The Choral Society of the Hamptons will open its 2017-18 season with “Dances, Carols, and Lullabies,” a celebration of the holiday season that will include compositions familiar and obscure, with performances at 3 and 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 3 at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church.

The concert will feature a medley of carols from the Hispanic world, as well as traditional carols that will provide the audience an opportunity to sing along with members of the choral society and the chorus of Sag Harbor’s Pierson High School. In addition to Christmas songs, the program has two selections inspired by the Jewish tradition of celebrating important occasions with dance. 

The program has “Carols and Lullabies” and “A Christmas Garland” by Conrad Susa; “Kol Haneshamah” (Psalm 150) by Bonia Shur; “Al HaNissim” (Sing to God) by D. Frimer, Joshua Jacobson, and Hankus Netsky, and arrangements of traditional songs by Zoltan Kodaly and others. Mark Mangini, the society’s music director, will conduct. Accompaniment will be by marimba, classical guitar, and harp.

A free reception with carol singing, hors d’oeuvres, and wine from Channing Daughters Winery will follow the 5:30 performance at Queen of the Most Holy Rosary Parish Center in Bridgehampton. A silent auction will benefit the choral society.

Tickets are $30, $35 at the door. For those 18 and under, the tariff is $10, $15 at the door, and preferred seating is available for $75. Tickets are available at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor and by phone at 631-204-9402. 

The Choral Society of the Hamptons is an auditioned chorus that performs with professional conductors, soloists, orchestra, and accompanists. The late Charlotte Rogers Smith founded it in 1946.

Collaboration across artistic disciplines is a tricky endeavor. How does an artist paint a sound, or a musician play a color? The symbiosis, or clash, may produce the sublime or the horrific. 

Audiences fill the Love Theatre at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, where Cirque du Soleil has presented “Love,” a circus-like performance set to clever mashups of the Beatles’ oeuvre, since 2006. But the Bee Gees, Peter Frampton, and nearly everyone else involved saw their reputations tarnished for years to come upon the 1978 release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” a criminally misguided effort to put the Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece to film. Even the Beatles themselves misfired when they tried their collective hand at writing and directing the ponderous “Magical Mystery Tour” film, released on the heels of the “Sgt. Pepper” album.

Mirra Bank, however, a documentary filmmaker who lives in Manhattan and East Hampton, captured the sublime, in all its untidy complexity, with “Last Dance,” a chronicle of the collaboration between the modern dance company Pilobolus and the late author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. The pairing produced “A Selection,” the company’s interpretation and depiction of the Holocaust. 

“Last Dance” will be screened next Thursday at 4 p.m. at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor as part of the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival. Ms. Bank will participate in a question-and-answer session after the screening. Tickets are $15 and available at ht2ff.com. 

Ms. Bank — whose credits include the PBS series “Nobody’s Girls,” in which stories of real women of the Old West were re-enacted by actresses, and “The Only Real Game,” about the baseball-crazed residents of the unstable border state of Manipur, India — finds and depicts the stories within the story in “Last Dance.” The dance company’s collaborative nature inevitably produces friction, as egos and visions struggle for supremacy and a work takes shape.   Sendak, who died in 2012, had lost many family members in the Holocaust; speaking directly to the camera, his countenance lays bare the lingering ache and emptiness. 

Quickly, one wonders if this collaboration will self-immolate before producing anything: While the company’s dancers — Rebecca Anderson, Otis Cook, Josie Coyoc, Matt Kent, Gaspard Louis, and Benjamin King — slowly forge a work of art that is as playful as it is heart-rending, the company’s artistic directors Robby Barnett, Michael Tracy, and the late Jonathan Wolken quarrel among themselves and with Sendak and his collaborator, the writer and director Arthur Yorinks. 

Patience and dedication are rewarded, however. The Sendak-designed set and a soundtrack featuring Hans Krasa and other composers murdered in the Holocaust are the backdrop to the dancers’ affecting performance. 

