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60+ Can't-Miss Shows on Philly Stages for Summer & Fall 2024

What's on stage at the best venues for live theater, dance and more in philadelphia & the countryside....

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Join in on the standing ovation. Greater Philadelphia’s venerable theaters and performing arts venues stage stellar productions all year long, but the scene kicks into high gear as summer rolls on and the holiday season inevitably approaches.

The epicenter for live performances in Philly is the Avenue of the Arts , the stretch of Broad Street between City Hall and South Street featuring stage, orchestral, dance, opera and comedy venues the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts , the Academy of Music , the (2024 Tony Award-winning) Wilma Theater , Suzanne Roberts Theatre and Miller Theater .

Elsewhere around the city exist many other extraordinary spaces devoted to everything from traditional theater to experimental ventures to children’s shows like the Walnut Street Theater , Forrest Theatre and The Arden . And don’t miss out on exciting engagements in the countryside at institutions like Bucks County Playhouse and Media Theater .

The second half of 2024’s robust lineup is highlighted by Broadway faves like Hamilton and Les Misérables , singalong jukebox musicals including Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys , world premieres, experimental theater, uproarious comedies, multicultural productions, murder mysteries and more.

Read on for a guide to the best performing arts venues in Greater Philadelphia, as well as the can’t-miss shows and performances slated for summer and fall 2024.

Philadelphia

Academy of music.

The gilded, crystal-chandeliered and velvet-curtained Academy of Music is one of the key components of the Kimmel Cultural Campus, one of three venues now part of Ensemble Arts Philly . The 160-plus-year-old venue on Philly’s Avenue of the Arts plays host to Opera Philadelphia , The Philadelphia Ballet (formerly The Pennsylvania Ballet), the annual Broadway Series and more.

• Funny Girl : Follow the rise of real-life comedian Fanny Brice as she embarks on an unlikely journey to stage superstardom in this love letter to the world of theater with an updated songbook and classics like Don’t Rain On My Parade and People (July 16-28, 2024).
• Mamma Mia! : Experience the hit jukebox musical , telling a feel-good mother-daughter story against the backdrop of a wedding in the Greek isles, featuring the music of ABBA through singalong tracks like Dancing Queen , Take a Chance on Me and Voulez-Vous (August 6-11, 2024).
• Les Misérables : Eight-time Tony Award-winning Les Mis follows ex-convict Jean Valjean as he seeks redemption amidst the burning embers of revolution in 19th-century France featuring earworms like I Dreamed a Dream , One Day More and Master of the House (August 27 – September 8, 2024).
• The Book of Mormon : Written by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, this uproarious Tony Award-winning musical comedy follows the misadventures of two missionaries tasked with spreading the good word halfway across the world (October 1-6, 2024).
• Hamilton : What more needs to be said about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway blockbuster ? The show returns to the city of its namesake Founding Father’s greatest achievements and romantic downfall , so come be in the room where it’s happening (October 29 – November 23, 2024).
• The Philadelphia Ballet Presents George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker : It’s just not the holidays in Philly without the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Mouse King and the magical inhabitants of The Land of Sweets inhabited by the world-class dancers of The Philadelphia Ballet (December 6-29, 2024).

Where: Academy of Music, 240 S. Broad Street

Arden Theatre Company

Noted for both world premieres and popular works, prominent regional Arden Theatre (and its eponymous theater company) presents diverse works on its main stage series for adults, as well as captivating productions for children . The troupe, established in 1988, has garnered much acclaim, including dozens of Barrymore Awards .

• POTUS (or Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying To Keep Him Alive) : When the President spins a PR nightmare into a global crisis, the seven women he relies upon must risk life and liberty to keep the commander-in-chief out of trouble (September 12 – October 6, 2024).
• Intimate Apparel : This Drama Desk- and Obie Award-winning play takes a penetrating look at the life of an African American seamstress, her Lower East Side clientele and the beautiful lingerie she creates for them as she yearns for a story of her own in a moving portrait of love and resilience (October 24 – December 1, 2024).
• Peter Pan : The Arden Children’s Theatre presents a traditional telling of the story of Peter Pan, Wendy, Tinker Bell, Captain Hook and the Lost Boys of Neverland, a magical island inhabited by fairies and pirates where there are no parents or chores (November 27, 2024 – January 19, 2025).

Where: Arden Theatre Company, 40 N. 2nd Street

On the first level of the historic Drake building , two renovated theaters — the intimate Louis Bluver Theatre and larger Proscenium Theatre — serve as home to InterAct Theatre Company and several resident companies including PlayPenn , Simpatico Theatre Project , Azuka Theatre , and Inis Nua Theatre under the “ At The Drake ” performance banner.

• Moreno : The year is 2016, and Colin Kaepernick has taken a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality. Now running back Luis Moreno finds himself forced to decide between his game (and paycheck) and taking a stand for his community by putting his politics on the field in this U.S. premiere (November 1-24, 2024).

Where: The Drake, 302 S. Hicks Street

The 220-seat waterfront FringeArts Theater — built inside a century-old former riverside pumping station — hosts contemporary out-of-the-mainstream Fringe performances, experimental concerts and other events throughout the year including the annual Fringe Festival . Before or after a show, visit the onsite restaurant Fringe Bar and its verdant outdoor Haas Biergarten space.

• Hamlet : The New York Circus Project transforms Shakespeare’s classic into a contemporary acrobatic performance featuring cast and creative team members from world-famous troupes like Cirque du Soleil where the lines between realism and internal monologue blur (July 24-28, 2024).
• Philadelphia Fringe Festival : This annual month-long celebration showcases hundreds of alternative theater, comedy, dance, gallery and film shows at venues large and small throughout the city, with FringeArts as its home base and curator (September 5-29, 2024).

Where: FringeArts, 140 N. Christopher Columbus Boulevard

Forrest Theatre

One of just two Shubert Organization venues outside of New York City, the Forrest Theatre bears the name of Edwin Forrest, a 19th-century Shakespearean actor and Philadelphia native. One of the city’s premier venues for more than 90 years, the Forrest frequently hosts touring productions of Broadway shows.

• A Beautiful Noise : The uplifting, untold true story of Neil Diamond, this jukebox memoir tells of the kid from Brooklyn who became a chart-busting music icon featuring many of the Brill Building legend’s most singalongable tunes like I’m a Believer and Sweet Caroline (December 10-22, 2024).

Where: Forrest Theatre, 1114 Walnut Street

Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

Uruguayan-born architect Rafael Viñoly designed Philly’s most renowned theater space, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts , a gem along the Avenue of the Arts which plays host to The Philadelphia Orchestra , regional productions and international masters of music and dance. Opened in 2001, Kimmel is the cornerstone venue of Ensemble Arts Philly , previously known as Kimmel Cultural Campus. The building features two primary auditoriums: the Perelman Theater and Marian Anderson Hall, the former Verizon Hall recently renamed to honor the Philadelphia-born opera singer, humanitarian and Civil Rights icon.

• The Philadelphia Orchestra Opening Night Concert : The Philadelphia Orchestra season kicks off headlined by a world premiere resetting of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones . Opening weekend continues with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 (Marian Anderson Hall, September 26-29, 2024).
• Children’s Halloween Spectacular : Dress up the kids (and yourselves) and go on a haunted orchestral morning adventure with The Philadelphia Orchestra performing classic Halloween tunes and family-friendly favorites to celebrate spooky season (Marian Anderson Hall, October 5, 2024).
• Ensemble Arts Presents Philadanco’s Our Voices, Our Choices… This is Us! : Philadelphia’s favorite dance company returns with a show featuring the voices and perspectives of African American women through original movement, music and stories (Perelman Theater, December 6-8, 2024).
• The Philadelphia Orchestra Presents The Glorious Sound of Christmas : The Philadelphia Orchestra’s annual holiday program stages lively renditions of Christmas classics to celebrate the joy of the holiday season, a Philly tradition since 1962 (Marian Anderson Hall, December 14-15, 2024).
• The Philadelphia Orchestra Presents Messiah : A more classical Christmas presentation, the full Philadelphia Orchestra plus soloists and chorus offers their interpretation of the 1741 George Frideric Handel choral holiday masterwork (Marian Anderson Hall, December 21-22, 2024).

Where: Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, 300 S. Broad Street

Miller Theater

The versatile 1,840-seat circa-1918 Miller Theater (previously known as Merriam Theater and Shubert Theatre) on the Avenue of the Arts hosts stand-up comedians, celebrity chefs, dance troupes, theater acts and much more. Intimate and enthusiastic crowds add to performances at the venue, one of the three Kimmel Cultural Campus locations now part of Ensemble Arts Philly .

