Big Drum Means Big Fun

The fourth annual Native Artisans’ Festival, where all are invited to meet native artists and purchase their works (clay and pottery, wampum and silver jewelry, beadwork and more), will be held on Saturday July 24, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Aquinnah Cultural Center (Vanderhoop Homestead) at the Aquinnah Circle on the Cliffs.

Enjoy native food cooked by Sly Fox’s Den and music and social dancing with the Wampanoag Nation Singers throughout the day. For details, call 508-645-7900.

The Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music concerts on Monday at the Whaling Church in Edgartown and at the Chilmark Community Center on Tuesday will feature Stephanie Chase and Joanne Kurkowicz, violins, violist Lila Brown, cellist Matthias Naegele and pianist Delores Stevens.

In celebration of Robert Schumann’s 200th anniversary, the ensemble will play Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat, opus 44. Also on the program are Ludwig van Beethoven’s familiar String Trio in G, opus 9, #1, and Joaquin Turina’s Quator, opus 67.

A documentary of a ballet odyssey, Dancing Across Borders, screens on Sunday, July 25, at 4 p.m. at the Capawock Theatre on Main street in Vineyard Haven, with filmmaker Anne Bass attending to join discussion after the screening.

Fury of the Ferry

A staged reading of The Sound and the Ferry, a new play by Says You! regular and Island seasonal resident Arnie Reisman, is the Monday Night Special for this week, beginning at 7:30 p.m. Monday, July 26, at the Vineyard Playhouse on Church street in downtown Vineyard Haven.

It takes place, of course, on the Vineyard, where the ferry arrives in May, 1974 and leaves in October 2001. Some of the same folks are still on it. There is terror in the air. Sharks are still in the water. This is a comedy!

Celebrate the Sea, Its Keepers and Songs

On Thursday night, Mark Alan Lovewell, a singer, storyteller and Vineyard Gazette reporter and photographer, will give a program called Celebration of the Sea, at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown. The event is a fundraiser for the Martha’s Vineyard Preservation Trust and the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.

When editor Judith Jones received the manuscript for Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, it was exactly what she had been looking for in her own kitchen. “And if I felt that way, there must be others out there,” Mrs. Jones said from her summer home in Vermont. For her and many Americans, it wasn’t just another cookbook. It was a teaching book.