Professor Margaret Laurena Kemp, chair of theatre and dance,
will direct Remote
Theatre’s forthcoming production which is a
mixed-reality piece inspired by the late Obie-award winning
playwright Ntozake Shange’s coming of age novel,
Liliane. The production, titled Your Mind,
Girls, is set to launch in early 2024 in the San Francisco
Bay Area.
Professor Margaret Laurena Kemp, theatre and dance chair, is
pleased to announce that UC Davis alum Dahlak Brathwaite
(B.A. English and theatre and dance, ‘08), a spoken-word
poet, musician, actor, playwright and writer, returns to campus
for a Hip-Hop residency in winter quarter 2024.
Alumna Kara Branch (M.F.A., dramatic arts, ‘11) has received a
2023 Drama Desk Award nomination for her costume design for
According to the Chorus, presented off-Broadway in New
York by the New Light Theater Project.
Alumnus Hien Huynh (B.A., theatre and dance, ‘15) appears in
Lemongrass & Anise, a performance featuring two
generations of a Vietnamese American family. San Francisco’s
Asian Art Museum presents the work on May 18 at 6:30 p.m.
A stalwart of the UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance,
Professor Emeritus John Iacovelli died April 14 at 64. An
award-winning artist, he designed numerous theatrical productions
in regional theaters across the country while maintaining a
distinguished teaching career at UC Davis where he co-created the
Master of Fine Arts program in theatre design.
Using paper, invented instruments, percussion, guitar, and other
amplified objects, Ph.D. candidate Gino Robair
(performance studies) has created an “opera of augury through
papermaking” titled Full: Radical Divination. It will be
performed at the
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) on April 5,
2023. At UC Davis, Robair is developing
performative models for improvised papermaking and letterpress
printing. Papermaking is not considered a performance-based
artform, but does embody its own rich choreography and provides a
medium for artistic exploration.
Alumnus Tom Burmester (B.A., dramatic arts, ’01; PhD,
performance studies, ‘22) has been named as the new executive
director of The Historic Woodland Opera House (WOH). He replaces
the outgoing director Angela Baltezore who will retire in June.
A number of UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance alumni are
working on the Big Idea Theatre’s upcoming production of William
Shakespeare’s classic comedy Twelfth Night. The
play is being presented March 3-April 1.
Professor L.M. Bogad’s play COINTELSHOW: A PATRIOT
ACT is a biting political satire about COINTELPRO,
the FBI’s counterintelligence program with which they sabotaged,
disrupted, and repressed domestic groups like the Black Panther
Party for Self-Defense, the American Indian Movement, along with
individuals like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred
Hampton. The play is being presented by ArtsEmerson as a virtual
event March 8-12.
Alumna Sonya Eddy (B.A., Afro-American studies, ’94), best known
to television audiences for her long-running role as head
nurse Epiphany Johnson in the ABC soap opera General
Hospital, has died. She was 55.
For their final project, Professor Margaret Laurena Kemp,
Department of Theatre and Dance chair, along with the students
and guest artists from the fall quarter course DRA 199:
Theatre for Social Change and Social Justice have created a video
inspired the striking UC graduate students and teaching
assistants.
Kristin Orlando (B.A. theatre and math ‘08) and the New Jersey
Symphony Orchestra won a Mid-Atlantic Emmy Award in 2022
for their long-form video of Mozart: Piano Concerto No.
21. She is Vice President of Operations at the NJSO, and in that
capacity, the film company, the orchestra and Orlando
jointly won the award.
Branwen Okpako, associate professor of cinema and digital media,
has adapted Helon Habila’s The Chibok Girls
into an experimental documentary, Return to Chibok.
The film re-enacts the journey to visit those left behind after
the shocking kidnapping of 276 girls from Chibok Girls School in
2014. It will be screened at UC Davis on Feb. 27 by the
Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspective on Social
Sciences, Arts, and Humanities (CAMPSSAH).
Professor L.M. Bogad has been awarded a grant from the Creative Work Fund. The
grants are given to Greater Bay Area artists collaborating with
nonprofit organizations to develop new works of theater,
traditional art, dance, poetry, arts activism and more.
A quartet consisting of two theatre and dance alumni and two
current undergraduate students worked behind the scenes at
California Shakespeare Theater this summer on the company’s
production of Lear, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s
classic tragedy by Marcus Gardley. The students were
supported by Steven Schmidt, lecturer in theatre and dance,
and technical director for Cal Shakes.
Poetry by doctoral student Diego Martínez-Campos (M.F.A, dramatic
arts, ‘20) has been selected to be part of Catalyst New
Music, an innovative music collaboration, along with the work of
14 other artists across the U.S.A.
Katherine Halls (B.A. theatre and dance and English, ‘20) is
currently rehearsing in Belgium with a TIE (Theatre in Education)
theatre company called Emerald Isle Theatre Company.
Olivia Caserta (B.A., theatre and dance, ‘22) is appearing as a
contestant in Hulu’s new baking competition series, Best
in Dough. Caserta is featured in episode 4 “College
Kids.”
Professor Margaret Laurena Kemp, Department of Theatre and Dance
chair, is pleased to announced two guest artists and presenters
for DRA 199: Theatre for Social Change and Social Justice in fall
quarter.
The 180 Series of courses provide exciting practical instruction
and participation in all aspects of theatrical and dance
production. Whether you are exploring these courses as a
Theatre & Dance Major, Minor, or are simply an interested
non-affiliated student, you will find passionate people working
to create art and tell stories on stage. We invite you to
join us at this link.
Emile Rappaport (B.A., theatre and dance, ‘19) works in
video production for the Los Angeles based Zach
King Team which specializes in making short, high
concept videos that are shared onto Tik Tok, Instagram, and
YouTube, though Rappaport originally arrived in L.A. to
pursue an acting career.
We are dismayed at the recent racist violence, and murders, in
Atlanta, and across the country, against Asian and Asian-American
people and women in particular. We recognize that this is part of
an ongoing regime of racism and violence and denounce it.
We stand in solidarity with those working against racism in
our communities, workplaces, government, and cultural
environment.
