The Master of Fine Arts in Theatre at Sarah Lawrence College supports students through research and practice to develop their unique artistic voice and robust creative practice to engage with the contemporary field. Under the guidance of faculty and thesis advisors who are working artists, curators, and organizers, the program offers an advanced study of theatre and performance that is interdisciplinary, collaborative, expansive, and rigorous.
Academic Program Like the College at large, the Graduate Program in Theatre emphasizes an individualized learning process. Each student’s course of study is unique and is created in consultation with the program director and faculty in response to the student’s background, interests, strengths, and artistic training requirements.
Students may apply for fall entry to the Master of Fine Arts in Theatre program. Applicants must have received a Bachelor of Arts or equivalent degree from an accredited college or university.
Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores are not required for admission.
Interdisciplinary – The program emphasizes theatre and performance making as an integrative process. Collaborative – Students work closely in classes, conferences, and productions with the faculty, guest artists, their graduate cohort, and the undergraduate theatre community. Expansive– We emphasize the development of original work, grounded in a study of historical and contemporary forms and in expansive articulations of performance frameworks. Rigorous – Embodiment, process, and feedback and reflection are at the core of graduate curricular work.
Program Overview
The program emphasizes theatre and performance making as an integrative practice. Each student develops a study program that draws from courses in acting, Alexander Technique, improvisation, creation of original work, design, directing, acting, contemporary performance, history/survey, movement, playwriting, solo performance, and puppetry speech, voice, and civic engagement.
Each student’s course of study is unique. Students spend several days during registration week in one-on-one interviews with the faculty to decide which “components” they will take. The program uses the term “components” instead of “courses” because it is possible, and encouraged, to take a component from the Music or Dance performing arts programs.
Graduate students work closely in classes, conferences, and productions with faculty, fellow graduate students, and the Sarah Lawrence undergraduate theatre community.
Graduate curricular work is augmented by a practicum in which students learn by doing. Multiple production frameworks offer graduate students a wide range of opportunities, including season productions, guest art residencies, downstage season, and independent student groups.
The Theatre and Civic Engagement program provides students with teaching placements with community partners.
Students participate in internships or fieldwork in New York City theatres and theatre organizations.
Each month, the program invites nationally and internationally recognized artists to mentor and lead workshops during Grad Lab classes. Some of the past guests have included:
For an MFA in Theatre, students will earn a total of 48 course credits (24 in the first year and 24 in the second). Students are accepted on a full-time basis; exceptions are made only in extraordinary circumstances.
In addition to the required components below, students choose components according to their interests and needs. The goal is to create an interdisciplinary course of study that builds on current skill sets and explores aspects of theatre and performance that are new to them.
Graduate students participate in one or more practicum activities per year. Students take at least one analytical class per year during the graduate program (history, theory, survey, dramaturgy, etc.).
Other than these required courses, students chose paths according to their interests and needs. The goal is to create an interdisciplinary course of study that builds on current skill sets and explores theater and performance aspects that are new to them.
Graduate students participate in one or more practicum activities per year. These may include season productions, guest art residencies, downstage season, independent student groups, or internships. Students take one analytical class per year during the graduate program (history, theory, survey, dramaturgy, etc.).
Apply Today
Students may apply for fall entry to the Master of Fine Arts in Theatre program. Applicants must have received a Bachelor of Arts or equivalent degree from an accredited college or university.
Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores are not required for admission.
The Master of Fine Arts in Theatre at Sarah Lawrence College supports students through research and practice to develop their unique artistic voice and robust creative practice to engage with the contemporary field. Under the guidance of faculty and thesis advisors who are working artists, curators, and organizers, the program offers an advanced study of theatre and performance that is interdisciplinary, collaborative, expansive, and rigorous.
Academic Program Like the College at large, the Graduate Program in Theatre emphasizes an individualized learning process. Each student’s course of study is unique and is created in consultation with the program director and faculty in response to the student’s background, interests, strengths, and artistic training requirements.
Students may apply for fall entry to the Master of Fine Arts in Theatre program. Applicants must have received a Bachelor of Arts or equivalent degree from an accredited college or university.
Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores are not required for admission.
I’m Very Into You is a civically engaged piece led by guest artist, Sara Lyons.
Interdisciplinary – The program emphasizes theatre and performance making as an integrative process. Collaborative – Students work closely in classes, conferences, and productions with the faculty, guest artists, their graduate cohort, and the undergraduate theatre community. Expansive– We emphasize the development of original work, grounded in a study of historical and contemporary forms and in expansive articulations of performance frameworks. Rigorous – Embodiment, process, and feedback and reflection are at the core of graduate curricular work.
Program Overview
The program emphasizes theatre and performance making as an integrative practice. Each student develops a study program that draws from courses in acting, Alexander Technique, improvisation, creation of original work, design, directing, acting, contemporary performance, history/survey, movement, playwriting, solo performance, and puppetry speech, voice, and civic engagement.
Each student’s course of study is unique. Students spend several days during registration week in one-on-one interviews with the faculty to decide which “components” they will take. The program uses the term “components” instead of “courses” because it is possible, and encouraged, to take a component from the Music or Dance performing arts programs.
Graduate students work closely in classes, conferences, and productions with faculty, fellow graduate students, and the Sarah Lawrence undergraduate theatre community.
Graduate curricular work is augmented by a practicum in which students learn by doing. Multiple production frameworks offer graduate students a wide range of opportunities, including season productions, guest art residencies, downstage season, and independent student groups.
The Theatre and Civic Engagement program provides students with teaching placements with community partners.
Students participate in internships or fieldwork in New York City theatres and theatre organizations.
Each month, the program invites nationally and internationally recognized artists to mentor and lead workshops during Grad Lab classes. Some of the past guests have included:
For an MFA in Theatre, students will earn a total of 48 course credits (24 in the first year and 24 in the second). Students are accepted on a full-time basis; exceptions are made only in extraordinary circumstances.
In addition to the required components below, students choose components according to their interests and needs. The goal is to create an interdisciplinary course of study that builds on current skill sets and explores aspects of theatre and performance that are new to them.
Graduate students participate in one or more practicum activities per year. Students take at least one analytical class per year during the graduate program (history, theory, survey, dramaturgy, etc.).
Other than these required courses, students chose paths according to their interests and needs. The goal is to create an interdisciplinary course of study that builds on current skill sets and explores theater and performance aspects that are new to them.
Graduate students participate in one or more practicum activities per year. These may include season productions, guest art residencies, downstage season, independent student groups, or internships. Students take one analytical class per year during the graduate program (history, theory, survey, dramaturgy, etc.).
Apply Today
Students may apply for fall entry to the Master of Fine Arts in Theatre program. Applicants must have received a Bachelor of Arts or equivalent degree from an accredited college or university.
Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores are not required for admission.
Opportunity: Open Call Mittelyoung2026 Where: CIVIDALE DEL FRIULI (33043) UD When: from 11.12.2025 Deadline: 10.02.2026 Online Application: www.mittelfest.org/en/mittelyoung/ Fee to Participate or Apply: Free
Open Call:
Send your artistic project for a paid opportunity on the international stage of Mittelfest, the festival of Central Europe.
The Open Call for Mittelyoung is officially open from 11 December 2025 to 10 February 2026. If you are under 30 and have a theatre, music, dance, or circus project, Mittelyoung is the right place for you.
Mittelyoung is one of the top under-30 festivals in Europe: every year it brings artists from across Central Europe and the Balkans to Cividale del Friuli, offering space to new voices on the scene and providing concrete support for their work.
For 2026, we are looking for projects that engage with the theme Fear: not as a blockage, but as momentum, vision, possibility. A starting point for imagining other perspectives and new languages.
Where: Cividale del Friuli (Udine), Italy When: 14–17 May 2026 What we offer: paid participation and the opportunity to present your work in an international context
Who can apply
Artists and companies under 30 from: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Ukraine, Hungary.
How it works
A group of under-30 curators will review all applications and select 9 projects to be presented during Mittelyoung Fear (14–17 May 2026). Among these, up to 3 shows will then be selected to be re-programmed within Mittelfest Fear (16–26 July), with additional support and visibility.
These posts are not affiliated with Contemporary Performance Network, but are of interest to our community. We post these with the caveat to check the sources and research the opportunities or views expressed in the posts.
Under the Radar Festival January 7–18, 2025 New York City
Since its founding in 2003 by Mark Russel, the Under the Radar Festival has played a central role in shaping the landscape of contemporary performance in New York. In 2006, the festival was included in The Public Theater season. The festival emerged in response to a growing field of artists working outside traditional theatrical forms, bringing together experimental theater, performance art, dance, and interdisciplinary practices. Over two decades, Under the Radar has become a key site for international exchange and U.S. premieres, supporting work that prioritizes formal experimentation, political urgency, and live inquiry. The festival’s curatorial approach has consistently foregrounded risk, hybridity, and practices that resist easy categorization.
The highlights selected here were chosen for how clearly they articulate distinct strategies within contemporary performance. Each work demonstrates a rigorous relationship to form, whether through image composition, engineered systems, durational structure, or embodied research. Rather than offering a survey of the program, this selection focuses on pieces that reveal how artists are working now: how they construct meaning through constraint, how bodies function as archives or instruments, and how performance continues to operate as a site of experimentation, friction, and sustained attention.
Banushi’s MAMI builds a visual-poetic theatre language in near-silence, using image composition and staged memory to approach the mother-child relationship as an emotional landscape. The work’s force comes from its refusal to over-explain, relying instead on choreographed proximity, objects, and the slow reveal of tableau to carry grief, tenderness, and inheritance. The program framing links “mami” (mother) and “mam” (food), placing nurture beside hunger, offering beside consuming, and locating care inside a charged, uncanny domesticity.
Dates: Tue, Jan 7 (7:30 PM); Wed, Jan 8 (7:30 PM); Thu, Jan 9 (7:30 PM); Fri, Jan 10 (7:30 PM) Tickets:https://nyuskirball.org
Tina Satter / Half Straddle Adapted from The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Presented as part of Park Avenue Armory’s Under Construction Series and by Half Straddle
This work-in-progress adaptation treats Fassbinder’s chamber drama as an engine for performance tension: a sealed apartment, a concentrated relational field, and a romance that quickly becomes an architecture of control. The Under Construction framing invites attention to how Half Straddle builds performance, how text, bodies, and design systems produce volatility, and how intimacy turns procedural. The narrative stakes are clear, a designer in isolation, an obsessive attachment to a model named Karin, and a breakdown in emotional governance.
TECHNE Homecoming functions as an expanded performance ecology, an exhibition format that treats installation, immersion, and durational encounter as its primary dramaturgical tools. The program describes six large-scale installations and immersive performances that investigate identity and kinship through biological, mythological, and digital bonds, positioning the audience as moving witness inside a networked environment rather than a seated receiver. Featured artists include Andrew Thomas Huang, Damara Inglês, Miriam Simun, Sister Sylvester, Natalia Manta, and Tamiko Thiel, signaling a curatorial logic oriented toward hybrid media languages and embodied interface.
Narcissister’s Voyage Into Infinity is constructed as a chain reaction, a live, chaotic causality machine that collides reclaimed objects with the spectacle logic that has shaped the artist’s masked practice for two decades. The work explicitly riffs on Fischli and Weiss’s The Way Things Go (1987), then shifts the authorship optics by foregrounding female-appearing performers as drivers of the action and as the image under pressure. A live score by Holland Andrews pushes the piece toward punk charge, with the title drawn from a Bad Brains song. The signature Narcissister mask operates as critique and distortion, holding beauty standards, objectification, and the malleability of race in a single visual device. The result reads as choreography, stunt system, and feminist revisioning at once.
Wet Mess Presented by Under the Radar at Dixon Place
TESTO works through “mess” as method, using movement and pre-recorded interviews to push at testosterone, drag edges, and the performance of transition as an unstable, comic, abrasive score. The program language is explicit about the piece’s surreal spectacle and its commitment to confusion, camp decision-making, and bodily rhetoric that moves between the mundane and the made-up until those categories collapse into each other. Rather than presenting a clean arc, the performance leans into instability, testing how desire and identity appear when language slips, when images overrun explanation, and when the body becomes a shifting site of projection.
Dates: Tue, Jan 13 (9:30 PM); Wed, Jan 14 (9:30 PM); Thu, Jan 15 (10:00 PM); Fri, Jan 16 (10:00 PM); Sat, Jan 17 (9:30 PM) Tickets:https://events.humanitix.com/testo
Autumn Knight Commissioned and Presented by The Chocolate Factory TheaterU
Knight frames NOTHING: more as an “anti-still life,” a durational composition built from object movement, disruption, and continuous reconfiguration. Three performers produce momentary images through shifting arrangements of size, texture, and density, then break those arrangements, re-read them, and sometimes merge body with object to create new composites. The work explicitly resists narration and legibility, favoring process and renewal as its central structure, a practice of assembling the self out of parts under conditions of ongoing change.
Opportunity: Open Call – PQ Performance Where: Prague, Czechia When: June 2027 Deadline: January 31, 2025 Online Application: https://pq.cz/pq2027/open-calls/ Fee to Participate or Apply: Free of charge.
