Since 1999, PAD actors, designers, tech and crew members have memorialized their time with a handprint, while dancers set their footprint on the PAD Hallway wall; each as a reminder to all of their hard work and dedication to the Performing Arts Department.

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2023 Handprint Ceremony for Graduating PAD Students

Washington University in St. Louis

Across the 19th century, American theatre artists and audiences turned to the “Indian” to tell stories of drama, tragedy, comedy, and history. From these diverse but popular plays a recognizable and racialized figure developed, the Stage Indian. This talk tracks the material elements used to create “Indian” characters to explore how theatrical techniques and dramatic repertoires worked with and through settler colonial logics resulting in a recognizable and racialized figure. The Stage Indian is more than feathers and face paint, however. It is an embodied figure whose legibility as an “Indian” is co-constructed with its audience. Tracing instantiations of the "Stage Indian" across the 19th century reveals the saturation, flexibility, and persistence of redface as a tool of U.S. control over Indigenous nations and peoples.

Feathers and Facepaint: The Making of Redface in American Theatre

Jessie and Lina are neighbors and brand-new mothers on parental leave. The shared digital sweet spot of their baby monitors forces them to meet in the backyard for their daily coffee during naptime.  In this oasis, they share hilarious, maddening, heartbreaking stories about family, home, work and motherhood. Their friendship becomes an essential and empowering force in their lives. 

Cry it Out

Glimmers bring hope, insight, and connectivity. They radiate a beauty that illuminates the corners of our existence. They are points of light that spark the imagination bringing flashes of insight into the human condition. Join us in celebrating a shimmering tapestry of creativity with choreography by Wash U Dance Collective graduate and undergraduate choreographers as well as PAD dance faculty and staff. Inspired by the concept of Glimmers, this promises to be an evening of dance art that nurtures and recharges the soul.

WUDance Collective: Glimmers

Join us for our seventh MFA Dance Concert featuring the works of our MFA candidates, Caroline Gonsalves Bertho, Emily Duggins Ehling, and Amarnath Ghosh. As part of their final project, each of these artists will premiere an original piece featuring undergraduate, local, and global dancers that showcases their diverse approaches to contemporary dance-making. Witness explorations of digital liveness, an embodied response to poetry, and a reimagining of Rabindranath Tagore’s collection of songs, “Seasons of Life.

2024 MFA Student Dance Concert

During a time when many “England First” nationalists thought a “pure” national identity could be created by purging the nation of Italian influence, Shakespeare embraced Italian stories, plays, and theatrical ideas and, along with that, a humanistic spirit of curiosity, mobility, and open-mindedness. This talk considers the Italian “sources” of his plays, especially when Shakespeare departs from them, as resonant and playable alternatives, not unlike the interventions of the spect-actor in Augusto Boal’s Forum theater.

Stop! Shakespeare, Boal, and the Italian Spect-actor

Once upon a time . . . King Leontes of Sicilia accused his childhood friend King Polixenes of Bohemia of seducing his wife. His jealousy was groundless and preposterous, and yet no one could dissuade him from it. Even when the “Oracle” confirmed his wife Hermione’s innocence, he rejected the truth and pushed his entire kingdom into further turmoil. Ultimately, Leontes lost everything -- wife, family, and all those who loved him.

The Winter's Tale

Listed below are the PAD Final Showings for Fall.  These showings are interesting, engaging and fun.  Go to support our students, or to check out a class you may be thinking of taking in the future. Everyone is welcome, students, faculty, and staff.  

Fall 2023 Final Showings

As we continue adapting to an always “new (ab)normal,” we are becoming accustomed to living in a constantly shifting world. Time feels simultaneously slow and brief, and the only constant is that everything is impermanent.
This is Temporary explores how dance art exists in a similarly fugitive state, with movement as its poetic medium embodying the transitory nature of our human experience.

Washington University Dance Theatre: This is Temporary

Whether explicitly or implicitly, artists use their medium to express personal experience, tell stories, and to contemplate where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going. WUDT’sNEXT, this year’s installment of the Performing Arts Department’ s annual fall dance concert poses the question to its artists, “what’s next?”-- in dance, in art, in society and culture. 

