The Met: Live in HD will resume at Guild Hall at noon on Saturday with Alexander Borodin’s epic “Prince Igor.” Famous for its Polovtsian dances, the opera is being staged at the Met for the first time in almost 100 years. Dmitri Tcherniakov’s new production is a psychological journey through the mind of its protagonist, played by Ildar Abdrazakov, with the founding of Russia as its backdrop. Tickets to the four-and-a-half-hour program are $22, $20 for members, $15 for students.

    “Speaking Shakespeare: A Classical Acting Class,” an eight-week workshop to be held at Guild Hall beginning Monday and continuing on Monday even­ings from 6 to 9 through April 21, will offer instruction to students ages 16 and up in sonnets, monologues, mask work, and scene work. Presented in partnership with the Round Table Theatre Company and Academy, the class will culminate in a performance onstage at the John Drew Theater on April 23.

    Morgan and Tristan Vaughan, the instructors, who hold M.F.A.s in classical acting from the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at George Washington University, have also studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London and the Circle in the Square School in Manhattan. The fee for the workshop is $300, $275 for Guild Hall members.

    Capping a busy week, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. the John Drew Theater Lab will present a staged reading of Brian Sutow’s play “The Personal(s).” Based on the 1996 Dutch film “Blind Date” and the American remake by Stanley Tucci, the play follows a husband and wife, estranged after a tragedy, on a series of blind dates with each other. The free program is directed by Isaac Klein and features Josh Gladstone, Kate Mueth, and Trevor Vaughn.

    HITFest, the Hamptons Independent Theatre Festival, will present the fifth episode of the “Water’s Edge Radio Hour” Sunday at 4 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Community House, where it will be recorded live for broadcast on WPPB 88.3 FM.

    Conceived by John Landes, Joshua Perl, and Peter Zablotsky and inspired in part by “A Prairie Home Companion,” the program features comedy sketches by the Naked Stage Players and music by Telly Karoussos and Brad Penuel of Hopefully Forgiven.

    Tickets to the program are $15 and available from eventbrite.com. Mr. Perl will host the event.

     “Get Paid to Talk,” an introductory class focused on the voice-over profession, will be held at the Southampton Cultural Center Monday evening from 6:30 to 9. Conducted by an instructor from voicecoaches.com, the class will cover how voice-overs are created, finding one’s specific vocal niche, where to find work opportunities, and how to avoid common mistakes.

    Each participant will record a short commercial script under the instructor’s direction for playback at the end of the workshop. Tuition is $25. The deadline for registration, through 287-4377 or [email protected], is tomorrow at noon. After that, questions regarding availability may be sent to the email address.

    The East Hampton Historical Society’s winter lecture series, In Their Own Words: Voices From East Hampton’s Past, continues tomorrow at 7 p.m. at Clinton Academy with “The Rustic Manners of Old East Hampton: John Howard Payne’s 1838 Recollections of His Boyhood.”

    “John Howard Payne came to East Hampton sometime between 1832 and 1834,” Hugh King, the director of the Home, Sweet Home Museum, told the village board at its meeting on Friday. “While he was here, he took notes. He wrote a whole article about what East Hampton was like in the 1830s.”

    Andrew Botsford, an actor and director with the Hampton Theatre Company, will read Payne’s recollections. In the program’s second part, Evan Thomas and Samantha Ruddock will portray a scene from Payne’s operetta, “Clari, the Maid of Milan,” in which the song “Home, Sweet Home!” was first performed. Payne wrote the song’s lyrics.

    “Payne’s 1838 recollections of visiting his aunt in East Hampton are extremely rich,” Richard Barons, the historical society’s executive director, said last month. He called Payne’s writings “somewhat romantic, but certainly realistic.”

    The series will continue on March 28 with “An Eagle Eye on East Hampton’s Main Street: Cornelia Huntington’s Vivid Diary, 1820-1860,” featuring Barbara Borsack in the role of Miss Huntington. It will conclude on April 25 with “From Cradle to Grave: The Rev. Nathaniel Huntting’s Extraordinary Records of East Hampton, 1696-1753,” with Mr. Thomas as Reverend Huntting and Mr. King narrating. Free refreshments are served before the lectures, all of which begin at 7 p.m.   