“Nobody knew what was going to happen,” Ms. Bank said of the project, “and what was attractive to me also was that leap of faith. It’s why I make verite documentary. If you don’t enjoy that level of risk, it’s probably not what you do. But I felt that these were world-class creative people, and whatever happened was going to be vivid and probably truthful, which was what I was interested in.” 

Ms. Bank includes footage from a Nazi propaganda film depicting seemingly happy children at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where Krasa had been sent before his murder at Auschwitz. That propaganda film depicts children interned there performing Krasa’s opera “Brundibar,” which Pilobolus used in “A Selection.” 

“They created in a very push-pull process,” Ms. Bank said of Pilobolus, “the idea of what the story was going to be and the through-line of what the action was going to be. Then they edited selections of this music to work with what they had done.” 

The dance company “really went out of their way to find people outside of their discipline,” she said. “That part of it was exhilarating. Everything you do changes you, and every film you make changes you. But for me this was profound, and a very important piece of work.”

The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival, celebrating its 10th year, starts next Thursday and concludes on Dec. 4. 

The East End is rich with theatrical happenings throughout the year, with venues from Quogue to Montauk offering comedy, music, and drama, but Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center seems to have cornered the market on the live radio play, which has become a holiday tradition there since 2014, when the theater’s creative director, Michael Disher, directed and Bonnie Grice of WPPB 88.3 FM produced “It’s a Wonderful Life.” 

The idea had its genesis in 2011, when Ms. Grice and Mr. Disher produced “A Christmas Carol” for broadcast on WPPB. The move to the cultural center added a new dimension, as the audience there is not only listening to but also watching the 1940s radio play in the same space as the performers, props, and sound effects. 

“A Christmas Carol” is this year’s production, opening tomorrow at 7 p.m. and continuing through Dec. 3 with nine additional performances. The production, written by Joe Landry, who has also created live radio plays for “War of the Worlds,” “Meet Me in St. Louis,” vintage Hitchcock films, and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” stars Daniel Becker, Christopher DiSunno, Richard Gardini, Joey Giovingo, Barbara Jo Howard, Deb Rothaug, Ken Rowland, Josephine Wallace, and Gerri Wilson. Mr. Disher will direct.

Additional performances will take place Sunday and Dec. 3 at 2 and 5 p.m., next Thursday and Friday, Dec. 1, at 7 p.m., and Dec. 2 at 2, 5, and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25, $15 for students, and both brunch-and-theater and dinner-and-theater packages are available.

Alfredo Merat is not standing still. Last Thursday, hours before he would resume a new, weekly residency at Lulu Kitchen and Bar in Sag Harbor, the musician excitedly shared plans to bring a vision to life in ways large and small. 

Outside his house in Springs sat a recently acquired recreational vehicle. Inside the house, guitars and ancillary musical equipment were everywhere, scattered among and between books and sheet music. All play an essential role in his upcoming plans. 

Last fall, Mr. Merat, who often plays at venues including Baron’s Cove in Sag Harbor and Sole East and Saltbox in Montauk, performed “Brel by Alfredo,” in which he channeled the spirit of Jacques Brel, the Belgian singer, songwriter, and actor who died in 1978, at Bay Street Theater, also in Sag Harbor. That performance, in which he sang in French and spoke about Brel’s life in English, coincided with the 50-year anniversary of Brel’s farewell concerts at the Olympia Theater in Paris, part of a long goodbye from live performances. 

The project sparked more ideas, and a collaboration with the director and producer Stephen Hamilton, who co-founded Bay Street Theater, and Randal Myler, the Tony and Drama Desk Award-nominated director whose credits include “Love, Janis,” a musical biography of Janis Joplin, and “Dream a Little Dream: The Mamas and the Papas Musical.” 

“We’re putting the concept together as far as this being more a theater play,” Mr. Merat said. “Hopefully, we’ll be done in the spring.” 

