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Modernism to Minimalism

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Samuel Beckett’s birth and the 25th anniversary of the 1981 world premiere of his play Rockaby in Buffalo. On Friday, Buffalo will celebrate Beckett’s career and connections to our city with an evening of film, music, discussion and theater at the Albright Knox Art Gallery sponsored by riverrun, Cinegael Buffalo, the Humanities Institute of SUNY Buffalo, the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library and the Irish Classical Theatre Company. In addition to Rockaby, Beckett’s Buffalo connections include friends/collaborators Raymond Federman, novelist and professor of English at UB; Chris O’Neill, late founder of Buffalo’s Irish Classical Theatre Company; and Morton Feldman, composer and former chairman of the Music Department at UB. The evening will conclude with a 9pm performance of Rockaby by Josephine Hogan of the Irish Classical Theatre Company, in the role of the shrouded old woman trapped in a chair who rocks herself to death. The role was originally played by Billie Whitelaw, the definitive interpreter of Beckett’s work, who once perfomed the part on the stage of what is today the Town Ballroom. The program also features John Reilly’s documentary film Waiting for Beckett (6pm); a talk by UB’s Dr. Damien Keane, titled “Catalogue, Index, Transcription: 1936-1946: Beckett’s Paperwork for the French Resistance” (7:45pm); and a panel discussion, “Beckett: Modernism to Minimalism,” with Reilly, Keane and UB’s Laurence Shine, moderated by Patrick Martin, director of Cinegael Buffalo.

Friday, November 3 at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1285 Elmwood Avenue

882-8700. FREE.

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