    While the founding families of Shelter Island — the Sylvesters, the Havenses, the Nicolls — are well-known cornerstones of the island’s history, the slaves and Native Americans who built and inhabited the island are not as widely recognized. “Race and Ethnicity on Shelter Island: 1652-2000,” a new exhibition at the Shelter Island Historical Society, celebrates their role in the island’s history.

    Nancy Jaicks, a retired professor of history at New York University and part-time island resident, will discuss this aspect of the island’s past Saturday at 1 p.m. at the Havens House Museum. The reception will include light refreshments.

    “The minorities on the island have always been here but have never been acknowledged in an exhibition,” said Nanette Lawrenson, executive director of the society. “There has never been much attention devoted to their lives, their challenges, and how they overcame them and became successful here.”

    Patricia Shillingburg, who with her husband, Edward, has written a number of books on the island’s early history, explained that Nathaniel Sylvester purchased the entire island in 1652. It had been part of the original Plymouth Company land grant made by James I of England in 1620. The Shelter Island property was primarily a provisioning plantation for the family’s sugar plantation in Barbados. The Sylvesters arrived on the island with slaves, who built the original house.

    A recent five-year dig at Sylvester Manor has turned up information about the three cultures living on the island at the same time — European, African, and Native American. The exhibition includes examples from the historical society’s collection of Native American tools, blades, and other artifacts, some of which date from 1000 B.C.

    Sylvester Manor Educational Farm recently held two events related to the themes of the exhibit. “Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North,” a PBS documentary on one extended family’s investigation of its history of slavery, was screened at the Shelter Island library on Friday. On Saturday morning a community remembrance was held at the Sylvester Manor burial ground, where 200 slaves, Native Americans, and freedmen are interred.

    After Nathaniel Sylvester’s death in 1680, his son Giles sold what is now the Mashomack Preserve to William Nicoll, a successful New York lawyer who owned the land that is now Islip. Soon after, George Havens, another newcomer, purchased 1,000 acres from Nathaniel II.

    After the American Revolution, many local landowners felt they should free their slaves. According to Dr. Jaicks, it is unclear how much of this was voluntary and how much was due to New York laws. According to the 1790 census, out of an island population of 200, 40 were either slaves or freedmen. Some went into whaling and became successful, though when the local whaling industry peaked in the 1840s, many relocated to the ports of New York City.

    Several African-American families remained on the island, one of whom, the Hempsteads, sent two volunteers, James Madison and Henry, to fight in the Civil War with the U.S. Colored Troop Regiments. While James Madison died in a Union hospital in 1864, his brother Henry fought, then married, started a family, and farmed his own property until his death in 1907.

    The Scott family arrived in the late 1800s, just as the Hempsteads were dying out. Albert Scott was a slave in Virginia who had been tortured and wounded so he couldn’t run away. Nonetheless, he made his way north to work for David Gardiner on Gardiner’s Island, where Vincent Joseph, a Montauk Indian, was also employed. It is not certain if Albert was still enslaved at that time. David Gardiner was anti-slavery, but his sister Julia, who later married President John Tyler, held the opposite view.

    Albert Scott married Elizabeth Jo­seph, a Montauk Indian who lived in East Hampton and, along with Vincent Joseph, moved to Shelter Island. In 1922 the Scotts’ daughter Laura married Benjamin Chase, an African-American photographer from Brooklyn. Just as the Hempsteads lasted through the 19th century, the Scott and Chase families remained a presence on the island until Benjamin Chase’s death in 1997.

    Many freedmen came north after reconstruction ended because life in the south had become unbearable. Some came to Shelter Island to work in the hotels. The exhibition includes, among its many documents, a manumission, or emancipation, certificate. To be freed, one had to be younger than 50 and able to be self-supporting.

    Among the other documents on view are the baptismal records of St. Mary’s church, including those for the three Scott children. A ledger from the school shows the attendance records. In addition to photographs, documents, and artifacts, there is a timeline that traces the island’s history from 1652 to the present, with some references to what was happening concurrently in the nation at large.

    The Havens house dates from 1743. Over the years before the society took possession of it in 1971, it had been a house, a farm, a hospital, and a tavern. In 1986, Havens House was placed on both the State Register of Historic Places and the National Register of Historic Places.