• Where Eagles Fly : This world premiere of a new musical follows a 300-year-old journey of hope and promise as the tiny ship Eagle Wing sets sail for America bearing the first Irish immigrants to the New World seeking freedom, safety and opportunity (September 26 – October 6, 2024).
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas : You know all the songs, from You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch to Welcome Christmas , now see the family-friendly production based on the beloved animated special with all your favorites including Max the Dog and a who’s-who of Whos (November 26 – December 1, 2024).

Where: Miller Theater, 250 S. Broad Street

New Freedom Theatre

Founded in 1966 by John E. Allen, Jr., New Freedom Theatre in North Philadelphia is Pennsylvania’s oldest black theatrical organization and one of the nation’s most honored Black professional theater companies. Occupying the former Philadelphia Cotillion Society building, the theater has staged productions from celebrated African American playwrights like James Baldwin, Ossie Davis and August Wilson. The program’s alumni include Hamilton ’s Leslie Odom Jr., Wanya Morris of Boyz II Men, Living Single ’s Erika Alexander and Tony Award nominee Samm-Art Williams.

• Box : This virtual production recounts the true harrowing experience of Henry Box Brown, an enslaved Black activist who mailed himself from confinement in Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia, starring hip-hop legend Karl “Dice Raw” Jenkins of Philly’s The Roots (virtual, for rent).
• The Last Jimmy : Jimmy is the last African American man in the world, on trial for past, present and future crimes in this virtual performance investigating the failures of the criminal justice system, issues of mass incarceration and the modern prison industrial complex (virtual, for rent).
• Forgotten Founding Fathers : Billed as a hip-hop dance theatrical odyssey, this untold story presented virtually explores the pivotal contributions made by real-life slaves and former slaves before, during and after the Revolutionary War (virtual, for rent).

Where: New Freedom Theatre, 1346 N. Broad Street

Penn Live Arts

Formerly known as The Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Penn Live Arts at the University of Pennsylvania is one of the nation’s top urban collegiate performing arts centers. The institution offers nearly all genres of cultural performance including jazz, world music, contemporary dance and touring plays in three spaces: the Harold L. Zellerbach, Harold Prince and Bruce Montgomery theatres.

• re:CREATION : The popular and clever Pilobolus troupe of acrobats and contortionists performs a dynamic collection of dance works infused with daring experiments and fantastical innovations where imagination knows no limits and boundaries of gravity blur (Zellerbach Theatre, September 27-28, 2024).
• She’s Auspicious : The classical Indian dance of Bharatanatyam is celebrated with a new work featuring an all-female cast of performers and musicians. The autobiographical story of dancer Mythili Prakash challenges tropes of femininity, motherhood and identity (Harold Prince Theatre, October 4-6, 2024).
• For Crying Out Loud : This boundary-pushing ballet performed by the Complexions dance company features stripped-down acoustic versions of U2 hits and explores the vulnerability of the human condition in its most conflicted state (Zellerbach Theatre October 18-19, 2024).
• SLAM! : The acrobats and dancers of Canada’s FLIP Fabrique present an incredible show defining a fusion of stage play and wrestling match, inspired by the sport in its many forms around the world as theatre and cirque meet on the mat (Zellerbach Theatre, October 25-26, 2024).
• The Traitor : Hailed as one of the most significant works of the 1950s, this piece performed by Limón Dance Company explores betrayal through vibrant movement, musicality and haunting images. Two additional premieres are paired with this production (Zellerbach Theatre, November 22-23, 2024).
• Murmuration : It’s theater, but on ice . Patin Libre, the world’s only contemporary ice-skating dance company, uses speed, precision and intricate moves to interpret the scientific algorithms and mysterious aerial ballet of bird flocks (Penn Ice Rink, December 13-14, 2024).

Where: Penn Live Arts, 3680 Walnut Street

Plays & Players Theatre

One of the oldest continuously running theaters in the nation, the Plays & Players Theatre opened as The Little Theatre in 1913. Its location on quiet residential Delancey Place in Rittenhouse Square adds to its charm — as do the comedic antics of theater troupe 1812 Productions , whose annual romp This Is the Week That Is has been a Philly favorite for more than a decade. Upstairs, black box Skinner Studio offers additional dance, music and theater programming and access to members-only late-night bar Quig’s Pub.

• This Is The Week That Is: The Election Special : A special presentation of the long-running 1812 Production series leads up to the 2024 Presidential Election, de-escalating the tension of the season with comedy and sharp satire through musical parodies, improv and sketch (October 3 – November 3, 2024).
• The Play That Goes Wrong : After selling out last year, the farcical murder mystery and play-within-a-play returns as the accident-prone Cornley Polytechnic cast-within-a-cast starts to crack under the pressure as hilarious disaster after disaster ensues (November 29 – December 29, 2024).

Where: Plays & Players Theatre, 1714 Delancey Place

Red Rūm Theater

Don’t be afraid Stephen King fans, that’s rūm as in “room.” One of Philly’s newest theaters and the brick-and-mortar home of Without A Cue Productions (located just a block from Independence Hall inside The Curtis Building), Red Rūm Theater opened in early 2023. Focusing on interactive murder mystery dinner theater shows, the audience is just as involved in the production as the cast, tasked to figure out whodunit.

• A Harlem Renaissance Murder Mystery : Step back to the 1930s and immerse yourself in the cultural movement that celebrated Black culture, art, literature and music in an interactive show where you not only help solve the murder, but become part of it. (July 25-28, 2024)
• A Rose Colored Murder: A Schitt’s Creek Parody : Ew, murder. The Rose family has departed The Creek to go out on tour with matriarch Moira performing her favorite hits across the country, until a murder interrupts the chaos. Help figure out which Rose is the killer (July 12-14, 2024).
• A Very Brady Murder: A Murdery Parody : Here’s the story, of the murder of a Brady. And you get to play ’70s detective and try to solve the groovy mystery . Gather your clues, get your mugshot and race to see who can take the most selfies (October 5 – November 16, 2024).
• A Dickens of a Murder : Celebrate the season with a Victorian murder mystery as Ebenezer Scrooge meets his untimely demise, unsolved until Sherlock Holmes shows up at Scrooge’s nephew’s holiday party asking for your help to uncover the mystery (November 23 – December 29, 2024).

Where: Red Rūm Theater, 601 Walnut Street

Suzanne Roberts Theatre

The Suzanne Roberts Theatre along Philly’s Avenue of the Arts has been home to the half-century-old Philadelphia Theatre Company since the venue opened in 2007. The theater — named the for the actress, playwright, director and television host who is also matriarch of the Comcast-owning Roberts family — is a hotspot for contemporary plays and musicals for adult audiences from the PTC and organizations like Opera Philadelphia , as well as often hosting events that are part of the BlackStar Film Festival .

• The Amazing Acro-Cats and Rock Cats Rescue : A can’t-miss one-of-a-kind fur -iety show starring trained orphaned, stray and rescued house cats performing feats of agility and entertainment, plus a finale featuring the world’s only all-feline band (September 4-7, 2024).
• Philadelphia Theatre Company Presents La Egoista : This equally funny and touching new play recounts the journey of a Philadelphia comedian coming to terms with the death of her mother and her sister’s sudden illness just as her comedy career is taking off (October 4-20, 2024).
• The Tapcracker : The Nutcracker , but make it tap. All-female Philadelphia tap company Lady Hoofers Tap Ensemble presents an all-tap modernized version of the holiday favorite set in rodent-infested Paris to Duke Ellington’s version of the classic score (December 14-15, 2024).

Where: Philadelphia Theatre Company at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 S. Broad Street

Theatre Exile

South Philly-based nonprofit company Theatre Exile explores the human condition through timely and thought-provoking productions meant to raise social wellbeing and community consciousness. Established in 1996, the theater focuses on contemporary works and new plays featuring local talent performing in an intimate setting.

• The Jewel Robbery at The Grand Metropolitan : The scene in this elegant whodunit is a party to celebrate the 21st birthday of young Olivia. But as the evening progresses, expensive gems go missing and there’s murder afoot in this Agatha Christie-penned Hercule Poirot mystery (Saturdays July 6-27, 2024).

