From a classic Shakespearean comedy to a dynamic hip-hop workshop, the UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance 2023-2024 season aspires to have worldwide effect.

“I am pleased to announce a season that reflects and incorporates the global impact of the UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance,” said Professor Margaret Laurena Kemp, department chair. “In 2023-2024 alumni and guest artists, who have influenced performance nationally and internationally, will be working and mentoring our students on stage classics and dynamic movement and performance projects.”

The fall season opens with a production of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It directed by alumna Josy Miller (PhD, performance studies, ’15) in fall quarter. Miller has been directing professionally and in educational settings since she moved to Northern California from New York. Her original work, The Dogs of War, premiered at UC Davis in 2014 and played the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2015. She spent five years as artistic director of the Bay Area’s Hapgood Theatre Company.

The Laramie Project by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project including alumnus Greg Pierotti (M.F.A., dramatic arts, ’16) will be presented in winter 2024. The production will be directed by Scott Ebersold who had served as artistic associate at New York’s Classic Stage Company. He recently directed the Off-Broadway premiere of the new musical The View UpStairs that was nominated for two Lortel Awards, three Drama Desk Awards, an Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Musical and for which Audelco/The Viv nominated him for a Best Director.

Internationally acclaimed hip-hop performer/creator and alumnus Dahlak Brathwaite (B.A., English and theatre and dance, ’08) returns to UC Davis for five-week hip-hop workshop of a new musical performance piece in winter quarter. He was launched into the national spoken word scene when he appeared in the last two seasons of HBO’s Russell Simmons’ presents Def Poetry Jam. His performances blend of hip-hop, theatre, and spoken word and have been presented at over 100 universities throughout the United States and Europe as well as at SXSW, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Smithsonian, Ars Nova, The Apollo, and Off-Broadway. 

Irish theatre director and acting teacher Sinéad Rushe returns to UC Davis to collaborate with Kemp on a production of Thornton Wilder’s American masterpiece Our Town in spring. Rushe and Kemp’s previous project AntigoneNOW, produced online at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, was screened worldwide including an invited presentation at the Egypt International Experimental Theatre Festival. Rushe is the author of Michael Chekhov’s Acting Technique: A Practitioner’s Guide, co-translator into French of four plays by Howard Barker and was senior lecturer in acting and movement at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. In fall 2023 she becomes lead acting tutor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).  

The department’s dance program’s Outside the Lines returns in spring under the direction of Doria E. Charlson, visiting assistant professor. She has trained with ODC/Dance, Mark Morris Dance Group, the Alvin Ailey School, the Joffrey Ballet School, L’école Superieuse de Danse Rosella Hightower and Stanford University. Her writing and scholarship can be found in TDR: The Drama Review, Women & Performance, and Dance Research Journal, as well as in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity (Rutgers UP 2019).

The Department of Theatre and Dance is part of the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. For information about other department productions, visit arts.ucdavis.edu/theatre-and-dance.