Description Of Opportunity:
Whatever form it takes, whatever atmosphere it evokes, scenography is an inseparable component of performance: it unfolds in time, in space, and in relation to the presence of the audiences. It is only complete when experienced. PQ Performance, a program section of Prague Quadrennial 2027, highlights these essential qualities of scenography by inviting audiences to encounter it live, in the moment of its actualization, when it comes into existence in a performance.
Artists are encouraged to apply with performances that are scenographically rich or design-led, taking place in a range of environments and performance spaces, and engaging diverse audiences, including children.
How To Apply:
You can submit via an online form via the link below: https://pq.cz/pq2027/open-calls/
These posts are not affiliated with Contemporary Performance Network, but are of interest to our community. We post these with the caveat to check the sources and research the opportunities or views expressed in the posts.
Tere O’Connor’s program at New York Live Arts brings together Construct-a-Guy (1984) and the world premiere of The Lace, offering a rare opportunity to encounter forty years of choreographic thinking in direct conversation. O’Connor has long treated dance as an autonomous system, a place where movement exists after language, and where meaning unfolds through sequencing, rhythm, and the accumulation of disruption and tangent. Across these two works, he returns to strategies that shaped his early career, reframes them through decades of practice, and probes how choreographic structures form, destabilize, and recombine in relation to queerness, perception, and lived complexity.
Construct-a-Guy, performed by the phenomenal Tim Bendernagel, retains the unruly vitality of its original presentation 40 years ago. Capricious rhythmic change, spatial fragmentation, and sudden shifts of sensibility form a composition that refuses hierarchical ordering. The piece arrives as a rapid collision of references and citations, both formal and quotidian. Movement veers from flirtation to opacity, from complex footwork to casual gestures. Moments spark associations with a vast history from Cunningham, Balanchine, Graham, Childs, and the queer sociality of downtown dance, but each echo appears only long enough to be disrupted.
“Movement veers from flirtation to opacity, from complex footwork to casual gestures.”
The work’s volatility reflects what O’Connor later described as the “closeted mind,” a survival architecture formed during his childhood and teenage years and later realized during the act of coming out in the early 1980s. According to his talk between pieces, he describes the closeted mind as multiple figures inside a single consciousness, including the enforcer, the analyst, and the strategist, each policing and adjusting the body at high speed . This description sits within a wider field of thought that examines divided perception. W. E. B. Du Bois articulated a related dynamic in his theory of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a concept that captures the lived condition of holding an inward sense of self while simultaneously being registered through the eyes of a dominant, oppressive culture. Although emerging from different histories and contexts, both frameworks illuminate the ways internal multiplicity forms under pressure. Each describes a perceptual architecture shaped by vigilance, self-monitoring, and continual recalibration of presence. O’Connor’s choreography translates this condition into motion, where rigor, multiplicity, strategic tangent, and queer complexity collide. This mental choreography becomes the engine of the dance. Sequencing tilts, cuts, and pivots. Tangents gather force. The dance never settles into wholeness; it thrives in the sidelong.
The Lace takes this early set of concerns and stretches them across a larger ensemble. The cast moves through shifting patterns where timing, proximity, and relational density form the work’s structure. O’Connor’s sequencing strategies appear in expanded scale: events accumulate, dissolve, and reconstitute themselves. Gestures thread through bodies and then weave through the group. The choreography generates meaning through adjacency rather than illustration. Like Construct-a-Guy, the work approaches dance as a post-linguistic expression driven by the strategies first articulated in that early solo and expanded through decades of inquiry, a space where vigilance, rigor, and continual recalibration intertwine with joy, community, and hope, folding into one another and expanding outward.
“This mental choreography becomes the engine of the dance.”
The performers sustain this architecture with striking clarity. Their attention to weight, tempo, and micro-adjustment allows O’Connor’s intricate sequencing to remain legible without becoming rigid. Small shifts in focus ripple through the group. The dancers hold the material with precision while allowing for the porousness the work requires, where relationships form and dissolve in real time. Their labor reveals a collective intelligence shaped through years of shared practice.
“The dancers hold the material with precision while allowing for the porousness the work requires.”
O’Connor framed the evening as an inquiry into consciousness and its structures, and this becomes central to the experience of The Lace. Movement operates as thinking. His choreographic technique emerges from the interplay of the past and a speculative future. His discussion of surviving oppressive frameworks, the patterns that reinforce normative narratives, casts new light on the dance’s strategies. The work reorganizes expectation. It places tangential action at the center and frees the dance from familiar arcs of development or resolution. The choreography becomes a site where other modes of togetherness can be imagined.
Across his career, O’Connor has resisted labels like avant-garde or experimental, arguing that such terms marginalize practices that diverge from conventional narrative or aesthetic frameworks. This program demonstrates the clarity of that position. Construct-a-Guy and The Lace form a continuum. The earlier work reveals the seeds of O’Connor’s craft: rhythmic dissonance, conceptual layering, and the refusal of prescribed structure. The new work reveals how those seeds have grown into a complex system of choreographic thought, one that considers consciousness as a choreography of attention, drift, and disruption. O’Connor’s contribution to the field continues to reside in his commitment to dance as an art of multiplicity, where the intangible states of life become material.
What remains after the program is a sense of continuity across time. The dances share a profound compositional logic, one shaped by decades of observation and inquiry. O’Connor’s work invites audiences into this logic, asking them to participate in the assembly of meaning rather than receive it. In doing so, the evening affirms the vitality of dance as a form that generates new ways of perceiving, thinking, and being together.
Photo: Maria Baranova
Credits: Construct-a-Guy (1984) Performer: Tim Bendernagel Lighting Design: Michael O’Connor Music: Diane Martel
How do the bodies we inhabit become machines? How do the machines we build carry our failures, our gestures, our hesitations? In a time of prosthetics, avatars, and surveillance interfaces, the question of what counts as living movement belongs in the theatre. In Under Construction at the Holand Festival, Geumhyung Jeong invites us into a workshop of failure and repair, where robot-figures assembled from medical skeleton models and mechanical components take awkward shape. What begins as an act of construction becomes a performance of collapse, adaptation, and care.
Exploring the Work of Geumhyung Jeong
Geumhyung Jeong is a choreographer and performance artist whose work probes the relationship between body, object and technology. She studied acting, dance and animation-film in Korea, and her practice consistently uses animatronic figures and everyday objects in ways that destabilise human presence. Under Construction (2025) is commissioned by the Holland Festival and presents a hybrid installation-performance in which robot-like figures move, fail, are maintained and adapt.