Where: Theatre Exile, 1340-48 S. 13th Street

Walnut Street Theatre

Dating back to 1808, Philly’s Walnut Street Theatre is the oldest continuously operating theater in the entire English-speaking world. For its first years, the theater hosted a horse circus and horse dramas, with its first traditional performance an 1812 production of Rivals attended by President Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette. The first theater to offer air conditioning, gas footlights and electric chandeliers (as well as the term “curtain call”), the National Historic Landmark presents productions on three stages: the Mainstage, Independence Studio on 3 and Studio 5.

• Jersey Boys : Go behind the music and inside the story of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons as they rise from the streets of Belleville on a rocky journey to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with an original sound radio that couldn’t get enough of (October 1 – November 3, 2024).
• Elf: The Broadway Musical : As Buddy says, the best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear. Help do just that with this fun musical version of the Will Ferrell holiday film classic in a story of family, forgiveness, redemption and identity (November 19 – December 29).
• Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol : Enjoy the classic Scrooge story reimagined as an hour-long musical adaptation for kids that uses traditional holiday songs to highlight the magical story of three ghosts tasked to change the selfish ways of an old cranky miser (December 6-21, 2024).

Where: Walnut Street Theatre, 825 Walnut Street

The Wilma Theater

Proud winner of the 2024 Regional Theatre Tony Award , Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater is an independent theater located along Philly’s Avenue of the Arts . The 50-year-old stagehouse is known for its intimate setting and adventurous live art that engages audiences in imaginative reflections on the complexities of contemporary life.

• Poor Judge : Created by Philadelphia’s Dito van Reigersberg and featuring the reimagined music of Lilith Fair-era icon Aimee Mann, this original work of dance-theater cabaret is a story of lost loves, seductive Hollywood success, loneliness and spy deception (September 11-22, 2024).
• The Comeuppance : Four former classmates reminisce and pre-game during a porch-side evening of jungle juice and weed before their 20th high school reunion in this comedy meditation on impermanence, nostalgia, and isolation (November 19 – December 8, 2024).

Where: The Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad Street

Philadelphia's Countryside

Act ii playhouse.

Located in the Montgomery County borough of Ambler , vibrant and award-winning regional theater ACT II Playhouse regularly draws patrons from Philadelphia and beyond for its eclectic productions in an intimate setting. Founded in 1998, the venue — with 42 Barrymore Awards nominations and wins in its coffers — offers a broad range of performances including comedies, dramas, musicals and original works.

• An Act of God : The lord almighty is the main character in this timely and outrageous comedy , where God himself returns to earth to update and improve his Ten Commandments and set the record straight on a couple of items causing confusion (August 6 – September 1, 2024).
• The Outsider : Despite being possibly the worst candidate to ever run for public office — with impressively bad poll numbers and an overwhelming fear of public speaking — newly elected governor Ned Newly might just be exactly what the country needs right now (October 8 – November 3, 2024).
• Christmas in the Catskills 2: A Star Is Borscht : Last year’s sold-out sensation returns for another holiday season celebrating the Borscht Belt-era with jokes and bits made famous by some of comedy’s most legendary performers from Dangerfield to Youngman (December 3-29, 2024).

Where: Act II Playhouse, 56 E. Butler Avenue, Ambler

Bristol Riverside Theater

Housed in a former movie house overlooking the Delaware River, Bucks County ’s 300-seat Bristol Riverside Theater stages hundreds of shows each year, including Mainstage productions, a summer music fest series, a Christmas show and special events. The theater is known for its commitment to inclusivity and fostering local talent.

• The Gin Game : A friendly game of gin rummy between two frenemies at a nursing home escalates into an all-out senior citizen war when one side loses over and over again in this powerful and darkly funny Pulitzer Prize-winning play (September 10-29, 2024).
• Venus in Fur : A director is ready to abandon his star search when an uninhibited actress barges into the audition room fighting to win the part in this story of power imbalance, determination and seduction, staged down the block at The Regency Room (October 22 – November 10, 2024).

Where: Bristol Riverside Theatre, 120 Radcliffe Street, Bristol

Bucks County Playhouse

Historic Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope dates back to 1939, but previously housed an 18th-century gristmill dating back to 1751. Since then, the riverside theater has seen the likes of Grace Kelly, Dick Van Dyke, Robert Redford, Liza Minnelli and more grace its stage. Professional Broadway producers took over the venue in 2012, returning to its roots incubating soon-to-be Broadway hits and staying open year-round for local and touring productions, world premieres, original plays, musicals, live music and more. Make it a full night at the Playhouse Deck restaurant and bar.

• Last of the Red Hot Mamas : This world premiere music and dance play follows the true life story of Sophie Tucker, a savvy teenager determined to conquer vaudeville at any cost, as she rises from singing in her parents’ kosher deli to international superstardom (June 28 – July 27, 2024).
• Grease : You know the word, the time, the place, the motion. It’s Rydell High in the late ’50s and greaser Danny and Pink Lady Sandy are dealing with the ramifications of their summer romance in a timeless tale of love, rivalry, gender norms and flying cars (August 9 – September 8, 2024).
• The Rocky Horror Show : In a fall New Hope tradition, The Rocky Horror Show — the play on which the famed film was based — returns with Frank-N-Furter, Brad, (dam-it) Janet and all their friends with plenty of legendary audience interaction ( but BYO rice ) (October 11 – November 3, 2024).
• Anastasia: The Musical : A family-friendly musical adventure based on the hit animated feature, recounting the tale of a brave young woman seeking to both discover and escape her past which transports the audience from Soviet Russia to années folles Paris (November 22, 2024 – January 5, 2025).

Where: Bucks County Playhouse, 70 S. Main Street, New Hope

The Media Theatre

The 440-seat Media Theatre opened in 1927 as the Delco borough ’s largest movie theater and vaudeville house. Fast forward 100 years, and today the theater produces musicals and hosts comedy shows and kid-friendly performances, the largest professional regional theater employing equity actors in Delaware County .

• Tuck Everlasting : Presented by the theater’s education department, this production adapted from the hit 2002 film and 1975 novel about mortality weaves a tale tinged with magic and young love on a quest for a life of adventure (August 2-11, 2024).
• John D. Smitherman Concert : Spend the evening with this versatile musical theater performer and his powerful tenor and emotional depth as he spins hits, with the help of a full orchestra, from Impossible Dream to Some Enchanted Evening to Be My Love (Saturday, August 17, 2024).

Where: The Media Theatre, 104 E. State Street, Media

People’s Light

Since 1974, professional, regional theater People’s Light has produced an eclectic mix of shows, from Macbeth and Pride & Prejudice to the world premieres of Such Things as Vampires and The Harassment of Iris Malloy . In addition to staged shows, the theater in Malvern, Chester County , also hosts classes for kids and other community engagement and educational programs.

• Off By One : In the world premiere of this profoundly human work, strangers with an unusual common bond meet through a wrong-number text and create a special relationship while questioning fate, coincidence and the impact of a seemingly small life (June 12 – July 7, 2024).
• Somewhere Over the Border : An original multicultural musical take on the Wizard of Oz story (and The Wiz aesthetic) placed firmly on the shoulders of a young El Salvadoran woman seeking the American Dream at the end of a very different yellow brick road (July 17 – August 11, 2024).
• The Porch on Windy Hill : The power of music and family is on full display in this story of a young biracial Korean American violinist who explores Appalachia in search of her grandfather, told against a backdrop of old time bluegrass melodies and Americana (September 18-October 13, 2024).
• Peter Panto: A Musical Panto : In a traditional panto (a type of British style theatrical performance held during the holidays), the story of Peter Pan is retold in a show full of audience participation (boos and cheers encouraged), slapstick, music and dance (November 20, 2024 – January 5, 2025).

Where: People's Light, 39 Conestoga Road, Malvern

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The Rise of Experimental Theatre

Theatre has always been a space for creativity and experimentation. From Shakespeare’s intricate plays to the contemporary works of Lin-Manuel Miranda, theatre has been an evolving art form that has captured the imagination of audiences for centuries. However, in recent years, a new form of theatre has been on the rise – experimental theatre. In this article, we will explore the techniques used in experimental theatre and the benefits it can bring to both performers and audiences.

Experimental theatre is a form of performance that breaks away from traditional theatrical norms. It is characterized by its use of unconventional techniques, themes, and structures. Experimental theatre often blurs the line between performance and audience, challenging the audience’s expectations and involvement in the performance. It can take on many different forms, from immersive theatre experiences to site-specific performances.

