Events

this all really happened (i made it all up) is a performance choreographed by M.F.A. candidate Leo Briggs, in collaboration with movement artists Clara Bolivar, Avry Carraway, Gillian Gordon, Riza Hernandez, Emma Safier, IvyCamille Sampson and Katherine Vaughn. The work uses the phenomenon of alien abduction as an entry point to explore embodiments of narrative, spectacle and transformation. Connecting the experience of abduction to Briggs's own experience of transition, this all really happened (i made it all up) hovers on the border between spectacular tall tale and mundane reality, asking how the stories we tell ourselves become truths. 

The Equitable Arts Infrastructure Research Group and The University of Texas at Austin College of Fine Arts are hosting a national symposium focused on the enduring challenge of cultural, economic and racial equity in the nation’s performing arts sector. Over two days, through conversations with cultural professionals and humanities scholars, this convening will address gaps in understanding about how performing artists in the U.S. work and how their work is supported systemically. By defining, theorizing and historicizing new methods and approaches to an equitable arts infrastructure, this symposium will create a foundation for new understandings of how educational institutions and cultural professionals can support each other.

Hello! It’s 1895. A young writer on a Russian estate recruits his crush to perform his new play for his mother, her boyfriend and the estate workers. It goes badly, but he refuses to give up. It’s also 2025. A company of actors in Austin, Texas performs a new play for you. It’s a cacophony of animals living and dying before your very eyes. But can anything truly be “new”—art, our lives, our problems? If not, then what do we need to feel whole? Come spend a thousand years with us in just one night trying to find out.

UTNT (UT New Theatre) presents newly developed works from playwrights of Texas Theatre and Dance and Michener Center for Writers. Now celebrating its 18th season, this festival exists as an incubator for new work, with many plays continuing on to be professionally produced across the country. 

A high school typing teacher, who prides himself on never failing a student, has a new student who threatens to end that streak. While trying to keep the new student from failing, the teacher learns to confront the past harm of focusing on this self-imposed competition and not on the students. On top of learning how to use proper typing techniques, the other students in class deal with all the end-of-year obligations as seniors: prom, graduation, and the inevitability of adulthood. It's a play about dealing with the past, and present, so a better future won't be out of reach.

A group of outcasts inside a medieval convent obsesses over a young girl famous for theatrical exorcisms. But as the exorcisms turn more and more violent, the obsessions become a new kind of devil, haunting them all. A play about envy, longing, loneliness and what being trapped does to the soul. 

With powerful new choreography to align with the emergence of spring, Dance Repertory Theatre returns to the stage in EQUINOX, presenting a series of new works by artists from Austin, the United States and around the globe. Showcasing works that question our sense of self, identity and connection, Equinox also features the return of the Haruka Weiser Memorial Commission. 

The Cohen New Works Festival is a biennial celebration of new, bold, risk-taking, future-thinking, cutting-edge, no-holds-barred, adjective-filled, original performance! The festival welcomes and encourages artists from any discipline to join us in a week-long celebration of student-led performance.