Eric McDonald and Katie McNally. Photograph by J. Michael McNally.

Postponed because of a February snowstorm, the third annual Bates College Folk Music Festival takes place at last with three days of contradancing, workshops and performances beginning at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 9, at campus locations to be announced.

The event is open to the public. Admission fees vary according to ability to pay — from $5 to $20 for one day, and $10 to $30 for all three days. No one will be turned away for inability to pay. Tickets are available at the door.

Performers include the Scottish-Latin fusion band Alba’s Edge; the Scottish-influenced, Boston-based duo of Katie McNally and Eric McDonald; the Bates student band Chase the Fiddlers; the Midcoast fiddle and mandolin duo Velocipede; Press Gang, an Irish-music trio from Portland; and local string players Greg and Jessie Boardman.

The Press Gang is a Celtic-music trio based in Portland, Maine.

The event is sponsored by the Freewill Folk Society, a student organization at Bates. For more information, please contact mpickof2@bates.edu or visit batesfolkfest.weebly.com/.

The event opens Thursday with a 7 p.m. fiddle tune workshop, followed at 8 p.m. by Chase the Fiddlers and Velocipede.

A 6:30 p.m. contradance begins Friday’s activities. Student bands perform from 8 to 9 p.m., The Press Gang till 10:30, and the evening concludes with a singing circle and jam session.

On Saturday, workshops take place from 9:30 till 11 a.m. McNally and McDonald perform from 11:30 to 12:30 p.m., followed by an outdoor contradance until 2:30. Student bands perform until 3:30, and then there’s a break in the action until evening.

A 7:30 contradance runs till 9 p.m., followed by an Alba’s Edge concert from 9 to 11 and a singing circle and jam session until 1 a.m.

About the performers

Alba’s Edge draws on jazz, funk and the music of Cuba and Brazil, infusing traditional Scottish melodies with new ideas. Based in New York City and Boston, Alba’s Edge is led by pianist Neil Pearlman.

Greg and Jessie Boardman play traditional music on fiddle and cello.

Chase the Fiddlers play traditional French-Canadian fiddle music along with Irish, bluegrass and old-time dance music and songs.

Alba’s Edge. From left, Doug Berns, bassist; Neil Pearlman, pianist; Lilly Pearlman, fiddler; Jacob Cole, percussionist. At Bates, Katie McNally will fill in for Lilly Pearlman.

Katie McNally and Eric McDonald, musical partners since high school, blend Scottish influences with diverse other sounds, and carefully arranged traditional pieces with original compositions.

The Press Gang, composed of squeezebox player Christian “Junior” Stevens, fiddler Alden Robinson and guitarist Owen Marshall, performs all over the Northeast and into Atlantic Canada.

Velocipede, featuring fiddle tunes from around the world, consists of Julia Plumb, a member of the Bates class of 2005 who plays fiddle, viola and foot percussion; and Baron Collins-Hill, on mandolin and tenor guitar.

Postell Pringle ’98 (left, as Othello) and GQ (Iago) face off as Iago’s plot unfolds in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of “Othello: The Remix.” Photograph by Michael Brosilow.

Rapper, writer, actor and director Postell Pringle ’98 is winning rave reviews for his star turn this spring in the title role of Othello: The Remix at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

In March, Time Out Chicago named Pringle its Performer of the Week. In a Time Out Q-and-A , he discussed how working in theater at Bates sharpened his delivery as a rapper:

“My approach to the actual attack of the line and getting punchlines and the arc of the storytelling within the song was all different. I realized that it had to do with the fact that I had just been working on acting, working on playing characters. … I wouldn’t be as good of a rapper if I hadn’t spent all that time working on just acting and just theater.”

Othello: The Remix was adapted from Shakespeare’s tragedy by the Q Brothers — aka GQ and JQ, who with Pringle and a fourth member are also members of the rap group the Retar Crew. The entire Crew performs in The Remix.

