PUTNEY-Sandglass's Summer Series presents artists working in interdisciplinary performance techniques. This series celebrates the crossroads of art forms and the connection between puppetry and other art forms like clowning, magic, and music. The Book of Stars will be presented at 7 p.m., on Saturday, June 7, 2025 at its theater on Kimball Hill.
The Book of Stars is the folktale of the Light Queen, written and performed by musician and folk artist Georgia Beatty. The show combines original music with old projector technology known as a magic lantern.
The story tells of the cosmic queen who is reborn every 3,000 years to learn the songs of Light and use them to heal Earth from oppressive powers.
Exploring resonance as both a musical and ancestral concept, visuals, song, and story, the performance guides the audience through a grounding ritual to discover the present body as a living archive capable of healing a broken world.
Beatty's website describes them as "focused on cycle, lineage, and healing through cultural transmission," continuing: "their music has two taproots growing at equally feverish rates in the paradoxically woven worlds of songwriting and traditional music."
Beatty plays traditional Norwegian fiddle music on regular or "flat fiddle" as well as the Hardanger (hardingfele) fiddle, a violin-like instrument with eight sympathetic strings.
Their first full-length album, Apprentice to Transformation, is a collection of original and traditional fiddle tunes "devoted to the practice of witnessing Death not as the end, but as a moment in the act of transformation," organizers wrote in a news release.
Currently a Folklife Apprentice with Loretta Kelley, studying hardingfele repertoire for dance (supported by the Maryland State Arts Council), Beatty lives and works in their hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.
Tickets for The Book of Stars can be purchased at bit.ly/818-beatty.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.