly the kind of professional public service Lewis’s book examines.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 2–3 PM
📍 Large Auditorium, Albany Public Library, 161 Washington Ave., Albany
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🥓 American Bacon: A Conversation with Mark A. Johnson
Union College
Bacon has had a remarkably successful second career as an American cultural object. Beyond breakfast, it has become an advertising device, internet joke, restaurant obsession and recurring subject of nutritional debate.
Historian Mark A. Johnson takes the food seriously enough to ask how that happened.
His book American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon traces bacon from early modern Britain through American history, including the Civil War and Progressive Era. Along the way, an everyday food becomes a route into much larger subjects: industrialization, urbanization, reform movements, globalization, race, class and gender.
Johnson specializes in American history, particularly the South and African American history. His earlier work includes books on Alabama barbecue and Black political performance, which gives some indication of the way he uses popular culture to illuminate broader historical change.
Good food history is rarely just about food. What people eat can reveal how food was produced and marketed, who could afford it, how tastes changed and how businesses turned ordinary products into cultural symbols. Bacon happens to provide Johnson with an especially colorful example.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 4–5 PM
📍 Reamer Campus Center Auditorium, Union College · 807 Union St., Schenectady
🎟️ Free and open to all
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson comes to UAlbany with The Running Ground, his memoir of running, ambition, fathers and sons.
🏃 Nicholas Thompson — The Running Ground
UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute
Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic, a journalist and an accomplished masters runner. His book The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports brings those parts of his life together in a memoir about running, family and his relationship with his father.
Running gives Thompson an effective structure because it is both extremely simple and endlessly measurable. Distance, pace and improvement can be reduced to numbers. The reasons people keep running—and what they think about during all those miles—are considerably harder to quantify.
That is where the book becomes more than a sports memoir. Thompson uses running to examine memory, ambition, aging and the ways people understand themselves through their parents. His professional life, meanwhile, is spent in the rapid flow of contemporary journalism, making the repetitive physical discipline of distance running an interesting counterweight.
The Albany Running Exchange, which began as a UAlbany student club, is a cosponsor. That should give the conversation a strong local running audience without limiting it to runners.
Books will be available for purchase, and Thompson will sign them after the program.
📅 Friday, October 9 · 7 PM
📍 Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free · No registration required
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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THEATER & PERFORMANCE
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Literature to Life brings Lois Lowry’s Newbery Medal-winning The Giver to the stage at UAlbany.
🎭 Literature to Life: The Giver
UAlbany / New York State Writers Institute
Lois Lowry’s The Giver begins in a society that appears to have solved many of humanity’s most persistent problems. Poverty, conflict and disorder have largely disappeared. So have genuine choice, historical memory and much of what makes an individual life individual.
Twelve-year-old Jonas begins to understand the cost when he is selected to receive the memories held by the community’s Giver. The arrangement that once looked safe and orderly becomes increasingly disturbing as he discovers what has been sacrificed to create it.
Lowry’s Newbery Medal-winning novel has remained a fixture of young-adult literature because its moral argument grows more complicated as readers get older. The central bargain—security and stability in exchange for freedom, memory and choice—is simple enough for a young reader to understand and substantial enough to revisit decades later.
Literature to Life specializes in theatrical adaptations that stay close to important literary texts. This production is performed by Aurea Tomeski, adapted and directed by Elise Thoron, and relies on the performer and Lowry’s language rather than trying to reproduce the novel through a large cast and elaborate scenery.
Readers who first met Jonas in a school classroom may find that returning to his world as adults produces a very different experience.
📅 Monday, October 5 · 7 PM
📍 Main Theatre, UAlbany Performing Arts Center · 1400 Washington Ave., Albany
🎟️ $15
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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FILM & MEDIA
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🎬 Whole Grain: Flaherty Film Seminar — Gestures of Refusal
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum / MDOCS / Picture Lock One
The Flaherty Film Seminar has been challenging conventional ways of watching film for more than seven decades. One of its traditions is particularly unusual: programs are not announced in advance. Viewers encounter the work without reviews, reputations and expectations telling them what they are supposed to think.
This week, the Tang brings the complete six-program 2026 seminar to Saratoga Springs through its Whole Grain experimental-film series, working with Skidmore’s MDOCS and Troy’s Picture Lock One.