Mr. Merat, who was born in Madrid and grew up in France, has fully immersed himself in Brel and his music. Among the books scattered around his house are a comprehensive collection of biographies of Brel, an immensely popular artist in his time. He has contacted and corresponded with one biographer, is absorbing “a lot of insider information and anecdotes,” and has devoured and translated interviews, excerpts of which may be incorporated into the show. “Tell the story and sing the songs” is how he envisions it. 

Brel’s oeuvre struck a chord in him, he said, in part due to his upbringing in France. “Then, when I was young, I picked up a guitar around the time his songs were in my ear,” he said. More recently, “I was in Paris, and realized I wanted to revisit his work. My God, there’s so much good stuff in there.”

Subsequent to the October 2016 performance at Bay Street, Mr. Merat traveled to Cuba, a journey that unexpectedly added a new element to the project. With Cuban musicians in a Havana studio, he recorded 11 Brel songs, often in a unique interpretation. “They’re fun songs,” he said, “and I’m doing it my way, rearranging them, rediscovering some of them, thinking, ‘This would be great with salsa.’ ” 

“Alfredo Sings Brel,” the resulting CD, features, for example, two versions of “Le Moribond,” one a lush and dreamy bachata arrangement, the other an up-tempo salsa interpretation. 

“I want to break it here,” he said of the show, “meaning we’ll do the rehearsals and then the previews. This is not going to be a one-time show — at least, that’s the aim! We will start production, hopefully, this winter into spring.” After previews at a South Fork venue to be determined, he hopes to take it to Manhattan. “Hopefully, it takes on a life of its own,” he said. “I’m hopeful that there will be a market in Canada, France, England, Belgium, Morocco, because those are the places he performed, and he performed in French. But for now, we’ll run it here and see if it’s got legs.”

Simultaneous to this project, Mr. Merat began the weekly residency at Lulu, a consequence of performing there during the Sag Harbor American Music Festival, in September. The gig is serving as a kind of laboratory in which, depending on the circumstances, Mr. Merat alternates between performance as part of a duo or trio and experimenting with Brel’s music. “I was really happy when Lulu came along and invited me to do this,” he said. “They were very receptive and complimentary when I did the festival.” 

“The funny part is, while I’m doing this solo work I’m preparing for the bigger show,” he said. “Ultimately, the plan is to do the big show but also prepare something much smaller where I can tell the story in English as well, in between songs, or translate while the song is going.” 

Hence the recreational vehicle, in which he plans to travel extensively in 2018 and beyond. “When I go to New Orleans and other places, in some places I’ll have gigs,” he predicted, “but in some I’m going to wing it. That’s my plan.” 

A first-time visitor would have no problem finding Steve Joester’s Water Mill studio on his rambling property. The music playing, a steady mix of classic rock, is the first thing that beckons from a small building across from the house on the other side of the pool. Then there is the potent odor of paints and solvents and, once inside, a trail of graphic and brightly highlighted images that lead to his upper-level studio.

On the first really cold day in November, the windows were closed and the heat on. The chemical haze made for a heady interview, perfect for the scene created by the canvases of mashed-up images of rock stars from photos he took in the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, “Blow-Up.”

“David Hemmings made it look so cool,” Mr. Joester said of the actor in the film, the plot of which centered on a fashion photographer who may have captured a murder in one of his photos. The movie is loosely based on the life of David Bailey, the photographer who caught London as it was awash in 1960s hipness and youth culture. “I thought, ‘Wow, you can make a living doing that.’ ”

Although Mr. Bailey worked primarily in fashion and portraits, Mr. Joester found that his own interest lay in music. “I got a camera, went down to London, and just started shooting things.” At that time, London’s music scene was still contained. “It was very small; there weren’t a lot of places to put the photos.” Melody Maker and New Music Express were the key publications. “If you could get your photo in one of those papers, everybody saw it.”

Things happened quickly. He spent the next decade in the studio, on tour, and on location, capturing images, making friends, and living the rock ’n’ roll life and all that came with it. “It was weird. You had 20 hours of boredom and four of real craziness, a dangerous combination. With access to anything you wanted, it could really lead to trouble.”

