Banda Ponto Com

This local Brazilian seven-piece band will launch the evening's festivities with its infectious dance-happy beats. Expect to hear samba and a type of music called axé, which hails from Bahia, a city in northern Brazil.

Chita-sou-do'm

This six-piece band plays Haitian festival music known as Rara. It is fast-paced and conveys Haitian identity--the joys and hardships of life in Haiti, a Catholic sensibility and political injustice. Somerville-based Chita-son-do'm includes two horn players, a saxophonist and a cata player.

Apollo Sunshine

This band mixes playful psychedelia and melodic, experimental pop. Beyond its distinctive sound, which often includes peddle steel, the band is known for inviting unlikely characters onstage à la Flaming Lips; recent guests have included a priest and a baton twirler. With a recent semifinal run in the WBCN Rumble and a debut CD coming out this October on Spin Art Records (home to Frank Black and Apples in Stereo), this trio of pop-rock upstarts is on a roll, locally and nationally.

Hoi Polloi Dance Performance

Dancer Sara Sweet Rabidoux is one of Boston's most imaginative and cinematic choreographers. Mixing theater and dance into a seamless dreamscape, Rabidoux will lead Hoi Polloi in a candlelight performance created especially for ArtBeat.

Hoi Polloi mixes dance with dreamlike theatricality.

"Spaces/Places" Film Festival

Our planet is always in a state of flux. Landscapes morph and political demarcations shift. People move from one culture to another, from wealth to poverty, from busy urban metropolitans to serene landscapes, from the war-zone to the paced life in the suburban towns. Earth's dwellers constantly battle for physical and emotional space to exist, a place to belong and imagination to escape to. "Spaces/Places," a film program curated by Alla Kovgan and Jeff Silva of Balagan Productions, takes you on a journey through cultural, political, psychological and imaginative places and spaces encountered and recorded by filmmakers in the form of documentary, experimental, and fiction films and videos. Featured filmmakers will include Reynold Reynolds, Bryan Papciak, Joris Ivens and many others.

Still from the film Balagan