Techniques Used in Experimental Theatre

One of the defining features of experimental theatre is its use of unconventional techniques. Here are some techniques commonly used in experimental theatre:

1. Physical Theatre

Physical theatre is a performance style that emphasizes the body as a means of communication. It can include elements such as dance, mime, and acrobatics. Physical theatre is often used in experimental theatre to explore themes that are difficult to express through traditional dialogue.

2. Improvisation

Improvisation is a technique where performers create a performance on the spot, without a script. Improvisation is often used in experimental theatre to create a sense of spontaneity and unpredictability.

3. Non-linear Narratives

Non-linear narratives are a technique used to tell a story out of order, often with multiple storylines running simultaneously. This technique is used in experimental theatre to challenge the audience’s expectations of a traditional story structure.

4. Audience Participation

Audience participation is a technique used to involve the audience in the performance. It can include elements such as interactive elements, voting, or even allowing audience members to join in the performance. This technique is often used in experimental theatre to create a sense of community and engagement.

Benefits of Experimental Theatre

Experimental theatre can bring many benefits to both performers and audiences. Here are some benefits of experimental theatre:

1. Creativity and Innovation

Experimental theatre allows performers to explore new techniques and ideas, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in theatre. This creativity and innovation can lead to new forms of theatre and storytelling.

2. Audience Engagement

Experimental theatre often challenges the audience’s expectations and involvement in the performance. This engagement can create a more immersive and meaningful theatre experience.

3. Inclusivity

Experimental theatre can be more inclusive than traditional theatre, allowing for a wider range of performers and stories to be told. This inclusivity can lead to more diverse and representative theatre.

Experimental theatre is a growing trend in the theatre world, offering a new and exciting way of exploring the art form. Through its use of unconventional techniques and focus on audience engagement, experimental theatre can challenge both performers and audiences. As theatre continues to evolve, experimental theatre will undoubtedly play an important role in shaping its future.

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• > Journals
• > Theatre Survey
• > Volume 64 Issue 1
• > The People and Places of Experimental Theatre Scholarship:...

Article contents

Computation, theatre scholarship, and distant reading, close reading 3,051 sentences, who makes experimental work, the shifting geographies of experimental work, the people and places of experimental theatre scholarship: a computational overview.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2023

The “experimental” playwrights of continental Europe have been experimental not because they have imitated modern literature or poetry, but because they have sought to express themselves in theatrical terms, and the great directors, like Jouvet, Barrault, Viertel, and Brecht have been there to make their plays “exist” on the stage.

Considering the institutional frames of Sighing , Tian Mansha's production is a star-centred experimental xiqu work.

Sixty years separate these two sentences—yet both are statements found in a dataset about experimental theatre. The first one references playwrights and directors in Europe. The article from which it is taken compares the situation in Europe to that in the United States (which Hoffman, a legendary director-educator then based in New York, refers to as “our theatre”). The second sentence talks about Sighing, an experimental adaptation of 戏曲 ( xiqu, Chinese opera) by Tian Mansha, one of the most internationally renowned Sichuan opera performers at the time of writing. These two sentences are, respectively, one of the oldest and one of the most recent entries in a dataset of sentences about experimental theatre. The first mentions four men and deals with a Euro-American genealogy of experimental theatre. The second mentions a woman, and explores the meanings of experimental performance in Mainland China and Taiwan. These two sentences are indicative of a larger trend: the progressive diversification of the people and places mentioned in the scholarship on experimental performance. As we might expect, increasingly more women and more places outside of Europe and North America were mentioned in six decades worth of academic articles. However, drilling into the data shows that this story is more complicated. Women became increasingly associated with experimental performance over time, but for almost every year on record, more than half the people in this dataset were still men. In contrast, a diversification of the places started much sooner and increased at a faster pace: as the results below show, in the twenty-first century the vast majority of places mentioned in connection to experimental performance were located outside Europe and North America. Data add nuance and precision to our impressions. If we believe that the diversification of the people and places of theatre scholarship matters, data make important contributions to our methodological palette.

This paper's conclusions are based on a large dataset of theatre scholarship that was analyzed with the help of computational tools. Despite the relative newness of its methods, this project continues a scholarly tradition interested in historicizing how experimental theatre is conceptualized and discussed. Perhaps the most influential example of this tradition is James Harding's The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s) , which chronicles the ways in which scholars have emphasized and downplayed different accents of meaning of the term “avant-garde.” Footnote 3 Harding writes that “to speak of the avant-gardes necessitates speaking of how the avant-gardes have been received and conceptualized in cultural criticism.” Footnote 4 Harding's book-length history requires a nimble analytical disposition capable of tracing changing contexts and meanings. In comparison, my brief piece of data history focuses on the who and where of experimental theatre scholarship. Histories such as Harding's use the terms “avant-garde(s)” and “experimental” somewhat interchangeably, and focus predominantly on a Euro-American context. The present overview is more expansive in its scope inasmuch as it considers the entire corpus of sentences about experimental work written in theatre research articles, but the price I pay for this expansion is a razor-thin focus on a single term, which necessarily leaves many things out.

All scholarship entails trade-offs of selection and omission, and I hope to convince readers that the conclusions that follow are worth the limitations imposed by computational research. As Debra Caplan notes, “data-driven theatre history, at its best, can reveal previously invisible patterns.” Footnote 5 The patterns I find here are perhaps not wholly invisible, but without data they are blurred and imprecise. Bringing them into sharp relief does not displace other modes of knowing, but suggests novel questions that might in turn be explored by close reading and traditional historiographic methods. Sarah Bay-Cheng notes that digital tools change the practice of historiography, enabling an interactive, performative way of interrogating the past. Footnote 6 This applies not only to the records of performance, but also to our own scholarship. For this research project, I created a new command line interface to help me reimagine the records of theatre scholarship interactively. Below, I give a nontechnical overview of this method and highlight the interpretive moves that underpin my approach.

When Debra Caplan wrote the influential “Notes from the Frontier: Digital Scholarship and the Future of Theatre Studies” in 2015, she dedicated substantial attention to justifying the importance of digital methods for theatre. Footnote 7 In the span of just a few years, her predictions have come true, and the work she describes has increasingly moved from the frontier to the center. Theatre Journal has dedicated two entire issues to digital theatre scholarship, book-length studies of theatre and digital humanities have been published, a working group dedicated to digital research meets regularly at IFTR, and ATHE gives an annual award for digital scholarship. Footnote 8 Among other things, theatre scholars have used digital methods to study changes in the lengths of production runs, patterns of collaborations among artists, and the cultural transmission of influential playscripts. Footnote 9

The digital humanities are an even more mature field in literary studies, and several influential monographs have been published in recent years. Footnote 10 Literary scholars have also used digital methods to study their fields scholarly production. Andrew Piper's Can We Be Wrong? Textual Evidence in a Time of Data analyzes the prevalence of “generalization” in literary scholarship using machine learning. Footnote 11 To the best of my knowledge, theatre scholars have yet to take advantage of such approaches to study our vast scholarly record. However, focusing on scholarship itself as an important object of study is an uncontroversial research strategy. Take, for example, Shannon Jackson's monumental Professing Performance , which takes scholarship as primary evidence for reconstructing the intellectual history of performance studies across various institutional contexts. Footnote 12

Computational tools enable us to ask these questions at a different scale and afford a level of systematicity that is useful for certain types of question. For example, digital methods have been shown to be especially important when studying representation and diversity. Deb Verhoeven and collaborators have used network analysis to identify structural causes that prevent women from occupying leading creative roles in the film industry. Footnote 13 Counting Together ( https://countingtogether.org/ ) is a database that collects statistics on race, gender, and disability in American theatre. Richard Jean So's Redlining Culture uses a host of computational tools to study racial and gender diversity in postwar American literature. Footnote 14

For this article, I participate in a form of “distant reading” that requires computer-assisted manual classification. As Ted Underwood notes, distant reading encompasses a wide range of activities that may not necessarily be explicitly computational. Footnote 15 Some forms of distant reading could be described as systematic reading, such as Underwood's own analysis of literary time. Footnote 16 In one article, he used digital tools to visualize the data, but the dataset itself was the product of human annotation. This type of work has long roots in the social sciences, where such “qualitative analysis” is often aided by specialized software such as NVivo and ATLAS.ti. The objective of software such as these is to help researchers systematically annotate or classify portions of text (typically from interviews, but also from media reports and other sources). I call the approach I use here “data-assisted” research, a term I have defined more extensively elsewhere, and which I contrast to “data-driven” methodologies. Footnote 17 In data-driven methodologies , data are used to answer specific questions. Researchers create a formal representation of a question and automate a sequence of procedures to provide an answer. The criteria for evaluation are defined beforehand, and the answer is measured against these criteria. In data-assisted methodologies , in contrast, researchers use data to transform their view of a problem. In these approaches, the purpose of framing a theatrical event as data is not to offer a clear answer but to augment our capacity to think about such an event. Data, in other words, provide a good defamiliarization strategy.

