Brazilian pianist Heloísa Fernandes first played in the Kerrytown Concert House in 2014. She's returning to Ann Arbor for the second time on Friday, February 21, but this will be the third time she's played for the venue.

Like many clubs during the pandemic, Kerrytown Concert House hosted concerts on its YouTube page featuring artists performing at home. On July 11, 2021, Fernandes performed a solo 50-minute set from her living room in São Luiz do Paraitinga, a city in the eastern part of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The local connection that brought together Ann Arbor and São Paulo was Musica Extraordinaria, an artists' representative org run by Tree Town's Michael Grofsorean.

The video below gives you a taste of what you'll hear when Fernandes physically returns to Kerrytown for a solo concert that will serve as something of a warm-up to record her next album. Fernandes spent most of this American tour in a quartet, exploring the jazz-classical-Brazilian hybrid she's explored her whole career. But after playing in Ann Arbor, Fernandes will go to Chicago for one more concert and to record her latest solo album, Dream of the Waters, which will be a mix of older originals and a new series of works inspired by a 2023 stay she had in the Amazon forest. 

Check out her 2021 virtual Kerrytown Concert House show below: 

From the outside, Ann Arbor conjures the image of a pastoral place. It’s in the name, suggesting a shady nook of trees and hedges and daisies.

For those with ears tuned to the bellicose joys of distorted guitars, drum battalions, and the expression of unfettered frustration, however, Ann Arbor is where punk rock began. A pair of brothers named Asheton eschewed formal lessons for more physical forms of musicality back in 1967, resulting in a band called The Stooges and coloring the history of this otherwise-typical college town forever.

Countless malignant youths have tried to re-create that magic in our tiny burg ever since. Ann Arbor sired other noisy acts who put their own stamp on the form, some who broke beyond our borders and many who didn’t, but loud music remains our birthright. Since 1995, a band called Mazinga has been coming together to conjure heavy sounds out of the ether, with regular hiatuses taken to weather the vagaries of fate, negotiate the cruel realities of an underground music economy, and recharge creative batteries with outside projects.

The four townies in question include drummer Donny Blum, vocalist and lyricist Marc McFinn, guitarist Chris “Box” Taylor, and bassist and in-house graphic artist Big Tony Fero, aka Rubber Wolf. Beyond their duties in Mazinga, all of them have helped move and shake local heavy culture in other area bands. Taylor in particular doubles as mastermind of the annual punk/metal/noise pageant Fuzz Fest (the 10th installment will be this August) and served time in local acts Blue Snaggletooth, The Avatars, and Powertrane.

In January, the University of Michigan Organ Department launched a new recital series in conjunction with St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, 306 North Division Street in Ann Arbor near Kerrytown. The Division Street Pipes concerts happen every Thursday at 12:15 pm and the free 30-minute shows feature students and faculty performing on the church's exquisite organ. Attendees are welcome to bring in their lunches, too.

Upcoming performers include:
February 20 - Nicholas Welch, BM student
February 27 - Ben Sidoti, BM student
March 6 - Ye Mee Kim, DMA student

The series continues until April 24 (with a break on April 17 for Maundy Thursday). Visit the announcement page for more info.

Below is The Division Street Pipes's debut concert from January 16 featuring the playing of master’s student Oliver Steissberg:

To whom or what do we owe ethical consideration? What circumstances call for morality?

University of Michigan professor Webb Keane argues that the answer to these questions is inextricably linked to our personal context in his new book, Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination.

People don’t live moral life in the abstract, they live it within specific circumstances and social relations, with certain capacities, constraints and long-term consequences. Put another way, you simply cannot live out the values of a Carmelite nun without a monastic system, or a Mongolian warrior without a calvary, and the respective social, economic and cultural systems that sustain them and acknowledge their worth.

We are who we are—and we make decisions—based on the situations in which we find ourselves, according to Keane.

Animals, Robots, Gods contains five chapters along with an introduction and coda. In the introduction, Keane starts by sharing that one of the premises of the book is the question, “What is a human being anyway?” and says that, “we will explore the range of ethical possibilities and challenges that take place at the edge of the human.” As he shows, the delineation is not always so clear.

Even as I accepted the assignment to attend and write about asses.masses—a daylong collaborative video game art installation brought to Ann Arbor on February 15-16 by UMS—I wondered why I’d made this choice.

