Public History in Performance Led by Artistic Director Trudy Williams, The Red Skies Music Ensemble (co-founded in 2010 by George Boziwick and Trudy Williams) presents original humanities based multimedia shows for the general public that animate facts and interpretations in American public history and culture that have been often overlooked, omitted, or hidden in plain sight.
Using music as the portal, the hour-long Red Skies shows combine a fascinating research-based narration with live music, theatrical vignettes, and large screen archival images to give audiences experiential engagement with the meanings of the artifacts, archives, special collections and exhibits of local and national libraries, museums, and historical societies.
The ninety-minute shows, authored by Trudy Williams or co-authored with George Boziwick, weave inter-connections across time and medium, aiming to inspire a closer relationship of the community to their shared socio-cultural history heritage, its relevance to today, and the value of preservation.
Performances include an audience participation component during the show, and a Q&A at the end. Crafted for easy adaptation to any size space, formal, informal, indoors and out, shows draw cast and crew mainly locally.
Performances include: The Library of Congress; New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Lincoln Center Public Program Series; American Repertory: Oberon Theater, sponsored by the Harvard Houghton Library and A.R.T. Special Programs; Yale University; The Emily Dickinson Museum; International Emily Dickinson Society, Amherst College; Long Island Museum of American Art; Hadley Historical Society/Porter- Phelps-Huntington Museum; Northampton Forbes Library; Northampton Center for the Arts, others.
Recent Performances
Rhythm & Rails: Northampton and the Rail Roads, a Social History in Times and Tunes. Trudy Williams, Author/Director. 2026 Northampton Center for the Arts 33 Hawley, Flex theater. Partnership: Historic Northampton. 2025 Forbes Library.
Cornstalk Fiddles: Soundscape and Place in 19th Century Hadley Trudy Williams, Author/Director. 2025 Partnership: Hadley Historical Society & Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum.
2027: A Painter & A Poet: Walt Whitman, Williams Sidney Mount & the Sounds of 19th Century Northampton. Forbes Library.