Geumhyung Jeong’s Under Construction
Five robot figures stand in a row, left to right, each increasing in articulation and instability. The first sits low: two legs splayed, back to the floor. The second rises: spine and two legs with knee joints, hip rotating in a z-shape reminiscent of a human stretch. Jeong controls each via a hand-held device. The third adds metal hips and abduction movement, its limbs testing the affordances of its frame. The fourth, detailed with bearing joints, allows twists of the legs and ground crawling; the fifth introduces a full torso and skull structure, heavily reinforced and balanced precariously. Jeong sits behind it, stabilising it, assisting its fragile articulation. The performance opens with robotic limbs in isolation, then accelerates into a choreography of care, adjustment, and mechanical malfunction. Jeong’s dry commentary, “sometimes I move them and it feels like they’re about to break,” she says, elicits audience laughter, then quiet attentiveness. Your gaze is drawn to wires, to hinge-joints, to the awkward fall and upright recovery of one figure. It becomes anatomical class, a stripping away of our bodily assumptions: how joints hold us upright, how ground-contact matters, how the body becomes machine and machine becomes body.
What stands out is the moment when Jeong stops pushing buttons and begins stabilising the robot. The shift from control interface to caregiver opens space for vulnerability. For an instance, the fifth robot collapses; Jeong catches a wire, reattaches a joint, coaxing the torso upright. That moment reframes the earlier spectacle; mechanical precision gives way to human fragility. The performance asks: What does autonomy mean when the machine needs our help? What does movement mean when every hinge can fail? And who holds responsibility for the body in motion?
Jeong’s lineage lies at the convergence of dance, object-theatre, machine aesthetics, and visual art. Where her work, such as Find, Select, Copy, and Paste, focuses on the bare body, Under Construction reinvests in the prosthetic, the artificial, the mechanical. In the broader field, the piece dialogues with dance, robotic theatre, puppetry, and art-machines, where the artist-as-coder and the performer-as-object converge. But Jeong shifts the emphasis: rather than control and perfection, she foregrounds failure, repair, contingency. This joins a current strand of post-digital performance that treats machines as partners rather than tools.
What lingers is care: the visible labour of holding a torso upright, of re-wiring a limb mid-performance, of sitting behind the machine rather than standing apart. Under Construction does not ask for seamless perfection. It rehearses breakdown and repair, inviting us to witness machines that lean on their maker. It reminds us that our bodies are machine-like, and our machines are still very much human. In that reflection, we see not just the robot, but ourselves. Jeong has made a work that feels urgent: not because it fears machines, but because it shows how much we are already entwined with them.
ACT is a three-day festival that brings together annually a hundred of participants and guests from around the world. The festival has four main sections: the pedagogical program, ACTmosfera encounters, the exhibition shows and the short play competition, open to companies willing to take part in the festival.
ACT launches a call for emerging artists on the international scene who have works of maximum 30 minutes. The festival is committed to companies that take risks in their proposals and new formats and scenic languages. ACT´s main goal is to promote and share the work of new creators with the audience, cultural managers, programmers and the media. To do so, the festival facilitates spaces for reflection and debate, besides a remarkable pedagogical program for the participating performers. ACT is not only a festival but also a performing arts fair attended by programmers from around the world.
The festival covers the accommodation of the company’s interpreters and the necessary technical team; breakfasts, lunches and dinners are also included in the invitation, as well as passes for all the activities that take place during the 3 days of the festival, including workshops, talks and all the programmed shows. The festival does not cover transport costs, they must assumed by the company or other institutions. Accommodation is offered in shared rooms with other artists.
COMPETITION. We are seeking artistic proposals of 30-minute maximum length by emerging creators: performance, dance, textual theatre, circus… any of the existing scenic languages. *Works exceeding duration on stage, may be penalized in the competition.
The selected proposals will be shown during the festival according to the program. ACT will have the rights to broadcast fragments of the works as well as the publication of images to promote the event.
An international and independent jury composed of performing arts professionals will grant the festival prizes during the closing ceremony:
ACT main award: 5.000 € for the production and presentation of a new project at the next edition of the festival.
Four mentions without economic compensation: Best interpreter, best direction, and two other mentions in the categories deemed appropriate by the jury.
How To Apply:
Complete the form(mandatory video or link to the video) before 20th of December 2025.
If you have any questions about the festival or the open call, contact us by phone to +34 944389096 or by email to [email protected].
Guidelines and application form are available on our website and Instagram page.
These posts are not affiliated with Contemporary Performance Network, but are of interest to our community. We post these with the caveat to check the sources and research the opportunities or views expressed in the posts.
Fog rises before anything else. It bubbles from the ground, drifts in slow sheets across the stage, and hangs in midair like breath. In Gisèle Vienne’s Extra Life at the Holland Festival, the fog asserts itself as presence, reflecting the characters’ emotion and struggle. It moves through the performance as a living participant. It coils around the performers, obscures them, and releases them again. Through this shifting density, the audience enters a world of unsettled time, where trauma and tenderness appear to move at different speeds.
Vienne has developed a distinctive language of slow motion, disjunction, and suspended intensity. Working between choreography, theatre, and visual art, she constructs temporal architectures where gesture and light become psychological material. At the Holland Festival, Extra Life extends this vocabulary into new terrain. The piece turns toward the fragile persistence of bodies that remain after violation.
The fog asserts itself as presence, reflecting the characters’ emotion and struggle.
The performance begins in darkness. A group of teenagers gathers in a forest clearing on their way home from a choir competition. Gradually, we understand that something terrible has happened to them. The work unfolds in the aftermath, in the silence following language, where survival is physical rather than narrative.
The stage resembles a nocturnal landscape, at once natural and artificial. Layers of fog and smoke move through it, sometimes as a low ground mist, sometimes as thick vertical sheets. At certain points, the vapor swells in opaque clouds that engulf the dancers. Lasers slice through the air, tracing geometric lines that pass close to the bodies or enclose them within a shifting grid. These elements shape the action itself, defining its space of existence.
The performers move through a double structure of time. Their voices speak at normal speed, while their bodies move with extreme slowness. The visual and vocal tracks are never aligned. This separation creates a kind of temporal vertigo. Speech belongs to the present, while movement carries the weight of the past. Occasionally, a dancer slips or jerks, breaking the precision of the slowed rhythm. These small ruptures feel like tremors, the body remembering what it cannot articulate.
The performers move through a double structure of time. Speech belongs to the present, while movement carries the weight of the past.
The fog becomes an extension of the body’s emotional field. It hides and reveals, expands and contracts, as if responding to what the performers cannot say. Within it, they find temporary shelter, a camouflage that allows them to approach the unspeakable. Vienne treats the fog as a material of empathy. Through its density, the characters find each other and, for moments, themselves.
The choreography remains precise yet unresolvable. Figures advance and recede in near silence. Their proximity suggests recognition and estrangement at once. The forest becomes a site of shared memory and isolation. Caterina Barbieri’s score and Adrien Michel’s sound design vibrates beneath the action, a low sustained presence that thickens the air. The sound sustains emotion rather than directing it, holding the stage in a continuous state of trembling.
