By Christie Bender
Grand Rapids Public Museum
The Grand Rapids Public Museum is excited to announce that Concerts Under the Stars are returning for 2019. Concert-goers will enjoy a fully immersive experience of audio and visuals in the Museum’s Chaffee Planetarium.
Beginning on January 17, join the GRPM for the first performance in the Concerts Under the Stars series, Fiona Dickinson, featuring dark folk music. Concerts Under the Stars will run January through March 2019. Visitors can sit back and experience the wonder of the cosmos with the wonder of music to performances featuring the sounds of folk, rock, electronic and R&B.
“The Museum is excited to bring back Concerts Under the Stars for the third year highlighting local music and audiovisual artists in this very unique venue,” said Kate Kocienski, VP of Marketing and PR for the GRPM. “Live music in the Chaffee Planetarium is a one-of-a-kind experience for concert-goers, and not something that is replicated at other venues.”
Fiona Dickinson is a British songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and music educator currently residing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Along with her work arranging strings for the ambient noise project, Saltbreaker, Fiona has a lengthy list of collaborations on stage and in the studio. She also has a background in composition for independent film and live score for site-specific performance with dance, video, and analog projection.
Dark folk is a sub-genre of folk music that blends traditional Nordic folk music and ambient music and is considered to be closely related to metal. Fiona will be accompanied by live visuals on the planetarium dome by Meghan Moe Beitiks.
Meghan Moe Beitiks, has designed lights for the California Academy of Sciences, the Asian Art Museum, SF Sketchfest, and Atom-R. She is an artist working with associations and disassociations of culture/nature/structure, analyzing perceptions of ecology through the lenses of site, history, and emotions in order to produce work that interrogates relationships with the non-human. She was a Fulbright Student Fellow in Scenic Design to Latvia and a recipient of the Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists. She received her BA in Theater Arts from the University of California at Santa Cruz and her MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University, and has designed media for previous Concerts Under the Stars in 2018.
Concerts Under the Stars will begin at 7:30 p.m., with Museum doors opening at 6:30 p.m. New this year, performers will play two sets, with a short intermission in between. Refreshments, beer and other beverages will be available for purchase.
Tickets are $12 for GRPM members and $15 for non-members if purchased in advance, and $15 for members and $18 for non-members on the day of the concert. Tickets are currently on sale at grpm.org, by calling 616.929.1700 or at the Museum’s front desk.
The 2019 Concerts Under the Stars series will continue on February 7 with psych rock from Frankie and Myrrh, February 28 with ambient R&B from Bronze Wolf, and will conclude on March 21 with the electronic sounds of Pink Sky.