This year’s theme, Gestures of Refusal, gathers experimental and documentary films concerned with memory, archives, erasure and resistance. Some rework existing images; others use fragmented narrative or personal recollection. What connects them is an interest in how images preserve history, how history can be lost or altered, and what it means for an artist to refuse the conventional way a story has been told.
Each program runs about 90 minutes and is followed by moderated discussion. That conversation is central to the Flaherty model. The seminar has always treated the audience’s response as part of the experience rather than something that happens privately on the drive home.
The Tang is one of three international pods extending this year’s seminar beyond its principal gathering. For Capital Region viewers interested in documentary or experimental film, having all six programs presented locally over three days is a rare opportunity.
Attendance does not require committing to the entire weekend. Still, seeing several programs should reveal more of the connections within the theme—and give the discussions a chance to build on one another.
📍 Somers Classroom, Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Registration requested
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8
6 PM — Program 1
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9
6 PM — Program 2
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
8 PM — Program 3
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10
1 PM — Program 4
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
3:30 PM — Program 5
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
7 PM — Program 6
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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MUSIC, SOUND & TECHNOLOGY
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🎺 Fiesta del Norte
Hudson Valley Community College
Mariachi is one of Mexico’s most recognizable musical traditions, but Fiesta del Norte ranges considerably farther than the familiar image of trumpets, violins and charro suits.
The ensemble’s program moves among several regional Mexican traditions. There is mariachi music from Jalisco, the western Mexican state most closely associated with the form; Norteñas from Chihuahua, music shaped by northern Mexico and its distinctive accordion-driven traditions; and marimba music from Chiapas, where the instrument occupies a very different musical landscape.
That range is part of what makes the concert useful as more than lunchtime entertainment. Mexican music is no more stylistically uniform than American music, and hearing several traditions in the same program provides a quick introduction to the enormous regional variety hidden inside a broad label like “Mexican folk music.”
Director Dave Giardina adds stories and cultural context between selections, helping connect the music to the communities and regions from which it developed.
The concert is part of HVCC’s Hispanic Heritage Month programming and is free and open to the public.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · Noon
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium, HVCC · Troy
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Sound artists Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart open three days of immersive-audio exploration at EMPAC.
🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio — Felix Deufel & Matthew Goodheart
EMPAC spends three days this week examining a part of sound technology that is easier to experience than to describe.
Ordinary stereo gives sound a left and a right. Immersive audio adds space. Sounds can be positioned around a listener and moved through a room, allowing composers and sound designers to work with location almost as another musical element.
German sound artist and developer Felix Deufel comes to Troy for a sequence that approaches the subject from three directions.
Deufel joins RPI composer, improviser and sound artist Matthew Goodheart for a public conversation about spatial sound, acoustics, composition and the relationship between sound and the physical environment.
Deufel directs Leipzig’s ZiMMT — Center for Immersive Media Art, Music and Technology and develops systems for recording and producing three-dimensional audio. Goodheart’s work has long explored the relationship among performer, instrument and listener.
EMPAC gives that discussion a particularly appropriate setting. Its studios and performance spaces were designed for experimentation with acoustics and media technologies, so spatial sound is not merely an abstract subject here.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
💻 Grapes 3D Workshop — Felix Deufel
Friday moves from listening and discussion to making things.
Deufel introduces Grapes 3D Audio Control, software designed to position and move sound through three-dimensional environments. It can be used in music, film, theater and live performance and can communicate with other digital-audio systems.
The four-hour format is significant. This is a working session rather than a brief demonstration, giving musicians, filmmakers, theater artists and people interested in audio technology time to experiment with the software.
Participants should bring a Mac or Windows laptop.
📅 Friday, October 9 · Noon–4 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free · Registration required
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🔊 Audio from Lost in Liquid Noise
Saturday’s final Felix Deufel event takes immersive audio out of the realm of demonstration and turns it into an environmental experience.
Lost in Liquid Noise grew out of two Arctic expeditions in 2023 and 2024 by sound artist Felix Deufel and video artist Lucas Gutierrez. They gathered material from a landscape undergoing changes so enormous that their scale is difficult to comprehend. Greenland loses hundreds of millions of tons of ice each day, but statistics like that remain abstract. Deufel and Gutierrez set out to make some of those changes perceptible through sound, image and physical space.
The material ranges from tiny sounds within ice and water to glacial ruptures and underwater acoustic ecosystems beneath frozen seas. Water itself becomes part of the structure of the work as it shifts among ice, liquid and vapor.
