The Village Trip 2026

By Liz Thomson

It was, as the late great Villager Lou Reed famously sang, “a perfect day.” Under the bluest of skies, The Village Trip’s climactic weekend opened on Gansevoort Plaza where The Slambovian Circus of Dreams headlined the festival’s signature free concert. From tots to teens, millennials to old hippies, it seemed everyone was out having fun in the sun. Dancing, relaxing at the many tables, or having a leisurely late lunch at one of the restaurants that ring the Plaza while Joziah Longo and his magnificent band transported us all ─ via “The Trans-Slambovian BiPolar Express” ─ to a much-needed break in Utopia.

A nor’easter had dampened the opening weekend of the eighth Village Trip but it didn’t dampen our spirits. It kicked off with a grand party at the Church of the Village, where guests included Council Member Carl Wilson. With its now customary mix of “hi- jinks and high ideals,” the festival’s ten-day run offered something for everyone. Some 40 events were themed around “Revolutionary Voices,” offering a suitably alternative way of celebrating USA250 while honoring some of the many Village voices who helped change America and the world.

The first weekend opened with the sellout premiere of New York City Children’s Theater’s production of Frank Ruiz’s interpretation of Woody Guthrie’s Songs to Grow On at the Little Red School House, where Woody, Pete Seeger and Lead Belly all played, and where Nora Guthrie and Mary Travers were among the pupils. The school’s founder, Elisabeth Irwin, was herself a revolutionary who designed her school as a place “where heresy will be looked upon as possible truth.” Children, with parents and grandparents, loved the theater production, were encouraged to engage with the performance and, afterwards, examined the imaginative staging and props.

The weekend closed with Let Freedom Sing: Paul Robeson – His Words, His Music, by acclaimed baritone James C. Martin with pianist Lynn Raley at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, where Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal welcomed everyone. The concert brought the capacity crowd to their feet, the faces of many wet with emotion as they sang along with Martin in Robeson’s favorite closer, Jacob’s Ladder, which critic Susan Brodie wrote in Classical Voice North America was, “an act of soulful solidarity that invoked the spirit of the old Village.” In addition to a program of songs arranged as biography, the concert featured the première of settings of Robeson’s fellow activist Langston Hughes’ poem Let America Be America Again. Conceived and commissioned for The Village Trip by Martin with support from the Roger Shapiro Fund, it featured music by ten composers, including Maria Thompson Corley and Augusta Read Thomas, as well as the festival’s artist emeritus David Amram, whose blues-inflected writing provided the opening and closing sections. Brodie concluded that the concert was “an inspiring portrait of this protean figure and a very satisfying afternoon.”

Amram and friends gave a lively performance a few days later at the Five Spot on East 9th Street, celebrating the centennials of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, two giants of jazz who are among the many with whom Amram ─ another protean figure whose half-century in the Village includes more than a decade composing for the great Joe Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park ─ had jammed with in the past.

Music provides the backbone of The Village Trip, and this year’s artist roster included esteemed singers Janie Barnett with her reimagining of Leaves from the Cole Porter songbook, as well as Janis Siegel and Lauren Kinhan with their nourishing serving of Vocal Gumbo: Songs of Dissent and Hope. On the classical and new music front, there were two very different but equally exciting trios ─ The Ahns and The Horszowskis ─ both of whom packed Greenwich House Music School. There was also a rare concert by the eclectic Allen Shawn, not to mention a host of young musicians and composers. But the festival also shone a light on some of the many figures whose shape-shifting activities had exerted a major influence far beyond the Village and far beyond America’s shores.

Walking tours explored not just the Beats and the musicians so readily associated with the Village, but also the lives of Thomas Paine and Aaron Burr – familiar names but perhaps not obvious Villagers – and Dorothy Day, bohemian turned Catholic radical and founder of the Catholic Worker movement. Robert Ellsberg, who helped his father Xerox the Pentagon Papers and who worked with Day, spoke to a packed room at the Jefferson Market Library, a few yards from the old Women’s House of Detention where Day was detained on several occasions.

The Village Trip ended with an all-star celebration of the Greenwich Village Folk Festival in the Great Hall of Cooper Union. Organized by Rod MacDonald and Ray Micek, it featured among many others Liz Queler, David Massengill, Reggie Harris, Crys Matthews and Suzanne Vega, a star of the 1980s Fast Folk movement. The five-hour event was brought to a close by Noel Paul Stookey, now sadly the only surviving member of Peter, Paul and Mary. A sprightly 88, he led cast and audience in a rousing chorus of If I Had a Hammer before closing with a rewriting of America the Beautiful, a prayer for God’s grace and a better future for us all that “we may renew our Founders’ call… and liberty and justice be the right of one and all.”

Amen to that. And we’ll see you next year.

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Liz Thomson is the founder of The Village Trip and joint artistic director with Cliff Pearson. Next year’s festival will run September 17 – 26.