MUSIC
The iconic feminist musician and performance artist Peaches performs Friday at the Variety Playhouse in her first tour since the pandemic. She gained stardom in 2000 with her debut album, The Teaches of Peaches, an album that Rolling Stone said was “surreally funny [and] nasty.” The eclectic Peaches has performed opera in Berlin and collaborated with Yoko Ono. Tickets start at $36.50.
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The Macon-based band Jupiter Coyote released its debut album, Cemeteries and Junkyards, in 1991 and has since become a fixture on the jam-band scene. The group’s latest album is 2020’s The Interplanetary Yard Dog, and celebrates the band’s unique mesh of Southern rock, bluegrass, funk and Appalachian folk. The band comes to Eddie’s Attic Saturday for two special “unplugged” shows at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. Tickets are $30.
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Soul Food Cypher, celebrating its 10th year, hosts its monthly One Hundred freestyle rap session on Sunday at CreateATL at 900 Murphy Avenue SE in Atlanta. The Cypher showcases the positive aspects of rap with freestyle emcees who test their lyrical dexterity with improvised raps based on random words. The person with the best freestyle of the night earns a $100 prize. Tickets start at $10.
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ART+DESIGN
MINT Gallery is featuring Georgia native Tim Short in a solo exhibition titled For Da Folks. Short’s detailed, large-scale oil paintings are heavily inspired by the album Gumbo’! by rapper/producer Pink Siifu, especially the song titled “Gumbo’! 4 tha Folks, Hold On.” According to the artist, “this body of work is an affirmation of my deep reverence for and accountability to Blackness.” Through September 17.
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With no formal art education, Madrid-based artist Taher Jaoui draws from African primitive art, graffiti, glitch art and CoBrA, an international art movement of pioneering artists who caused a revolution in modern art following World War II. The result is a career of vibrant and energetic paintings that lean toward abstract expressionism. In Urban Sense, his solo exhibition at Maune Contemporary, he explores his relationship between art and spirituality: In an uncertain world full of chaos and anxiety, he writes, spirituality can be a solution. Opening reception Saturday 6-9 p.m.
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Charmaine Minniefield’s art exhibit Indigo Prayers: A Creation Story (through September 11 at the Carlos Museum) was inspired by her search in West Africa for her grandmother’s ancestral lines. It builds on an exploration of the Ring Shout, a rhythmic prayer and African American practice of resistance. The exhibit is part of the Praise House Project, a two-year program which kicks off at Emory University on Sunday with a series of public events. At 1:30 p.m. in Cannon Chapel, Dr. Julie B. Johnson, chair of the dance department at Spelman College, and professor of dance Tamara Williams will join the artist for a conversation about movement as medicine. The Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters will dance and engage in call-and-response singing. Free. At 4:30 p.m. there will be an Ancestral Feast at the Carlos’ Ackerman Hall prepared by Chef Cleophus Hethington, renowned for his Ębí Chop Bar pop-ups. Minniefield will be there. Members $60. Non-members $85. Registration required.
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DANCE
Kennesaw State University’s Department of Dance will present world premieres by two visiting choreographers, Tsai Hsi Hung and Chuck Wilt, in the second annual iteration of the university’s Eleo Pomare-Glenn Connor Summer Choreographic Residency. ArtsATL dance writer Robin Wharton talked with Hung and Wilt about their works and how the dancers entered into the creative process. The approximately hour-long double bill Double Exposure will take place Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. KSU Dance Theater in Marietta. Tickets $15-20.
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Sean Nguyen-Hilton, co-founder of the dance collective Fly on a Wall, is performing a new solo work this weekend. The movement artist developed this room is a body during the pandemic and performed it as a work in progress earlier this year. This version will premiere on the eve of his 40th birthday. ArtsATL editor-at-large Cynthia Bond Perry talked with Nguyen-Hilton about that milestone, his struggles with weight gain and alcoholism, and a reassessing of his dance career in which “he kept pushing, digging, dancing in the dark, and came out knowing that the end of his career as a virtuoso dancer is not a death, but rather a rebirth.” Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 4 p.m. General admission $25. Students $15. Windmill Arts Center, East Point.
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THEATER
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) is a wild ride of a show, depending entirely upon the personality and improvisation skills of the performers. At Atlanta Shakespeare Company through September 4, O’Neil Delapenha, Trevor Perry and Ebony Jerry perform a script by Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield that allows for each performance to have lots of up-to-the-minute cultural references and local flavor. The jokes fly fast. Look for Benjamin Carr’s review next week on ArtsATL.
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The 2022 SheATL Arts Summer Festival, a summer theater festival that produces work by playwrights from underrepresented genders and identities and empowers them to self-produce, continues through Sunday in the Theater Lab at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts at Emory University. Next up are Julia Byrne’s To Serve the Hive, about betrayal and power in a climate crisis (Thursday-Friday); and Erin Shea Brady’s You’re a Weirdo, Annie Best, a new play exploring Nora Ephron’s classic romcoms from a queer, polyamorous lens (Saturday-Sunday). These festival stagings, as well as last week’s walls by Sofia Palermo and Sarahjeen Francois’ Sister Braid My Hair, also will be available to stream from September 1-7.
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Now for something completely different from Dominion Entertainment Group, the production company best known for presenting Black Nativity every Christmas in Atlanta. Chicken & Biscuits, onstage at Southwest Arts Center through Sunday, features comic ingredients including a dead pastor, a funeral, a dysfunctional family and, according to Dominion, “all the messy fixins” for delicious fun.
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FILM+TV
The 13th annual BronzeLens Film Festival continues through Sunday, with features, documentaries, shorts, student films, conversations and celebrations across the city. Some screenings are sold out, so make sure to consult the online schedule. This year’s festival theme is “Creators Wonderland,” paying tribute to Atlanta and Georgia’s rising role in film and TV production.