Many recent digital humanities projects use computational methods that rely heavily on machine learning techniques. Footnote 18 Though the promise of such computational work is doubtless exciting, computer-aided qualitative text analysis also holds great promise. The latter approach is particularly useful for relatively small datasets (e.g., thousands of datapoints) and for messy data where automation is difficult and a human observer can classify data in ways that are faster or more accurate.

The present study fits both of these conditions. I developed a custom piece of software that allowed me to tag and classify Named Entities (people, places, and companies; hereinafter NEs) semiautomatically within a few thousand sentences. My custom program displayed each sentence individually, in chronological order, and highlighted a number of potential NEs, which I then verified manually. Verification was necessary because some of the potential NEs were false positives, and some NEs were not initially captured. At a second stage, I classified each verified NE according to different categories, as I explain later.

Manual annotation is at the heart of this data-assisted approach, in ways that differ from those of other researchers in the computational humanities, who are interested in developing fully automatic solutions to classification problems. However, it must be noted that even “fully automatic” solutions require human annotators manually to tag a subset of the data, which can be used to draw more generalizable inferences using machine learning (ML). Typically, these systems take a long time to train (the technical term for fitting a model to a portion of the data) and validate, and even the most robust models are never 100 percent accurate, and they can consume large amounts of computational resources. Footnote 19 Larger datasets justify the effort and resources needed to train and deploy such models. But in my case, I had a reasonably “small” dataset that did not, in my opinion, justify the trade-offs required by ML. Thus, I chose to use my time and energy to tag and verify each datapoint manually. That being said, my methods are still computational inasmuch as they are enabled by a custom piece of software that aimed to make my tagging and validation process as fast and reliable as possible.

My custom software was built using the Python programming language and a host of open-source libraries. Footnote 20 The program added my manual tagging decisions to a dataset, and new entries were verified against this dataset to ensure consistency and to increase the accuracy of potential NEs in subsequent sentences (see the screenshot in Fig. 1 ). To display the sentences and the potential NEs I relied on an interactive command line interface (CLI). CLIs might seem arcane or difficult, but they afford enormous flexibility and ease of use. Developing these interfaces is very straightforward, especially when compared to graphic user interfaces with buttons and other features. They require relatively little time to code, and allow a researcher to make changes constantly.

Figure 1. Screenshot of the custom Command Line Interface (CLI) developed for this research project.

When manually revising a dataset of this size (fewer than three thousand items), I find it easier to use the keyboard and a combination of keys for operations that I have to repeat over and over. This adds flexibility, reduces frustration, and ensures higher quality. I used the Rich library to add color to the interface (typically CLIs are black and white) so that potential NEs and NEs already in a dataset could be displayed in different colors. Rather than merely an aesthetic decision, I find that this keeps me alert when doing repetitive work and helps minimize errors. The interface also displayed the current rate of progress—this was important for minimizing frustration, an important consideration given that tagging the NEs took several weeks. Minimizing frustration and ensuring quality and ease of use are fundamental for this type of computationally enabled, systematic reading of thousands of instances. Footnote 21

Software such as the one I built for this project can be thought of as computational assistants, simple programs tailored for specific research objectives rather than full-fledged pieces of software ready to be used in multiple situations. For the reasons given above, I think it makes sense for researchers invested in the systematic manual analysis of thousands of items to develop their own custom software. Out-of-the box solutions for this type of work exist, and they are typically used for manually annotating interviews and other textual records by researchers in the social sciences (such as NVivo and Atlas.ti, as noted earlier). But one distinction between these software packages and my custom-built program is that my solution uses bespoke computational components to learn from my choices and update itself according to parameters within my control. I also find the ability to fully customize shortcuts and the distraction-free environments of CLIs justification enough to develop this type of software.

This study relied on data from Constellate, a portal for textual analytics from JSTOR and Portico. Using this service, I constructed a dataset that includes the metadata and unigram counts (the frequency of single words) for all articles of the following theatre journals: Tulane Drama Review, TDR/The Drama Review, Theatre Research International, PAJ/Performing Arts Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Topics, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, and Modern Drama. Originally, I also included articles from Educational Theatre Journal (the predecessor of Theatre Journal ). However, the online archive for this journal is patchy, as many extant articles for the early years are not research articles but progress on doctoral dissertations or items such as “don'ts for theatre builders”—hence the data for this journal were discarded.

The metadata for the articles include information such as the author, document type, name of the journal, number of pages, date of publication, a unique identifier, and the title of the article. The initial dataset comprised 19,661 titles. Constellate collections are very comprehensive, but some articles are duplicated as they are part of both the JSTOR and the Portico collections. Some journals are covered exclusively by one database, but there is significant overlap, so this required an additional step of deduplication (the technical term for removing duplicates). A complicating factor is that at times the titles are not exact matches, as sometimes a subtitle is missing, markup information (i.e., HTML codes for italics) is present in only one of the datasets, and some non-Latin characters are incorrectly displayed in the Portico dataset (the JSTOR dataset has gone through additional layers of cleaning and is more reliable). Identifying and removing near-duplicates is called fuzzy deduplication, and it is an important part of many data projects. Footnote 22

In order to carry out this process, I created another custom Python script using Pandas (a general purpose library for data science) and FuzzyWuzzy (a library to detect similar strings of texts). If two titles were from the same year and the similarity between them was above a 90% threshold, the script kept only the title in JSTOR (the preferred version). If both versions were from Portico, it kept the one that did not include markup, which was not important for the present research. In order to ensure maximum data quality, I manually verified every flagged title before removal, also using a CLI as the one described earlier.

The Constellate metadata are very comprehensive but not error-free: not all items with the document type of “article” are actual articles. Many of the retrieved documents are letters to the editor, front and back matter, and book reviews. Using another custom script, I removed all “articles” that actually belonged to these categories by relying on regular expressions. A regular expression or regex is a sequence of textual symbols that specifies a search pattern. For example, I looked for titles that included patterns such as “Letter to” or “Letters to,” and manually verified each matching title before removing it from the dataset. After removing such items and keeping only confirmed academic articles, the final dataset comprised 8,938 articles, spanning sixty-three years between 1958 and 2020.

For these articles, I then inspected the unigram (single-word) counts. I counted the number of articles that included the word “experimental” at least once, and divided this number by the total number of articles for a given year. The resulting ratio is the percentage of articles in any given year that includes the word “experimental” at least once. Figure 2 shows this percentage for every year as a bar, as well as the centered, five-year moving average as an overlaid solid line.

Figure 2. Percentage of articles per year that include the word “experimental” at least once. The bars indicate the raw percentage. Note: In this and other figures, the lines always depict a five-year, centered moving average, and thus always end in 2018 (the last year for which this can be calculated, as the dataset ends in 2020).

This visualization indicates a clear, if slightly subtle upward trend that peaks at around 25 percent in the 2000s and 2010s. There is a surprising dip in the 1970s, but overall increasingly more articles include the word “experimental” over time. How meaningful is this pattern in the context of theatre scholarship? To answer this question, I also calculated the percentages of three other terms: “contemporary,” “modern,” and “avant-garde*” (the asterisk denoting that I combined searches for “avant-garde” and “vanguard,” two terms that are often used interchangeably). Figure 3 presents the five-year, centered moving average for each of these terms. This visualization shows that the trend of “avant-garde*” is similar to that of “experimental” until the 1990s, at which point it starts becoming less common. In contrast, “modern” and “contemporary” are always disproportionally more common than “experimental.” “Contemporary” continues in an upward trend into the late 2010s, whereas the frequency of “modern” starts to decay in the late 2010s. Both terms also dip in the 1970s—note that these percentages are adjusted for the total number of articles in any given year, so they cannot be explained away by decreases or increases in that total. The pattern for “experimental” looks less dramatic in this comparison than it did in Figure 2 . We can say that, although there is a slight upward trend, the usage of “experimental” remains reasonably consistent when placed against the backdrop of other terms with more dramatic changes over time.

Figure 3. Percentage of articles per year that include the words “contemporary,” “modern,” “avant-garde*,” and “experimental” at least once. The lines indicate the five-year, centered moving average.

