Four 30-minute performances and one 60-minute performance by graduating MFA candidates Lindsay Beamish, Mary Ann Brooks, Peet Cocke, Andrea del Moral, Deirdre Morris and Amanda Vitiello in two separate programs commencing in different locations. (Picnic Day performance features one piece only.)

Program 1: Lab A

Program 1 is not conventional  theater: it begins in Wright Hall’s Lab A Theatre with Lindsay Beamish’s piece; moves through the Arboretum with Deirdre Morris’ piece; then the audience will be led back to Wright Hall’s Arena Theatre for the final piece, by Mary Ann Brooks.

Program 1: Tuesday, April 8 and Thursday, April 10, 6 p.m.; Saturday, April 12, 12:15 p.m.; Sunday, April 13, 6 p.m.

Program 2: Wyatt Pavilion

Program 2, featuring work by Peet Cocke, Andrea del Moral and Amanda Vitiello, commences and remains at Wyatt Pavilion Theatre. The audience should enter at the usual entrance on the south side of the theater.

Program 2: Wednesday, April 9 and Friday, April 11, 6 p.m.; Sunday, April 13, 3 p.m.

Picnic Day Program: Wyatt Pavilion, 11 a.m. and Lab A, 12:15

Special Picnic Day performance at Wyatt Pavilion Theatre: 11 a.m. Saturday, April 12:  Oracle of the Western Shore by Peet Cocke and Andrea del Moral.

Picnic Day performance of Program 1: Lab A Theatre, 12:15 (see program 1 details above).

Ticketless; Suggested $5 donation. Early arrival advised given limited seating.

38 1/2, Lindsay Beamish

In Lindsay Beamish’s work, a 38-year-old woman interacts with found video footage of her seven-year-old self on a 1980’s game show, and a 20-year-old woman interacts with footage of herself and her twin when they were three years old pretending to be mothers to two twin baby dolls. The man who filmed the twins, now in his 90’s, interacts with the two decades of VHS videos he took of his family, trying to edit them before his eyesight fails completely.

Improvising While Black: Chronicling a Black Aesthetic, Mary Ann Brooks

Mary Ann Brooks’ piece, Improvising While Black: Chronicling a Black Aesthetic, is an inquiry into racial representation, spontaneous movement creation and survival. Brooks says her piece explores many questions including “What is blackness in a world where most things black and/or African are reviled, demonized and erased while at the same time desired, coveted and appropriated?”

Oracle of the Western Shore, Peet Cocke and Andrea del Moral

Peet Cocke’s and Andrea del Moral’s Oracle of the Western Shore is an adaptation for the stage of the novel Voices by Ursula Le Guin. The adaptation tells the story of a young woman’s journey to fulfill her destiny in a town struggling to free itself from occupation by a foreign power. Cocke and del Moral are working with a talented group of undergraduate students to bring this tale to life.

We Do Not Live In Splendid Isolation, Deirdre Morris

We Do Not Live In Splendid Isolation by Deirdre Morris includes stilt work as well as a boat in Lake Spafford. This site-particular* collaborative performance takes place in the UC Davis Arboretum.

Encompassing suspension, surveillance and sustainability practices through the medium of visual, textual and corporeal engagements, on stilts, on film, on land and on water, We Do Not Live in Splendid Isolation asks what is a right relationship to place? In this era of intense human impact on ecosystems, we prioritize what the performing arts contribute to understanding the relationship of humans to place, both wilderness and human-built spaces. How does a human in nature impose temporality on that place? Linear temporality is one of many times; we view this prevailing temporality as a ‘colonialism.’

Does imposing its rhythms, tempos, and measurement on a landscape deprive place of its own time? Does Western temporality deprive the humans who impose it of a fuller knowledge of place and self? These site- particular narratives aim to explore concepts of human-to-place relationships, embodied wilderness, and to deepen our understanding of how humans belong in landscapes.

*Site-particular refers to a direct engagement with the landscape being worked in, and through the time and place of the structured presentation.

Travesty: Representations of Joan of Arc and Gypsy Rose Lee, Amanda Vitiello

The working title of Amanda Vitiello’s piece is Travesty: Representations of Joan of Arc and Gypsy Rose Lee. This solo thesis project will examine and analyze the depictions of two iconic women, Joan of Arc and Gypsy Rose Lee.  It will investigate the conflicting characteristics of ‘virgin’ and ‘whore’ represented in these women in an attempt to discover their  humanity.