Join us ! BLEMF 2025 offers a weeklong series of concerts & discussions, educational workshops for kids & adults, our 2nd annual BLEMF Community Showcase & New Neighbors Children’s Art Exhibit, and more. Both live & online. Explore our program & mark your calendars!
New Neighbors Children’s Art Exhibit
A partnership with Exodus Refugee Immigration
Evenings at FAR Center for Contemporary Arts
Throughout Festival Week, enjoy artwork created by children of families who have recently joined our community, having left their troubled homelands in other parts of the world. The exhibit will encircle the mainstage space at FAR Center from Opening Night, Sunday, May 25th through Thursday night, May 29th. We are thrilled to mount the New Neighbors exhibit for the second year in a row, and we are more grateful than ever to our new young friends for sharing their artwork with us and for contributing their talents to our festival. Thank you and welcome to Bloomington!
Live Concerts & Pre-Concert Talks
Pre-concert discussions take place prior in the same venue.
No tickets or RSVP to attend!
All in-person concert venues are handicap-accessible.
Live Concerts & Pre-Concert Discussions will be livestreamed and available for streaming soon after the festival. See this section below for how to view online.
Virtual Concerts & Public Screenings
All virtual concerts & preconcert discussions will be released for streaming on Opening Night, Sunday, May 25th, and will be available until June 7th. Enjoy them from the comfort of your own home, or from where ever you may be!
Or join us for free public screenings at 5:00 PM Tuesday-Thursday at the Monroe County Public Library (Kirkwood) Auditorium. Bring your friends & family along to enjoy the performances in a comfy & fun theater setting in the heart of downtown!
Schedule:
2:00pm - Workshop
African Art & Mask Making
Take an Exclusive Tour & Create Your Own African Mask
Experience an exclusive tour of the Eskenazi Museum’s African art & textiles, and craft your own African mask to take home! Get a sneak peek at some behind-the-scenes artwork and artifacts and an in-depth guide to the exhibits before making your own work of art that reflects what you’ve just seen & learned. We will explore how masks are created, what different designs and shapes symbolize, and how masks are used in rituals, ceremonies and performances in cultures across the African continent. Start dreaming now of your own mask creation!
Led by the Eskenazi Museum of Art
Workshop runs 2:00pm-4:00pm
Eskenazi Museum of Art
1200 E. 7th Street
Register Here For Mask Making
5:00pm - Public Screening with Pre-Concert Discussion
Sonya Headlam & Rebecca Cypess
Transatlantic Musical Heritage
(New York, NY) Eighteenth-century Europe, Britain, and the Americas were home to countless musicians of African origin who made music of many genres as public performers, players at home or in community settings, and composers who notated or published their music. In a rich collaboration, highly celebrated soprano Sonya Headlam and renowned early keyboardist-scholar and artistic director of BLEMF regulars The Raritan Players, Rebecca Cypess, together explore the work of three composers who earned international praise during their lifetimes: Ignatius Sancho, Francis Johnson, and Joseph Bologne. With texts by Shakespeare, the ancient Anacreon, the contemporary David Garrick, Sancho himself, Philadelphia abolitionist Sarah Louisa Forten, Phillis Wheatley and others, the program offers a kaleidoscope of beauty, passion, and insight into the works and worlds of these then-famous and now no-longer forgotten Black musicians.
Pre-Concert Discussion screened at the start of the program
Monroe County Public Library — Downtown
Auditorium
303 E. Kirkwood Avenue
This concert is part of GEMAS, a project of Americas Society and Gotham Early Music Scene devoted to early music of the Americas, curated by Nell Snaidas and Sebastian Zubieta.
7:00pm - Showcase
BLEMF Community Showcase
Bloomington Musicians Take the Stage!
A remarkable line-up of musicians from our local community and an astonishingly enthusiastic response from their audience of friends, neighbors, and fans made it abundantly clear that the BLEMF Community Showcase must continue. Our 2024 program brought to the stage a surprisingly diverse array of early music talent and skill, including an entrancing solo lute performance, a French madrigal quartet, Bloomington’s premiere amateur choir Voces Novae, an extraordinary realization of German organ tablature–which for decades, scholars and performers claimed could not be done, inspiring music from new neighbors from Syria and Afghanistan thanks to our friends at Exodus Refugee Immigration, and a rousing community sing-along. We cannot wait for our second round!
FAR Center for Contemporary Arts
505 W. 4th Street