The performers’ work is extraordinary. They embody Vienne’s exacting physical language with precision and stamina, sustaining the extreme slowness while carrying the emotional weight of their characters. Every gesture, shift of focus, or intake of breath feels deliberate and charged. Their control is matched by vulnerability. The discipline required to maintain tempo and form over the span of the performance reveals a kind of endurance that is both physical and emotional. It is a feat of strength and feeling, a rigorous translation of trauma into movement that remains fully alive.
It is a feat of strength and feeling, a rigorous translation of trauma into movement that remains fully alive.
Vienne’s work has always interrogated the act of looking. In Extra Life, she transforms spectatorship into a condition of uncertainty. The fog reduces visibility, the slowness amplifies detail, and the lasers enforce distance. The audience watches yet never fully perceives. The experience mirrors the social blindness surrounding trauma, a collective inability to see what is already present.
There are moments when the performers approach one another and the illusion shifts. A hand touches a shoulder, a head turns toward a faint light, a breath becomes audible. These gestures are small but charged with the energy of endurance. They mark the return of life inside a landscape suspended between memory and disappearance.
Vienne has long used the languages of cinema, installation, and sculpture to expand the frame of dance. Here she pares them down. The scenography is elemental: air, light, sound, time. What remains is the act of persistence itself, the slow rebuilding of relation in the wake of harm.
When the fog finally begins to lift, the figures stand in the clearing. The light is thin. Resolution never arrives, only a shift in awareness. The work closes in a quiet recognition that survival continues as choreography, a repetition without conclusion.
concept Gisèle Vienne choreography Gisèle Vienne direction Gisèle Vienne scenography Gisèle Vienne in close collaboration with Adèle Haenel, Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick performance Adèle Haenel, Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick music Caterina Barbieri sound design Adrien Michel light design Yves Godin, Gisèle Vienne text Adèle Haenel, Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick, Gisèle Vienne assistant Sophie Demeyer costumes Gisèle Vienne, Camille Queval, FrenchKissLA creation dolls Etienne Bideau-Rey, Nicolas Herlin technical coordination Samuel Dosière stage management Antoine Hordé sound manager Adrien Michel, Géraldine Foucault Voglimacci light manager Samuel Dosière, Iannis Japiot with thanks to Elsa Dorlin, Etienne Hunsinger, Sandra Lucbert, Romane Rivol, Anja Röttgerkamp, Sabrina Lonis, Maya Masse, Giovanna Rua, Lina Hinsky, Erik Houllier, Andrea Kerr tour Alma Office (Anne-Lise Gobin & Camille Queval) production Alma Office (Anne-Lise Gobin & Camille Queval) administration Cloé Haas, Clémentine Papandrea
The call is open to single artists or emerging and independent professional companies that work with professional purposes in the field of contemporary theatre, dance and performing arts.
DEADLINE: 7TH DECEMBER 2025
PREMISES
The Festival is organised by the Association Festival Opera Prima. Coherently with its history, Opera Prima wants to host and enhance the multiplicity of trends and researches in national and international contemporary performing arts.
THE OBJECT OF THE CALL
This call for entries is opened to national and international groups or artists that practice experimental theatre or experimentation on scenic languages. By experimental theatre we mean a work that truly experiments with the dramaturgy (interpreted as scenic composition), the actor, the spectator and the scenic space.
PARTICIPATION REQUIREMENTS
The call is opened to Italian and international individuals or groups of professional theatre and performing arts, structured in any legal form that allows them to fulfil the administrative and bureaucratic practices necessary to realise their performance. Only artistic projects that realise experimentation with scenic languages are eligible for selection. Amateur works, drama theater and performances of entertainment won’t be selected.
The Festival commission selects both original works that have not been yet performed, as well as works that have already debut, but which have not had an adequate circulation and/or visibility. The submitted works must be no longer than 60 minutes. In case of selection, the artist agrees not to perform the aforementioned work and not to reproduce it within an 80 km radius of Rovigo for a minimum of 60 days before and 30 days after the dates of the festival.
CONDITIONS
The selected performances are going to be included in the XXII edition of Festival Opera Prima and are going to be performed from the 10th to the 14th of June 2026. All expenses and practices concerning the organisation, communication, staff, promotion of the event will be in charge of the Festival. At each selected company will be paid, after the presentation of an invoice, a fee that has to be agreed and will be guaranteed the possibility of lodging at an affiliated guesthouse (just for the artists and technicians working in the performance).
CALENDAR AND PLACE OF PERFORMANCE
All the performances are going to be realised in Rovigo inside the venues used by the Festival from the 10th to the 14th June 2026. It is possible to realise performances also in unconventional locations and outdoor. The artistic direction can ask the selected company to realise more replies of the performance in the same day.
OBLIGATIONS
Selected candidates commit to: • support the promotion of FESTIVAL OPERA PRIMA throughout their channels (web site, social, press office…); • respect Festival praxis regarding set-up times and rules; • perform the selected work on the agreed day or days.
How To Apply:
SUBMISSION
Submissions must include:
• Artistic curriculum of the company or the artist; • Artistic presentation and technical rider of the performance; • Link to the full video of the performance (if the proposal consists of a debut, link to a video of rehearsals). Video material has to
be viewed directly online (by a link) and it mustn’t be downloaded (no wetransfer, google drive, etc.). Each group or individual can submit only one proposal.
The application has to be sent fulfilling the form online at https://forms.gle/ekRMo8SijUVU9atr8 by 12.00 am on December 7th 2025. We do not accept other ways of sending materials. Participants authorize, pursuant to Law 196/2003 and GDPR – European Regulation no. 2016/679, the processing of personal data and the use of the sent informations for all the purposes related to the announcement.
SELECTION
The selection of the performances is entrusted to the unquestionable judgment of the artistic direction of the Festival. By submitting their candidacy, participants authorise the use of sent images for the communication and publications related to the initiative.
PUBLICATION OF RESULTS
The contact person of the selected projects is going to be contacted by Association Festival Opera Prima once the selection process has been completed. Anyhow, the selected artists/groups’ names are going to be published on the website of the Festival.
These posts are not affiliated with Contemporary Performance Network, but are of interest to our community. We post these with the caveat to check the sources and research the opportunities or views expressed in the posts.
Since 2017 the Norwegian theatre company Susie Wang has been building a distinctive body of work at the intersection of horror, fiction, and theatrical spectacle. Founded by Trine Falch, Martin Langlie, Mona Solhaug, and Bo Krister Wallström, the group emerged from Norway’s experimental performance scene with a deliberate move toward story-driven theatre after years of conceptual forms. Their productions, including The Hum (2017), Mummy Brown (2018), and Burnt Toast (2020), use practical stage effects, sound design, and darkly comic gesture to probe human nature and the “un-real”.
