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The ICA is proud to present musician and artist Devendra Banhart in an intimate solo concert. An internationally renowned musician considered a pioneer of the “freak folk” and “New Weird America” movements, Banhart has toured, performed, and collaborated with Vashti Bunyan, Yoko Ono, Os Mutantes, the Swans, ANOHNI, Caetano Veloso, and Beck, among many others. His musical work has always existed symbiotically alongside his pursuits in the other fine arts. Banhart will be joined by legendary singer and songwriter Kath Bloom, who will perform an opening set.

“Jazz Urbane is a musical tapestry … informed by tradition, probing the present, provoking thought and possibilities for the (music-making) future.“ —Patrice Rushen  

Jazz Urbane Cafe returns to the ICA for an evening of collaboration, connection, inspiration, and artistic exchange. The Imagine Orchestra directed by Dr. Bill Banfield shares the stage with an incredible array of dynamic artists and projects from across the Greater Boston area, including pianist Dr. John Paul McGee, movement and storyboard artist Wyatt Jackson, filmmaker Karina Choudhury, the voices of Boston Children’s Chorus and Boston City Singers, students from the Longy School, and Boston Ujima Project.  Featuring music, dance, and film, this one-of-a-kind concert experience is a meaningful ode to artistic inspiration and the liberating pleasure and joy of working within a collaborative and supportive community of artists. 

Art Forward is a one-movement interdisciplinary celebration of connection and collaboration. It is our gift, our blessing, and our passion to bring this collective experience to you. 

Jazz Urbane Cafe Art Forward is presented in collaboration with Boston Ujima Project, the Longy School of Music, and the Boston Children’s Chorus and Boston City Singers. 

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Sip a drink from the ICA Wine + Coffee Bar and enjoy live music from Gregory Groover, one of Boston’s best and brightest jazz musicians.

About Gregory Groover, Jr.

Following two sold-out screenings, Eno returns to the ICA with three unique presentations of Gary Hustwit’s groundbreaking, Oscar-shortlisted documentary. Working with generative software, Hustwit created a documentary process that produces infinite variations—each with its own archival material, interviews, backstage footage, oblique strategies, and musical numbers—befitting its always experimental subject, Brian Eno. The visionary musician and artist is known for producing music for David Bowie, U2, and Talking Heads, among many others; playing with the glam-rock band Roxy Music; pioneering the genre of ambient music; and releasing more than 40 solo and collaboration albums. The New York Times describes Eno as both “unlike any other portrait of a musician” and “marvelously watchable.”

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Urban Bush Women (UBW) burst onto the dance scene in 1984 with bold, innovative, demanding, and exciting works that brought under-told stories to life. Originally founded by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the company, now under the co-artistic direction of Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra Spies, continues to weave contemporary dance, music, and text with the history, culture, and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora.

A centerpiece of Urban Bush Women’s 40th Anniversary Celebration, This is Risk looks forward and back in celebrating four decades of operating at the vanguard of movement and social activism. At the ICA, Urban Bush Women will perform an evening of iconic works celebrating the Company’s 40-year history including Visibility, Batty Moves, Blues Medicine, and Shelter and will feature live music performed by Grace Galu Kalambay and Lucianna Padmore. This is Risk takes the audience through intentional storytelling to the next space of collective brilliance.

Following Saturday’s performance, members of Urban Bush Women will join Grisha Coleman for a post-performance conversation. Coleman is Professor of Movement, Computation, and Digital Media at Northeastern University and a former member of Urban Bush Women.

Read the digital program

Also, catch the Urban Bush Women leading an all-levels movement workshop at Dance Complex on March 19! Learn more

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Star Scores is both a performance and immersive sculptural installation by Roberto Carlos Lange (also known as Helado Negro) and visual artist Kristi Sword. The piece features a live ensemble performance of four experimental compositions, paired with an impressionistic film that explores the imperceptible forces that shape the West Texas landscape and the Appalachian skies. Parts of the film were originally commissioned by Ballroom Marfa and organized by Sarah Melendez. 