The Q’s modus operandi, previously exercised on such works as The Bomb-itty of Errors, is to render Shakespeare’s entire text as rhyming couplets suitable for rap delivery. The Remix re-imagines the title character as “a hip-hop mogul whose life falls apart when he makes Iago the opener’s opener on a new tour,” writes Time Out blogger Oliver Sava.

“To cut to the chase: Othello: The Remix — the 90-minute, lightning-fast, hip-hop version of Shakespeare’s tragic tale of jealousy and self-doubt — is absolutely brilliant, and immense fun,” wrote Chicago Sun-Times theater critic Hedy Weiss.

With Bates classmate Erin Gottwald, a dancer and choreographer, Pringle returns to campus this spring to lead the longstanding Short Term unit Tour Teach Perform, in which students create a dance piece and teach it to pupils in local schools.

• See the Chicago Time Out story about Pringle from March 21, 2013.
• See the Chicago Sun-Times review.
• See Pringle and Gottwald in their collaborative piece “Last Chance.”

After Whitten’s blog post recommended Slave to Sensation, there was a run on the romance novel at Maine libraries.

In its profile of Sarah Whitten ’94, recently named Librarian of the Year by the country’s romance writers, the Bangor Daily News explains the influence Whitten wields over Maine’s romance readers.

An active blogger for the Bangor Public Library blog Not Your Ordinary Book Banter — “for readers who love popular fiction, edgy and uncensored” — Whitten announced in February 2011 that Nalini Singh’s Slave to Sensation was the blog’s top vote-getter for book of the month.

Within 24 hours of her post, every copy in the state library system had been borrowed.

The organization Romance Writers of America recognized Whitten as Librarian of the Year for “making a significant online library presence supporting the romance genre.”

Whitten, a circulation assistant at Bangor Public Library who several years ago co-founded the library’s Not Your Ordinary Book Club, tells reporter Ardeana Hamlin that her interest in romance novels was “kept that under wraps” at Bates, when the literary genre was anything but appreciated.

“People would be surprised by how much romance novels have changed,” Whitten says. “No longer does a woe-is-me heroine need to be rescued by the hero. Heroines are much more independent, confident and strong.”

• View story from the April 3, 2013, Bangor Daily News

Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Julia Foxworth ’13 of New York City, at right, spent much of April 5 “bombing” a bench on Alumni Walk — yarn bombing, that is.

Aka “guerrilla knitting” and “grandma graffiti,” yarn bombing is a genre of street art designed to raise awareness of the community environment, and inspire conversation and collaboration. Seeking to bring color and warmth to a concrete bench during a time of year that’s drab, chilly and stressful (finals are next week), Foxworth crocheted the piece with the help of 15 collaborators.

Later in the afternoon, other students were expected to celebrate the piece with ukulele playing, cupcakes, poetry, guerrilla knitting and other creative expressions. “The more color, the more collaborators, the better,” said Foxworth, shown above with classmate and fellow crocheter John Sowles. “The piece reflects the diversity of Bates.”

The piece was welcomed with simultaneous cries of “That’s so cool!” from passers-by. With the guidance of associate professor Pamela Johnson, art and visual culture major Foxworth undertook this project as an independent study complementary to her art history thesis. After Bates, Foxworth is off to a master’s program in arts administration at Columbia.

Novelist Ron Currie Jr. Photograph by Lisa Prosienski.

The Language Arts Live series of literary readings at Bates College welcomes Ron Currie Jr., an award-winning author from Waterville, to read from his work at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 27, in the Edmund Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Admission is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6256. The Language Arts Live series is sponsored by the English department and the John Tagliabue Fund at Bates.

A native and lifelong resident of Waterville, Currie is known for mixing fantasy with reality, shock with hilarity and themes of huge import with close personal detail. His new book, Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (Penguin Group, 2013), was described by the Bangor Daily News as a “raw, intimate blend of memoir and fiction” that depicts traumatic and transformative events in the life of a stylized version of Currie.

“Artificial intelligence, bar fights, intense self-reflection, writing, love and death are just some of the themes present” in the book, wrote Daily News reporter Emily Burnham.

