Production Archive: 2018-2019
Methtacular!
By Steven Strafford
Monday, September 17 at 7:30 p.m.
Strider Theater
Methtacular! is the brutally honest story of writer/performer Steven Strafford’s three years as a crystal meth addict in Chicago. Remarkably, the account of his exploits manages to be simultaneously hilarious and devastating. Don’t miss your opportunity to experience this heartfelt, fun, and searingly honest memoir directly from someone who’s been through the worst and came out the other side…with jazz hands.
This performance includes an audience talkback with Steven after the performance.
The American Shakespeare Center Presents: Sophocles’ Antigone
Wednesday, October 10 at 7:30 p.m.
Strider Theater
Antigone, the ASC’s first foray into Greek tragedy, reaches across 2,500 years to speak to us today with surprising relevancy. Our young heroine, Antigone, intentionally breaks a newly imposed law when she buries her brother’s corpse; a divine ritual that honors the dead, ushers them into the underworld, and is a woman’s domain to perform.
This act earns a death sentence from the recently throned king, yet she faces this terror with a pragmatic resolve to do what she knows is right for her beloved kin and, thus, tells her uncle-king, “And if by chance I seem to you to act in foolishness, it may just be it is a fool himself condemns my foolishness.”
In her unflinching dedication to do what is right rather than buckling under the pressure of what is easy, Antigone reaches across time to invite us to challenge injustice, honor the memories of those we love, and continue speaking up for others even (and especially) when our words are unpopular. -Doreen Bechtol, Director
Presented by American Shakespeare Center
with support from the Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Classics Department, Government Department, and the Cultural Events Committee
Set in the Living Room of a Small Town American Play
By Jaclyn Backhaus
Directed by Toby Vera Bercovici
October 25-27 at 7:30 p.m.
Strider Theater
Jaclyn Backhaus’ Set in the Living Room of a Small Town American Play is the story of a group of middle- and working-class suburbanites living in Illinois in 1947, all enmeshed in their own tragedies. The play is rooted in the American drama of the 1940s and 1950s, and it playfully explores that style, as well as the pursuit of the American dream.
The Dance Exchange presents an Animated Keynote
Tuesday, October 30 at 4:30 p.m.
Strider Theater
Free and open to the public
Fall Performance Projects
November 30 and December 1 at 7:30 p.m.
Strider Theater
Fall Performance Projects includes new works by four student choreographers; highlights first year students in the first year theater and dance projects directed by senior majors Gabriella Foster and Kaylee Pomelow; and features a powerful solo by Visiting Assistant Professor Tsiambwom Akuchu. Fall Performance Projects highlights products of curricular creative research that emphasize experimentation, collaboration, and hybridity.
The Passion Project – Activist Storytelling Workshop
January 30-31 at 7:30 p.m.
Portland Stage Studio Theater, Portland Maine
Preview Performance: Friday, January 25 at 6:30 p.m.
Pugh Center, Colby College
After a spirited and successful program last year, Theater and Dance presents The Passion Project 2019, a brand-new evening of original, story-based performance about the issues Colby students are most passionate about in their lives. Through the JanPlan Activist Storytelling Workshop, students will write and rehearse a series of short solo and small group pieces inspired by what change they would like to see in our world, and then present their new work to audiences on campus and at Portland Stage’s Studio Theater.
Tick Tock – Memory Metamorphosis
February 1, 2019 at 8 p.m.
February 2, 2019 at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Plaza Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts
539 Tremont St, Boston, MA 02116
We draw from our own individual and collective experiences in order to imagine possible futures. Using the presence of the past as a point of departure, student performers cull their remembered experiences, to articulate their own desires, hopes and challenges, set to an environment much like a mind in motion. The resulting performance, Tick Tock, explores this world of memory and experience, ultimately challenging us to ruminate on the nature of memory, through its emotional and bodily manifestations.
This original, student-devised work was constructed through our Theater and Dance ‘Jan Plan’ course, ‘Colby on Tour.’
Run time: 75 minutes, with no intermission.
The End of Men: An Ode to Ocean
February 7-8, 2019 at 7:30 p.m.