During those years, he amassed an astounding library of superstars caught in their prime. Some of the faces looking out from repurposed mixed-media compositions, prints, and silkscreens include Neil Young, Bob Marley, Freddie Mercury, Sting, Deborah Harry, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the rest of the Rolling Stones, the members of KISS, Thin Lizzy, the Sex Pistols, AC/DC, and Judas Priest.

But after 10 years, he was done. “That small community grew pretty quickly,” he recalled. “Merchandising came in, and the value of the image became very different. Then, the contracts came, saying you have to give up copyright. That’s when I quit.” Having retained the rights to his images up to that point, he wasn’t ready to sign them over in exchange for the choice of only a couple of photos to publish or hold back for other purposes. With no extra money coming  for the rights to the rest of those images, Mr. Joester walked away. “It became a whole different business.”

He then landed in advertising. Back then, he said, there was “still a lot of fun and creativity, great campaigns that were irreverent and with shock value.” He stayed there for another decade or so, but lost interest after the messages started repeating themselves in watered-down versions. “After about 12 years of it, that was enough.”

It wasn’t long after that he returned to his archives. “I went back into my boxes. I realized I was sitting on something,” he said. Having never sold his rights, he had carte blanche to use them. “I just needed to figure out how.”

He came up with a mixture of Pop Art and Street Art, borrowing from icons such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring. He has constructed several silkscreens from some of his favorite images, easily recognizable portraits of Mick Jagger, Sid Vicious, Sting, and even Warhol, whom he met for the first time backstage at a Judas Priest concert.

“Andy’s head popped in backstage, and I said, ‘Hey, come in. I want to take a couple of shots with you.’ ” He borrowed the lead singer Rob Halford’s handcuffs to handcuff the artist to Mr. Halford and then to the radiator. “Andy loved it; he thought it was cool. But I was thinking, ‘What the hell is he doing at a Judas Priest concert?’ ”

Mr. Joester saves his more portrait-like images for the silkscreens and uses the images of the bands playing live in his multimedia works, where the prints vie with paint and other applied surfaces to form a coherent composition. Sometimes, he uses just one very large print, but often he adds smaller ones or contact strips.

Even his portraits are mostly of the performers in concert. “I only like shooting them live, because that’s what they do,” he said. “When you meet them in a regular setting, they’re not that interesting, but when they’re out onstage they’re mesmerizing.”

Back in those days, he was working with film, which required patience and agility. “You would have to chase after them as they were moving around onstage, then change the film, usually missing the best part as you were winding it.” Although he eventually got a self-winding camera, he still had no idea what he had until it was developed a couple of days later. An image of Mick Jagger looking right at him from a Stones concert was only a split second among hours of his stage strutting.

He said he tries to recreate some of the intensity of those moments in his compositions. “It was craziness with an order, because you had to be ready, you really had to be there to get it all on film.” And it happened even with all of the vertigo and discombobulation of touring. 

“There was no reason to know where you were. Someone would knock on the door when it was time to get on the bus or to the show.” He recalled one night out at dinner with KISS. “They took fake blood capsules with them, and we bit into them in the middle of dinner. We were in a Midwestern restaurant with blood coming out of our mouths,” he said with a laugh. From this perspective, he said the film “This Is Spinal Tap” did a great job of “summing up the politics and nonsense of touring.”

In the studio, he works on a variety of supports, including paper, canvas, and even pallets, which have a shadow box kind of feeling to them. He likes to work collaboratively, bringing in people like LA II (also known as Angel Ortiz), who worked with and inspired Keith Haring, to add their characteristic marks to his canvases. He recently had members of the Tats Cru — Nicer, BIO, and BG-183 — add drawings and tags to compositions he had started with his photographic images. 

Recently, he has added erotic subject matter to his oeuvre, which helped inspire “Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll,” a show coming up in December at the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton. His work is also on view in New York City at John Allen, a men’s grooming club on Wall Street.

