Campus Stories - Theater & Performance
Stanford student’s research contributes to the history of black sacred music
Jessica Anderson spent three months during her junior year immersed in the culture, sights and sounds of Cape Town, South Africa. Mostly the sounds. What she found in the music she heard around town was the influence of American swing, jazz and bebop, but also the African American gospel music of her childhood. She discovered…
Determined students overcome challenges and breathe new life into a classic musical
Reimaging Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins as part of the British Asian immigrant community in early 20th century London was the first of several challenges for Ken Savage, ’14, and Asia Chiao, ’15, two students who don’t take no for an answer. It was fall 2012 when they agreed to join forces and stage My…
Introducing the Interdisciplinary Honors in the Arts Program
The Stanford Arts Institute is bringing to Stanford’s campus a program unlike any other. Meet the Interdisciplinary Honors Program, Honors in the Arts, which provides an opportunity for students of any major to complete a capstone project that brings a student’s experience in another discipline together with artistic endeavor. Conceived by Executive Director of Arts…
STANFORD TAPS PRESENTS MARTIN CRIMP’S ATTEMPTS ON HER LIFE
Stanford Department of Theater & Performance Studies (TAPS) open its 2013-14 performance season with British playwright Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, a production featuring dance, song and projection. TAPS performance-making professors Leslie Hill and Helen Paris direct. Attempts presents 17 scenarios for the theater, shocking and hilarious by turn, on a roller coaster of…
What were the aristocracy enjoying at the Paris Opéra while the peasants starved in the days before the French Revolution?
Stanford University Libraries is pleased to introduce Opening Night! Opera & Oratorio Premieres, a cross-index of data for over 38,000 opera and oratorio premieres. It allows complex searches across multiple categories or simple browsing within any single category, such as genre, composer, librettist, premiere date, country, oratorio subject or theater. The database is linked to…
Stanford Summer Theater Festival presents works by two great Irish dramatists and funnymen, Wilde and Beckett
Lynne Soffer knows what she likes when she sees it. Earlier this month, she was tinkering with the blocking of the third act of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and her directorial instincts were swiftly shaping the action on stage. The actors’ every step, gesture and inflection were quickly weighed and tweaked to her liking…
He’s Funny That Way: Oscar Wilde & Samuel Beckett
Stanford Summer Theater (SST) celebrates its fifteenth season with an explosion of comedy – comedy with a difference. We meet two great Irish dramatists, Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett, in a festival featuring productions of The Importance of Being Earnest and Happy Days. There is also a free Monday night film series on “apocalyptic comedy,”…
Art slideshow from the Frost Music and Arts Festival
The Frost concert planning team organized an arts component at this year’s Frost concert that gave the event a festival vibe. Festival art directors and undergraduates Alberto Aroeste, Max Oswald and Danny Smith were the visionaries behind the art installations. The objective was to make the art experiential rather than static. Success! Click here to…
Performance Studies International Conference comes to Stanford University, June 26-30
From June 26-30, Stanford University’s Department of Theater and Performance Studies will host the nineteenth annual Performance Studies international conference (PSi 19). The conference, which has not been in the United States in six years and has never been on the West Coast, features over one hundred performances, praxis sessions, workshops and installations, and approximately…
Stanford poetry competition aims to revive a performance tradition
Poetry is often thought of as silent text confined to the page, but the words of some of the most famous poets in the English language were given new life at Stanford’s second annual Poetry Out Loud (POL) competition. In a room packed with spectators, the works of Walt Whitman, Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan…
Stanford Live Announces 2013-14 Season
Highlights include Season-Opening concert with Itzhak Perlman and the Perlman Music Program, evening with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin and recitals by violinist Joshua Bell, sopranos Deborah Voigt and Angela Brown, and pianist Richard Goode World premiere of Linked Verse, a collaboration between Stanford assistant professor of music Jaroslaw Kapuscinski and artistic collective OpenEndedGroup, features…
Wit and Wordplay Take Center Stage in StanShakes’ Love’s Labour’s Lost
Performing the show at an actual fraternity house aligns with StanShakes’ history of presenting high-quality, free Shakespeare shows in uniquely Stanford locations. Past locations have included the old Terman fountain, the Cantor Arts Center, and the oak tree amphitheater outside Huang Engineering. This week only, through the generous support of ASSU Special Fees and a…
SCIT presents Euripides’ Cyclops
Otis and Us of Ithaca, New York, are like any old band touring the Williamsburg circuit. They’re tearing up stages, bagging chicks, and rolling their own fair-trade tobacco cigarettes all while keeping to a strict locavore, vegan, paleo-diet. Worn and exhausted from their most recent conquests at Coachella, the merry band of brooding hipsters gets…
Dead Man’s Cell Phone at Pigott Theater
Leanna Keyes: Dead Man’s Cell Phone (DMCP) ponders issues of technology and connectivity. At this particular historical juncture, it seems people are never more than a text message away, and the idea of not having a cell phone at all is inconceivable. How does Stanford’s position within Silicon Valley and start-up culture affect your approach to the play? Isaiah…
Stanford visiting artist Ann Carlson creates a performance piece made entirely of gestures
Ann Carlson has been animating the Stanford campus, sometimes with silence, sometimes with stillness, for over a year as a visiting artist in dance and performance with the Department of Theater and Performance Studies. Carlson’s work mines the ephemeral and the commonplace toward extraordinary results. Her upcoming project, commissioned by the Stanford Arts Institute, is…
‘Learning play’ pushes Stanford scholars and actors to explore the contradictions of capitalism
The Stanford Summer Theater production of Bertolt Brecht’s play The Exception and the Rule is a uniquely Stanford affair: a classics student is acting in it, a music student wrote the score and a drama professor is the director. The multidisciplinary academic involvement is particularly fitting, since the show is one of the German playwright’s “learning plays,”…