At EMPAC, the audio is presented through Studio 1’s 39-speaker ambisonic system. Instead of hearing a soundtrack coming from the front of the room, listeners occupy the sound field. Sonic events can appear around them and move through the space, shifting between delicate crystalline sounds and the much larger physical force of breaking ice.
The work uses noise in two senses: as sound and as a condition of environmental instability. Deufel is interested in overload, continuous transformation and the loss of control that accompanies a system undergoing rapid change.
That is what makes this considerably more than a demonstration of EMPAC’s speaker system. The technology is being used to translate a planetary process into something a person can experience with the body. Rather than explaining climate change through another graph or statistic, Lost in Liquid Noise asks what happens when some of those changes become something you can actually hear around you.
This is a drop-in installation, not an 11 AM presentation. It remains open continuously for four hours, so visitors can enter when they wish and spend as much or as little time with the work as they choose.
The timing also makes it possible to combine this with the EMPAC tour. The tour runs from 11 AM–12:30 PM; Lost in Liquid Noise remains open until 3 PM.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 11 AM–3 PM
📍 Studio 1—Goodman, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free · Drop-in
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🏛️ EMPAC Tour with Dena Beard
There are building tours that amount to walking around while someone points out architecture. An EMPAC tour can go considerably deeper because so much of the building was designed around things an audience normally never sees.
Saturday’s guide is particularly interesting: Dena Beard, EMPAC’s executive director.
Beard came to RPI after directing the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College and, before that, serving for nearly a decade as executive director of The Lab in San Francisco, a center known for experimental and avant-garde work.
That background should make her tour different from one led principally from an architectural or engineering perspective. EMPAC deliberately rotates guides among members of its staff, and the center says no two tours are quite the same.
Inside, visitors get behind-the-scenes access to a building in which the rooms themselves function as artistic and technical instruments. Depending on the route and what Beard chooses to emphasize, the tour can explore how a stage transforms, how light behaves inside a performance space and how reproduced sound changes not only what an audience hears but how it experiences a room.
That last subject is especially appropriate this Saturday. The tour takes place while Felix Deufel’s Lost in Liquid Noise is running in Studio 1, giving visitors the unusual opportunity to learn how EMPAC’s spaces are conceived and then experience one of them being used for a 39-speaker immersive installation.
For people who have attended performances at EMPAC but have never understood what is behind the walls, above the stages or inside the studios, this is a chance to see the building from the point of view of the people who actually use it to make work.
And with Beard leading, it is also an opportunity to hear from the person currently responsible for deciding what kind of artistic and research institution EMPAC is going to become.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 11 AM–12:30 PM
📍 Level 7 Lobby, EMPAC · 50 8th St., Troy
🎟️ Free · Registration recommended
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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📝 Poetry Reading — Susan Comninos, Janet Bowdan & Shira Dentz
Russell Sage College / Opalka Gallery
This is not simply three poets standing at a microphone and reading one after another.
Susan Comninos, Janet Bowdan and Shira Dentz are contributors to the new anthology The Color Wheel: Poems, published this year by Terrapin Books. The collection uses color as a point of departure, and the evening brings poetry into a gallery environment where visual and literary images can work against one another.
The three poets bring quite different bodies of work to the room.
Susan Comninos, who lives in the Capital Region, is the author of Out of Nowhere: Poems. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Harvard Review Online, Rattle, The Common, Prairie Schooner and North American Review. She has also taught writing in college and community settings.
Janet Bowdan is the author of Making Progress and editor of Common Ground Review. Her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review and elsewhere, with work moving through family, aging, identity and the accumulated meaning of ordinary experience.
Shira Dentz works across poetry, visual writing, nonfiction and hybrid forms. Her work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review and Ploughshares. Her books include Sisyphusina, which combines poetry, prose and visual elements in an exploration of female aging and received the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize.
That range should make the reading particularly well suited to Opalka. Comninos, Bowdan and Dentz do not represent a single poetic style, and the gallery provides a setting where written language and visual perception can overlap.
The reading also offers another reason to see Opalka’s current exhibition, Light and Transient Causes, which examines migration, displacement, memory and identity through the work of immigrant artists.
The program is supported in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 6:30–7:30 PM
📍 Opalka Gallery · 140 New Scotland Ave., Albany
🎟️ Free
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
💀 Día de los Muertos Altar Exhibit
Hudson Valley Community College
The Mexican tradition of Día de los Muertos approaches remembrance in a way that can feel strikingly different from the solemnity usually associated with death in the United States.