Washington University Dance Theatre: WUDT'sNEXT

Auditions for Winter’s Tale and Cry it Out will take place online and in person. In-person Auditions will be held on Friday, November 17th, 7 pm – 10 pm. You will be able to submit an online audition from October 23rd- November 13th. 

PAD Spring Production Auditions

God of Carnage follows a meeting between two sets of parents after a playground altercation between their sons. The adults agree to settle the dispute amicably, putting on a show of politeness. However, the facade of civility quickly falls as the four give into their childish rage. Couple spats with couple, husbands turn on wives, and the ugly side of humanity is revealed with hilarity. This dark comedy reminds us of how close we are to crossing a line, and how ridiculous it looks when we do. 

God of Carnage

What makes radio storytelling unique? How does the medium’s restriction to the auditory sense offer new opportunities for dramatic representation? In this presentation, Caroline Kita offers new perspectives on radio drama, a genre that emerged with the birth of the radio medium in the early 20th century. Her research focuses on the construction of radio story worlds through the core elements of voice, music, noise, and silence, and highlights how the soundscapes of radio dramas offer critical insights into practices of listening and attitudes toward mediated sound in particular cultural moments. Drawing on work from her book in progress, Border Territories: The Emancipatory Soundscapes of Postwar West German Radio Drama, Prof. Kita’s talk illuminates the significance of radio drama in the German context in the aftermath of World War II, and points to the ways that the dramaturgical language of radio dramas from this era continues to shape radio storytelling today in the form of the audio fiction podcast.

Sounding the Unseen: Radio Dramaturgy from Wireless to Podcast

Taking the songwriter Bruno Balz as his case study, Jürgen Kuttner looks at the possibilities of—and limits on—art to challenge political repression. With clips of performances of Balz's songs, Kuttner will guide us through his biography to tell the untold story of queer cabaret within the context of Nazi culture.

Queer Hits for Hitler's Hollywood:Bruno Balz, Zarah Leander, and the Nazis

Join us for a raucous and risqué revival of Kander and Ebb’s musical masterpiece.  Set in the chaotic world of Weimar Berlin, Cabaret is a phantasmagorical theater of pleasure, churning with hedonistic “camp,” that dances wildly on the edge of disaster.  As the looming Nazi storm becomes terrifyingly real, the play asks the challenging, and deeply resonant, question:  “What would you do?”

Cabaret

Join us for a conversation with Brooklyn-based choreographer Leslie Cuyjet, this year's Marcus Guest Artist in Residence in the Dance Program of the Performing Arts Department, in which she will discuss the importance of writing to her creative process. Called "a potent choreographic voice" by the New York Times, Ms. Cuyjet is the recipient of a 2019 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for her sustained achievement as Outstanding Performer and a 2022 award for Outstanding Choreographer/Creator. According to Cuyjet, her choreography "aims to conjure life-long questions of identity, confuse and disrupt traditional narratives, and demonstrate the angsty, explosive, sensitive, pioneering excellence of the Black woman."

Writing and Embodied Creativity

Drawing from SanSan Kwan's book, Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration, this event will begin with a participatory workshop in embodied collaboration. Following that, SanSan will share excerpts from the book and engage the audience in a discussion about interculturalism and dance. No dance experience necessary, but please come dressed to move. 

Love Dances: A Workshop and Lecture on Intercultural Collaboration

This event is supported by a grant from the Center for Literary Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.  A reception immediately following the Q&A is co-sponsored by the Performing Arts Department, the Comparative Literature Program, and the Hispanic Studies Program in the Romance Languages & Literatures Department.

Bitter Fruit: A Roundtable on Drama in Translation

Return to Play: A workshop in Clown and Improv will use the clown method developed by Christopher Bayes, head of physical acting at The Yale School of Drama as well as various improv techniques, to help participants rediscover the joy and freedom of play. This workshop will combine the techniques of clown with the spontaneity of improv to help participants find their inner child and tap into their natural sense of playfulness. Through a series of exercises and games, participants will learn to let go of judgement and unlock a deeper sense of embodiment, vulnerability and connection - both with themselves and with the audience.