Given the trend described above, another question arises: Are the mentions of “experimental” consistent across the various journals? Figure 4 shows the arithmetic mean and standard deviation for the percentage of articles that include the word “experimental” across the different journals. There is some variation, from over 10 percent to 25 percent in the arithmetic means of the journals. Note that PAJ and Performing Arts Journal are treated as separate journals, even if there is a historical continuity between them. However, the mean and standard deviation of both journals is not substantially different, and jointly they include a larger percentage of articles with “experimental” than any other journal.

Figure 4. Percentages of yearly articles with the word “experimental” per journal. The gray bars indicate the arithmetic mean values, and the solid darker lines indicate the standard deviation. On the vertical axis, the journals are ordered by the arithmetic mean, from smaller (top) to larger (bottom).

Besides analyzing the data above, which are directly accessible from the Constellate portal, I made an additional data request directly to the Constellate team, and they kindly provided me with a dataset of every sentence that uses the word “experimental” from all the theatre journals mentioned above. (They used the Python NLTK package to segment the articles into sentences.) The dataset included all sentences and unique identifiers, and I used these to remove all items that were discarded from the original dataset (duplicates and items that were not academic articles, as noted above).

After deduplication, the final dataset comprised 3,051 sentences. I then close-read each of these sentences and used the custom-built Python CLI described earlier to tag people, places, and theatre companies or collectives mentioned in those sentences semiautomatically. The identification of people, places, and companies in this manner is called Named Entity Recognition (NER). Many research projects, including some in digital humanities, often rely on automatic NER. Footnote 23 This works better for some fields than others—for example, identifying names of US politicians in news articles typically yields high accuracy. Footnote 24

I could have relied entirely on an automatic system for NER and estimated its accuracy (e.g., by manually tagging a random subset of the sentences and comparing it with the results of automatic NER in the same subset). I could then use this to estimate false positives and false negatives in the NER. I could determine that a result above a certain threshold (say, 80%? or 90%?) is acceptable. However, given that my dataset is still reasonably small and within a scale where manual inspection is possible (if labor-intensive), I decided to take a different approach. I used an automatic NER system (using the library spaCy) to flag potential NEs in each sentence and then manually verified each flagged named entity. Besides increasing accuracy, there is another important reason why I preferred this semiautomatic approach: I wanted to ensure that only NEs directly described in connection to experimental art were included. To this end, I first discarded sentences that referred to experimental science or experimental medical treatments (and there were more such sentences that I had previously imagined). Given the extensive references to other art forms, I decided to keep references not only to performance but also to literature, music, and film. If I had not read at least a subset of the sentences closely, I might have missed this characteristic of the dataset.

Second, I made a conscious decision to extract NEs only in the portion of a sentence that is about experimental art. Sometimes many people and places are described in the space of a single sentence, and I kept only those places and people directly and explicitly described as experimental. Consider this sentence in an article by Guillermo Gómez-Peña as an example:

The four-day Arty-Gras included art workshops for children, poetry readings, experimental video at Larry's Giant Sub Shop, performances by the Emperor Oko Nono and the Georgia Independent Wrestling Alliance, the Oakhill Middle School Band, the Haramee African Dance Troupe, Double Edge Dance and Music, and the Baldwin High School Concert Choir, and an exhibition by Chicano artist Robert Sanchez. Footnote 25

While many places, people and companies are mentioned here, only video is described as experimental. The only relevant NE is Larry's Giant Sub Shop. However, as I explain below, I was interested only in specific references to cities, countries, regions, and continents. I could have searched for the specific location of the Larry's Sub Shop under consideration, but I did not pursue this level of specificity. Gómez-Peña could have written this sentence in a way that explicitly stated the name of a city (say, Palm Beach Gardens, FL). In that case, I would have included the city as a NE. There is, in other words, some level of “noise” in the data. Ultimately, I am making claims about what scholars have written, not about the geographies of experimental theatre as such . In the same vein, it is important to note that I am reworking these sentences into data, for a purpose very different from their intended objective. Most likely, when writing these words, Gómez-Peña never imagined that someone would be using his sentence in the way I am doing now. In explaining this limitation, I seek full methodological transparency so that readers of this article can determine whether my approach is reasonable and useful—and so that other people interested in verifying or expanding my results can follow different paths in subsequent data projects.

In spite of the limitations, I show that the data reveal fascinating trends about who is said to be making experimental work. But reaching these conclusions required additional layers of data cleaning and classification. In the sentences, people are often referred to by their last names. In cases where this happened—and where I could not determine the social identity of the person from the context—I read longer portions of the articles, and often additional sources, in order to ascertain the social identity of the person under consideration.

When evaluating potential people's names in the sentences, I chose only people who were described as artists and producers, rather than scholars whose ideas on experimental theatre were reported in the text. My focus was on the people involved in the creation of experimental art and performances, rather than on those who have theorized experimental theatre (which is also an interesting, but separate question). This means that I discarded Schechner when he was mentioned as a theorist, but not when he was described as an experimental director.

To calculate gender ratios, I included both proper names and pronouns. In some sentences people are described only by pronouns, and in those cases I used this pronoun information as proxy for gender. For proper names, I manually assigned each person to a social gender identity after individually researching each name. Sometimes people are referred to only by their last names, so I standardized all names after the initial process of semiautomated tagging. For this purpose, I again used FuzzyWuzzy to detect similar entities. In this case, the program matched partial ratios , when a string of text was identified within another string of text. This flagged “LeCompte,” “Elizabeth LeCompte,” and “Liz LeCompte” as potential matches. I manually verified every potential match before conflating them into a single standardized named entity and choosing a “canonical” name (“Elizabeth LeCompte” in the example above). Table 1 shows the ten women and men most often mentioned in the sentences. Figure 5 visualizes the ratio of women over time, both as raw percentages and as a five-year, centered moving average. This graph shows a steady increase in the percentage of women mentioned in connection to experimental work, with two “local peaks” in the 1980s and early 2000s. Shockingly, the percentage of women in the first two years was zero, and the percentage for any given year exceeded 50 percent only on two occasions.

Figure 5. Percentage of women mentioned in sentences with the word “experimental.” The data combine proper nouns and pronouns. The bar plots indicate the raw percentages, and the solid line is the five-year, centered moving average.

Table 1. The ten women and men most often mentioned in the sentences

The gender imbalance is striking if not totally surprising. Footnote 26 It must be noted that the binary approach to gender would be woefully inappropriate for other types of question. Gender is a textured and complex category whose construction is the subject of intense academic and artistic attention, especially in experimental theatre. Why then, still classify gender in this way? As scholars, we can be committed both to a textured understanding of gender, and also to highlighting imbalances in the representation of women in art and academia. Footnote 27 When identifying the social identity of each person, I manually sought out information on each of them (as noted above, this often meant extensive additional research). I followed each person's explicit statements of their gender identity when this information was available in an attempt to avoid misgendering a person—but this was harder to do with historical data and for artists for whom little information is known. This caveat should be taken into account when evaluating this type of research. Gender is not the only contested term that computational approaches aim to model in a way that reduces the complexity of a phenomenon—race is another such term. That being said, sometimes reducing the complexity of a term for the purpose of data representation reveals important imbalances. An excellent example comes from Redlining Culture by Richard Jean So, a data history of publishing in the United States that reveals the overwhelming extent to which people of color are underrepresented in book publishing. As So notes, “quantification always means losing something; thinking about race with numbers risks reduction and reification,” but it can also enable detailed follow-up studies and reveal patterns that are easy to miss when we focus only on individual examples. Footnote 28 The same attitude guides the present investigation—a desire for precision, tempered by a recognition of the importance of nuance. This type of work encourages, rather than forecloses, more detailed attention at a different scale of analysis (individual works and careers), but also helps to reveal important patterns and omissions at the level afforded by data.

One limitation of focusing on individual people is that often the sentences do not discuss only single artists and producers, but also companies and collectives. As noted above, I also tracked mentions of theatre companies. As with peoples’ names, sometimes the same company can be referred to in multiple ways (e.g., “The Living” is sometimes a shorthand reference to “The Living Theatre”). For this reason, I applied the same type of verification and named entity resolution described above in connection to peoples’ names to the company data. Figure 6 shows the top ten most common companies and collectives mentioned in the sentences, and their distribution over time.