Susie Wang’s Burnt Toast at Skirball Center
Is it a hotel? Is it Hell? Why is everyone obsessed and slurping on the complimentary eggnog drink? Burnt Toast at The Skirball Center in NYC, by the Norwegian company Susie Wang, opens inside an all-red hotel lobby that feels like No Exit or The Shining. The receptionist stands behind the counter, typing with hypnotic slowness on an unseen terminal, occasionally pausing to suck a hard candy. Two elevator doors glow on either side of her. Skin-toned beanbags fill the space like discarded organs. The sound design hums at a hyper-amplified register, so that each keystroke and swallow becomes unnervingly intimate, almost ASMR. Something is very wrong.
The sound design hums at a hyper-amplified register, so that each keystroke and swallow becomes unnervingly intimate.
Susie Wang’s world is meticulously artificial. Every surface feels cheap and dangerous, promising theatrical excess: plush red carpet, fluorescent lighting, mirrors gleaming. When the elevator finally grinds open, a man steps out dragging a rolling suitcase and a silver briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. His trousers are too tight, his posture too deliberate. He is part salesman, part specimen. The scene unfolds with excruciating patience. The two exchange greetings in a slow, off-kilter American Southern accent, each syllable tinged with a Norwegian undertone. Their conversation slips and slides into the uncanny.
At this point, Burnt Toast descends into pulp horror, surreal comedy, and psychological nightmare. A single mother with a newborn named Miracle enters the lobby. She strikes up a conversation with the man, who introduces himself as Dinny Iwas. She breastfeeds while he connects a feeding apparatus, a small tube from his silver briefcase to his mouth, and drinks an unknown liquid. She is also slurping the eggnog drink. The slurping is constant, and it’s a heavy foreshadowing for what’s to come. The woman’s C-section scar begins to bleed through her blouse. Dinny asks to look at it. The scene becomes the most horrific and foreboding meet-cute imaginable, sliding into a series of moments that are difficult to describe.
It unfolds like a Grand-Guignol fantasy of an American Southern Rom-Com
What follows plays out like a Grand Guignol fantasy of an American Rom-Com. Relationships collapse and reform in seconds. Time loops and jumps. The hotel becomes a site of ritual dissection. Bodies open, close, and are cut away. The mother’s wound becomes a doorway. The baby is sacrificed again and again, each version smaller than the last, until the final one, a speck named Hope, is sealed in a tiny ring box. It is grotesque, but also absurdly tender. The audience laughs, then recoils, or vice versa.
Susie Wang’s craft lies in the precision of these morphing relationships and theatrical sleights of hand. The lighting and sound design operate as sculptural tools. There is slurping, cutting, blood, and a love story. The performance’s horror is built on theatrical rhythm, the stillness before movement, the delayed reaction, the held breath. The characters grasp at each other emotionally and physically. The red hotel becomes a living organism, digesting its characters and spitting them out as mythic residue.
The red hotel becomes a living organism, digesting its characters and spitting them out as mythic residue.
What emerges is a meditation on consumption and reproduction, on how desire, motherhood, and mortality fold into one another through the negotiations of relationship and need. The grotesque is necessary in this world. Every incision reveals a strange beauty in exposure and an absurd humor in our limits. Burnt Toast reconstructs the artifice of horror from the inside out. By the end, nothing remains but Hope.
Opportunity: Teatri Riflessi 11 | International Short Performance Competition Where: Zafferana Etnea When: 16-19 July 2026 Deadline: 1 November 2025, 22:00 (CET) Online Application: www.iterculture.eu/en/teatri-riflessi/teatri-riflessi-2026-en/tr11/ Fee to Participate or Apply: Free
Description Of Opportunity:
Teatri Riflessi 11 – International Short Performance Competition
Teatri Riflessi has opened its 2026 call for short performances: live works no longer than 15 minutes of contemporary dance, theatre, circus or multidisciplinary performance.
Where: Zafferana Etnea, Sicily, Italy
When: 16-19 July 2026
Deadline for applications: 1 November 2025 (22:00 CET), Free application
Selected works will receive a cachet ranging from €500 to €1,100 (based on the number of performers on stage) and partial support for travel expenses, compete in front of numerous Italian and international professionals (theatre and festival directors, dance networks coordinators, programmers, residency centres, critics and scholars) for several monetary prizes and the possibility of receiving touring and artist residency opportunities.
These posts are not affiliated with Contemporary Performance Network, but are of interest to our community. We post these with the caveat to check the sources and research the opportunities or views expressed in the posts.
The Master of Fine Arts in Theatre at Sarah Lawrence College supports students through research and practice to develop their unique artistic voice and robust creative practice to engage with the contemporary field. Under the guidance of faculty and thesis advisors who are working artists, curators, and organizers, the program offers an advanced study of theatre and performance that is interdisciplinary, collaborative, expansive, and rigorous.
Academic Program Like the College, the Graduate Program in Theatre emphasizes an individualized learning process. Each student’s course of study is unique and is created in consultation with the program director and faculty in response to the student’s background, interests, strengths, and artistic training requirements.
Students may apply for fall entry to the Master of Fine Arts in Theatre program. Applicants must have received a Bachelor of Arts or equivalent degree from an accredited college or university.
Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores are not required for admission.
Interdisciplinary – The program emphasizes theatre and performance-making as an integrative process. Collaborative – Students work closely in classes, conferences, and productions with the faculty, guest artists, their graduate cohort, and the undergraduate theatre community. Expansive– We emphasize the development of original work, grounded in a study of historical and contemporary forms and in expansive articulations of performance frameworks. Rigorous – Embodiment, process, and feedback and reflection are at the core of graduate curricular work.
Program Overview
The program emphasizes theatre and performance making as an integrative practice. Each student develops a study program that draws from courses in acting, Alexander Technique, improvisation, creation of original work, design, directing, acting, contemporary performance, history/survey, movement, playwriting, solo performance, and puppetry speech, voice, and civic engagement.
Each student’s course of study is unique. Students spend several days during registration week in one-on-one interviews with the faculty to decide which “components” they will take. The program uses the term “components” instead of “courses” because it is possible, and encouraged, to take a component from the Music or Dance performing arts programs.
Graduate students work closely in classes, conferences, and productions with faculty, fellow graduate students, and the Sarah Lawrence undergraduate theatre community.
Graduate curricular work is augmented by a practicum in which students learn by doing. Multiple production frameworks offer graduate students a wide range of opportunities, including season productions, guest art residencies, downstage season, and independent student groups.
The Theatre and Civic Engagement program provides students with teaching placements with community partners.
Students participate in internships or fieldwork in New York City theatres and theatre organizations.