    According to Ms. Lawrenson, the society has benefited from the generosity of local residents who have donated everything from Delft china to letters, photographs, furniture, and other documents. The society not only mounts exhibits but also handles inquiries from residents and scholars.

    The society has embarked on a capital campaign that will include necessary repairs to the house, the construction of a new, larger archival vault to allow for the proper care of the ever-expanding collection of artifacts and documents, and the creation of a study center. Basement space beneath the vault will allow for the storage of furniture and other materials currently filling several upstairs rooms, which will in turn become available as additional exhibition spaces.

    The exhibition will remain on view through March 22. The museum is open Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

    A screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film “Vertigo,” presented by Guild Hall and the Hamptons International Film Festival, drew a full house to the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Saturday night.

    Following the screening, the actor Alec Baldwin, who has a house in Amagansett, hosted a brief but equally entertaining forum with David Nugent, the festival’s artistic director.

    As Guild Hall’s website noted, the British film journal Sight & Sound named “Vertigo,” a psychological thriller starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, the best film of all time in 2012, dethroning longtime favorite “Citizen Kane.”

    Mr. Nugent, following the screening, read aloud the Sight & Sound editors’ reasoning. “ ‘It’s the ultimate critics film,’ ” he read. “ ‘It’s a dreamlike film about people who are not sure who they are but are busy reconstructing themselves and each other to fit a kind of cinema ideal about the ideal soul mate.’ ”

    “If you love cinema,” Mr. Nugent said, “it has pretty much everything you want. It’s about as perfectly done as could be.”

    After the screening, Mr. Baldwin invited two members of the audience — provided they were between the ages of 30 and 60 and had seen most of the current Academy Award-nominated films — to serve as “guest film critics.”

    Clearly enjoying himself, Mr. Baldwin riffed on current cinema and its actors and directors. “Tonight you are a critic,” he told his guests, exhorting them to speak freely. “I’m not me, you’re not you, we’re not us,” he instructed. “We’re like film critics: We can say whatever we want to, and ruin people’s careers, hurt their feelings, decimating their careers in the industry. We don’t care.”

    The ad-hoc panel discussed their favorite films of the year, which included “12 Years a Slave” (which Mr. Nugent noted was the closing night film at the 2013 Hamptons International Film Festival), “The Act of Killing,” “American Hustle,” “Nebraska,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and “Blue Jasmine.”

    “I hear that’s good,” Mr. Baldwin joked of the latter film, in which he appeared.

    He asked the guests who they felt would win the Academy Award for best actor. “Christian Bale, and if not him [Leonardo] DiCaprio,” one replied. “He got cheated with ‘The Aviator.’ ”

    “I hear that’s good, too,” Mr. Baldwin, who also appeared in that film, deadpanned.

    Mr. Nugent predicted that Matthew McConaughey would be named best actor for “Dallas Buyers Club,” but felt that Chiwetel Ejiofor, who stars in “12 Years a Slave,” was the more deserving actor.

    For his part, Mr. Baldwin said he felt that “12 Years a Slave” was the year’s best film, with which much of the audience and panel concurred. He did part company with the editors of Sight & Sound, however: “Citizen Kane,” he said, remains the greatest film of all time, likening it to a Shakespearian tragedy.

    This year’s Hamptons International Film Festival will take place Oct. 9 to 13, coinciding with Columbus Day weekend.

    What, you may well ask, could possibly be the connection between a lunar rover and bas-relief sculpture made by folding paper?

    On its face, there does not seem to be one, but once the demands of engineering and architecture are considered, a thread of continuity appears.

    Nils Bruun, a resident of Springs and New York City, seems to approach both disciplines as puzzles to be solved. After earning a degree in mechanical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he worked at Grumman as part of a team that had to come up with new projects for NASA, one of which was to devise a way to design a vehicle the size of a car, so that it would fit into a lunar lander, but with a big wheelbase. He had to figure out how to fold it in order to make it compact enough to fit in the lander.

