EVENTS

Friday, October 9
7:00 PM
$10 or $15 Sliding Scale Admission
Black Box Theater

Join celebrated writers Jo Ann Beard and Mary-Beth Hughes for an evening of readings and conversation exploring artistic inspiration and literary kinship. Please join us for a reception in our Lobby Gallery following the conversation. 

Presented in partnership with A Public Space as part of the Weekend Writers' Retreat, an annual long weekend of writing, reading, and conversation hosted by Kaatsbaan.

Jo Ann Beard’s books include the essay collections The Boys of My Youth and Festival Days, which was a New York Times Notable Book and Boston Globe Best Book of the Year; and the novel In Zanesville (all Little, Brown). The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard was published last year by Serpent’s Tail. The recipient of a Whiting Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, she teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Mary-Beth Hughes is the author of two novels, Wavemaker II and The Loved Ones; a story collection, Double Happiness, and, most recently, The Ocean House, a novel in stories (all Grove). She has been a DeWitt-Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellow at MacDowell, the Director’s Guest at Civitella Ranieri, and a guest at Yaddo. She has taught creative writing at Pratt Institute, NYU, Skidmore College, Bennington College Writing Seminars, and A Public Space.

Saturday, October 17
6:00 PM
$40 General Admission | $20 Student Admission (with student ID)
Black Box Theater

Vernard J. Gilmore returns to Kaatsbaan with an evening of mixed-repertoire performances. Leading with work he choreographed and danced during his career as a professional dancer at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Gilmore will also feature new works by his company, La Verdad. Since retiring from a three-decade career with Alvin Ailey, Gilmore has been passionately developing new works imbued with personal stories and meaning. For this evening’s performance, he remounts repertory La Muette and new works developed while in residence at Kaatsbaan in April and this fall.

Revisiting and recasting work that premiered in 2017 at New York City Center, La Muette Reimagining explores the vulnerability of emotion—the unspoken truths that gather in the quiet den of ourselves. Centered on the weight carried in the Black American experience, this excerpt examines the constant demand to fit, to endure, to rise above. Home, a solo from La Verdad’s Unchainable Voices, speaks to the weight of losing one of life’s anchors. A striking blow of surrender, the solo navigates grief, memory, and the delicate search for balance. ERECT is a glimpse of a life unfolding—a search for meaning within the experiences that shape us, a journey that will return us to the vastness from which we came.

Of his time in residence, Gilmore shares that Kaatsbaan is a place where “ideas become language, language becomes movement, and movement becomes shared experience.”