Altars, or ofrendas, may include photographs, flowers, candles, favorite foods and personal objects associated with people who have died. The purpose is remembrance, but the visual language is often bright, abundant and celebratory rather than somber.
HVCC’s altar opens this week in the Marvin Library Learning Commons Atrium and remains on view through October 30 as part of the college’s Hispanic Heritage Month programming.
The college says there will be a free opening event with refreshments on Tuesday, October 6, but the published fall schedule does not provide a time.
📅 Opens Tuesday, October 6 · On view through October 30
📍 Marvin Library Learning Commons Atrium, HVCC · Troy
🎟️ Free
ADVERTISEMENT
📣 ONGOING THIS WEEK — Tang Town Crier
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Every afternoon from Tuesday through Sunday, a member of the Skidmore community steps into the Wachenheim Gallery, puts on a costume, rings a bell and briefly becomes a Town Crier.
The performance is part of Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, an exhibition that connects American history with contemporary civic life. Each appearance contains two announcements: news from the corresponding date 250 years ago and news from the present day.
The performances may last only a minute or two, but repetition is part of the idea. Across the run of the exhibition, the accumulated announcements create a kind of daily record, placing 1776 beside 2026 and asking how history is selected, narrated and remembered.
📅 Tuesday–Sunday · 2 PM
📍 Wachenheim Gallery, Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free
👨👩👧 Tang Family Saturday
Museums often tell families that children are welcome. Family Saturday goes a step farther by giving children something to make in response to what they have seen.
The Tang’s recurring family program begins with art on view in the museum or works from the collection and turns that encounter into a hands-on project. Children are not simply being occupied while adults look at the galleries; the making activity becomes another way of looking at and thinking about art.
That makes the program particularly useful for families who want to introduce younger children to contemporary art without expecting them to approach a museum in the same way an adult visitor would.
The session is designed for children ages 5 and older accompanied by adults. No advance registration is required, but materials are available first-come, first-served, so arriving near the beginning is sensible.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 2–3:30 PM
📍 Payne Room, Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free · Ages 5+ with adult companions
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🖼️ Tang Guide Tour
Sunday afternoon offers one of the easiest ways to become acquainted with the Tang’s fall exhibitions.
A student Tang Guide leads visitors through selected works and exhibitions currently on view. Because the guide chooses what to emphasize, the tour is less a comprehensive survey than a way into the museum through another person’s observations and questions.
There is plenty to choose from this fall, including A Feeling of With, Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest and Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move.
The tour is especially useful for people who enjoy museums but sometimes find contemporary art easier to enter with a little context. Afterward, visitors can go back through the galleries at their own pace.
📅 Sunday, October 11 · 2 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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REGIONAL EXTENSION PICKS
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😂 My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier — An Evening with Alan Zweibel
Regional Extension Pick — Williams College
Alan Zweibel was one of the original writers hired for Saturday Night Live. That alone gives him a remarkable vantage point on American comedy. His later collaborators make the story considerably larger: Gilda Radner, Billy Crystal, Garry Shandling, Larry David and Martin Short, among others.
Williams College brings Zweibel to the ’62 Center for an evening about the work behind those collaborations.
Comedy writers are often least visible when they are most successful. The audience remembers the performer, character or punch line; the process of shaping the material remains offstage. Zweibel has spent half a century working in that space, from SNL through television, books, theater and film.
The evening has a useful second half. After the conversation, Williams screens Here Today, the 2021 film Zweibel co-wrote with Billy Crystal, who directed and starred in it. The audience therefore gets to hear about Zweibel’s approach to collaboration and then see a later example of that collaboration on screen.
Former Saturday Night Live cast member Gary Kroeger hosts.
Williams, like Bard, has to clear a higher bar for this newsletter. An original SNL writer discussing a career with some of the most important comedy figures of the last fifty years, followed by one of his films, clears it.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 7–10 PM
📍 MainStage, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance, Williams College · Williamstown, MA
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
The China Now Music Festival brings Chinese and American musical traditions together at Bard in two programs spanning folk song, history and symphonic music.
🎶 China Now Music Festival — Chinese and American Folk Songs
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
The China Now Music Festival gives Capital Region readers two quite different reasons to make the trip to Bard this week.
