Teen World of Arts

Ann Lee, played by Amanda Seyfried, dances with wild abandon, her wavy, blonde hair strewn across her peaceful face, head tipped back, arms slicing through the air, hands grasping heavenward. This image, refracted throughout the film, defines The Testament of Ann Lee, writer-director Mona Fastvold’s (co-writer of the 2024 film, The Brutalist) dance-forward portrait of the mother of the Shaker movement.

Melodrama Mag

The ecstatic, high-energy revival of Cats: The Jellicle Ball at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York reimagines the feline competition at the heart of the show’s episodic string of character numbers as a night in the New York City ballroom scene. Glamour cats of all stripes strut their stuff in the hopes of being named “The Jellicle Choice,” an homage to the generations of self-made ballroom performers that is both fierce and tender. In this interview, the show’s celebrated costume designer and activist Qween Jean talks to Kate Purdum about how her work designing on Broadway is “dedicated to the legacy” of her ancestors who “had to quite literally fight for a space in this world.” 

Dance Enthusiast

On the checkerboard-bordered stage of BAM’s Harvey Theatre, splashed in all the glory of a cubist take on Alice in Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts, Richard Foreman and Michael Gordon’s skittering rock opera What to wear propels itself through a duck-centered ritual of mockery.

Melodrama Mag

“I often say as a director, I am operating as a jazz musician. [There’s] an internal feeling, a pulse,” says Oliphant, who draws on an extensive jazz background in his directorial process. He is also informed by his artistic upbringing in South Africa’s non-hierarchical theatre-making culture. All of this and more has shaped his approach to Hassan’s intensely metatheatrical play, which  features characters who are actors, directors, and designers themselves. Oliphant and Purdum discuss the play he admits is one of his favorites he’s gotten to direct, as well as his collaboration with Hassan, his musical sensibilities, and his feelings about power dynamics in theatre — on and off stage.

HowlRound Theatre Commons

When Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE) was founded in 2011, its artists never planned to spend a decade with the work of Anton Chekhov. PETE, “a company of artists who make new plays in a collaborative way,” is led by co-artistic directors Jacob Coleman, Rebecca Lingafelter, Cristi Miles, and Amber Whitehall, who direct, produce, act, and run the company’s education wing. These four work alongside a collective of directors, designers, performers, and production staff on devised pieces and revivals.

Dance Enthusiast

Joan Jonas, small yet magnetically stoic at 89, stands beneath a projected photograph of herself in even-smaller childhood, on the beach with a pail and a shovel. The photo is the centerpiece of the original 1976 flyer for The Juniper Tree, splashed larger than life in all its hand-scrawled glory across the altar wall of St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery. Memory dwarfs life in this tableau, an apt beginning to this performance — part-retelling, part-remaking — of a fable of life and death. 

Dance Enthusiast

Das Rauschgift is a metaphor for all that can befall you, both beautiful and terrible, on a night out. It’s a gnostic fable about the divine power of friendship and Taco Bell Cantina that summarizes itself in the line: “Every second is both precious and useless while I wait around for an unknown future.” What do we do with the time that we’re given, and how do we walk the very fine line between utterly wasting it and filling it to the fullest?

Dance Enthusiast

The performance was incredibly dynamic and displayed a nuanced understanding of physics, both how actual objects move and how to manipulate shadow and light to create illusions of objects behaving within the laws of gravity. More than just a children’s show, Plato Caves is a fantastic analog for creative education for life.

Teen World of Arts

Few figures in classical music have moved so seamlessly between the concert hall and the public imagination as Gustavo Dudamel. Even fewer have done so while carrying the weight of such a complex political and cultural inheritance.

As he prepares to assume leadership of the New York Philharmonic, Dudamel’s career invites a familiar but unresolved question: can art claim neutrality when it is publicly funded, symbolically mobilized, and repeatedly placed in the service of national narratives?

HowlRound Theatre Commons

Charly Evon Simpson’s new play On Loop, which premiered at the end of February 2021 at Barnard College, marked the fourth and latest installment in the New Plays at Barnard initiative, founded and led by the play’s director, Alice Reagan. On Loop was drastically different from any work Barnard has produced in the past: it marked the theatre department’s return to in-person production and required a range of special precautions and innovations.

Teen World of Arts

Martha Graham (1894-1991) is one of the best-known and most revered figures of 20th century American dance, with a distinct style and transformative major works that have long outlived her. While Graham frequently collaborated with dancers in her company, and with notable artists like composer Aaron Copland, perhaps her most instrumental collaborator was designer and sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who, in his partnership with Graham, helped to cement her signature visual language. 

Barnard College Zine Library

“Speaking about dance is like nailing Jell-O to the wall.” – Merce Cunningham

The Drama Review

When The Builders Association began working on their Ayn Rand–inspired, technofeudalist-satirizing production of ATLAS DRUGGED (Tools for Tomorrow), the 2024 election was still years away. By the time the show premiered at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in October 2024, it was just around the corner. This dossier—comprising an interview with Richard Schechner, commentary, script excerpts, and a summary of the Builders’ mediaturgy—is a comprehensive examination of the factors that influenced the genesis of ATLAS DRUGGED, and the ludicrous “predictions” made by the sprawling, technologically advanced work that have since come true.

Theatre and Performance Design Journal

Theatrical designers know that the objects they put onstage communicate ideas beyond and in addition to what can be read in the text and help to co-create the meaning of a piece. At present, what is being communicated by much of the material world of the American theatre is an unfortunate story of environmental degradation, waste and inequity in the context of an increasingly urgent climate emergency. This article examines patterns of design and production and argues that to move forward, theatre artists can reshape the meaning they create onstage to include considerations of sustainability and environmental justice in design choices. We argue that circular, regenerative design practices in conversation with clear public statements can forge a collective vision for sustainable American theatre. From the smallest prop to the loftiest mission statement, every choice theatre artists make has the potential to tell a different and better story: one of environmental justice, renewal and sustainability.

Barnard College Department of History

"Oddly enough, I don't get many applications from women for this kind of work. Most girls are only interested in acting." – Ruth Mitchell

Ruth Mitchell began her career as a performer in the chorus of musicals, the way so many theatrically inclined folk find their way into the business. Amidst a budding career with considerable success, she quickly realized that performance was not for her. Instead, she felt called to the seductive darkness of a theatre's wings and to the too-often invisible work of stage management. She spent twenty years as a Broadway stage manager, with ten of those years in collaboration with Hal Prince, a partnership which would change the face of the American musical forever.