Campus Stories - Theater & Performance

Wit and Wordplay Take Center Stage in StanShakes’ Love’s Labour’s Lost
Campus Stories

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…

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Stephen Sansom (foreground) with Alan Sheppard, Scott Arcenas, Michael Vang and David Driscoll rehearsing the contemporary presentation of Cyclops.
Campus Stories

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…

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[wpbb-if post:acf type="image" name="image" size="thumbnail" display="alt"]Set for Dead Man
Campus Stories

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…

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Visiting Artist Ann Carlson views a rehearsal of The Symphonic Body: Stanford.
Campus Stories

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…

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‘Learning play’ pushes Stanford scholars and actors to explore the contradictions of capitalism
Campus Stories

‘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,”…

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First Night, Twelfth Night
Campus Stories

First Night, Twelfth Night

Earlier this week the Stanford community commemorated the 75th anniversary of Memorial Auditorium with a performance in Pigott Theater of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which was the first-night production on August 20, 1937, in what was then called Memorial Hall. We can thank the plumbers for bringing Twelfth Night back to MemAud. To quote from the evening’s program, “it…

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Sophomore Natasha Mmonatau stands in front of a work by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum.
Campus Stories

Art in the Metropolis

“Art in the Metropolis” is a sophomore seminar  offered in conjunction with the annual “Arts Immersion” trip to New York that takes place over spring break and is organized by the Stanford Arts Institute.  The trip, now in its fourth year, provides a group of students with the opportunity to immerse themselves in the cultural…

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Ram’s Head Theatrical Society Presents Spring Awakening: A New Musical
Campus Stories

Ram’s Head Theatrical Society Presents Spring Awakening: A New Musical

Book + Lyrics by Steven Sater Music by Duncan Sheik Winner of eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Spring Awakening is a rock musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 expressionist play about the trials and tribulations, and the exhilaration of the teen years. Spring Awakening takes its inspiration from one of literature’s most controversial masterpieces…

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Othello, the Moor of Venice
Campus Stories

Othello, the Moor of Venice

The Stanford Shakespeare Company is proud to present Othello, Shakespeare’s timeless tale of a foreign general plagued by prejudice and insecurity, poisoned with the words of a treacherous friend seeking to advance his own position in the world. In the course of the general’s downfall, we encounter a love twisted into monstrous jealousy, an innocence battered…

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The Crucible
Campus Stories

The Crucible

Salem, Massachusetts, 1692: a small, devout town is thrown into chaos with accusations of witchcraft and spiritual possession. Arthur Miller’s explosive account of the famous Salem witch trials caused a sensation with its parallels to the Communist scares of the 1950s, and remains one of his most enduring classics. Approximate duration: 2.25 hours Performances: Thursday,…

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Tickets for Bing Concert Hall inaugural season performances are selling out
Campus Stories

Tickets for Bing Concert Hall inaugural season performances are selling out

Early reviews of Bing Concert Hall are in, and they are glowing. The best of the bon mots include: “The sound popped like champagne,” “The hall exudes a serenely majestic air,”  “The acoustics in the room and the intimacy of the space made performing an incredibly personal musical experience,” and “In a word, it’s magnificent.”…

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The Stanford Arts Timeline unearths a vital legacy of tradition and transformation
Campus Stories

The Stanford Arts Timeline unearths a vital legacy of tradition and transformation

On Friday, January 11, 2013 – nearly 121 years after Stanford convened its first class – Bing Concert Hall opened its doors. A culminating event for years of curricular and extracurricular arts activity on campus, this exciting moment has deep roots in over a century of Stanford arts – from one department focused on applied…

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Asian American Theater Project taps into the need to prove oneself
Campus Stories

Asian American Theater Project taps into the need to prove oneself

In spring 2012, Ken Savage and Asia Chiao decided to reboot the Asian American Theater Project (AATP) by scheduling a full academic year of productions for 2012-13, something that hasn’t been done in years, starting with The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee in fall quarter. Following Spelling Bee is Trying to Find Chinatown in…

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Stanford Live Single Tickets for the 2013 Inaugural Season at Bing Concert Hall Now On Sale
Campus Stories

Stanford Live Single Tickets for the 2013 Inaugural Season at Bing Concert Hall Now On Sale

Bing Concert Hall and the Stanford Live inaugural season debut in grand and festive style, beginning with a historic “Opening Night” concert on January 11 and continuing with a full weekend of tickets and free event. Single tickets for Stanford Live’s inaugural season go on sale Friday, Nov. 16 at 12 pm. You can order…

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TAPS presents Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Campus Stories

TAPS presents Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Guest performance by Guillermo Gómez-Peña on 11/28 has been cancelled. Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978. His performance work and 10 books have contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, border culture and…

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Robert Whitman: Local Report 2012
Campus Stories

Robert Whitman: Local Report 2012

Local Report 2012 was an international media and telecommunications work in which Robert Whitman used live video and audio reports from approximately ninety participants around the world. Whitman used these reports to create a live sound and video performance, composing what he calls “a cultural map of the world.” Local Report 2012 was the latest…

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