Return to Play: A Workshop in Clown and Improv

For nearly 30 years, the Performing Arts Department has produced the A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival as a vehicle to support and develop new plays written by WashU students. The annual Festival begins with a university-wide solicitation of new, unproduced plays. Several plays are selected, through an anonymized screening process, to be developed in a two-week event in September.  During those two weeks, each play will be workshopped with a professional dramaturg, a faculty director and student cast.  The Festival culminates in a public staged reading of each play.  

A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival 2023

As the Performing Arts Department’s repertory dance company, Washington University Dance Collective comprises student dancers who have distinguished themselves on the basis of ability, technical skill, and performance acumen. Company rehearsals start in the Fall to prepare for the annual Spring show.

PAD Dance Auditions

GENERAL AUDITIONS for The A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival, Cabaret & God of Carnage our fall semester productions will take place in-person and through online submission. In-person auditions will be on Thursday, August 31st from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm Friday, September 1st from 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Online submissions are open now until August 30th. To be considered you only need to do one of these options, not both. For in-person auditions please show up at least 15 minutes before your scheduled audition time to check in.

Fall Drama Auditions

Presentations will be made by faculty about courses, auditions, productions, lectures and colloquia in the Performing Arts Department this fall. This is also a chance to learn more student-led performing arts groups on campus and an opportunity to sign up for various roles for backstage and theater design. This event is open to all students interested in the Performing Arts Department, regardless of declared or intended major/minor.

PAD Kick-Off

Mallinckrodt Center

William Whitaker, Professor of the Practice in Drama, along with current Drama students, will lead a short workshop on Saturday, August 26th from 4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre located in the Mallinckrodt Center, main floor.  

Drama Audition Workshop

This class is not an “audition” for admission to the program, but a chance for students new to dance at WashU to meet dance faculty, dance majors, and learn information about program curriculum, events and performance opportunities. The class format is informal, including a short ballet barre, followed by modern and jazz combinations to determine appropriate entry level to these course sequences. No signup or preparation required. 

Dance Placement Class for the 2023-2024 Academic Year

The next Arts & Sciences Recognition Ceremony will be held on Sunday, May 14, at 8:30 am on Francis Olympic Field. At this ceremony, each graduate will be recognized by name.  On Monday, May 15, the All-University Commencement will be held on Francis Olympic Field at 9 a.m., and the graduates will be recognized by school. 

College of Arts & Sciences Recognition Ceremony

The next Arts & Sciences Graduate Studies Hooding and Recognition Ceremony will be held on Friday, May 12, 2023, at 3 p.m in Graham Chapel. At this ceremony, each graduate will be recognized by name and the doctoral students will be hooded. On Monday, May 15, the All-University Commencement will be held on Francis Olympic Field at 9 a.m., and the graduates will be recognized by school. 

Graduate Hooding & Recognition Ceremony

Join us as we celebrate the 400-year anniversary of William Shakespeare’s first folio—the first time his collected works were printed.

Shakespeare Day: Celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare in Print

Lēna Blou holds diplomas in jazz and contemporary dance, choreographic interpretation, and dance teaching. She founded the Center for Dance and Choreographic Studies (CEDC) in 1990 and the Compagnie Trilogie in 1995. She obtained a Masters in Caribbean Art and Cultural Promotion in 2015, and a PhD in 2021. In 2017, she founded Larel Bigidi’Art, a space for training, creation, and research. Since 2020, she has been developping her projects as part of Lafabri’k, a Laboratory of Dance and Expression through Movement. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 2008, and was made an Officer of the National Order of Merit in 2013.

Lena Blou: Performing the political

SDS is proud to present our 2023 showcase "A Beautiful Life". Composed by nine student choreographers, pieces will cover a wide range of styles and subjects. We are grateful to put on another show this spring and to allow so many students to help create new works with the talented dancers here at WashU. We hope that our audience is eager to jump in and experience how beautiful life can be!

