Past Events

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 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. 

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.

Award-winning student dance company, Dance Repertory Theatre, returns to the stage in a series of new works of choreography by students and guest artists. Centering around the spirit of the cypher, this unique dance performance (performed in the round) weaves through unique dance styles including ballet, modern, hip-hop, African and ballroom to create space for a sense of community and catharsis. Choreographers include Meredith Rainey, Le'Andre Douglas, Love Muwwakkil and Megan Davidson. 

In this delightful stage adaptation, Roald Dahl’s classic tale is faithfully told by James himself along with the insect characters – Miss Spider, Old-Green-Grasshopper, Centipede, Ladybird and Earthworm. The play begins at the end of the story, when James and his friends are living in the giant peach stone in Central Park, New York. 

A bilingual adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s most cherished works, Romeo y Juliet recounts the tale of two star-crossed lovers, daughters from the feuding houses of Capulet and Montague, reimagined in Alta, California in the 1840’s prior to the annexation of California to the United States. Set in the limbo between Mexican rule and new statehood, this retelling shifts between English and Spanish, bringing new life to a well-loved tale of love, bloodshed, family and fate.