SARATOGA SPRINGS — Legendary performance artist Penny Arcade will serve as the visiting artist showcased in the Tang Museum’s final Dunkerley Dialogue of the 2024-25 season. 

The event – Penny Arcade in conversation with Skidmore professor Joseph Cermatori – will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 24 at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.  

Penny Arcade, aka Susana Ventura, was a teenage superstar for Andy Warhol’s Factory, featured in the film Women in Revolt. She is an international icon of artistic resistance whose social practice is focused on the support of other artists and on the preservation of artist legacies, including the work of Sheyla Baykal (1944-1997) whose photographs are part of the Tang Museum’s monumental exhibition of 100 years of queer art, a field of bloom and hum. 

She has co-helmed The Lower East Side Biography Project, a video oral history of downtown New York that broadcasts and streams every Monday at 11 p.m., and is the author of 16 full-length works, hundreds of performances pieces, lectures, and interviews, all available online. 

She last visited Saratoga Springs in June 2018 during a 10-day residency in Saratoga Springs organized by the Orchard Project. An interview conducted with this reporter during her stay at a Spring Street apartment may be read at: https://www.punkglobe.com/pennyarcade1218.php.  

The dialogue April 24 will take place in the exhibition, a field of bloom and hum, which fills the Museum’s two floors with work by more than 160 artists in a celebration of queer identities and communities. The Tang’s upstairs gallery, the Malloy Wing, features two stages created for exhibition-related events like the Dunkerley Dialogues. Dunkerley Dialogues pair Skidmore professors with artists in a conversational format. 

Admission to the museum and to the events is free. For more information, contact the Tang Visitors Services Desk at 518-580-8080 or visit https://tang.skidmore.edu.

HUDSON FALLS — The band EXTC – featuring the music of XTC and the band’s drummer Terry Chambers – will perform at 8 p.m. on Saturday April 12 at the Strand Theatre.

Terry Chambers with his band EXTC was named and approved by XTC frontman, Andy Partridge.

XTC experienced global success after their emergence in the late ‘70s and toured with the likes of The Police and Talking Heads. 

In 1982 XTC stopped touring to become a studio-based entity. Born in early 2019, EXTC set out to achieve its goals of performing to audiences who had waited so long to hear the XTC back catalogue performed live.

Alongside Chambers, the EXTC line-up features frontman Steve Hampton (lead vocals & guitar – Joe Jackson, The Vapors and Dead Crow Road) and Terry Lines (bass & vocals – The Rams and Dead Crow Road). 

Tickets are $30 general admission and available at the Strand Box Office; cash or check only or online at Brown Paper Tickets. Doors into the lobby, coffee shop and box office open at 6:30 p.m. For the ticketing link, visit www.mystrandtheatre.org. The Strand Theatre is located at 210 Main St, Hudson Falls. 

SARATOGA SPRINGS — A new public fixture in Congress Park celebrates the memory of David Cassidy. Saturday marks what would have been his 75th birthday.  

Cassidy was born April 12, 1950, and was a longtime Saratoga Springs visitor and eventual resident.  The popular singer and horseman died in November 2017 at the age of 67. 

Cassidy charted more than one dozen Top 100 hits in the early 1970s, both as a solo artist and in his role as a member of The Partridge Family – whose TV series aired on ABC from 1970 to 1974. 

For several decades, Cassidy was a frequent summer visitor to Saratoga Springs – the city in general and the racecourse specifically, purchasing his first yearling at Fasig-Tipton in 1974. Cassidy eventually purchased a house in the Spa City in 2001.

“This is my favorite place in the world, I played here in ‘72, ‘73, ‘74,” Cassidy said about the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, during a 2008 fundraising gala at the adjacent Hall of Springs. 

The bench fixed with a plaque honoring Cassidy stands in Congress Park just behind the Canfield Casino.  It was recently commissioned by Shelley Murphy and installed and reads, in part: In Loving Memory of David Bruce Cassidy.

