2026-2027 Season Announcement - UVA Drama & Dance
We are excited to share our 2026–27 mainstage season, where we look to the past to spark timeless conversations about courage and connection, and celebrate the present with inventive work shaped by fresh perspectives. This academic year also marks a milestone for the Department of Drama as we commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Dance Minor Program and honor the artistry, innovation, and vibrant community of students, alumni, and faculty who have shaped it. Our fall and spring dance concerts will celebrate our program’s past, ground us in the present, and inspire us to imagine the future.
Fall 2026 features Eric Bentley’s Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? Directed by Dave Dalton, this engaging documentary drama revisits the entertainment professionals called before the House Un‑American Activities Committee at the height of 1950s McCarthy‑era investigations. Drawing directly from historical transcripts, the ensemble cast reanimates the testimonies of Paul Robeson, Lillian Hellman, Jerome Robbins, José Ferrer, Arthur Miller, and many others. As these artists are pressed to prove their loyalty and name suspected communists, the play reveals the pressure to conform, the strain on personal lives, and the fierce commitment to principle that shaped a generation. Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? is history in the spotlight and drama at its most urgent.
Also in the fall, we launch dance's 20th anniversary season with our Fall Dance Concert. Rooted in collaboration and creative inquiry, this program highlights current students' choreographic work and celebrates their central role in the life of the program. Student makers will explore dance as a source of connection - to ourselves, one another, and the world around us. We are also pleased to welcome New York City-based dance artist Ching-I Chang for a week-long residency that will include the creation of a new work with students. Through both live performance and screen-based works, audiences will experience an eclectic program that honors 20 years of supporting and showcasing student creative work on our stages.
Spring 2027 offers the fantastical musical Alice by Heart, where teenagers Alice and Alfred take shelter in an underground tube station as bombs fall during the London Blitz. With Alfred isolated in quarantine, Alice reaches for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the book they’ve both cherished since childhood, hoping to bring him comfort. When the book is unexpectedly destroyed, Alice chooses to keep telling this story she knows by heart. Powered by a contemporary pop-rock score and a gleeful streak of Wonderland weirdness, this musical follows the best friends as imagination becomes their refuge, their rebellion, and their lifeline in a reality where the future is anything but guaranteed. Book by Steven Sater and Jessie Nelson with music by Duncan Sheik and lyrics by Steven Sater.
The mainstage season concludes with Sensing Back/Shifting Forward, our spring dance concert. As we celebrate two decades of dance‑making and the collaborative communities that sustain it, this concert will feature works by former faculty and alumnae of the Dance Minor Program, who will return to create with current students. Choreographers and student dancers will delve deeply into the creative process to sense into what it means to mover in relationship with one another as well as with our pasts and imagined futures. Together we enter this next chapter with curiosity, resilience, and a deep recognition of the power of the moving, dancing body to connect us and shift us forward.
Developmental projects will round out the academic year, including Virginia Players' Lab Series and additional student- and faculty‑led events to be announced. We look forward to welcoming our students and community into the creative work ahead. Please also see our audition announcement for the fall production of Are You Now or Have You Ever Been!
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R. Lee Kennedy, Chair, UVA Department of Drama
Marianne Kubik, Artistic Director, Drama
Kim Brooks Mata, Artistic Director, Dance