Friday afternoon begins on a smaller human scale, with voices rather than an orchestra. Saturday expands dramatically into a program involving a full orchestra, approximately 120 choristers and six soloists, with music connecting Chinese immigration, the building of the Transcontinental Railroad and contemporary space exploration.
Together, the two programs make this more than an isolated destination concert.
The Choir of the Music Education Institute of the Central Conservatory of Music in China joins the Xinsheng Chinese Choir of New York in Bard’s Chapel of the Holy Innocents.
The program brings Chinese folk songs into conversation with North American ballads. That pairing suits the larger festival particularly well. Folk songs travel with people, change as communities move and often survive long after the circumstances that produced them have disappeared.
A Chinese conservatory choir singing alongside a New York Chinese choir adds another layer to that idea. One ensemble comes directly from one of China’s leading music institutions; the other represents a Chinese community making music in the United States.
The chapel setting should also make this a very different experience from Saturday’s large orchestral program at the Fisher Center.
📅 Friday, October 9 · 2 PM
📍 Chapel of the Holy Innocents, Bard College · Annandale-on-Hudson
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🎹 Gilles Vonsattel — Beethoven Piano Recital
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
A program containing Beethoven’s Waldstein and Hammerklavier sonatas would be substantial under almost any circumstances. Putting both on the same recital, alongside Beethoven’s first numbered piano sonata, turns the evening into a journey across a remarkable span of his writing for the instrument.
Gilles Vonsattel has received an Avery Fisher Career Grant and won the Naumburg International Piano Competition and the Geneva International Music Competition. At Bard he performs Piano Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1; Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53, “Waldstein”; and Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier.”
The first sonata comes from the young Beethoven establishing himself in Vienna. The Waldstein belongs to the expansive middle period, pushing the piano toward a larger scale and brilliance. The Hammerklavier is something else again: one of Beethoven’s most demanding late works and one of the monuments of the entire piano repertory.
Bard is outside our regular weekly coverage and has to justify the drive. A pianist of Vonsattel’s stature taking on this particular Beethoven program does.
📅 Friday, October 9 · 7 PM
📍 Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space · 30 Campus Road, Annandale-on-Hudson
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🎼 China Now Music Festival: Chasing Dreams
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
The historical center of Saturday’s concert is Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Zhou Long’s Men of Iron and the Golden Spike. The symphonic oratorio remembers the thousands of Chinese laborers who came to the United States in the 1860s and helped construct the Transcontinental Railroad.
Their role was enormous. Chinese workers made up a major part of the Central Pacific Railroad labor force and took on some of the most dangerous construction through the Sierra Nevada. Their contribution sits uneasily beside the discrimination Chinese immigrants subsequently faced in the United States.
Zhou’s work gives that history a large musical canvas: full orchestra, approximately 120 choristers and six soloists.
The second major work turns from nineteenth-century railroad construction to space exploration. Bard presents the U.S. premiere of Li Shaosheng’s five-movement symphonic suite Chasing the Sky.
The pairing gives the concert a coherent idea rather than simply assembling unrelated Chinese orchestral music. Both works concern people pushing beyond familiar boundaries, but from radically different historical positions.
The Orchestra Now performs under conductor and festival artistic director Jindong Cai.
Bard is outside our normal Capital Region coverage, so routine campus concerts do not make the newsletter. This two-day festival program does: its scale, historical subject, U.S. premiere and unusual repertoire make it worth considering as a destination event.
📅 Saturday, October 10 · 3–5 PM
📍 Fisher Center at Bard · Annandale-on-Hudson
🎟️ Ticketed
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD
October 12–November 1
💃 Pam Tanowitz and the Pastoral: Artists in Conversation
Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum · Wednesday, October 14 · 5:30 PM · Free
🎷 The Cookers
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, October 16 · 7 PM · Ticketed
💃 Compagnie Hervé Koubi
Friday, October 16 — Union College
5–6:15 PM — Master class
6:30–7:30 PM — Lecture/demonstration
Free and open to the public · No registration
Saturday, October 17 — The Egg
6:15 PM — Pre-show talk
7 PM — Sol Invictus
Ticketed
🔬 UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week
October 19–23
The Albany Nanotechnology Symposium, October 22–23, is part of the week.
🚀 RPI Entrepreneur of the Year
Wednesday, October 21 · 1–3 PM · EMPAC Theater
Award ceremony, fireside chat with President Marty Schmidt, startup pitch competition and poster presentations.
