MoCA Features Songwriter's Stage Producation

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Singer-songwriter Terry Allen, Photo Courtesy of MASS MoCA
NORTH ADAMS - Visual artist and singer-songwriter Terry Allen will take a break from working on his newest stage production, "Ghost Ship Rodez," for an "alt cab" performance at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art's Club B-10. Allen, here for a residency at Mass MoCA, will perform Saturday, Jan. 19, at 8 p.m. He has recorded 11 albums of original songs, including "Juarez," "Lubbock" and his most recent, "Salivation." The albums feature Allen's Texas accent and attitude, with text focusing on bizarre characters and biting observations. He also contributed a song to David Byrne's only feature film, "True Stories." The Boston Globe praises Allen as "utterly uncompromising, profoundly unsettling even at his most cheerful, and one of the most important musical voices around." Allen spent his formative years helping out at Jamboree Hall, an old church turned nightclub that his parents ran, where he was introduced to a steady stream of blues and country music acts including B.B. King and T-Bone Walker. He also often accompanied his mother, a piano player and jazz and blues musician, to her performances in Santa Fe. These experiences, as well as being raised in Lubbock, Texas, Buddy Holly's hometown where storytelling was a way of being and the people had, according to Allen, "a different outlook on life because of the way the horizon threatened to swallow everything whole," shaped his later work. Surrounded by other artists and performers in high school - such as Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, Flatlanders' Butch Hancock, Jo Carol Pierce, and his wife, Jo Harvey Allen - Allen, as well as the rest of these characters, would eventually become pioneers of contemporary country music's most progressive movement. Allen has made a career out of creating art based on how things are, not how they ought to be. His experience includes theatrical performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, video, installation, radio works and, of course, writing and performing his own music. He's the recipient of numerous awards and honors - including Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, Bessie (New York) and Isadora Duncan (San Francisco) Awards for text, music, sets, and costumes, and induction into the Buddy Holly Walk of Fame. Based on the life of French theater visionary, poet, and artist Antonin Artaud, "Ghost Ship Rodez" will be performed as a work-in-progress on Friday, Jan. 25, and Saturday, Jan. 26, in the Hunter Center. Tickets are $14 in advance/$18 day of show. MoCA members receive a 10 percent discount. Tickets are available at the box office off Marshall Street from 11 to 5, except Tuesdays. Tickets can also be charged by phone by calling 413-662-2111 during box office hours or purchased at www.massmoca.org
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SteepleCats Shut Out on Road

iBerkshires.com Sports
MONTPELIER, Vt. -- Four Vermont pitchers combined to strike out 11 and allow four hits Tuesday as the Mountaineers beat the North Adams SteepleCats, 11-0, in New England Collegiate Baseball League action.
 
Evan Meier, Bobby Stang, Tonny Woodie and Chris Diaz each had a hit for the SteepleCats, who used five pitchers in the loss.
 
North Adams (0-2) comes home Tuesday to host the Mystic Schooners at 6:30 p.m. at Joe Wolfe Field.
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