SARATOGA SPRINGS — In May, Universal Preservation Hall will activate its space in an innovative way, presenting an immersive take on a “sound bath” – The RESET – created and performed by renowned singer and sound healing artist Davin Youngs. 

Audiences are invited to bring yoga mats, pillows, and blankets to cozy in and enjoy what is anticipated a profound experience.

Created and performed by Davin Youngs, The RESET transforms iconic venues into sanctuaries of stillness and sound, elevating the mind, body, and spirit. 

Using improvisational singing, looping devices, crystal-singing bowls, tuning forks, and electronic beats, Youngs weaves a sonic tapestry that reflects the unique beauty of the inner landscape. The RESET has been enthusiastically received at iconic venues like The Kennedy Center, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, and The Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville and the roof of Ace Hotel. 

The event takes place 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 10. Tickets are on sale through the Box Office at Proctors in person, via phone at 518-346-6204 Tuesday- Saturday 12-6 p.m. or online by visiting atuph.org. Groups of 10 or more can get the group discount by calling 518-382-3884 x 139. 

SARATOGA SPRINGS — “When was the last time we had a Haitian voodoo priestess in town?” Proctors Collaborative Passport Series curator Mona Golub asked the crowd, introducing Moonlight Benjamin to the stage at Universal Preservation Hall on March 29. 

Infused with the guttural boogie of two guitars, bass and drums, Moonlight Benjamin spilled Haitian Creole syllables backed by a catchy beat during a rollicking 90-minute performance with multiple encores in Saratoga Springs on Saturday night.  

The lyrics fused French and African languages with a dash of Spanish, here, Portuguese and Aramaic, there. The music: a pastiche revelry merging garage blues with searing guitar runs. The audience expressed their love for every minute of it.  

High marks to Universal Preservation Hall and Proctors Collaborative for bringing the seldom-heard-in-these-parts sounds to town and for providing audiences the opportunity to engage in the shared joy of music as being the ultimate coalescence of all souls.

SARATOGA SPRINGS — From its humble beginnings at Caffè Lena with a production of Wait Until Dark, to their most recent production of Hamlet at the Saratoga Music Hall, Home Made Theater – which was founded in 1985, has striven to bring quality community theater to the Saratoga region. 

To celebrate the milestone the company will be hosting a 40th Season Celebration. Join members of the HMT family on either Friday, April 25, or on Saturday, April 26 at The Mansion of Saratoga on Route 29 in Rock City Falls.

The evening will start at 6 p.m. with hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar. There will be a silent auction, raffle baskets, and a musical preview of the company’s next production, Oklahoma!. A three-course dinner will follow at 7. 

The highlight of the evening will be a murder mystery performance, ’Til Death Do Us Part: A Marital Murder Mystery to Die For. This interactive theatrical experience will feature prizes for solving the mystery of “whodunit.” The mystery will have a different solution each evening to avoid “spoilers.”

Tickets for Celebration Guests are $100. Honorary Guest tickets are $140 and include a $40 donation to Home Made Theater in honor of 40 years. Full tables of eight are available at a discounted price. To purchase tickets, visit Home Made Theater’s website at www.HomeMadeTheater.org by April 23.

SARATOGA SPRINGS — Universal Preservation Hall in Saratoga Springs hosted the seventh class of inductees into the Capital Region Thomas Edison Music Hall of Fame on Monday, March 24. 

The Class of 2025 inductees include Charlene Shortsleeve – nightlife curator of Albany’s 288 Lark, and founder of the legendary downtown Albany QE2 Club; percussionist Brian Melick; folk artist Dan Berggren, SIRSY duo Melanie Krahmer and Rich Libutti; and the groups Emerald City, Stony Creek Band, The Clay People, and The Sharks. 

“I just want to thank all the bands, poets, actors, the drag queens and vampires and all the sordid people,” Charlene Shortsleeve said from the stage during her acceptance speech.

The Capital Region Thomas Edison Music Hall of Fame honors local individuals who have made outstanding contributions to, or significant impact on the evolution, development, and perpetuation of the music industry. UPH in Saratoga Springs is the permanent location of the Hall of Fame.