Hancher

“The last leading man” comes to Hancher Auditorium to perform with University of Iowa student musicians under the baton of Dr. William LaRue Jones. Brian Stokes Mitchell and his trio will join the UI Symphony Orchestra, which will provide a lush setting for Stokes’s luscious voice.

Hancher has enjoyed a long and creatively fruitful relationship with both the Kronos Quartet and Rinde Eckert. For My Lai, the string quartet and the vocalist come together with multi-instrumentalist Vân Ánh Vanessa Võ to lay bare the tragedy of the 1968 massacre at My Lai.

There are plenty of top tier string quartets in the world. Even so, the Elias String Quartet stands out among its peers. As the Philadelphia Enquirer put it, “Few quartets at any stage of their evolution have this much personality.”

Motown The Musical is the true American dream story of Motown founder Berry Gordy’s journey from featherweight boxer to the heavyweight music mogul who launched the careers of Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Smokey Robinson, and many more.

Lin Hwai-min is the founder and artistic director of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. He is also a University of Iowa graduate, earning his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1971. After studying at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, he founded Cloud Gate in 1973.

A trumpeter, santur player, vocalist, and composer, ElSaffar is steeped in classical and jazz traditions while also bringing the microtones and ornaments idiomatic to Arabic music into play. His band, Rivers of Sound, features 17 musicians who blend eastern and western music.

Pianist and composer Billy Childs joined the Ying Quartet for a classical concert last season at Hancher. This season, the four-time Grammy winner returns for a run of Club Hancher performances with his jazz quartet.

Camille A. Brown's new work, ink, seeks to reclaim African American narratives and culture from appropriation and silence. The third work in a trilogy about identity, ink is an amalgamation of African dance, African American social dance, tap, jazz, modern, and hip-hop.

It truly is a family affair when Natalie MacMaster and Donnell Leahy bring their Celtic—by way of Cape Breton, Canada—music to the stage for a holiday party.