The University of Massachusetts Amherst Fine Arts Center has unveiled its new season, and it’s one that most will not want to miss.
For the center’s 2016-17 season, music, ranging from jazz to Indian ragas to classical guitar, is a big part of the agenda, as is a wide range of dance, with companies from Canada, Australia, the United States and Japan among the performers.
Highlights include an Oct. 30 performance by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, one of Poland’s most distinguished musical ensembles, with a history dating to the early 1900s. And the multiple Tony-winning musical “Once,” with actors/musicians who play their instruments onstage, comes to the FAC Dec. 1.
Cinema also gets its due, with a twist. “Birdman,” the 2015 Oscar winner for Best Picture starring Michael Keaton, will be shown Nov. 15 — and jazz drummer Antonio Sanchez will accompany the film live, recreating the score he played on what proved to be a Grammy-winning soundtrack for the film.
Among a wealth of other performances in its new season, the FAC will host Contra-Tiempo, an activist, multilingual dance company from Los Angeles, on Oct. 6, for the group’s new project, “Agua Furiosa” (“Raging Water”). The new show, inspired in part by Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” encompasses racial conflict, inequality, gun violence and the politics of water and drought, and it blends salsa, hip-hop and other contemporary dance styles with electronic music.
Another show promising lots of movement: the Nov. 9 appearance by the Shanghai Acrobats of the People’s Republic of China. The award-winning group, which has performed in over 30 countries, will offer its newest work, “Shanghai Nights,” in which more than 100 acrobats dramatize “the hustle and bustle of contemporary Shanghai with China’s rich cultural heritage.”
And among several jazz concerts, a Feb. 16 show at the FAC will celebrate the work of two seminal American composers, Jelly Roll Morton and George Gershwin, as two rising stars — pianist Aaron Diehl and Grammy-winning vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant — combine to offer “energetic interpretations” of the composers’ work.
For details on this and other FAC shows, visit: www.fineartscenter.com