Figure 6. A bubble chart with the ten most common companies and collectives mentioned in the sentences. The horizontal axis shows the year of the mention. The diameter of the circles shows the comparative number of mentions in that given year. The companies/collectives are arranged in the vertical axis from the most common (top) to the tenth-most common (bottom).

The Women's Experimental Theatre, The Wooster Group, and Mabou Mines were all lead by women (and women have played crucial roles in others, such as The Living Theatre). But perhaps not surprisingly, the women associated with these companies are also the ones with the highest mentions in Table 1 (Sondra Segal, Roberta Sklar, Elizabeth LeCompte, JoAnne Akalaitis, and Judith Malina). We also see that two of the companies are outside of Europe/North America: Teatro de Ensayo (Chile) and Teatro Experimental de Cali (Colombia). However, looking at the distribution of the mentions over time shows that this is due to distinct bursts rather than continuous referencing. It is to this topic—the presence of artists and groups outside Europe and North America—to which I now turn.

For named places, I identified cities, provinces, countries, continents, and larger cultural regions (e.g., Latin America). In a second stage, I classified each of these toponyms as being either located in Europe and North America, or outside these regions. I did not include theatre venues, even though some (e.g., LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club) have been central to the history of experimental work, and terms such as Broadway, which refer to specific geographies. Figure 7 shows the percentage of places that are outside of Europe and North America in sentences with the word “experimental.” As before, this includes raw counts and the five-year, centered moving average.

Figure 7. Percentage of places that are outside of Europe and North America in sentences with the word “experimental.” The bar plots indicate the raw percentages, and the solid line is the five-year, centered moving average.

The distinction between Europe/North America and “elsewhere” elides important differences (e.g., between Western and Eastern Europe), but, as in the case of gender, it helps shed light on histories of imbalance and change. As in the case of gender, this is a story of increased representation (see Fig. 7 ). Yet here, there were no mentions of any place outside Europe and North America before 1970—the first twelve years in the data. However, the increase in the presence of places outside Europe and North America is dramatic, with many years far exceeding 50 percent of all mentions, and becoming the norm in the last part of the 2010s. This steady increase could be due to the addition of journals to the dataset over time, as perhaps more recent journals had a more international orientation. To explore this alternative hypothesis, I plotted mentions of places outside Europe and North America in the Tulane Drama Review and TDR (which, combined, constitute the journal with the largest spread in the dataset), and compared this to all journals ( Fig. 8 ). Both curves (moving averages) tell stories of increased geographical diversity, but this was more pronounced in TDR for most years, except for the most recent five, during which combined counts for all journals overtook TDR . An important caveat for interpreting this graph is that the Tulane Drama Review  +  TDR data are counted twice: both on their own and as part of the combined totals. The reason why this makes sense is that the objective of the visualization is to show that the trend of the oldest journal in this dataset is not significantly different from the overall trend. Hence, the reason for the increased geographic diversity is not that Tulane Drama Review is the only journal for which data are available in the first few years.

Figure 8. Percentage of places that are outside of Europe and North America in sentences with the word “experimental.” A comparison of all journals (dashed line) and Tulane Drama Review/TDR (solid line). Both lines represent five-year, centered moving averages.

So far, I have described the increasing geographic diversification in broad brush strokes, but what are the specific places mentioned in the sentences? As for other named entities, I also did a semiautomatic verification and resolution, conflating a range of terms together (i.e., NYC and New York City). Table 2 displays the ten most common cities and countries, and Figure 9 plots all mentioned cities in a world map. Notably, New York is disproportionally more common, with more than a thousand mentions, all other cities being in the order of tens, and this frequency was not represented visually in the map. When manually classifying geographical entities, I also identified a series of “larger regions,” but only a handful are mentioned more than once (Europe, 16; Africa, 6; Latin America, 3; Caribbean, 2; North America, 2). The same is true for provinces/states (California, 7; Michigan, 7; Québec, 4; Fujian, 3; Flanders, 2; Bali, 2; Ohio, 2).

Figure 9. A map of all cities mentioned in sentences with the word “experimental.”

Table 2. The Ten Most Common Cities, Countries, and Regions in the Sentences

In comparison with the gender ratio visualization, here we see a clear dominance of places outside of “non-Western” spheres in more recent years. However, both the mentions of women and the mentions of places outside Europe and North America became increasingly common over time. Figure 10 places both trends side by side. We also see that, not only did the ratio of non-Western places increase at a faster pace, but it experienced its first peak much earlier. The reasons for these trends cannot be ascertained fully by the data collected here. My hope is that untangling the causal mechanisms of these patterns will prove a tantalizing question for other types of historical analysis in the future.

Figure 10. A comparison of the percentage of women and the percentage of places that are outside of Europe and North America in sentences with the word “experimental.” Both lines represent five-year, centered moving averages.

The data analyzed so far indicate that the scope of experimental theatre, as represented in scholarship, became increasingly diverse over time (even if men continue to be more associated with experimental work than women). What do these results mean for the history of experimental theatre? The current analysis doesn't seek to disprove previous claims in experimental theatre scholarship or to make extant histories of this term any less useful or accurate. But the data do reveal that, collectively, when we as scholars talk about experimental theatre, we still have a tendency to talk about men, even if we have widened the geographical scope of the term “experimental.” What shall we do with this information? Perhaps it can help us think more closely about our own biases and change the direction of our future scholarship. When we talk to our colleagues and students about experimental work, of whom are we thinking? Are we unconsciously conjuring up images of John Cage and Jerzy Grotowski? Or are we also choosing our words and examples in ways that ensure our audiences are also picturing Judith Malina and Julie Taymor?

As I bring this article to a close, I want to highlight once again the many assumptions that are baked into the current analysis. First, these trends are based on scholarship, not on actual performances as counted by playbills or critic's reviews, and it would be fascinating to compare these data to other sources. A good inspiration for doing this is Derek Miller's analysis of Broadway, which demonstrates how we can compare actual show data to plays that are included in canonical scholarly collections. Footnote 29 Articles published in the 1980s might describe performances from the 1920s. Second, these results are based on sentences in which the word “experimental” was used. Choices of how individual writers decided to split ideas into sentences have influenced these results in ways that are hard to track. Fourth, the named entities and their trends are the result of highly interpretive decisions, as I focused only on artists and producers rather than scholars.

Listing these assumptions, as I have done, helps limit and contextualize the scope of my results. However, it also strengthens the research inasmuch as it renders my decisions and shortcomings visible. Others might disagree with my interpretive decisions in the handling of my sources, and an important characteristic of data work is that these decisions can be described and disproved by subsequent research.

One question I still have, and that this article doesn't even begin to explore, is whether male artists are discussed more often than female artists in general , across all theatre scholarship. Are male scholars more likely to talk about male artists? Are younger scholars more sensitive to gender imbalances in their choice of examples? These are important questions that I hope we will take seriously as a discipline and bring the best of our methods to bear upon, from close reading to computational techniques.

The limitations of this piece of data history, which I have tried to communicate as candidly as possible, might also help other people imagine new avenues for research. For example, this article focuses on sentences, as this is easy for a systematic first case study. But what about artists whose work is described at length in a single article? Do we see the same trends in such cases? As one anonymous reviewer of this article suggested, we could also further contextualize these results with some other possible terms and find trends for named entities near words such as “mainstream,” “commercial,” or “Broadway,” to name a few. This might require more advanced computational techniques that justify recourse to machine learning. As I noted earlier, I preferred to eschew this approach here, given the relative smallness of my dataset. But if we seek to expand our attention to longer portions of scholarly texts, the dataset will be much bigger and the trade-off of size and precision might no longer lead to the same methodological choices.

This paper identified a moderate increase in the representation of women in sentences about experimental work, and a more dramatic increase in the global geographies represented in the same dataset. However, the extent to which this is an eminently positive development should also be scrutinized with critical attention. It would be reductive to assume that every single label (modern, contemporary, classical, etc.) should be increasingly diverse. Perhaps, as the objects of scholarly attention become wider, the labels should also become more varied. There is a danger in recycling old terms to describe new work. As Rosella Ferrari notes in her study of experimental theatre in China, it is important to trace the Eurocentric assumptions of constructs such as the “avant-garde” before uncritically applying them to other contexts. Footnote 30

A fuller commitment to tracking the diversification of scholarship requires more studies similar to the present one. If we, as theatre scholars, are so inclined, we would need a more general and expansive analysis of all artists and places that have been described in scholarship. This type of work has been developed in other fields (such as the aforementioned analysis of literary scholarship by Andrew Piper), and data can help us better understand the history, diversity, and omissions of our collective work as scholars. The type of computational work outlined here, which combines systematic interpretive attention at the level of individual instances with the explanatory power of visualizations, can also be applied to understand further the shape and history of theatre research.

