The 2023-2024 Season

Friday, October 27 and Saturday, October 28, 2023
7:30 p.m., Studio 3, Gordon Center

Colby Dance Company: First year dance & faculty works
Led by Annie Kloppenberg and Matthew Cumbie

Break, Burn, Build is a landmark in the development of movers, makers, and performers. It’s a platform for emerging dancemakers to incubate new performance work. It’s a creative laboratory to explore and expand on ideas driven by inquiry. And it’s a celebration of rigorous work, made manifest through the collaborations between performers and designers on and off stage. The creative processes underpinning these works encourage students to begin their academic years – and careers – by focusing on BREAKing away from familiar patterns, sparking new ideas and letting them BURN; and then BUILDing new work.

Co-directed by AB Brown and Bess Welden
Friday, November 17 and Saturday, November 18, 2023 at 7:30 p.m.
Studio 2, Gordon Center

Three short plays exploring the themes of girlhood and ‘play’
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun is a collection of three short plays exploring the themes of girlhood and play, inspired by the Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities theme of ‘Play.’ Each play investigates the gendered, age-based, and class politics of ‘play’ and questions how play in our US society socializes young women/girls into particular social roles that have broad implications for both individuals and broader socio-cultural structures. We invite you to come play and consider the ways all genders, ages, and classes are implicated in social practices along the way.

Directed by Matthew Cumbie in collaboration with Jeri Pitcher and José Martínez
Friday, February 9, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, February 10, 2024 at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Performance Hall, Gordon Center

“History moves like the river, and bridges are possibilities – and responsibilities – for new beginnings.”

 Of This Place, a community-based performance project that weaves together stories of Waterville and Colby College using dance, original music, text, projection, and participatory community workshops.

Presented by the Departments of Performance, Theater, and Dance and Music.

This work is made possible by support from the Colby Arts Office, in collaboration with the Center for Arts and Humanities, the Special Collections and Archives in the Colby Libraries, Office of Civic Engagement, the Cultural Events Committee, the Office of the Provost, and the Office of the President.

Artistic Directors Annie Kloppenberg and Nell Shipman
Friday, March 8, 2024 at 7:30 p.m. 
Performance Hall, Gordon Center

Continuing its fruitful partnership with Colby, the Portland Ballet returns with a slate of new contemporary and neo-classical ballets. Last season, Steve Feeney of the Portland Press Herald celebrated the company’s “complete theatrical experience” as “sophisticated” and “engrossing.”

Led by Ariana Karp and Annie Kloppenberg –
in collaboration with students in Improvisational Practice in Performance
Friday, April 12, 2024 at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, April 13 at 2 p.m.
Studio 2, Gordon Center

Performance invites audiences in like poetry, offering evocative imagery that summons your experience, your response, and your reading rather than telling a single, linear story. This program includes new choreographic work and highlights the work of TD258, Improvisational Practice in Performance, performing never-before-seen, never-before-conceived improvised work that operates at the intersections of performance forms.

Written by William Shakespeare and Directed by Ariana Karp
Thursday, April 25, Friday, April 26, and Saturday, April 27 at 7:30 p.m. 
Studio One, Gordon Center

“What’s done cannot be undone.”

Join us for Shakespeare’s thrilling brew of ambition, madness, guilt, equivocation, and witchcraft. The production features ensemble movement work, abstracted violence, and a new embodiment of Macbeth’s fractured mind with two actors playing the title role.