    At the same time Mr. Bruun was working on a lot of planes, designing slats and flaps that come out of the wing. He did this kind of work for 10 years, “making something smaller from something bigger,” as he put it, but then became interested in going back to school. He got into a master’s program in environmental design at the Yale School of Architecture, where he did sculpture and some architecture. He also got into folding paper, which is an exercise given to architecture students who are asked to make a structure out of a piece of paper. While reverse-engineering some of the more abstract projects he was working on, Mr. Bruun started “learning all kinds of things about folding paper,” he said recently at his house on Gardiner’s Bay in Springs.

    At the end of the 1980s and 1990s, after making forays into teaching — at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he designed lamps out of folded plastic — doing design work as a consultant and contractor, working at I.B.M. helping physicists design experiments, and doing industrial design work making closures for computer hard drives, Mr. Bruun knew that he wanted to get back to folding paper. It almost seems as if, all that time, bouncing back and forth between an academic environment and the practical world, Mr. Bruun was looking for a way to combine architecture and engineering, engineering being the nuts and bolts and architecture being the aesthetics.

    He also started sculpting in wood and metal, learning to fold sheet metal along perforated lines.

    “Paper folding is sculpture,” Mr. Bruun said, “bas-relief sculpture.” It is similar to painting in the sense that he fits a low (usually) bas-relief form within the rectangular shape of a wooden frame. “Variations on Gardiner’s Bay,” for example, which hangs in his hallway, has nine bas-reliefs in 12-by-12-inch frames, each one a sculpture folded from one piece of paper. In this work each sculpture is one of the many colors in the water and sky, which are visible from the huge picture window in the living room.

    Mr. Bruun uses heavier paper for bigger pieces and lighter paper for smaller ones. Some of the lighter, thinner paper looks remarkably like fabric, silk even. What is difficult to imagine is how he is able to achieve such symmetry by folding one sheet of paper, without a single cut.

    Pamela Williams, whose Amagansett gallery represented Mr. Bruun’s work, referred to “the light and shadow, the purity, of his work.” She said he can “see things on multiple planes and can play with them; the aesthetic is Eastern. His work is striking and sophisticated.”

    But does he really see things multi-dimensionally? Mr. Bruun said he has no depth perception because of a condition called strabismus, which allows him to see things with only one eye at a time. “If I turn my head slightly and look at the object, then it’s the same as if I were seeing it with both eyes at once, with integrated vision.” His bas-relief sculpture seems almost an attempt to turn something three-dimensional into something two-dimensional. “People say,” said Mr. Bruun, that “we do something in our life to overcome a handicap that we have.”

    He seems to approach the work as an engineering problem. “How can I change this using the same basic pattern for folding so that it doesn’t look like this?” He manipulates the material to produce a different effect. “The aim is usually what happens if I do this? Then I try and see if I can make it work. There are a lot of not so good attempts that get recycled, but that is the nature of the beast.”

    Each piece looks different from the back. Does he think of showing both sides? “No,” he said, “I have one side in mind, and then I look at what the other side looks like, and sometimes that is the better side. If I like both sides, I show them both.”

    The folding techniques and concepts have been translated into folded plastic lamps, wood and metal sculptures, and a line of clothing Mr. Bruun is developing with a business partner who became a costumer designer while studying at the Yale School of Drama.

    Mr. Bruun’s work is in many private collections and has been shown at the Julie Artisans Gallery in New York and other galleries on the East End, as well as the Pamela Williams Gallery, and in Connecticut. In addition to studying at the New School and the Art Students League, he has also taught at the Yale School of Architecture, Northern Illinois University, and the Art Barge.

    The Montauk Library will host a free concert of Bulgarian folk music Saturday evening at 7:30. Vlada Tomova, an internationally acclaimed Bulgarian vocalist, will perform with Chris Rael, an American guitarist who plays sitar, guitarra Portuguesa, Turkish Zas, and the 12-string guitar. The program will include Ms. Tomova’s arrangements of authentic Bulgarian folk music as well as her English-language repertoire.

    Ms. Tomova has toured in North and South America and throughout Europe. She has performed at such New York venues as Symphony Space, the Public Theatre, Irving Plaza, and BAM Cafe. Mr. Rael’s group, Church of Betty, has performed around the world and on National Public Radio, and Mr. Rael has teamed with musicians ranging from David Byrne to Frank London of the Klezmatics to Curt Smith of Tears for Fears.

    Ms. Tomova and Mr. Rael live in Brooklyn with their son, Sasha.