Alexander Dashnaw, a professor emeritus of music at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University, will conduct a choral workshop for singers and directors on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church.

Singers will learn about vocal production, breathing, diction, intonation, and choral blend, with a variety of music for church, school, or community choirs. Directors will be given an opportunity to direct a portion of the music for constructive criticism.

The cost of the workshop, including copies of the music and lunch provided by Panera Bread, is $10, $7 for middle or high school students. Registration is required by tomorrow with Thom Bohlert at thbohlertfirstpres@hotmail. com or 631-553-0390.

Films based on operas are not uncommon. Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” for example, was adapted for the screen by both Ingmar Bergman, in 1975, and Kenneth Branagh, in 2006. Next up in The Met: Live in HD series is a rarity, an opera based on a film, the source in this case Luis Bunuel’s 1962 “The Exterminating Angel,” the story of a group of upper-class friends who are invited to a mansion for dinner and are inexplicably unable to leave.

The opera, by the British composer Thomas Ades, which The New York Times called “a major event” when it premiered at the 2016 Salzburg Festival, will be simulcast at Guild Hall on Saturday at 1 p.m. Sung in English, the wickedly comic takedown of the rituals of the wealthy is directed by Tom Cairns, the librettist, in collaboration with the composer, who also conducts. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students.

The JDTLab will present “Gutless and Grateful,” Amy Oestreicher’s solo cabaret show about the almost unimaginable sequence of medical traumas she calls her “beautiful detour,” on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. After developing a blood clot the week before her senior prom, she was rushed to the hospital, where her stomach exploded and both lungs collapsed. Several months in a coma were followed by 27 surgeries that reconstructed her digestive system.

Ms. Oestreicher is an artist, writer, actress, health advocate, and speaker for TEDx and RAINN (the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network), and her 70-minute musical autobiography is meant to inspire people to flourish because of, rather than in spite of, challenges. The performance is free, but reservations are encouraged.

“Liberty Ladies — A Musical Revue,” a program created and performed by Valerie diLorenzo to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in New York State, will take place Sunday afternoon at 3 at the Southampton Arts Center.

Ms. diLorenzo, an award-winning cabaret artist now living in Sag Harbor, has chosen songs that trace the struggle of women for the right to vote from its beginnings within the abolitionist and temperance movements through the modern feminism of the 21st century. Amanda Borsack Jones from East Hampton is the show’s music director and accompanist. Tickets are $10 and include a post-show reception.

The names most commonly associated with women’s suffrage are Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The History Channel’s website lists three other “Women Who Fought for the Vote”: Alice Paul, Lucy Stone, and Ida B. Wells. While that article doesn’t claim exclusivity for those five, it is curious that it doesn’t include Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States — in 1872!

That would not surprise Victoria Bond, the East Hampton composer and conductor whose opera “Mrs. President” will be presented by the Rochester Lyric Opera on Saturday in celebration of the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote in New York State.

“For somebody who I think is such a significant historic person, most people don’t know Victoria Woodhull,” said Ms. Bond. “She was such a radical, and was involved not only with the suffrage movement but also had her own newspaper and was the first woman to have a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. I mean, that’s pretty major stuff.”

Woodhull’s 88 years were full of successes, failures, and controversies. Born in Ohio in 1838 into a poor and abusive family, she became a follower of the spiritualist movement and claimed spirits guided her to New York City. There she met the financier Cornelius Vanderbilt, with whose assistance she and her sister Tennessee Claflin opened a brokerage firm on Wall Street in 1870.

They used their profits to found Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, whose primary purpose was to support her bid for president, but which also advocated free love, sex education, woman suffrage, and other radical ideas at the time.

However, in 1872, a few days before the election, the paper published a story revealing that Henry Ward Beecher, the renowned preacher of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church and a critic of Woodhull’s free love philosophy, was having an affair with one of his parishioners.