Currie, she continued, takes a kind of kitchen-sink approach to advancing his narrative. “If it furthers the story, if it adds flavor and depth and excitement, Currie will mix it in, be it unsentimental depictions of sex, or achingly intimate passages about the sad, slow death of his father.”

Currie’s Everything Matters! (Penguin Group, 2009), his second book and Amazon’s “Best of the Month” in June 2009, is the story of a man born knowing exactly when and how the world will end.

“Currie shows an appreciation for whimsical storytelling, leaning on unlikely chains of events and multiple perspectives to tell what could otherwise be a very dark tale,” Publisher’s Weekly wrote about the book.

“The big decision he makes toward the end recasts the story in a strangely hopeful light and lends a pile of emotional currency to the book’s title.”

Currie’s debut, God is Dead (Penguin Group, 2007), earned him favorable comparisons to renowned American novelists Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver. God is Dead received the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York City Public Library and the American Academy of Arts and Letter’s Metcalf Award.

Currie graduated from Colby College. His work has appeared in such print and online magazines as Glimmer Train, The Sun, Other Voices and The Nervous Breakdown, and he blogs for The Huffington Post.

“Volkswagen Van” (2013), an inkjet print by Amanda Wescott ’13.

The Bates College Museum of Art announces its spring exhibitions, featuring the annual show of work by graduating studio art majors, a display of recent museum acquisitions and a show of drawings by renowned Maine artist Dozier Bell.

The Senior Thesis Exhibition 2013 opens with a reception at 6 p.m. Friday, April 5, and runs through May 25. More about the Senior Thesis Exhibition.

Dozier Bell: Mind’s Eye and Selections from the Permanent Collection: Recent Acquisitions open on April 6, with an opening reception taking place at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 11. They too continue through May 25. More about Dozier Bell: Mind’s Eye. | More about Selections from the Permanent Collection: Recent Acquisitions.

The museum is located in the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. Exhibitions and related programming are open to the public at no cost. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and until 7 p.m. Wednesdays while the college is in session. For more information, please call 207-786-6158 or visit the website.

The Bates Dance Company in November 2012. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Featuring aerial performances, works exploiting the capabilities of video, and a total of some 70 student participants, the Bates College Dance Company offers After Affects, its annual spring concert series, in performances in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St.

Performances take place at 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 29; at 5 p.m. Saturday, March 30; at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 31; and at 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 1.

The company presents two different programs over the four nights. Program A will be performed Friday and Sunday and Program B on Saturday and Monday.  Admission is $6 for the general public and $3 for seniors and students, and one ticket is good for attendance at all performances. Tickets are available at batestickets.com. For more information, please call 207-786-6161.

The programs comprise a mix of jazz, hip hop and modern dance created by students in composition and advanced composition courses. Three students in an independent study program perform with aerial straps, hoops and silks. Dance major Kirsten Pianka will offer a senior thesis.

The aerial work is new to Bates, and involved a residency with Chicago aerialist Andrew Adams, a member of the college class of 1999, and his performing partner Helena Reynolds. The student aerial performers are:

Travis Jones ’13 at work last summer as an instructor at the Trapeze School New York. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Travis Jones, a senior who performs on straps of thin fabric that wrap around the arms and function something like gymnastic rings; Alison Haymes, a first-year student who works with a metal hoop; and Kelsey Schober, a first-year student who performs on silks — long, broad colorful fabrics that hang from the fly space.

“We received a grant from the Harward Center for Community Partnerships to bring Andrew and Helena here for two weeks this winter,” explains Rachel Boggia, assistant professor of dance. “They worked with more than 60 students, teaching basic aerial skills and conditioning.”

Two sophomores will present works involving video. Talia Mason’s “Empty House” uses a video projection to create an environment for three dancers to perform in. The work is one of two in the program to feature an original score by junior Conor Smith, a music composition student.

Working with videographer Joshua Ajamu, a junior, Tomisha Edwards created a dance for the camera that will be shown on screen. “Video is an important aspect of contemporary dance composition, and I’m proud that we are teaching our students these skills,” says Boggia, herself a video dance artist.

