Past Events

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. 

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.