The installation, featuring large-scale weather balloons, never-before-seen abstract visuals by Sword, and an immersive soundscape by Lange, will be on view in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, included with museum admission, at the following times:
Thu, Feb 13, 2025 | 5–9 PM
Sat + Sun | Feb 15 + 16, 2025, 11 AM–4 PM

About Roberto Carlos Lange

About Kristi Sword

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French composer Pierre Boulez (1925–2016) was among the most influential composers and music educators of the last hundred years. Consistently challenging the musical status quo, Boulez’s music transformed and revolutionized the contemporary musical landscape. In addition to composition, Boulez was a singular conductor who led performances by some of the world’s best orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Chicago Symphony. Boulez also invested in contemporary music’s future, building institutions, ensembles, and training programs like IRCAM, Ensemble intercontemperain, and the Lucerne Festival that still thrive today.

The ICA and the Boston University Center for New Music celebrate the life and legacy of Boulez. Sound Icon, one of Boston’s leading interpreters of contemporary music, will perform under the direction of conductor Jeffrey Means two monumental Boulez works: the early career masterpiece Le marteau sans maître and the late period Dérive 2. These two pieces highlight the extraordinary range, color, and depth of Boulez’s music and offer audiences a rare opportunity to hear these works performed live.

Pierre Boulez’s music and the institutions he built made a lasting impression on the contemporary music world, and his influence continues to challenge and inspire.

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Samora Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist/vocalist, and interdisciplinary artist whose work delves into the things our society tries to hide—about its history, its structures, and the individual and daily things we all experience but don’t know how to talk about. His art is an invitation to feel things deeply and to think deeply about how we all live. He is known for his honest lyrics, his harmonic language, his vulnerable visuals, his cultural commentary, and his commitment to making art that is of use to everyday life. He is also known for using his music to examine sociopolitical issues and fight for change, and he works in the tradition of the Black surrealists, those who bend word, sound, and image toward the causes of revolution. Pinderhughes’s emotional, soulful music and lyrics beautifully unravel difficult and vulnerable topics.  

For this one-night-only experience at the ICA, Pinderhughes will perform in support of his new album, Venus Smiles Not in the House of Tears. He will be joined onstage by his longtime band members and a multi-voiced choir for an unforgettable evening of contemplative, searching, and joyful music.

Pinderhughes has collaborated with many artists across boundaries and scenes, including Herbie Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Sara Bareilles, Simone Leigh, Daveed Diggs, Kyle Abraham, Titus Kaphar, and Lalah Hathaway. He is the first-ever Art for Justice + Soros Justice Fellow and a recipient of Chamber Music America’s 2020 Visionary Award.

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Renowned quartet Sandbox Percussion joins forces with Gandini Juggling to illustrate how we hear, see, and perform sounds and rhythm. This unique new live collaboration combines percussion music by contemporary composers Steve Reich, Iannis Xenakis, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Andy Akiho performed live by Sandbox with the virtuosic, mind-blowing juggling of Gandini to illuminate music both visually and aurally. With vanishing dots of sound and balls replicating and complementing complex rhythms in the air, Gandini Juggling and Sandbox Percussion make the complex simple and the simple complex. This will be serious fun.

Following the Friday performance, members of the company will join John Andress, Bill T. Jones Director/Curator of Performing Arts, for a post-performance conversation.

Advisory note: This performance includes moments of flashing light.

Read the performance program

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This performance was developed at a Summer Stages Dance @ ICA/Boston residency in July 2023. Summer Stages Dance @ ICA/Boston is made possible, in part, with the support of Jane Karol and Howard Cooper, George and Ann Colony, The Aliad Fund, and Stephanie and Leander McCormick-Goodhart. 

“An enthralling, epically adventurous work”
—New York Times

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Choreographer Faye Driscoll’s newest work Weathering is a multi-sensory flesh sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids, and objects. Ten people (dancers, singers, and crew) enact a glacially morphing tableau vivant on a mobile raft-like stage surging through the Anthropocene. Their voices generate a score that crescendos and resonates as they clutch, careen, and cleave in a space too small to contain them, spilling off the edges. The audience embanks the performers, close enough to smell the sweat and feel the steam of these central, spiraling scenes. The symphonically active, luminously living work is a breathing, leaking choreography of micro events within a momentum thrusting from just beyond the perceivable. Driscoll and her team of collaborators ask: How do we feel the impact of events moving through us which are so much larger, yet are animating and activating our bodies all the time? How do we get closer to the impact? Can we slow down enough to feel the dust, hurt, howl, absence, spill, plume? 

Advisory note: This performance includes moments of full and partial nudity.

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