A jam-packed week at Guild Hall will start with contemporary dance and continue with comedy, a discussion about the changing media landscape, chamber music, and an artists’ conversation.
Jacob Jonas the Company, a dance troupe based in Los Angeles and founded by Jonas, a choreographer, will perform at Guild Hall Friday evening at 8. The program, which will highlight Jonas’s exploration of the body, nature, and resilience, will include examples from his film-dance series as well as stage works created for the company, among them “Nature Sounds While the IV Drips,” “River,” and “Rain.”
Also on the program is “Zebra,” a collaboration with Sara Mearns, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, in a solo that explores the tension between strength and vulnerability. Tickets range from $92 to $180.
“Best of The Second City,” set for Saturday at 8 p.m., will feature six current members of the Chicago troupe that launched everyone from Alan Alda to Bill Murray to Cecily Strong.
The production blends improvisation with songs, characters, and sketches “crafted by some of the sharpest comedic minds and reimagined by today’s boldest voices,” according to Guild Hall.
The cast includes Aaron Alicea, Kristen Aviles, Deb Duncan, Max Kantor, Audrey Schiffhauer, and Ross Taylor. Music direction is by Mel Owens. Tickets are $92 to $122.
Four musicians from the New York Philharmonic will take the stage on Sunday evening at 7 with a program of chamber music derived from three centuries of the string quartet repertoire.
The program includes Haydn’s String Quartet in D major, Op. 76, No. 5 (circa 1797); Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in E minor, Op. 44, No. 2 (1837), and Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 2, “Company” (1983).
The musicians are Alina Ming Kobialka and I-Jung Huang, violin, Leah Ferguson, viola, and Matthew Christakos, cello. Tickets are $69 to $95.
Who better to discuss the changing media landscape than Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and Tom Freston, the co-founder of MTV and former C.E.O. of Viacom. Their conversation, moderated by the longtime New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, will happen on Monday at 7 p.m.
The pair will address the rise of social media, the merging of mainstream media outlets, and the responsibility of media in an age of misinformation and polarization. Tickets are $55.
The cultural center pivots to visual art next Thursday at 7:30 p.m., when Arcmanoro Niles and Eric Fischl discuss Niles’s current exhibition there, “Forgotten Words I Never Got to Say.” They will take the show as their point of departure and continue with the evolution of Niles’s practice through early and recent works, and the role of the history of painting for contemporary artists. Tickets to the talk are $35.
Earlier that evening, from 5:30 to 7:30, there will be a performance by Whatever Lola Wants, a jazz trio, in the Guild Hall garden.