The same day Woodhull was arrested, along with her sister and her second husband, Colonel James Blood, for publishing an obscene newspaper. Stigmatized by the press, branded “Mrs. Satan” by Harper’s Weekly, she spent election night in jail.

“The person who brought this story to my attention was my mother,” said Ms. Bond. “She was traveling in San Francisco and saw a plaque that said, ‘Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president, slept here.’ She suggested it would make a good opera.” While Ms. Bond was working on something else at the time, the idea took hold, and several biographies on Woodhull came out within the next few years.

The playwright Marcia Norman introduced Ms. Bond to Hilary Bell, a student of hers at the Juilliard School who was also interested in Woodhull. “We just hit it off immediately. I could not have wished for a better person to work with.” They discussed the story together from the beginning. Ms. Bond had a clear idea of which scenes from Woodhull’s life she wanted to musicalize, “but as far as where they came, that was something we experimented a great deal with.”

“The brilliant thing Hilary was able to do was to condense the action to basically one year, 1872. A playwright as well as a librettist, she was able to transform this very messy and complicated life into a very clear through line. That was what we always worked toward, finding that dramatic center.”

The first reading of the opera with an orchestra took place in 2001 with the New York City Opera, long before there was any thought of centennial celebrations. Subsequent performances happened at Guild Hall in 2008, when it was titled “Mrs. Satan,” and in 2012 at the Anchorage Opera in Alaska. Several scenes were performed at Opera America in New York City last November.

The Lyric Opera had planned a performance of another opera by Ms. Bond, “Clara,” the story of Clara Schumann, the musician and composer who was married to Robert Schumann. “They were working with the Susan B. Anthony Society on the centennial celebration and suggested we do ‘Mrs. President’ instead.”

Ms. Bond stressed the importance to any operatic story of a character with charismatic appeal, even if that character is flawed or dark, “like Boris Godunov or Don Giovanni. Both Woodhull and Beecher had almost predatory characters,” she said. “Both were radicals and visionaries, but he had a fatal flaw, sleeping with his female parishioners, and she was not above exposing him if he didn’t support her presidential campaign. If the character is all goodness and always does the right thing, there’s not much of a story there.”

Ms. Bond noted the similarities of the story to today’s news. “Beecher definitely used his position to take advantage of women.” She made one change during the performance last November at Opera America in the scene where Woodhull announces her candidacy for the presidency at Steinway Hall. “In that scene, the crowd heckles her, calling her ‘Mrs. Satan.’ So I added the words, ‘Lock her up!’ And in fact they did.”

The story has a strong East Hampton connection. Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher’s father, was the preacher of the Presbyterian Church on Main Street from 1798 until 1810. “He was a real hellfire and brimstone preacher, very charismatic,” said Ms. Bond. He relocated in 1810 to Litchfield, Conn., where Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe were born. His two oldest children, the theologian Edward Beecher, and Catharine Beecher, an educator, were born in East Hampton.

“Mrs. President” is still awaiting a fully staged performance; the Rochester production will be semi-staged. Ms. Bond recalled a remarkable moment during the final scene of the Anchorage Opera performance. “Many prominent women politicians live in Anchorage. In the final scene, when Victoria is alone in this jail cell singing, ‘Arise, arise, from my ashes arise,’ the women came out of the wings onstage and walked through the audience. Here it was, 1872 talking to 2012, and her vision had become a reality. The audience went wild.”

Saturday’s performance will take place at 7 p.m. at Rochester’s Lyric Theatre. Tickets, available from the theater’s website, are $25, $50 for preferred seating and a reception.

“Ladies of Liberty: A Musical Revue,” a free cabaret created and performed by Valerie diLorenzo to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in New York State, will take place Sunday afternoon at 2:30 at the Montauk Library.

Ms. diLorenzo, an award-winning cabaret artist now living in Sag Harbor, has chosen songs that trace the struggle of women for the right to vote from its beginnings within the abolitionist and temperance movements through the modern feminism of the 21st century. Amanda Borsack Jones of East Hampton is the show’s music director and accompanist.