Student Dance Showcase

The Performing Arts Department  invites you to join the students of the Lighting Technology class as they put on a full concert in the Edison Theatre.  The concert, which we lovingly call RETINA BURN, is the culmination of a semester long process in learning the craft of designing a concert lighting and projection rig. Students have spent the better part of the semester programming this concert in computer visualization in preparation for the live show.

Retina Burn

Dance is the physical emergence of the untold stories that originate from deep within ourselves. Fueled by emotion and energy, it moves through the body and out into space to create the language from which we tell the stories of our everyday lives. Please join us for an evening of dance derived from deep personal reflections on our most valued experiences in the world. 

WUDance Collective: GENESIS

David Henry Hwang’s stage work includes the plays M. Butterfly, Chinglish, Yellow Face, Golden Child, The Dance and the Railroad, and FOB, as well as the Broadway musicals Aida, Flower Drum Song (2002 revival) and Disney’s Tarzan. His screenplays include M. Butterfly and he is currently penning the live-action feature musical remake of Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame as well as an Anna May Wong biopic to star actress Gemma Chan. For television, he was a Writer/Consulting Producer for the Golden Globe-winning television series The Affair and is now creating two television series, Billion Dollar Whale for Westward/SKG and another for Netflix. Called America’s most-produced living opera librettist, he has written thirteen libretti, including five with composer Philip Glass. He also co-wrote the Gold Record “Solo” with the late pop music icon Prince.

2023 Helen Clanton Morrin Biennial Lecture

Washington University Alumni, Russell Schwartz, Senior Vice President & Head, Original Programming Business & Legal Affairs at Starz and Barbara Thomas, Actress and former Senior Vice President & CFO of HBO Sports, and Sayed Kashua, Novelist, Creator and Screenwriter of  the TV shows, Arab Labor, The Writer and Madrasa will talk with students about their careers in the entertainment industry, the paths that led them to where they are now and what the future of the industry holds for those just beginning their careers.  They will take questions from the audience as well.  Join us for what is always a lively and informative discussion.

Careers in the Entertainment Industry

In her book Deadpan, Tina Post argues that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, and that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers. This talk, drawn from the book’s introduction, Post introduces some of the ways that deadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation, excess and insensibility.

"On the Aesthetics of Black Inexpression"

The program brings to our audience an outpouring of choreographic inspirations. Each creation offers a particular perspective on contemporary topics and abstract concepts: both historic and current. These original works look at collaborative articulations that move beyond existing expectations of what dance should be. One is the innovative and collaborative process that comes from sourcing material when the rules are developed as the dance is designed. The other is an exploration of the creative and performative spectrum of social and avant-garde jazz dance.

2023 MFA Student Dance Concert: No Boundaries

Based on his 30 years of experience in stage design, exhibit design, art direction for film, and theme park and industrial design, Robert Mark Morgan's talk will highlight the lessons in creativity included in the text of this new book The Art of Scenic Design: A Practical Guide to the Creative Process. The talk will demonstrate that while a design process for creating these types of works can seem like niche applications, the lessons learned in collaboration, testing and re-testing ideas, prototyping concepts, overcoming fears, venturing guesses, divergent thinking, and the creative process in general are applicable – and valuable – in nearly all disciplines and professions both inside and outside of the entertainment industry. 

"Looking at the Creative Process Through the Lens of Scenic Design"

How can justice be achieved without piling new crimes on top of old ones? Ellen McLaughlin’s gripping adaptation of the trilogy by Aeschylus explores the intimacy of violence and the centrality of actions by women in this ancient Greek story about the foundations of the law.

The Oresteia

The current presidential administration began with a commitment to bridging political divides, even offering physical bridges in the form of an infrastructure bill to help meet that goal. Locally, the team at Health Equity Works has studied inequity created by geographical divide resulting from conscious choices to create a segregated city, and then explored recommendations and activities that dismantle regional divides.

More Than Just Entertainment: The Politics of Branson’s Tourism Industry and Ethical Questions for Scholars

Kindred is a showcase of two senior dances choreographed by Diamond Warren-Tucker & Izzy Yanover exploring themes of family and belonging.

