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In just a few hours the weekend will be here. TPR’s Jack Morgan has three suggestions to fill out your weekend with music, adventure and drama.
Spring has definitely sprung, and Texas Parks and Wildlife’s Rachel Grotte is inviting the community to take part in a nature event at the San Antonio Botanical Garden.
“City Nature Challenge is an initiative that's organized on a global scale,” Grotte said. “It's an initiative that brings people together in various metro areas around the world to host observations to iNaturalist.”
iNaturalist is a software designed to help citizen scientists document what they see in nature. Citizen scientists have become an important part of managing nature centers and parks.
“We will be looking at things that are in the gardens, like birds, mammals and insects that are there, and spiders, of course, anything else that's around the gardens,” she said.
To find more, go to the San Antonio Botanical Garden website.
Then there will be a stage production from Robin Laverne Wilson—also known as Dragonfly.
“I would say that the show is definitely a love letter to Amalia and I's generation, Generation X,” Dragonfly said.
Amalia Ortiz is a collaborator on this project, which Dragonfly says is aspirational.
“The show is technically ambitious,” she said. “We have original music. We have original costumes that were created by Jess Betancourt with the concept of Raza Cósmica — very futuristic. And we have projections going on in the background to help tell the story.
You can catch the production, named The Miraculous Mixes of DJ Santa Cecilia at Say Si’s black box theater at 1310 Brazos St.
Then on Sunday only, chamber group Agarita has designed another fascinating musical collaboration. Here’s violist Marisa Bushman.
“This Sunday at 3 p.m. we are collaborating with acclaimed guitarist Pablo Sainz-Villegas again. He's a wonderful past collaborator of ours, and this concert, like all of our concerts, is free and open to everyone,” Bushman said.
The program — as are all Agarita performances — is free. In fact, they have presented free music programs for the last 8 years.
“Our mission is really to bring classical music to our community in an accessible way. So taking down the boundaries of time, travel and cost, and making sure we meet you where you are,” she said.
