The Weekly Roundup, September 22-28

Delaware Korean Festival
September 24, 5-8pm
Delaware Art Museum, 2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington, Delaware

The Delaware Art Museum will present its seventh annual Delaware Korean Festival on Friday for an evening of activities and performances inspired by traditional and modern Korean culture. The fest is slated to coincide with the Chuseok holiday, a three-day harvest festival celebrated in South Korea. Chuseok always lands on the (takes a deep breath) 15th day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar on the full moon—which is actually today, the 22nd!

The event is free and registration is required. Masks are required to use indoor restrooms, and you can see the rest of the Museum’s Covid-19 policies here. In case it rains, the festival will move to Saturday, September 25.

Penn Live Arts season opener
Saturday, September 25, 1pm and 4pm
Bloomfield Farm at Morris Arboretum, 100 East Northwestern Avenue, Philadelphia

Alarm Will Sound will present an outdoor performance of John Luther Adams’s Ten Thousand Birds this weekend as part of Penn Live Arts’ season opener. This year’s season serves as a reflection on the environment, and Ten Thousand Birds comes as an experiential, open-ended collection of pieces based on native birdsong and migration patterns observed at the Morris Arboretum. The audience can roam freely around the space and the performers in this ensemble.

Tickets must be purchased in advance, they will not be sold at the arboretum.

YallaPunk’s JAM3A
September 23-26
Streaming online

YallaPunk has been redefining the narrative for Southwest Asian and North African folks through the arts in Philadelphia, and this weekend, they’re presenting JAM3A, a free four-day online music and arts event. In partnership with the Arab American National Museum near Detroit, the lineup will include artists including 47soul, Alsarah & The Nubatones, EMEL, Hello Psychaleppo, and many more.

Black Panther in Concert
Saturday, September 25, 8pm
The Mann Center, 5201 Parkside Avenue

Black Panther is one of those films that has always felt like it just came out. The fever around its release was a joyful one, one for the culture, that left an impression on me back in 2018. I’m not the biggest Marvel (or DC) fan to be honest—I dabble in their films but I couldn’t tell you much about characters or storylines and backstories and all that jazz. I did just pick up the Uncanny X-Men comics collection recently at Amalgam, and that, too, feels like I was reading them only yesteryear.

It also feels like just yesterday that we got word about Chadwick Boseman. It was a rainy, balmy afternoon in August last year when I heard the news about his passing. Again, I’m not one to idolize celebrities, either, but there’s something about Boseman and something about Black Panther that resonated with me culturally, and maybe a screening backed by an orchestra can inspire the right words.

This weekend’s your chance! The Movies @ the Mann series concludes with Black Panther in concert on Saturday with the Mann Center Festival Orchestra. Tickets range from $25-$79 in advance and are $5 more on the day of the screening.