Each month, the program invites nationally and internationally recognized artists to mentor and lead workshops during Performance Lab classes. Some of the past guests have included:
For an MFA in Theatre, students will earn a total of 48 course credits (24 in the first year and 24 in the second). Students are accepted on a full-time basis; exceptions are made only in extraordinary circumstances.
In addition to the required components below, students choose components according to their interests and needs. The goal is to create an interdisciplinary course of study that builds on current skill sets and explores aspects of theatre and performance that are new to them.
Graduate students participate in one or more practicum activities per year. Students take at least one analytical class per year during the graduate program (history, theory, survey, dramaturgy, etc.).
Required courses in the M.F.A. program:
Performance Research (Year 1)
Performance Studio (Year 1)
Performance Lab (Year 1 & 2)
Embodied Thesis (Year 2)
Written Thesis (Year 2)
Practicum (Year 1 & 2)
Other than these required courses, students chose paths according to their interests and needs. The goal is to create an interdisciplinary course of study that builds on current skill sets and explores theater and performance aspects that are new to them.
Graduate students participate in one or more practicum activities per year. These may include season productions, guest art residencies, downstage season, independent student groups, or internships. Students take one analytical class per year during the graduate program (history, theory, survey, dramaturgy, etc.).
Apply Today
Students may apply for fall entry to the Master of Fine Arts in Theatre program. Applicants must have received a Bachelor of Arts or equivalent degree from an accredited college or university.
Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores are not required for admission.
How many screens are in the room with you? Your phone, your laptop, your iPad, your desktop, your TV. Maybe a smartwatch. Maybe a smart fridge. For many of us, the mediated image is not something we step away from to experience theater. It arrives with us, woven into our perception. For decades, artists have been grappling with this fact.
Live video entered the theatrical stage as early as the 1980s, most notably through the radical mise-en-scène of Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne in Berlin. Castorf’s work, particularly beginning in the early 1990s and extending through the 2000s with collaborators like Bert Neumann and video artist Andreas Deinert, used handheld cameras and jarring screen presence to fracture time, foreground mediation, and expose the constructed nature of representation. Meanwhile, in New York, The Wooster Group was already embedding live-feed cameras and CRT monitors into their dense, fragmented stagings, mapping performance onto the logics of editing, feedback, and deconstruction. Big Art Group emerged in the early 2000s with what it called “Real Time Film,” a technique that used green screen, projection, and live compositing to split performance into doubled temporalities, what happens live, and what happens onscreen, and make visible the ideological and political construction of media.
Since then, live video has become ubiquitous. Ivo van Hove’s large-scale productions at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, West End, and Broadway use cinematic close-up and architectural projection to create psychological intimacy at scale. Small downtown spaces and indie productions utilize inexpensive handheld cameras, phone feeds, and hacked surveillance to stage liveness as a mediated, fragile negotiation. At every level of production, from Off-Off Broadway basements to Broadway houses, the screen is no longer an intrusion but part of the vernacular of theater itself.
Still, some audience members and critics continue to ask, “Is this theater?” or, “Why is the video necessary?” as if the presence of a camera somehow disqualifies the work from theatrical legitimacy. But in 2025, when most of our lives are lived on multiple screens, the more urgent question might be: how does the screen shape our seeing, our time, our sociality, and our bodies? And what does it mean to watch performers live through the frame?
We are no longer only here, in this room, in this moment. Our bodies and selves are captured, stretched, and dispersed across digital networks, spaces of image, video, avatar, and profile. We live in time and space, and we are also projected and networked into other spaces as reproductions, copies, avatars, and extensions. Some of these are close to the real, to the lived and felt you. Others are partial, performed, or false. The tension between presence and projection, between original and copy, between materiality and simulation, is not abstract. It is daily. It is intimate. And it is at the core of what theater now confronts, through the camera, through the screen, through the staged and the streamed.
“The tension between presence and projection, between original and copy, between materiality and simulation, is not abstract. It is daily. It is intimate.”
Łukasz Twarkowski is an internationally recognized creator of rich multimedia theatrical work, operating at the intersection of theatre, visual arts, music, and digital technologies. He consistently interrogates the boundaries and capacities of theatre as a medium, deploying live video, real-time compositing, and deconstructed narrative to confront audiences’ ingrained viewing habits and challenge what is real or constructed.
Twarkowski has built a significant international profile: past works include Kliniken / Love is colder than…Akropolis, Lokis, Respublika, and ROHTKO. His productions have toured major venues and festivals, including Odéon Théâtre, Ruhrtriennale, New York’s Skirball Center, Piccolo Teatro Milano, Münchner Kammerspiele, Wiener Festwochen, and London’s Southbank Centre.
In Respublika (2020), which appeared at the Holland Festival in 2023, Twarkowski staged a six-hour immersive installation blending techno, film, performance, and communal ritual. He pushed the audience to choose their own trajectory, between screens, the dance floor, and the theatrical set, asserting that “theatre on its own is no longer enough”; instead, he seeks hybrid forms born of video and liveness.
ROTHKO, which ran at the Holland Festival this past month, opens with an illusion: two seemingly pre-recorded shots, one of a Chinese restaurant kitchen, the other of a Wolt delivery person, framed in high cinematic detail and projected on separate large rolling screens on a bare stage. But slowly, the illusion cracks: the footage is live. From the very first moment, the production destabilizes the boundary between the authentic and the copy. The rupture that follows is explosive, a loud, kaleidoscopic scenic shift that feels more like cinematic vertigo than theatrical transition. The kitchen set glides out. A Chinese restaurant spins onto the stage. A massive widescreen projection, like an exaggerated, suspended Cinemascope frame, flies in from above. Handheld cameras begin to move. The restaurant structure rotates in full as actors and camera operators step in and out, revealing a corridor of neon-lit fish tanks, green linoleum tabletops, bustling diners, and waitstaff. Everything in the space is in motion. Moving scenery glides into place. Actors hit their marks with exactitude. Lighting cues and handheld cameras track and sculpt every shift in real-time.
Within this suprising architecture, the story begins to take shape. A man and a woman meet inside the restaurant, a dealer and an art handler, possibly former lovers. Their interaction is terse, ambivalent, and charged with personal and professional subtext. Simultaneously, another encounter unfolds between two men: a gallerist and a reporter. The staging is thick with simultaneity, like a long cinematic take, reminiscent of Robert Altman’s layered realism or Wong Kar-wai’s neon lite intimacy. The set, with its walls, windows, and reflective surfaces, obscures and reveals the live action in a nod to the form’s originators, such as Castorf and Neumann. There are fish tanks with believable but artificial fish, and others that appear live, only to reveal themselves as screens. These visual contradictions echo the deeper thematic inquiry: what is real, what is fake, what is copied?
