AMHERST — In what is expected to be its biggest season since before the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Massachusetts Fine Arts Center is jam packed with performers and showcases for its upcoming 2024-2025 Fine Arts Center performing arts season.
The season’s highlights include community partnerships, celebrations of Max Roach and James Baldwin and much more, as the Fine Arts Center is presenting its most expansive and robust season of performing arts in a handful of years.
The 2024-2025 performing arts season opens on Thursday, Sept. 12 with a speaking event featuring interdisciplinary artist Yanira Castro, whose public art project “Exorcism = Liberation” will unfold across the region through election season. It will close on May 9, 2025 with a performance by singer-songwriter-pianist Bruce Hornsby and the inventive chamber quartet yMusic.
Between those dates is the most extensive programming for the performing arts season in a handful of years, according to Performing Arts Curator and Fine Arts Center Director Michael Sakamoto.
“It’s exciting and we’re working with some great new partners including Mullins Center and the Drake and a range of on campus partners as well,” Sakamoto said. “We’re really super happy with where we’re at right now and we’re very, very grateful I think more than anything, that audiences have returned en mass and we’re back up to just about pre-pandemic levels of attendance. We couldn’t be more appreciative of the community for supporting us in that way.”
Tickets for all events are now available to the general public and most tickets are sold through the Fine Arts Center Box Office. Tickets for Dropkick Murphys at the Mullins Center have been on sale since May through the Mullins Center Box Office.
Sakamoto said one of the specific things the Fine Arts Center has focused on in curating this year’s season is the effects of the ongoing political and cultural divide, making it important for them to bring in programming and experiences that get people thinking and conversing.
“What kind of experiences do we want to provide to bring people together to provide comfort, but to also ask really interesting and necessary questions that we can all be in conversation and dialogue around and so that’s also what we’re hoping this season reflects,” Sakamoto explained. “We have artists and experiences and perspectives from lots of different cultures, lots of different social experiences, so we really just wanted to provide a very broad spectrum and diversity of perspectives and again, to give people a chance in lots of different ways to come together.”
Another big time event schedule for the new season will be celebrations of the lives and work of jazz drummer and bandleader Max Roach and writer James Baldwin — anchored by Makaya McCraven and Meshell Ndegeocello. The Max Roach Centennial Celebration takes place on Oct. 25 in the Frederick C. Tillis Performance Hall of the Randolph W. Bromery Center for the Arts.
The event is a part of a campuswide celebration of Roach tied to the 100th anniversary of his birth. Roach, a legendary jazz drummer and a tireless civil rights activist, was one of the artist-scholars who, as a member of the UMass faculty, put the university on the map as a world center of jazz performance and education. McCraven, who ranks among the top of the most innovative drummers working today in the jazz scene, will lead an all-star band in tribute to Roach.
This tribute anchors a week-long celebration organized jointly by the Fine Arts Center, College of Humanities & Fine Arts, Department of Music and Dance and W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies.
Ndegeocello comes to Bowker Auditorium on April 24, 2025, as part of a tour in support of her album “No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin.” Baldwin, the celebrated novelist, essayist, playwright, poet and civil and LGBTQ rights activist found a home on the UMass Afro-American Studies department faculty late in life. Baldwin, like Roach, was born in 1924.
According to Sakamoto, this year is expected to serve as a solid bridge into the 2025-2026 season, in which the Fine Arts Center will be celebrating its 50th anniversary season.
“We’re kind of building not just out of the pandemic, but building towards that celebration in the 25-26 year which will look back at our past and achievements, the present where we’re at now, and the future and where can we go together,” Sakamoto said.
Other headliners schedule during the 2024-2025 performing arts season will be five-time Grammy winner and Afropop legend Angelique Kidjo, satirist Fran Lebowitz, stage and screen favorites Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp (original stars of RENT), and much more.
On Saturday, Sept. 14, the Fine Arts Center will also be presenting an evening of Puerto Rican-themed music and dance. The Holyoke-based chamber ensemble Victory Players will perform El Puerto Rico, their program of new music by Puerto Rican composers in Tillis Performance Hall. Bomba de Aqui will host a post-performance celebration of Puerto Rican culture featuring food and dance in the Bromery Center lobby.
To view the full performing arts schedule, visit https://fac.umass.edu/Online/default.asp.
As the largest indoor mainstage in the region, Sakamoto said the Fine Arts Center sees themselves serving a role in the larger arts and culture ecology of the region.
“That’s why we try to bring mainstage touring artists, especially in all genres of music, theater and other performing arts, and also to bridge between town and gown, between the academic and educational and research community and greater diversity of communities in our region,” Sakamoto said. “So again, everything we’re doing this year is about people coming together.”