It would take me away from my family for nearly an entire Saturday (the program ran from 1-9:30 pm); I’d have to drive from Farmington to Stamps Auditorium on a snowy, freezing February day, all too aware that I’d also be hosting guests in my home the next morning; I had no idea what kind of food would be provided at the event; and while I’m an absolute puzzle fiend, I’m decidedly not a gamer. (The whole idea of Twitch, where viewers can watch others play video games, is something I still struggle to wrap my head around.)

If I’ve learned anything in recent years, though, it’s that I should always follow my curiosity, and I’d repeatedly wondered what this collective all-day video game experience would look and feel like.

My short answer, after attending asses.masses? Community-building. But let’s start with the basics.

Created by Canadian duo Patrick Blendarn and Milton Lim, the game’s narrative involves a herd of donkeys who have been replaced, as workers, by machines, so many of them decide to confront their human overlords and push back against their (existential) obsolescence.

Imagine a time in the near future when scientists develop a procedure that will allow some people to become near immortals.

Lisa Sanaye Dring’s play Kairos is an interesting idea but her real subject is how precarious relationships can become when threatened.

Theatre Nova is presenting Kairos as part of the National New Play Network Rolling World Review, which includes stagings by other theater companies in Cincinnati and Los Angeles.

Kairos doesn’t begin as a sci-fi thriller. The challenge of immortal life is offered up as a unique test of human relations. So the play opens not with mad scientists but with two people looking for love.

It begins when two drivers have a minor car accident, which opens the door to romance. David and Gina are in their early 30s. David is black, Gina is white. David is attracted to Gina and she’s interested in learning about him, and so begins their sometimes blissfully happy and sometimes darkly unhappy relationship. Dring tells their story in a series of short vignettes.

Funerals can be sad, yes, but they can also be funny and even life-changing.

The Purple Rose Theatre is presenting the Michigan premiere of Eric Feffinger’s Fourteen Funerals, a very funny comedy with a very serious look at friendship, family, and life from the perspective of two very different women from two very different places.

Sienna is a young Chicago woman with aspirations of becoming a published writer. She has received a confusing call to come to small town Blissfield, Indiana, to present a eulogy for a relative she’s never met. She’s intrigued, she’s curious, she needs money, she needs to escape from Chicago if just for a day. But when she arrives she’s informed that 14 relatives have all died in an explosion of fireworks and she must give a eulogy for all of them at 14 separate funerals.

Millie is the funeral director’s daughter who has asked her to come. Millie is a young woman who loves Blissfield and hates Blissfield. But she’s ever optimistic. She’s learning all the ins and outs of being a funeral director. She’s funny, even a little goofy and leary about the woman from the city.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition was co-written with Influenzavirus A and features indie-gaze from The Nuts, modern classical by PRISM Quartet, indie-folk by People I Like, dancey new wave by Kelsey, and smooth jazz by STELLA.

Corruption collides with confusion and bureaucracy with buffoonery in the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance’s production of The Government Inspector, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher in 2009 from Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 play.

While the original play was set in Russia circa 1836, Malcolm Tulip's version could be anywhere, anytime that corruption is common—but certainly not here or now.

“We’ve taken things from different periods,” says Tulip, who directs U-M musical theater students in the production, which runs February 20-23 at the Arthur Miller Theatre.

The play is set in a small village where everyone in a position of power is corrupt. “Six gymnasiums have been built to get names on buildings they don’t need,” Tulip says.

When the crooked leadership learns an undercover inspector is coming to root out corruption, they panic. They bribe. They flatter. They flirt. The inspector moves into the mayor’s house and receives large “loans” from the local officials. “They fall over backward to make sure he’ll say good things about them,” says Tulip. “On another level, the mistreated peasants come across as the resistance.”

In April 1993, I took my first step into the world of Rocky Horror.

I went with three high school friends to see a midnight screening and shadow cast of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the State Theatre in Ann Arbor.

Upon arrival at the theatre, I was greeted by one of the shadow-cast actors fully dressed in her costume. She walked over to me and asked, “Are you a virgin?”

Somewhat taken aback, I asked, “Who wants to know?”

The actor just laughed and said, “You’re my very special virgin.”

Being a naïve, clueless teen and new to Rocky Horror, I didn’t get the reference at first. I thought the actor was nosy and wondered why she asked me such a personal question.

Her question didn’t click with me, though, until the start of the show. As the emcee, she made some announcements and invited me to join her on stage as the “Very Special Virgin.”