Another musical rupture arrives as a thundering pulse, like a jump scare, the audience actually flinched, disorienting and deliberate. The Chinese restaurant set splits in two and begins to rotate. The kitchen transforms into an outdoor street stall, where the reporter interviews the dealer about her forged Rothko paintings, which were sold for millions. Then everything rotates again. The kitchen becomes a portal between two mirrored Chinese food restaurants, a doubling: two timelines, two Americas, two Rothkos.
One-half stages Mark Rothko in 1960, in conflict with his wife over his decision to reject a lucrative commission for the Four Seasons Restaurant, an iconic story of artistic refusal that also formed the basis of Romeo Castellucci’s 2012 The Four Seasons Restaurant. The other half is set in 2025: two actors discuss auditioning for a film about Rothko, each trying to claim the role. As timelines begin to blur, the image in the elongated projection screen above splits to match the dual narrative structure. This is then complicated by a lengthy, full-ensemble sequence, a virtuosic display of slow-motion, looped movement, time travel, and synchronized camera work. Actors begin to cross decades through the kitchen portal, between the two mirrored restaurants. It evokes the overstimulated excess of a music video or stadium performance, but remains grounded in an philosophical inquiry: What is an original? Can a copy still move you?
“From the very first moment, the production destabilizes the boundary between the authentic and the copy.”
What makes ROTHKO notable is the seamless integration of performance, scenography, and camera. The actors deliver emotionally precise, grounded work even as the stage is in flux, rotating, splitting, mirroring, and recombining. Their labor is constant and invisible: traversing moving scenery on cue, hitting tightly choreographed marks and lighting states, and adjusting to shifting camera positions. The live-feed cinematography is dramaturgical. It builds meaning through framing, doubling, and movement. Camera operators and stage crew are fully visible, pointed to, framed, and folded into the logic of the piece.
By the second part, the restaurant has become something like an affinity spiral. It is mirrored front to front, forming a see-through structure where video, set, and actor loop and slide across registers of real and fake, now and then. The kitchen exists both physically and as an image. The fish tank now spans a massive projection wall, pulsing with scale and saturation. Through this unstable, shifting architecture, the production poses questions that echo and multiply: What gives art its value? Its originality? The emotion it elicits? Or its rarity? If you love a painting and later discover it is fake, is your love less real? Are we attached to aesthetic experience or to ownership and scarcity? And in a world of NFTs, blockchain-certified provenance, and infinitely reproducible digital objects, what does originality even mean?
These questions are not presented as abstract theory, but embedded in the visceral reality of the staging. The set unlocks, opens, spins, and turns like a sci-fi puzzle box, revealing new locations and decades. Screens shimmer with layered images. Costumes glimmer from vintage to contemporary. Choreography is employed as a structural principle, where entire scenes unfold as interlocking tableaux of rhythm, timing, and gesture. It’s a hybrid language that draws lineage from live theatrical video visionaries of the past 40 years. Yet Twarkowski renders this vocabulary his own, spatial, cinematic, philosophical, and relentless.
“The live-feed cinematography is dramaturgical. It builds meaning through framing, doubling, glitch, and movement.”
ROTHKO continues Łukasz Twarkowski’s deep engagement with mediated form, architectural scenography, and fractured temporality. Like his earlier work Respublika, it dissolves the boundaries between theatre, film, and installation. However, where Respublika immersed audiences in a durational, rave-like environment with distributed attention and a horizontal narrative, ROTHKO returns to a more vertical dramaturgy, structured, layered, and recursive. The camera is not a supplement to performance, but an actor within it. The screen is not a surface for illustration, but a machine of meaning. This marks a maturation of Twarkowski’s hybrid vocabulary: the interplay of liveness and image is tighter, more choreographed, and more embedded in the logic of the piece.
The production also signals Twarkowski’s position within a longer lineage of artists who have used live video to interrogate perception and theatrical time. There are clear echoes of Frank Castorf’s work at the Volksbühne, especially in the way screens fracture realism and gesture toward the ideological frame. The reflective materials and spinning architectural modules evoke Bert Neumann’s scenographic provocations. The use of simultaneous, durational camera feeds and layered cinematic rhythm recalls The Wooster Group and Big Art Group, companies who pioneered live compositing and feedback as dramaturgical tools. And like Ivo van Hove, Twarkowski stages subjectivity through framing, proximity, and rupture, using the camera to isolate and amplify emotional stakes.
Yet ROTHKO pushes these strategies further. It does not simply represent media, it performs mediation. It stages forgery not as a plot point but as an ontological condition. The set does not signify a restaurant, it performs the labor of duplication. The screens do not show the actors, they reveal the conditions of performance: the gaps, the seams, the excesses. In doing so, the piece asks urgent questions not only about art, value, and originality but about what it means to be seen in a world of copies. What kind of presence is possible when every gesture is split between its execution and its projection? What kind of theatre is possible when the camera is no longer observing but structuring the event?
“We recognize ourselves in these copies not because they are authentic, but because they reflect the conditions under which authenticity is now produced.”
What lingers after ROTHKO is not just its scale, precision, or virtuosity, but its willingness to embrace contradiction. It is both emotionally intimate and architecturally vast, conceptually rigorous and wildly excessive. It stages collapse without ever losing control. In its spinning worlds, mirrored timelines, and recursive frames, it enacts the very questions it asks: What is original? What is fake? What is the value of feeling when that feeling is mediated, duplicated, or multiplied?
The production does not offer resolution. Instead, it leaves the audience inside the loop, a copy of a copy of a copy, inviting reflection on how perception, desire, and meaning are shaped by duplication. It is not only about the art market, but about how we live inside systems of representation: theatrical, digital, economic, and political. We recognize ourselves in these copies not because they are authentic, but because they reflect the conditions under which authenticity is now produced.
Twarkowski has made a work that feels unmistakably of this time: fractured, dazzling, exhausted, precise. ROTHKO does not ask us to choose between the real and the fake. It shows us how deeply entangled they have become, and how performance, when staged with this level of craft and formal clarity, can still cut through the noise and show us something sharp, strange, and true.
Credits
directionŁukasz TwarkowskitextAnka HerbutdramaturgyAnka Herbutstage design Fabien Lédé costume design Svenja Gassen choreography Paweł Sakowicz music Lubomir Grzelak video design Jakub Lech lighting design Eugenijus Sabaliauskas cast Juris Bartkevičs, Kaspars Dumburs, Ilze Ķuzule-Skrastiņa, Yan Huang, Andrzej Jakubczyk, Rēzija Kalniņa, Katarzyna Osipuk, Artūrs Skrastiņš, Mārtiņš Upenieks, Toms Veličko, Xiaochen Wang, Vita Vārpiņa productionDailes Theatre Latviainternational distribution & production Vidas Bizunevicius (NewError) coproduction JK Opole Theatre co-organisation Adam Mickiewicz Institute co-financing Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland
