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The Berkeley Arts Center’s Words in Collision: Summer Performance Arts Series begins this today and runs through Saturday, June 24. 

The series of six pieces runs on Friday and Saturday evenings beginning at 8 p.m. at the Art Center in Live Oak Park. 

“Most of the work is literature-based with a strong visual component,” director Robbin Henderson told the Daily Planet. 

The series was curated by Jaime Robles, poet and editor of the Berkeley poetry magazine, Five Fingers Review. The series kicks off tonight with “A Voice from the Fire,” a storytelling performance about an 18th century couple, poet/artist William Blake and his wife Kate, written by Betsy Davids and James Petrillo. The story will be accompanied by slide images of Blake’s work. 

Saturday’s performance is “Scout,” a slide-text presentation written and performed by the Canadian-born poet, painter and translator Norma Cole. Cole, who has lived in San Francisco for the past 20 years, has been the recipient of a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, Gertrude Stein Awards, and awards from The Fund for Poetry. 

The second week of performances starts June 16 with a reading by poets and writers from the “Livres de poètes (femmes)” exhibition. Carlos Barón will read “Impunity” by Eduardo Pavlovsky, an exiled Argentinean playwright on June 17. 

Performances conclude the following weekend with “subtitled,” an interdisciplinary performance and “Out of the Q,” a three-act play by Dale Going. 

In addition to the performance times, there will be special gallery hours on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. during the three-week span. 

“There will be a really interesting presentation of artists’ books and one-of-a-kind books,” Henderson said. “It is a quite interesting installation and most of the books can be handled.” 

Admission to all the performances is a sliding scale $7 to $10. The Berkeley Art Center is located at 1275 Walnut St.