VAE Presents, “A Star Has Burnt My Eye” with Howard Fishman

Photo Credit: Rebecca Greenfield

Featuring: Charlotte Mundy – Vocals, Osei Essed – Guitar, Banjo, Mandolin & Upright Bass, Dina Maccabee – Vocals, Violin & Guitar, Howard Fishman – Vocals, Guitar & Piano, and Nic Adams

At the Masonic Hall, 504 Main Street, Bennington

December 12^th 7:00 pm show, doors at 6:00pm.

$2o Advance,  $25 At the Door, $10 Students

In 1961, the polymathic songwriter Connie Converse grew disillusioned with music and New York, packed her bags for Ann Arbor, and eventually disappeared. Her home recordings from the 50s have only recently come to light—vulnerable, literary songs about loneliness, sexual longing, and bad credit—but they were unclassifiable at the time and she vanished without an audience or album to her name.

“A Star Has Burnt My Eye”, is a multimedia meditation from songwriter and guitarist Howard Fishman. Three other musicians who perform and consider Converse’s music and life, pondering what it meant, and still means, to be an outsider artist, join Fishman. A treasure trove of recently discovered artifacts—personal letters, diary entries, poems, along with first-person recollections—come to life alongside intimate performances on guitar, piano, violin and upright bass in tribute to this enigmatic songstress whose fate still eludes.

“A Star Has Burnt My Eye” had its world premiere at The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) as part of the 2016 Next Wave Festival, where it sold out its run and was a New York Times Critics Pick.

Link to the BAM production:

http://www.bam.org/theater/2016/a-star-has-burnt-my-eye

Howard’s New Yorker piece is here:

http://http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/connie-converses-time-has-come