Four ten-year-olds meet at a wedding. Little do they know, they will become the center of each other’s lives for decades to come. Jumping through time, we see these people only during important life moments such as prom, funerals, weddings, anniversaries and even divorces. …but you could’ve held my hand uses dance, music and poetry to explore sexuality, gender, race, love and blackness in a beautiful meditation on how love manifests in our lives as we experience life’s ups and downs.

The American Girl Dolls are all grown up and gathered together for a televised Bachelor-style reunion to decide the fate of the company. But suddenly, the girls start disappearing; something glitches and we’re thrown into a glossy feminist co-working space on the brink of expansion. The progressive women at the helm are still perpetuating age-old oppressive practices, now just in a shade of millennial pink. In Sisters We Trust, or My F*cked Up American Girl Doll Play investigates how corporate feminism is repeating and rebranding mistakes of the past instead of finding new pathways to empowerment.

Award-winning student dance company, Dance Repertory Theatre, returns to the stage this fall with new works by professional and student choreographers. Featuring a range of interdisciplinary new and revised works, Fall For Dance showcases cross-disciplinary dialogue that invites the audience to consider what Pan-African, street, contemporary and technology-based movement forms have to say to one another and what we can learn by listening. Performances will include work by faculty members Erica "eg" Gionfriddo, Leah Cox and Joel Valentín-Martínez as well as Teena Marie Custer, Kevin Ormby and work by emerging undergraduate choreographers. 

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.

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. 

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.