Kindred: A Senior Dance Showcase

In the classic Death of Salesman, Arthur Miller explores the disillusionment of the American Dream and the toll it takes on all aspects of life for traveling salesman Willy Loman and his family. The Black Rep will be performing this seminal work January 11-29, 2023, at Washington University’s Edison Theater in a production directed by Jacqueline Thompson, with company founder and artistic director Ron Himes in the role of Willy Loman. Join Himes  for a conversation about the production, the Black Rep and this moment in American theater. This program is offered in partnership with Washington University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

On ‘Death of a Salesman’: A Conversation with Ron Himes

The classic story of traveling salesman Willy Loman and his family explores the disillusionment of the American Dream and the toll it takes on all aspects of life.

The Black Rep presents "Death Of A Salesman

The play presents a series of seemingly unrelated scenes unfolding at what the writer calls the “instant of explosion.” Explosion of a building? Of a city? Of individual lives? A mother meets an estranged son. A professional couple debate what they choose to know about how they will die. A surrogate mother imagines starting a new world with the birth father. The Dust presents fragments of lives hovering on the brink of annihilation, and yet, all these people are doing their very best to move beyond fear to live lives of authentic happiness. Annelise Finnegan’s translation gives Hsu’s beautiful work a clear theatrical voice. First produced in November of 2013 in Taiwan, this is the U.S. premiere of The Dust.


The Dust

“Translation : Dramaturgy,” is supported by a grant from the Republic of China (Taiwan) and features presentations by translators working in a variety of languages, including a keynote address by actress/playwright Ellen McLaughlin, whose contemporary translation of The Oresteia will be presented by the Performing Arts Department Spring 2023.

Translation : Dramaturgy

Our three-week summer program will run from July 10th - 28th, 2023 in London at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and will be led by William Whitaker, Professor of Practice-Drama and Dr. Claire Sommers, Lecturer, Department of English.  This is a superb experience where students take master classes in acting, voice, movement, text study, and stage combat with Globe Education faculty and leading members of the British theater – including (hopefully) Tony Award winner and Royal Shakespeare Company actress Jane Lapotaire.  While you are there, not only will you see performances at the Globe, but you will also have opportunities to rehearse and perform on the GLOBE STAGE itself!

Globe Summer Program Information Meeting

In this colloquium, Miguel Valerio, Assistant Professor of Spanish,  will discuss the sources and methodologies from his new book, Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640. Sovereign Joy explores the performance of festive black kings and queens among Afro-Mexicans between 1539 and 1640. This fascinating study illustrates how the first African and Afro-creole people in colonial Mexico transformed their ancestral culture into a shared identity among Afro-Mexicans, with particular focus on how public festival participation expressed their culture and subjectivities, as well as redefined their colonial condition and social standing. By analyzing this hitherto understudied aspect of Afro-Mexican Catholic confraternities in both literary texts and visual culture, Valerio teases out the deeply ambivalent and contradictory meanings behind these public processions and festivities that often re-inscribed structures of race and hierarchy. Were they markers of Catholic subjecthood, and what sort of corporate structures did they create to project standing and respectability? Sovereign Joy examines many of these possibilities, and in the process highlights the central place occupied by Africans and their descendants in colonial culture. Through performance, Afro-Mexicans affirmed their being: the sovereignty of joy, and the joy of sovereignty.

Performing Black Sovereignty

Inspired by the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim and book writer James Lapine upend the "Happily Ever After" trope to unearth the doubts, fears, and longings that undermine prepackaged morals.  Winner of three Tony Awards and the 1988 Drama Critics Circle Award and Drama Desk Award for Best Musical, Into the Woods is a story of our time. In our current moment of social unrest and political polarity, this fractured fairytale challenges us to grapple with ambivalence and uncertainty without losing our humanity.

Washington University in St. Louis Performing Arts Department

May 12, 2024

2023 Handprint Ceremony for Graduating PAD Students

Apr 26, 2024

Feathers and Facepaint: The Making of Redface in American Theatre

Washington University in St. Louis Performing Arts Department