Valerie and Her Week of Wonders + Beverly Ketch!

A dreamy and gothic coming-of-age fairytale overflowing with bucolic beauty and macabre menace, this 1970 Czech New-Wave Masterpiece offers a lushly stylized phantasmagoric realm of vampires, black magic, and pagan sexuality. Our evening begins with ethereal music and poetry by Beverly Ketch!

A dark fairy-tale evocation of adolescent anxiety, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970, Dir. Jaromil Jireš, 77 mins). takes its place alongside Daisies as one of the major works of the Czechoslovak New Wave to center female subjectivity. In a gothic storybook universe, 13-year-old Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) tumbles through the subconscious looking glass into a phantasmagoric realm of vampires, black magic, and pagan sexuality where fanged grandmothers feast on children and lascivious priests transform into weasels. Adapted from a novel by surrealist writer Vítězslav Nezval, this lushly stylized cinematic fantasia overflows with dreamlike visions of beauty and horror.

Beverly Ketch is a poet, singer & lyricist known for her work as vocalist and songwriter with the groups Stella Kola and The Bunwinkies. She is a co-creator of The Lovelights, a multimedia collective investigating joy & magic which began as a children's television program and evolved into a series of all ages events that combine song, dance, theatre & brilliantly costumed pageantry to share merriment & wonder across Franklin County. Bev is also a leading light behind the annual Fairy House Day in which a local park is transformed into a welcoming and delightful daydream populated with dazzling Fair Folk and beautiful singing mermaids. Her poetry and lyrics are often informed by her deep passion for the Tarot and she has developed an uncanny ability to combine the prosaic with the mystical to a very mesmerizing effect. Her talent for extracting light from darkness (and vice versa) and for revealing the mystery that lurks inside the "normal" has spread a joyful energy that echoes across the valley.

You may also like the following events from Epsilon Spires:

• Next Thursday, 29th May, 07:30 pm, THE CASSANDRA CAT w/ Live Soundtrack by MAW! in Brattleboro
• Next Sunday, 1st June, 08:00 pm, ganavya: Daughter of a Temple in Brattleboro
• Next month, 7th June, 07:30 pm, UNDERWORLD (1927) W/ Organ Score by Peter Krasinski! in Brattleboro

Also check out other Arts events in Brattleboro, Literary Art events in Brattleboro, Music events in Brattleboro.