Support WBUR
This fall, find inspiration and hope in the arts
Editor's note: This story is an excerpt from WBUR's weekly arts and culture newsletter, The ARTery. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox, sign up here.
Fall has always felt like a season of renewal for me. A new school year beginning. Heading off to college. Moving to Boston. As the leaves turn and drop, it’s as if nature is urging us to shed the old and make way for the new.
Recently, that feeling of anticipation has been harder to find. There’s uncertainty in the air, especially among the institutions I treasure: public media, museums, libraries, national parks. Spaces that have been resources for an exchange of ideas or offered an escape are vulnerable.
What heartens me during such a fraught time is the way our local organizations are responding. At WBUR, we’re still here, showing up every day to bring you the news that matters. The musicians, theater practitioners, filmmakers, dancers, and other creators are meeting the moment through their artwork, as is evidenced in our fall arts guides. From the orchestra to the ballet to the stage, artists are offering a reason to be inspired and vital ways to look forward.
- Classical music concerts: WBUR arts critic Lloyd Schwartz rounds up a cornucopia of fall concerts, and some of the programs speak to our current challenges. Activist performance company White Snake Project explores race and climate change with the sci-fi fantasy opera “White Raven, Black Dove.” A Far Cry’s concert “Then is Now” uses music that “transforms recollection into revelation,” including a collection of Armenian folk songs that preserve a lineage almost silenced by genocide.
- Theater productions: From the dramatic to the whimsical, WBUR theater critic Jacquinn Sinclair highlights 16 fall productions. Front Porch and The Modern Theatre’s “The Mountaintop” reimagines Martin Luther King Jr.’s last evening before his assassination. American Repertory Theater stages a world premiere of the musical “Wonder,” based on the novel and film of the same name, a boy with facial differences encounters the kindness and cruelties of the world as his family members learn more about themselves.
- New local albums: This fall's album releases offer proof that New England musicians are creating music of the highest caliber, and WBUR music writer Noah Schaffer shares 14 that prove it. Skilled rapper Billy Dean Thomas’ “MX” is a record overflowing with joy and passion, celebrating the queer community on the track “Praise Latifah” and “Shaking Up the Charts,” made with nonbinary hip-hop artist Alice Dee. And the world-traveling Boston band Couch has its first full-length album coming out in October and will play Roadrunner in November, a venue that is a feat to book as a local act.
- Dance performances: This season’s dance events offer a variety of styles and perspectives. WBUR contributor Shira Laucharoen highlights 12 performances, including beheard.world at The Dance Complex with a program that blends poetry and dance and aims to bring people from different cultural backgrounds together. Camille A. Brown & Dancers come to town with a piece about self-discovery called “I AM,” inspired by an episode of the sci-fi horror show “Lovecraft Country.”
- Film festivals: WBUR film critic Erin Trahan shares 10 film events that balance hope with tense reality. Screening at the Newburyport Documentary Film Festival, “Checkpoint Zoo” follows workers at a Ukrainian zoo who, along with their friends and neighbors, work to relocate hundreds of wild animals to safer locations as Russia invades the country. At the Boston Asian American Film Festival, “Love, Chinatown” documents two tai chi classmates born two generations apart, both born in Boston, as they reflect on the neighborhood and its evolution.
- Art exhibits: As WBUR contributor Maddie Browning writes, many of the season’s fall exhibits reflect on current injustices and future triumphs. The ICA’s “An Indigenous Present” showcases work from 100 years of contemporary Indigenous artistic practices, including new, site-specific commissions. The Gardner Museum presents a tribute to a Boston artist, a civic leader and storyteller. “Alan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory” will feature works from his decades-long career documenting the Black community, gentrification and the changing demographics of the city he loved.
Stay tuned for our fall books guide, publishing early next week.
