Past Events

The Equitable Arts Infrastructure Research Group is made of artists-scholars from seven universities and includes UT faculty Dr. Charlotte Canning and Dr. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez. The group has committed to a multi-year, inter-campus, and cross-disciplinary effort to connect historical conditions of arts labor to the current call for more just and flexible support systems for arts and culture. Those interested in how artists are paid and supported within institutional and networked environments will find this conversation necessary and thought-provoking. 

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 artists from the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative.

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.

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 musicologist Dr. Jacqueline Avila, whose recent work focuses on Latinx film and streaming media and musical cultures on the US-Mexico border.

Dance Repertory Theatre returns this spring in EMERGE, presenting new work from professional and student choreographers. Exploring themes of emergence, EMERGE seeks to reflect on history in order to imagine a way forward, elevating the inventiveness and interconnectivity of moving art forms. Each piece has been developed in a residency-style incubator, allowing for immersion with a single choreographer in a depth of research where the future of dance is given space to emerge. EMERGE will also feature the return of the Haruka Weiser Commission. 

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.

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 Texas-based artist and COFA Early Career Fellow Bella Varela.

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.

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.