Warwick Summer Arts Festival wraps up this weekend
WARWICKTraditional Irish music, cutting-edge gypsy melodies and unusual theater are on the bill as the Warwick Summer Arts Festival ends its run at the Stanley Deming Park, offering three more days of free entertainment. The weekend kicks off Friday evening, July 14, at 7:30 p.m. with Cherish the Ladies, Irish musicians The Washington Post describes as “an astonishing array of virtuosity.” The group, who have shared the stage with James Taylor, Joan Baez, Emmy Lou Harris, The Clancy Brothers, Tommy Makem, The Chieftains and dozens of symphony orchestras, earned a Grammy nomination in 1999 for the “Celtic Album,” their collaboration with the Boston Pops Symphony. The Arts Festival committee suggests that those going to see Cherish the Ladies arrive early and bring a picnic blanket. On Saturday, July 15, at 7:30, the park will play host to Luminescent Orchestrii, whose mash of Romanian Gypsy melodies, punk rock, tangos, klezmer, Balkan harmony, hip-hop beats and Appalachian fiddle, has brought the band from folk festivals in Appalachia to punk clubs in New York City to a gypsy festival in Transylvania. The band has also been featured on NPR’s Weekend America, as part of a weekly Global Rhythm Magazine segment hosted by Tom Pryor, and on John Shaefer’s “New Sounds” on WNYC. Luminescent Orchestrii will be leaving for a European tour the day after their Warwick performance. The festival concludes at Stanley Deming Park on July 16 at 7:30 p.m. with The Carpetbag Brigade, a physical theater company from California that does much of its work on stilts. They will perform Mudfire, a living poem invoking our ancient relationship with the power and passion of fire. A touring ensemble based in the San Francisco Bay area, The Carpetbag Brigade has performed for crowds from British Columbia to Bogota. They fashion their choreography and characters using the techniques of contemporary European physical theater, dance, mask work, acrobatics and their own skills in stilt walking. Festival 2006 is supported with funds from The New York State Council on the Arts, requested by Senator Thomas Morahan and administered by New York State Parks and Recreation, Shop Rite of Warwick, and The Town of Warwick, with additional funding from Provident Bank, The Warwick Savings Foundation, the Village of Warwick, Orange and Rockland Utilities, WVT Communications, and many individual contributors. The Warwick Summer Arts Festival is a project of Community 2000 and works in partnership with the Town of Warwick, the Village of Warwick and Scheuermann Farm and Greenhouses. The concerts are free of charge, but donations will be accepted and will help to support the arts and culture of Warwick. More information is available at www.warwickarts.org or by calling 987-9836.