The Village Trip Fuses Hot Acts with Cool Beats and Smart Talk

By Cliff Pearson

We live at a time when the old rules no longer apply—in politics, media, culture, and technology. We’re all trying to figure it out as a cloud of uncertainty hovers above the city, the nation, the world. With this as backdrop, The Village Trip — the annual festival that celebrates culture and community in Greenwich Village and the East Village/Lower East Side — is offering fresh takes on legendary artists, critical issues, and cherished places. By harnessing some of today’s most talented artists and minds, the 10-day festival, which runs September 19 through September 28, aims to rethink iconic masterworks and revive Greenwich Village as New York’s cauldron of creativity. In the process, it will offer lots of great entertainment—exactly what we need right now!

The Village has long been the place where people from all over the globe hang out in cafes, clubs, bars, and public squares to swap stories, exchange ideas, propose radical notions, and do crazy things. (Let’s climb to the top of the Washington Square Arch, drink a few bottles of cheap wine, and declare the Free and Independent Republic of Greenwich Village!) It’s where abolitionists like Henry Highland Garnet called for the end of slavery in the 19th century, where the NAACP set up its first offices, where the Abstract Expressionists changed painting, where Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Pete Seeger galvanized the Folk Revival in the 1950s, where the Stonewall uprising pioneered gay rights, where Eve Ensler developed The Vagina Monologues, and where, today, daring plays continue to appear on neighborhood stages and musicians like Taylor Swift record new albums. It’s still happening in the Village, baby!

“The Village Trip’s mission is to express the spirit of Greenwich Village, where artists and all kinds of creative people have gathered for at least 150 years to pioneer new ideas and pursue social activism,” says Liz Thomson, who founded the festival in 2018 and serves as Joint Artistic Director with me.

Recognizing the past, though, isn’t enough. We need to rethink it, take it apart, and re-jigger it for a new time. That’s what this year’s festival aims to do at venues around the neighborhood and for audiences of all ages. In doing so, we hope to offer new perspectives and provide new context for works and issues that may seem at first glance to be old hat or familiar fare.

The festival kicks off with the world premieres of new work composed by David Amram, Carman Moore, and Maria Thompson Corley, sung by baritone James Martin and accompanied on piano by Lynn Raley. Amram, who is the Village Trip’s Artist Emeritus, turns 95 in November, but is still flexing the creative muscles that have served him well in collaborations with the New York Philharmonic, Shakespeare in the Park, Jack Kerouac, Arthur Miller, Charles Mingus, Tito Puente, and many more. Come to St. John’s in the Village at 7 pm on September 19 and catch his latest opus.

A pair of concerts on September 20 and 21 draw new light on the genius of Leonard Bernstein, a protean figure who continues to inspire new work by filmmakers like Bradley Cooper and musicians of all stripes. The first will be Classical Cool!, a children’s concert at St. John’s in the Village at 2 pm, featuring work by Bernstein as well as Saint-Saëns’ family favorite Carnival of the Animals, narrated by Nina Bernstein Simmons, one of the Maestro’s daughters. The next day, his other daughter Jamie Bernstein, will host Bernstein Remix! at the Loft at City Winery, where a remarkable mix of performing artists from diverse genres will reinterpret and reimagine Lenny’s music.

That first weekend will also offer gamelan music under the portico of St. Mark’s in the Bowery and then, inside the church, a gospel commemoration of Jimmy Carter’s work in the East Village with Habitat for Humanity. Where else will you find the sounds of Indonesia giving way to those of the American South? Talk about mixing it up!

This year The Village Trip lecture will take place at 1:30 pm on September 21 at Jefferson Market Library. New York Times reporter Clay Risen will discuss his new book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, a topic that helps us understand our current moment in history. Another hot-button issue — climate change — will be addressed at a panel discussion on September 26 at Pier 57 where experts on the built environment and what lives underwater will look at New York’s 400-year relationship with its waterfront. That event is supported by DutchCultureUSA, a program of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the United States.

If you want to get outside and stretch your legs, The Village Trip offers some unique tours you won’t find anywhere else. On September 20, poets Marcos de la Fuente and Annalisa Mari Pegrum will lead a ramble around locations associated with Beat Generation authors and will recite verse along the way. On September 21, a walking tour of Woody Guthrie’s New York will be led by his grandchildren, Anna Canoni and Cole Quest. Quest will perform songs at each location, offering a trans-generational interpretation of Guthrie’s iconic music. For those interested in the emergence of the American avant-garde and the tipsy characters who occupied the top of the Washington Square Arch in January 1917, artist Marc Kehoe will take you to the places where Duchamp, Man Ray, De Kooning, Pollock, Krasner, Haring and others lived, worked, and played. Sign up for his Republic of Greenwich Village tour on September 20 at 11 am, which ends at Framing the Village: FREEDOMLAND!, the exhibition he curated at St. John’s in the Village and that showcases new painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture by Village artists.

I’m not sure Allen Ginsberg imagined his Beat masterwork, Howl, accompanied by drums and cornet, but that’s what percussionist Justin Jay Hines and jazz improviser Kirk Knuffke will do at the Bowery Poetry Club on September 23. I’ll bet a pair of beers at McSorley’s that Ginsberg would be pleased.

As always, The Village Trip will present a free concert in Washington Square Park on its final weekend. This year Kennedy Administration will headline the event on September 27 at 4 pm, animating Garibaldi Plaza with its distinctive blend of jazz, R&B, soul, and funk. Adding to the vibes will be Dali Rose, whose music reveals the influence of Nina Simone, Sly Stone, and rapper Earl Sweatshirt.

I got involved with The Village Trip in 2021 to rally the Village in the wake of Covid. That pandemic is over, but a different kind of virus is infecting our body politic. Once again, we need to bring everyone together, inspire hope, and use art to instigate action. That’s what The Village Trip is all about.