Past Events

Evolution is a collaborative design laboratory facilitating interdisciplinary experimentation in dance performance. Choreographers from the Department of Theatre and Dance join with concert and event lighting designers and composers from the School of Design and Creative Technologies to create short dance works for the concert stage. This public showcase is presented in the B. Iden Payne Theatre each spring.

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.

Penny and Polly are best friends and gymnastics rivals. They like to make up stories and eat donuts in the car. They get in a big fight, grow up, get religious. They’re lonely and in love and still competing over something neither of them can name. Penny gets sad and Polly gets sick. So does a king living elsewhere. Have you read Uncle Vanya? This isn't like that. This is a play about getting lost at sea and seduced by power; about two friends and how each informs the other; and about beauty, grief, love, and ambition.

We are sick and tired. So you know it’s time to believe us when we are ready to talk. To have our words chopped. To taste our tongues as if tasting honey and eyebrow. We do our best to keep our jobs. We do our best to answer all the calls, and stay on top of our friends’ lives. We give up and feel great giving up. So please be quiet. Protract the silence while we find hard ways of making sense of ourselves. 

With powerful new choreography to align with the emergence of spring, Dance Repertory Theatre returns to the stage in EQUINOX. Showcasing dance performances that question our sense of self, identity and connection, EQUINOX presents a series of new works by artists from Austin, the United States and around the globe. 

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. 

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. UTNT (UT New Theatre) 2025 will feature three fully produced plays by graduate playwrights, in addition to new play readings and workshops.