Past Events

Through a multi-college collaboration, The University of Texas at Austin will host leaders from the Center for Theater of the Oppressed (CTO) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Join us at the Symposium where the artists, who also work with Black aesthetics, will facilitate workshops, perform original theater pieces and introduce the new methodology Teatre de las Oprimidas, systematized by Bárbara Santos. 

Four trees in the north Maine woods communicate through an underground network of roots and fungi. Four women, each struggling to come into her own in a nearby rural logging town, pass each other gifts by way of the town’s one-car postal service. By blurring the boundary between human and tree, elizabeth is going into the ground contemplates the communities of our forests, weaving a tale of love, resilience and old growth.

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 4-6 (approximately nine to 12-year-olds) will explore the self through art, music dance and theatre. 

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.

Harold follows a college improv team that is disqualified from a national competition because of foul play. When a new member joins the team, she offers an unconventional opportunity to compete. As the team rehearses, they struggle to agree on the same base reality. Harold is a play about long-form improv, consent, saying yes-and, and the thorny complications of saying no. 

Girls will imitate; girls will learn. What are you teaching them? What have you learned? Stuck in the abstract (or is it?) of a no-woman's-land, the women in mirror, mirror must push you to the brink until you end up exactly where the world won't allow you: Angry.

UTNT (UT New Theatre) presents newly developed works from playwrights of Texas Theatre and Dance and Michener Center for Writers. Now celebrating its 16th season, this showcase exists as an incubator for new work, with many plays continuing on to be professionally produced across the country.

Half paranoid conspiracy thriller, half Kafkaesque ghost story, Address the Body! takes a bracing look into the banalest of evils: the university bureaucracy. When Cree and Blair, the only two Black members of The Presidential Committee on Slavery and its Afterlife, notice something amiss at their new work-study job, they uncover a racist plot at the heart of America’s most prestigious university. Lost African legacies, treasonous Latin mottos, and experimental Japanese technology come together in this Afropessimistic examination of slavery and repatriation.

Marfa, TX, 2022--Magna was likely abducted by aliens, but her friends don't believe her. She seeks out the fabled Marfa Lights hoping for answers, and discovers that the secrets of the cosmos are both monumentally far-reaching and disarmingly mundane. Very Blue Light is a play about isolation and doubt, revising relationships, and the implications of the existence of unidentified aerial phenomena.

A Director's Studio Presentation.
Eitan is 17. Avi is 35. Eitan loves Arsenal. Avi loves his wife. Eitan goes to school. Avi is trying for a child. Every Friday they immerse in the holy water of the Mikvah, participating in a traditional Jewish ritual. They talk about football. They talk about their synagogue. They talk about women. And as their bond deepens, a transformation begins that threatens to disrupt life outside the Mikvah. A play about joy, the courage it takes to confront our desires and how easily a heart can break.