📖 Garth Greenwell — Steloff Lecture
Skidmore College · Thursday, October 22 · 8 PM
🏛️ Danielle Allen — Kuroda Symposium
Skidmore College · Friday, October 23 · 5 PM
⚠️ CONFIRMED EVENT — PUBLIC ACCESS BEING VERIFIED — State of Grace 2026
UAlbany · Thursday, October 29 · 9 AM–4 PM · ETEC + Campus Center
The event, date, time and location are confirmed. Explicit 2026 general-public eligibility remains under verification.
🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, October 30 · 7 PM · Ticketed
🎬 Raiders of the Lost Ark in Concert
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College · October 31–November 1
Saturday · 7 PM
Sunday · 2 PM
🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
🧠 INTERFACE: Cognitive Science — Brett Fajen & Heidi Latsky
RPI / EMPAC · Thursday, November 12
Limited capacity · Reservations required
🎷 Ali Ryerson Quartet
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, November 13 · Ticketed
🎼 Gershwin, Jazz, and the Music of Jewish Émigrés
Regional Extension Watch — Bard College · November 14–15
🎄 Hansel and Gretel
Regional Extension Watch — Bard College · December 11 & 13
🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
CORE CAMPUSES
The Drunken City — UAlbany — Oct. 21–25 — Details
BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain — Skidmore College — Oct. 23–28 — Details / Tickets
Grease — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — Oct. 30–Nov. 8 — Details / Tickets
Rent — Siena University — Nov. 12–21 — Details / Tickets
A Doll’s House — UAlbany — Nov. 18–22 — Details / Tickets
This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — Nov. 20–Dec. 5 — Details / Tickets
Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — Dec. 2–10 — Details / Tickets
Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — Feb. 24–Mar. 3 — Details / Tickets
UAlbany Theatre Program Musical — title forthcoming — Mar. 3–7
REGIONAL EXTENSION
Rossum’s Universal Robots — Bard College — Oct. 23–25 — Details / Tickets
Wakka Wakka: Dead as a Dodo — Williams College — Nov. 7 — Details
Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play — Williams College — Nov. 19–21 — Details
📅 BY DAY CALENDAR
MONDAY — OCTOBER 5
1–2 PM — 🤖 AI Policy Town Hall — UAlbany
3–4:30 PM — 📚 Amy Reid — UAlbany
6–8 PM — ⚖️ Trading Places — UAlbany
7 PM — 🎭 The Giver — UAlbany
TUESDAY — OCTOBER 6
1:30–3 PM — 📚 Wait…THAT Book Is Banned? — UAlbany
2–3 PM — 🏛️ Who Is Government? — Albany Law / Albany Public Library
4–5 PM — 🥓 American Bacon — Union
7–9 PM — 🌍 Engage America — UAlbany
WEDNESDAY — OCTOBER 7
No qualifying timed events.
THURSDAY — OCTOBER 8
Noon — 🎺 Fiesta del Norte — HVCC
6 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 1 — Tang
6–7 PM — 🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio — EMPAC
6:30–7:30 PM — 📝 Susan Comninos, Janet Bowdan & Shira Dentz — Opalka
7–10 PM — 😂 Alan Zweibel — Williams
FRIDAY — OCTOBER 9
Noon–4 PM — 💻 Grapes 3D Workshop — EMPAC
2 PM — 🎶 Chinese and American Folk Songs — Bard
6 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 2 — Tang
7 PM — 🏃 Nicholas Thompson — UAlbany
7 PM — 🎹 Gilles Vonsattel — Bard
8 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 3 — Tang
SATURDAY — OCTOBER 10
11 AM–3 PM — 🔊 Lost in Liquid Noise — EMPAC
11 AM–12:30 PM — 🏛️ EMPAC Tour with Dena Beard
1 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 4 — Tang
2–3:30 PM — 👨👩👧 Tang Family Saturday
3–5 PM — 🎼 China Now: Chasing Dreams — Bard
3:30 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 5 — Tang
7 PM — 🎬 Whole Grain Program 6 — Tang
SUNDAY — OCTOBER 11
2 PM — 🖼️ Tang Guide Tour
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The colleges and universities around us produce an extraordinary amount of public programming. The challenge is finding it.
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CAPITAL REGION CURATED
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
Edited by Alan Koslow
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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
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Designed and Developed by Ta-Da Studios