A self-taught artist who grew up in the rural south during the civil rights era, folk artist Winfred Rembert draws and speaks from experience, weaving together leather, color and real-life injustices to make meaning of painful memories.

Holiday live entertainment options abound this time of year in Southwest Michigan, but perhaps none so festive and crisp as the Canadian Brass Christmas concert at Miller Auditorium in Kalamazoo, which kicked off the season mere days after Thanksgiving.

Christopher Wheeldon, the British-born Royal Ballet trained dancer and one of the world’s most innovative and celebrated choreographers, created a ballet based on An American in Paris, the iconic multiple Oscar-winning 1951 Vincente Minelli film starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, in 2005 for New York City Ballet, but he had never before directed actors.

Between the two acts of Seeing/Seen, Wellspring/Cory Terry & Dancers’ Fall Concert of Dance, the audience is invited onto the stage to interact and make noise with drumsticks on the Singing Wall Sculptures, an enormous set of suspended gongs and other metalwork created by Lisa Renee Coons and Steven E. Pierce that is prettier to look at than to hear.

German conductor Hans von Bülow coined the famous snap judgment of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem Mass: “an opera, though in ecclesiastical robes.”

• Grand Rapids Symphony
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Regardless of the form it takes or how much time has passed since a now-famous adolescent girl documented her life in a red checkered notebook while in hiding from the Nazis during World War II in Amsterdam, “The Diary of Anne Frank” remains powerfully moving.

“Passing Strange,” by Stew, is a beautifully raw story of a young African American boy searching for more out of life and the whirlwind of emotions he faces along the way.

Many renowned classical piano duos have kept it in the family — consider the Labèque sisters, the Pekinel sisters, or the Kontarsky brothers. The vast benefits of a musical partnership between siblings were obvious during Christina and Michelle Naughton’s concert with The Gilmore’s Rising Stars Series yesterday. The two 28-year-old pianists brought esoteric unity to their art form in a way only identical twins can. But as their spellbinding Sunday afternoon performance showed, the Naughton sisters are no gimmick. The two extraordinary musicians demonstrated uncanny harmoniousness and technical precision, even when expressing individual soulfulness and spontaneity across two separate Steinways.

In H2 Dance Company’s current modern dance program, “All About a Table,” the same sturdy rectangular table appears in all three pieces composed by Hope College dance department faculty members. The company of 11 select pre-professional student dancers move around, atop, beneath the table, at turns, as desperate housewives, birds, and tragicomic men in control of the world’s fate — all at the Knickerbocker Theatre in Holland.

Besides directing Muskegon Civic Theatre’s latest production, Jason Bertoia is settling in to what he considers his dream job.