Upcoming Performances
FALL studio Production
The Whole Shebang: Chronicles of Very Serious Students
Created with students in the Spring 2026 Theater 114 Class
Directed by Timmia DeRoy
October 15-18, 2026
Durham Studio Theater
This brand-new documentary play, developed by Berkeley students in spring of 2026, brings us a slice-of-life look into the lives of Gen Z on and off campus. Inspired by the subreddit “Am I The Asshole?,” each vignette, from the raunchy to the heartfelt, creates surprising opportunities for self-reflection. A bit too close to home, comedic and, at times, absurd, this is as much an experience as it is a play.
FALL Student-directed Workshop
Under Light
A Student-led Dance Workshop
Choreographed by Naomi Lyu
October 29-30, 2026
Zellerbach Hall • Room 170
This work examines how systems construct visibility and shape action, asking what it means to move within structures that determine who is seen, positioned, or valued. Drawing on the logic of chess, the piece frames performers as both agents and instruments, appearing to act while being shaped by a larger system. It asks what it means to be visible when movement is already scripted, and what kind of agency is possible within conditions one does not control.
Fall Production
Orestes: An Antic Tragedy
Transadapted by Anne Washburn from the play by Euripides
Directed by Susannah Martin
November 19-22, 2026
Zellerbach Playhouse
"The Trojan war is over. Orestes and Electra have killed their mother. The city wants them dead. Just when it seems like they have nowhere to turn, their best friend comes up with a plan... Ironic, desperate, humorous, and highly entertaining, this potent satire on the Oresteia myth brings this marvelous play to new life."
This transadaptation by Anne Washburn brings Euripides' Orestes into the 21st century. Euripides wrote from a place of experimentation and innovation, infusing the classic tragedy with irony, skepticism toward the gods, and a vehement anti-war stance. Just as urgent today as it was then, Orestes asks us to confront the weight of history and what it means to live within enduring cycles of violence in our contemporary world.
FALL Student-directed Workshop
Boy
by Anna Ziegler
Directed by Mathew Chipman
December 3-4, 2026
Durham Studio Theater
"Inspired by a true story, Boy explores the complicated terrain of trying to find love in a new body, and the inextricable bonds between doctor and patient. In the 1960s, a well-intentioned doctor convinces the parents of a male infant to raise their son as a girl after a terrible accident. Two decades later, the repercussions of that choice continue to unfold.”
Fall Showcase
Fall Choreography Showcase
Directed by Lisa Wymore
December 10-11, 2026
Zellerbach Hall • Room 7
Fall Choreography features student-created solos and duets representing a diverse range of movement styles, influences, and ideas. The final showcase is an exciting and popular staged event that has been a hallmark of the department for over fifty years!
Spring Production
Berkeley Dance Project: What Moves Between Us
Choreography by SanSan Kwan (Two Doors) and Lisa Wymore (Cycle)
February 18-21, 2027
Zellerbach Playhouse
This collaboration offers two dance works that sit inside the friction of seeing and not seeing, doing and not doing. Together they unsettle passivity. They treat perception not as something fixed or solitary, but as something shared and in motion. The audience is invited not only to watch, but to notice and to sense where attention settles, and where it drifts. In this space, seeing, listening, and feeling become forms of participation.
Two Doors is inspired by an incident in New York City in 2021 in which doormen closed their doors just after seeing an attack on an Asian woman outside their lobby. Through a choreographic study of the aftermath of violence, Two Doors explores the viscerality of anti-Asian racism and the sovereignty that we wrest for ourselves in response. Dancers experiment with closings and openings, weight sharing and weight bearing, playing with the kinetics of in/visibility, and Asian American model minoritization. Two Doors depicts a journey toward self-possession via relational vulnerability.
Cycle, inspired by Professor Georgina Kleege’s book More Than Meets the Eye, is built with language and sound as equal partners with the dance. Audio description does not trail behind the movement - it generates it. The result is a reorientation of how we watch dance, and an insistence that dance can be heard, felt, and imagined beyond the primacy of sight.
Spring Studio Production
Melancholy Play
by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Patrick Russell
March 11-14, 2027
Durham Studio Theater
What if sadness were an exquisite force of beauty? For Tilly, a melancholic bank teller, her heaviness becomes something luminous—strangely alluring, powerfully magnetic—drawing others toward her with a disarming pull and, in the process, revealing their truest selves.
The poetic farce of Melancholy Play invites us into a whimsical world where emotional truth is contagious, where identities slip free from the mundanity of everyday life and reform in response to longing, perception, and desire.
Moving between sincerity and absurdity, Tilly’s journey creates a space where vulnerability and humor coexist, and where transformation becomes both surprising and inevitable, unfolding in a world that is at once heightened and immediate. This surreal, magical story speaks to the simple truths of the human condition: the need for connection, and the profound value of feeling deeply.
Spring HONORS Project Performance
The Love Portal
Choreography by Ruchita Verma
March 18-19, 2027
Zellerbach Hall • Room 170
The Love Portal is a dance offering that explores love as a vessel for building community to serve as an antidote to hyper-capitalism. Through dance, this piece explores themes of belonging, community, liberation, healing, relationships, and collectivism. This work will be informed by scholars and thinkers from different parts of the world who use love as a form of resistance and as a tool to cultivate community. The Love Portal is an invitation to step into embodied knowledge, love rituals, and heart-led spaces.
Spring HONORS Project Performance
Title to be Confirmed
Directed by Manny LaPorte
April 15-16, 2027
Durham Studio Theater
More information to come.
Spring STUDIO Production
Indeed, friend!
By Eliza Bent
Directed by Nancy Carlin
April 29-May 2, 2027
Zellerbach Playhouse
Indeed, friend! by Eliza Bent explores a group of undergrad college students, on the editorial board of a student-published arts and literature magazine, who meet regularly in a basement office over the course of the 2000-2001 academic year. We watch these misfit students work together, as they hunger for meaning, amusement, validation and relationship. How does creativity help shape what kind of adult we become? How do we best adjudicate a piece of art? A life?
The production, which will be performed on a stage shared with the audience, in the Zellerbach Playhouse, invites the audience to feel included in these monthly editorial meetings.