Senior dance major Pianka looked to theories of urban spawl for inspiration while choreographing her thesis, “What I Know About Crocker Park.” She says,  “Groups form and re-form, creating dynamics that shift and respond to the spaces and people around them, but ultimately fall back into the same repressive patterns.”

The concerts are distinguished by the number of collaborations between student choreographers, musical composers and designers of lighting and costumes. “We’ve had weekly production meetings to facilitate this large number of collaborations,” says Boggia. “We are bursting at the seams — there are so many creative ideas.”

The weekend following After Affects also features a Bates dance offering. Dance major Zoë Fahy will perform a site-specific dance thesis, “359°,” at the Bates Mill Complex above Museum L-A, 35 Canal St. Fahy performs the 20-minute piece at 7:30 and 8 p.m., with a short intermission for Q&A, on Friday and Saturday, April 5 and 6. A student shuttle to the mill leaves from the steps of Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave., at 7 p.m. Admission is free, but tickets are required: batestickets.com. FMI 207-786-6161.

The Bates Gamelan Orchestra in March 2011. Photograph by Simone Schriger ’14.

In a program titled Mebarung! — a Balinese term for a sort of “battle of the bands” between gamelan ensembles — the Bates Gamelan Orchestra welcomes the Massachusetts group Gamelan Galak Tika for a joint performance at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 24, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Featuring two world premieres, and performances of dance as well as music, the concert is open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

Gamelan is a classical genre of music indigenous to Bali and Java, in Indonesia. The instruments consist mostly of tuned percussion, and tend to be created in sets comprising a variety of instruments — Bates owns two sets. Singing and wind instruments are also part of the gamelan tradition.

Gamelan is a living musical force, sustained by Indonesian and Western composers who respect traditional idioms while staying contemporary in both compositional and performance practices.

Gamelan Galak Tika.

Peter Steele, visiting instructor of music at Bates, directs the Bates ensemble. Gamelan Galak Tika is directed by composer Evan Ziporyn, recently appointed inaugural director of the Center of Art, Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“In Bali, mebarung performances showcase the brilliance of two competing gamelan groups on a shared stage,” Steele explains. “These events are hotly anticipated and typically show off a myriad of artistic styles, both classical and contemporary.”

The Bates concert features two new works by a prominent Balinese composer, I Dewa Ketut Alit. Also on the program, along with classical Javanese and Balinese pieces, are Ziporyn’s groundbreaking fusion works, “Tire Fire” and “Amok” for Balinese gamelan and electro-acoustic instruments.

Finally, the gamelans will accompany dances performed by students in the course World Dance Forms: Balinese Dance, taught by guest artist Shoko Yamamuro.

The Bates College Gamelan Orchestra is an Indonesian-music study and performance group that, among other roles, provides ceremonial music for college events. The gamelan plays music of West and Central Java, as well as new music for gamelan.

Steele is a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, where for four years he directed the Gamelan Wira Surya. His dissertation examines the global popularity of Balinese performing arts in the 21st century. Active as a performer and composer, Steele wrote “Mornings Well Augured” for the Bates gamelan to perform at the October 2012 installation ceremony for Bates President Clayton Spencer.

Gamelan Galak Tika has been at the forefront of innovative music for Balinese gamelan since 1993. The ensemble has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, several Bang on a Can Marathons, the Cleveland Museum of Art and colleges throughout the Northeast. In 2005 the group toured Bali.

Galak Tika is dedicated to commissioning and performing new works by Balinese and American composers, as well as performing traditional Balinese music and dance. “Galak tika” is classical Javanese for “intense togetherness.”

Ziporyn is an American clarinetist, composer, the founder and director of Gamelan Galak Tika, and a founding member of the acclaimed Bang on a Can All-Stars. He writes boundary-crossing music with a downtown experimental sensibility. His compositions have been performed by Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project and the Kronos Quartet, among other artists.

Alit is generally acknowledged as the leading composer of his generation in Bali. He has collaborated with dancers and musicians from around the world, including Ziporyn and Gamelan Galak Tika. He is regularly invited to teach and compose for gamelan outside Bali.

Seeking a wider path for his approach to new music in gamelan, Alit founded his own gamelan group in 2007, Gamelan Salukat, performing on a new set of instruments of Alit’s own tuning and design.

Hiroya Miura conducts the Bates College Orchestra. Photograph: Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Three Bates seniors are featured as instrumental soloists in works by Franz Strauss, Max Bruch and Wolfgang Mozart as the Bates College Orchestra performs at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 9, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Admission is free, but tickets are required. To reserve, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The Bates orchestra is conducted by Hiroya Miura, associate professor of music. The March 9 program comprises five works:

Edvard Grieg’s music for Peer Gynt, Suite No. 1;

the first movement of Strauss’s Horn Concerto No. 1, featuring hornist Molly Bruzzese of West Hartford, Conn.;

Bruch’s Romance for Viola and Orchestra, with Jessica Cooper of Unionville, Conn., as soloist;

the first movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major (K. 622), showcasing clarinetist Catherine Tuttle of Pittsford, N.Y.;

and Maurice Ravel’s Ma mère l’oye (“Mother Goose Suite”).

“We hosted a concerto competition this year,” Miura explains, “and with the high level of musicianship these three students showed, I was glad to program not just one, but three varied movements with three soloists.”

The program is further distinguished by its literary connections, Miura points out. Grieg originally wrote the Peer Gynt material in 1875 as incidental music for Ibsen’s play, while Ravel’s 1910 Mother Goose Suite was a response to children’s stories by Mother Goose Tales author Charles Perrault and others.

“The Ravel and Grieg are phantasmagorical, colorful suites,” Miura says. “Perrault wrote Ma mère l’oye for his own children, but some of the stories are quite poignant with a great sense of irony—like many of these children’s fables are.

“Grieg shares that humor and irony, but more blatantly, and both composers treated these stories masterfully while carefully balancing the sense of fantasy and ironic humor.”

Franz Strauss, father of the better-known composer Richard, was celebrated as a master of the horn. The first of his two concertos for the instrument, this work in C minor was premiered by the composer in 1865.

Bruch is known as a composer in the German Romantic vein exemplified by Brahms. He published his Romance for Viola and Orchestra in F major (Op. 85), one of the few Romantic-era compositions with viola as lead instrument, in 1911.

A standard audition piece for clarinetists, the first movement of the Mozart concerto is an allegro. Written in 1791 and one of the composer’s last compositions, the concerto as a whole is characterized by the delicacy of the conversation between soloist and orchestra.

Heartbeat.

Bates presents the young Israeli and Palestinian musicians of Heartbeat, a band seeking to use music to promote peace in the Middle East, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 27, in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St. A reception follows the performance.

Admission is open to the public at no cost. The event is sponsored by the Multifaith Chaplaincy, the Student Government, the Student Activities Office, Bridges for Peace, J Street, Hillel, the Arts House, and several other Bates departments and organizations. For more information, please call 207-786-8272.

Heartbeat, an ensemble of Arab and Jewish artists aged 17 to 21, has performed across Israel, the Palestinian territories and Germany. Their program features uplifting performances interweaving traditional and modern music from East and West.

Members also share experiences of growing up amidst the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, highlighting their creative effort to build a better future.

Based in Jerusalem, Heartbeat is an international nonprofit organization uniting musicians, educators and students to build mutual understanding and transform conflict through the power of music.

Founded in 2007 with support from a Fulbright-mtvU Award, Heartbeat creates opportunities and spaces for young Israeli and Palestinian musicians to work together, hear each other and amplify their voices to influence the world around them. Sharing in sustained music-based dialogue, Heartbeat artists develop creative nonviolent tools to express themselves and become voices for their communities.

Heartbeat seeks to combat the tidal wave of separation, fear, violence and injustice in the Middle East with powerful sounds and voices calling for cooperation, equality and peace.