Public History in Performance Led by Artistic Director Trudy Williams, The Red Skies Music Ensemble (co-founded in 2010 by George Boziwick and Trudy Williams) presents original humanities based multimedia shows for the general public that animate facts and interpretations in American public history and culture that have been often overlooked, omitted, or hidden in plain sight.
Using music as the portal, the hour-long Red Skies shows combine a fascinating research-based narration with live music, theatrical vignettes, and large screen archival images to give audiences experiential engagement with the meanings of the artifacts, archives, special collections and exhibits of local and national libraries, museums, and historical societies.
The ninety-minute shows, authored by Trudy Williams or co-authored with George Boziwick, weave inter-connections across time and medium, aiming to inspire a closer relationship of the community to their shared socio-cultural history heritage, its relevance to today, and the value of preservation.
Performances include an audience participation component during the show, and a Q&A at the end. Crafted for easy adaptation to any size space, formal, informal, indoors and out, shows draw cast and crew mainly locally.
A comment from a museum director who commissioned two different shows: "The Red Skies shows brought our collection areas and galley walls to a fully-fleshed out, breathing, dancing-in-the-aisles reality."
Performances include: The Library of Congress; New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Lincoln Center Public Program Series; Oberon Theater of the American Repertory Theater, sponsored by the Harvard Houghton Library and A.R.T. Special Programs; Yale University Institute of Sacred Music; The Emily Dickinson Museum; International Emily Dickinson Society, Amherst College; The Long Island Museum of American Art; Hadley Historical Society, in partnership with Porter- Phelps-Huntington Museum. Find out more at www.TheRedSkiesMusicEnsemble.com
2024 Performance: Cornstalk Fiddles: Soundscape and Place in 19th Century Hadley. Trudy Williams, author. Sponsor partnership: Hadley Historical Society and Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum.
2025 In Development: Rhythm & Rails. Trudy Williams, Author. Partnership with Historic Northampton. At Forbes Library 12/25.
Complex Harmony: Music, Walt Whitman and the Railroads. Trudy Williams, Author
