Past Events

The Performance as Public Practice Fridays@2 speaker series facilitates discussions about the creation and study of performance. PPP welcomes artists from within and beyond the Winship Drama Building, including current students, distinguished alumni and arts leaders from across the country, to share their research and methodology. Up next is a conversation with Vanessa Anspaugh, a choreographer and performance-based artist developing new work in the College of Fine Arts at The University of Texas at Austin this season.

The Performance as Public Practice Fridays@2 speaker series facilitates discussions about the creation and study of performance. PPP welcomes artists from within and beyond the Winship Drama Building, including current students, distinguished alumni and arts leaders from across the country, to share their research and methodology. Up next is a conversation with Allison Orr, the founder and artistic director of Forklift Danceworks, featuring a presentation of her work as a choreographer followed by a Q&A session. 

Three sisters are left in the forest by their woodcutter father. From this fairytale beginning, three resolutions are made – one sister will walk one way, one sister will walk the other and the third will stay right where she is. Twenty years later, having circumnavigated the globe, and fought vikings and crossed oceans and tamed wilds and achieved greatness the three meet again, as women.

Exploring the Arts, Exploring the Self is a week-long day camp at the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin where youth going into grades 2-5 (approximately seven to 11-year-olds) will explore the self through art, music, dance and theatre. Each day, the group will engage the arts to present and perform ideas of who they are, as individuals and as a community. All youth will be involved in each of the disciplines and be challenged to further develop their skills in art forms they are more familiar with as well as try art forms that are less familiar to them.

In this contemporary/modern dance intensive, youth ages 13-17 will further their dance technique, deepen their artistry and develop their collaborative skills in a community of passionate dancers. Each day will include classes in contemporary/modern dance technique, phrase-work and collaborative choreographic methods. The week will culminate in a showing for friends and family of the dances we choreograph together based on a theme we choose. Our time together will be rooted in positive reinforcement, exciting challenges and shedding perfectionism for curiosity and imaginative play.

The UT Live Design and Production Showcase 2025 presents work created for theatre, dance and other performance mediums by M.F.A. candidates in the UT Live Design and Production program at The University of Texas at Austin Department of Theatre and Dance. Areas of work include costume design and technology, lighting design, integrated media design and scenic design. Collectively, this work helps tell visual stories for live performance and reflects the collaborative nature of the theatrical process.

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.