    Akiko Kobayashi, a violinist, and Eric Siepkes, a pianist, will perform a program of works from Beethoven to Schumann Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton. Both musicians, who are based in New York, perform as solo artists and as a duo.

    Ms. Kobayashi has appeared as soloist with orchestras including the Yonkers Philharmonic, Tokyo Suginami Kokaido Chamber Orchestra, and the Berkshires International Festival Orchestra.

    Mr. Siepkes, who made his debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, has performed in master classes for Richard Goode, Angela Hewitt, Natalya Antonova, and in chamber music master classes for London Baroque, the Avalon String Quartet, and the Eroica Trio.

    A reception will follow the concert.

    After several years writing about art critically, it is often surprising what ends up being surprising. Is it just the setting that makes a group show of East End artists so striking in a Chelsea gallery or is it the art itself?

    Many, if not all, of the artists chosen by Beth McNeill for “Seeking Engagement, No Strings Attached” have shown in New York City before, but seeing them together in Lyons Wier’s cramped storefront gallery setting during a hectic opening night in the neighborhood gave the show a certain charge that may not have caught fire in the same way at a venue like Ashawagh Hall.

    In any event, the animated crowd and the colorful and, indeed, engaging art did issue sparks and made for an energetic presentation that has caught notice and attention on social media, including a picture of a Jeff Muhs portrait bust of Ol’ Dirty Bastard posted on Instagram by Swizz Beatz that has received 18,800 plus likes. The bust captures the half-smile, half-glower of his grillz and is a convincing enough evocation to seem more spiritually charged than a simple death mask.

    The theme of the show was initially hard to grasp from the press release, but in the setting itself, it made sense. The artists chosen, including Jack Ceglic, Tom Dash, Tapp Francke, Julia Greffenius, Nika Nesgoda, Darius Yektai, and Gavin Zeigler, have a way of drawing viewers into their work either overtly or with deliberate obfuscation.

    Mr. Zeigler’s mixed-media works play with this idea in his “Peep Show” series. The works are layered with Op Art-like designs in such a way to obscure the nude models underneath, but revealing enough so that viewers are quite aware of what they are looking at. The hint of arm or other body parts is just as mysterious as the glimpse of breast here and there. Once you recognize you are not supposed to be looking at something, it charges everything not just with a hint of voyeuristic naughtiness, but also a need to overcome bewilderment. The eyes come back for more to be sure the brain can make sense of what it is seeing, putting all the parts together to make a whole.

    Mr. Dash’s “Pin Ups” are more obvious in their straightforward depiction, but also share in a distancing device, this time repetition. It’s hard to engage when the images repeat like a wrapping paper design. Add language such as “Bright Like Neon Love” and suddenly the former assistant to Richard Prince seems to be taking on the mantle of that artist, putting some of his themes into his own black box to reshuffle and make them his own.

    Ms. Nesgoda reimagines classical Christian imagery as photography featuring modern models, using porn stars as the leads. The show has a selection of her work, including a nursing Madonna, a couple of Annunciation scenes, and the Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth. As radical as it may sound, it is hardly new to cast the outliers of society as some as the most revered Christian icons. But the same gambit that created scandal around Caravaggio in the 16th and 17th centuries seems tamer today given the prevalence of nudity and pornography on the Internet. Still, the long and lacquered nails, the barely sheathing sheaths the models wear, the topless presentations, and lascivious glances do give the searingly bright C-prints an erotic charge that succeeds in attracting rather than turning off audiences.

    The “Three Graces” of Mr. Yektai’s imagination marry many of the classical ideals of the subject to his own interpretation, abstract and surreal. Removed from a setting and cut and pasted on canvas, they look like entwined paper dolls, too ethereal to require much definition or individual detail. The faces appear to have a certain Eastern mystery that belies the idealization of the Renaissance and other neoclassical movements.

    In Julia Greffenius’s compositions, she begins with paint and ends with duct tape. It gives her work a sunny optimism that lingers past what might be a one-note expression in other hands. Mr. Ceglic’s portraits are individual meditations on appearance and personality and how one can affect the other. Ms. Francke’s neon and mirror piece, “Hello” may be the most obvious of the works, but does it engage the viewer? You bet.    The work is on view through Feb. 22.