Strider Theater
Interweaving demanding physicality with spoken dialogue, sonic religiosity, and sublime virtuosity, creator and Colby Theater and Dance Visiting Assistant Professor Vanessa Anspaugh investigates masculine vulnerability and the historical and unyielding dynamics of cultural domination. From her subject position as a lesbian choreographer and mother to a young son, Anspaugh, along with an all male cast, explores how power lives in, and between, all of the participating bodies.
CONTENT ADVISORY: End of Men contains nudity.
Strings
March 7-8 at 7:30 p.m.
March 9 at 2 p.m.
Strider Theater
How can we as individuals act meaningfully in imbalanced systems? Strings interconnects lights, sound, lasers, sensors and performers to explore our world of all-pervasive computation.
Systems breathe. We are in a constant flow with the social, cultural, technological world in and around us. Strings explores this feedback loop by giving performers the power to affect the light and sound, just as that platform affects them. In a living system of imbalanced control, you have to find meaning for your life, weighing those you might hurt or help and determining what is actually possible. You have to create and believe and anchor yourself, or else dissolve as the system breathes.
Strings is the product of a student-driven interdisciplinary performance technology arts incubator led by a team of faculty, staff, and students from Computer Science, Music, and Theater and Dance, and by professional Artistic Lead Magnus Pind Bjerre. Strings student researchers and project leaders are Colleen Wright ’19, Jay Huskins ’19, Jerry Diaz ’19, and JP Perales ’21.
Colby Fringe Festival
April 9-27, 2018
Various Locations Across Campus
It’s edgy. Experimental. Collaborative. Innovative. And experiential.
Fringe theatre presents artists the opportunity to present theatrical experiences that are experimental in style or subject matter. Performances are typically in shared venues, often non-traditional spaces that are used to creatively showcase the work. Technical resources are simple, placing emphasis on the content of the work being presented.
More information available here. Check back for updates!
The Kickoff Event for the Colby Fringe Festival…
Guillermo Gómez-Peña: The Most (un) Documented Mexican Artist
By Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Performance: Tuesday, April 9th, 2019 at 7 p.m., Strider Theater
Workshop: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 4-9 p.m., Dance Studio (Runnals 203)
In his latest solo work, Gómez-Peña draws from his 30 year old living archive and combines new and classic performance material to present a unique perspective on the immediate future of the Americas. His-self styled “imaginary activism” invokes performance art as a form of radical
democracy and citizenship.
Combining spoken word poetry, activist theory, radical storytelling and language experimentation, Gómez-Peña offers critical and humorous commentary about the art world, academia, new technologies, the culture of war and violence in the US, organized crime in Mexico, gender and race politics, and the latest wave of complications surrounding gentrification in the “creative city”. This spoken word performance includes multiple cameos by troupe member and collaborator, Balitronica Gómez.
Besides his international work with the legendary troupe La Pocha Nostra, he has presented his solo work at museums, universities, galleries and theatres throughout the US, Canada, Europe, Latin America, Australia and
South Africa.
Gómez-Peña’s unique format reveals to an audience the process of creating, languaging and performing material and this process becomes the actual project. It is precisely in his new solo work where Gómez-Peña’s literature, theory, activism, pedagogy & live art come together in a wonderfully strange mix.
Gómez-Peña’s visit will also include a special workshop from 4-9pm in the Runnals Dance Studio (room 201) on Wednesday, March 10, the day after the performance.
bodymods
May 3 and 4 at 7 p.m.
Strider Theater
What happens when sculpture meets live performance?
Students in AR/TD268 Design Thinking Studio: Performative Sculpture explored this question through the design and fabrication of body modifications based on themes explored from personal life experience.
Together with professional choreographer Molly Gawler, Colby faculty Bradley Borthwick (Art) and Jim Thurston (Theater and Dance) worked with Brit Biddle ’19, Dominic Malia ’21, and Chang Zhang ’20 to create body-specific sculptures and solo performance works. Each student designed all lighting and atmospheric effects for a classmate’s technical production and final stage expression. The informal showing in Strider Theater becomes an important process moment where student-artists share their art through choreography and light on stage.
Run time: 45 minutes