When collecting the data, I had expected that both geographical and gender diversity would rise slowly over time. But I believed that, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the majority of people mentioned in the scholarship would still be men, and the majority of places would still be in Europe and North America. I was right in my first hypothesis, but I stand happily corrected on the second. This is why data and quantification matter. People are naturally good at noticing changes, but the vagaries of time-based trends might elude us if we don't rely on numbers. We might thus be blind to positive developments, or inattentive to truly dire imbalances, which might be worse than we fear. In other words, the main advantage of quantitative studies is that they give precise contours to the vague shape of our intuitions.

Tackling important issues requires seeking precise data when possible, and considering sources of uncertainty when needed. At the time of this writing, recent historical events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and unprecedented floods in Europe and Asia have demonstrated all too well the challenges we face in areas such as public health and climate change. We might argue that the crises before us are evident even without looking at the numbers. But quantitative precision adds nuance and context to our impressions, and can help us better understand our current moment and our potential for future action. In the digital humanities, a particularly interesting example of data-supported strategies for real-world interventions is found in Verhoeven et al.'s use of simulations to model the impact of different policies that aim to bring greater gender equity and inclusivity to film production. Footnote 31 Empirical analyses backed by data cannot help but sharpen our perceptions and enhance our resolve to change what we see before us.

Miguel Escobar Varela is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. His primary area of research, often in collaboration with scientists and engineers, is the application of computational methods—including textual analytics, network analysis, image and video processing, and geospatial analysis—to the study of theatre. He is also involved in the development of multimedia interfaces for theatre research. His publications include Theater as Data: Computational Journeys into Theater Research (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and articles in such journals as Theatre Research International, Asian Theatre Journal, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, and Journal of Historical Network Research. A full list of publications and digital projects is available at https://miguelescobar.com .

I would like to thank Amy Kirchhoff, Ted Lawless, and the rest of the Constellate team for their support obtaining the data for this article.

1 Hoffman , Theodore , “ An Audience of Critics and the Lost Art of ‘Seeing’ Plays ,” Tulane Drama Review 4 . 1 ( 1959 ): 31–41 CrossRef Google Scholar , at 41.

2 Chen , Lin , “ Wounds of the Past: The Chuanju Performance of Qingtan (Sighing), ” New Theatre Quarterly 35 . 3 ( 2019 ): 221–37 CrossRef Google Scholar , at 231.

3 James M. Harding, The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013).

4 Ibid ., 11.

5 Debra Caplan, “ Reassessing Obscurit y: The Case for Big Data in Theatre History,” Theatre Journal 68.4 (2016): 555–73, at 557.

6 Bay-Cheng , Sarah , “ Digital Historiography and Performance ,” Theatre Journal 68 . 4 ( 2016 ): 507–27 CrossRef Google Scholar .

7 Caplan , Debra , “ Notes from the Frontier: Digital Scholarship and the Future of Theatre Studies ,” Theatre Journal 67 . 2 ( 2015 ): 347–59 CrossRef Google Scholar , at 355–9.

8 Examples of the book-length analyses are Clarisse Badiot, Performing Arts and Digital Humanities: From Traces to Data (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2021) and Miguel Escobar Varela, Theater as Data: Computational Journeys into Theater Research (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021).

9 Miller , Derek , “ Average Broadway ,” Theatre Journal 68 . 4 ( 2016 ): 529–53 CrossRef Google Scholar ; Vareschi , Mark and Burkert , Mattie , “ Archives, Numbers, Meaning: The Eighteenth-Century Playbill at Scale ,” Theatre Journal 68 . 4 ( 2016 ): 597–613 CrossRef Google Scholar ; Bench , Harmony and Elswit , Kate , “ Mapping Movement on the Move: Dance Touring and Digital Methods ,” Theatre Journal 68 . 4 ( 2016 ): 575–96 CrossRef Google Scholar .

10 See, for example, Katherine Bode, A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018); Alan Liu, Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Andrew Piper, Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Folgert Karsdorp, Mike Kestemont, and Allen Riddell, Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); and Hoyt Long, The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

11 Andrew Piper, Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 4.

12 Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

13 Deb Verhoeven et al., “Controlling for Openness in the Male-Dominated Collaborative Networks of the Global Film Industry,” PLOS One 15.6 (2020): 1–23, e0234460, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234460 .

14 Richard Jean So, Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

15 Underwood , Ted , “ A Genealogy of Distant Reading ,” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 11 . 2 ( 2017 ) Google Scholar .

16 Underwood , Ted , “ Why Literary Time Is Measured in Minutes ,” ELH 85 . 2 ( 2018 ): 341–65 CrossRef Google Scholar .

17 Escobar Varela, Theater as Data, 7–13.

18 Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak, “The Goodreads ‘Classics’: A Computational Study of Readers, Amazon, and Crowdsourced Amateur Criticism,” Post45 × Journal of Cultural Analytics 1.1 (2021).

19 For an overview of the sometimes staggering planetary and financial costs of training ML models see Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

20 The libraries are Pandas v1.2.4, Seaborn v0.11.1, Matplotlib v3.4.2, Rich v10.1.0, FuzzyWuzzy v0.18.0, and spaCy v3.0.

21 For more on interactive systems for semiautomatic data annotation see Bárbara C. Benato et al., “Semi-Automatic Data Annotation Guided by Feature Space Projection,” Pattern Recognition 109 (2021), 107612, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2020.107612 .

22 For more on fuzzy deduplication see S. Preetha Bini and S. Abirami, “Proof of Retrieval and Ownership for Secure Fuzzy Deduplication of Multimedia Data,” Progress in Computing, Analytics and Networking : Proceedings of ICANN 2017, ed. Prasant Kumar Pattnaik et al. (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2018): 245–55.

23 See, for example, Miguel Won, Patricia Murrieta-Flores, and Bruno Martins, “Ensemble Named Entity Recognition (NER): Evaluating NER Tools in the Identification of Place Names in Historical Corpora,” Frontiers in Digital Humanities 5 (2018); and Alexander Erdmann et al., “Practical, Efficient, and Customizable Active Learning for Named Entity Recognition in the Digital Humanities,” Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, vol. 1 (Minneapolis, MN: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019): 2223–34.

24 Archana Goyal, Vishal Gupta, and Manish Kumar, “Recent Named Entity Recognition and Classification Techniques: A Systematic Review,” Computer Science Review 29 (2018): 21–43, at 21.

25 Gómez-Peña , Guillermo , “ Disclaimer ,” TDR 50 . 1 ( 2006 ): 149–58 CrossRef Google Scholar , at 154 (emphasis added).

26 See, for example, Elaine Aston, Restaging Feminisms (Cham: Palgrave Pivot/Springer Nature, 2020).

27 An important referent for this type of research in the computational realm is the analysis by Verhoeven et al., “Controlling for Openness,” 6.

28 So, Redlining Culture, 6.

29 Miller, “Average Broadway,” 548–51.

30 Rosella Ferrari, Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China (London: Seagull, 2012).

31 Verhoeven et al., “Controlling for Openness,” 16–20.

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• Volume 64, Issue 1
• Miguel Escobar Varela (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000552

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• PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art
• Experimental Theatre Then and Now
• Sam Shepard
• The MIT Press
• Volume 40, Number 1, January 2018 (PAJ 118)
• View Citation

Additional Information

The death of Sam Shepard, on July 27, generated an outpouring of genuine sadness at the loss of an incomparable voice in the American theatre. Some will say he punctured the myth of masculinity, and others that he represented a certain kind of lost manliness. He was a playwright, actor, and musician who organized his life around a fierce individuality, and who reflected on his strengths and vulnerabilities with an unflinching gaze. Most of all, he was a man who loved writing and gave to the theatre a new dramatic language that could be a rock-and-roll sentence or a lyrical riff or a staccato punch or a trainload of desire. He was a taciturn man who imagined garrulous characters, a cowboy with Neruda in his back pocket. Over the decades, Shepard’s own writings were published as well as often discussed in the pages of PAJ. In 1985, a play he wrote with Joseph Chaikin, entitled The War in Heaven (Angel’s Monologue), appeared in the journal’s tenth anniversary issue. We also published Shepard’s work in two books, in 1981: American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, which I had edited, and Hawk Moon: Poems, Stories, Monologues, a volume that remains in print . Included here is Shepard’s first contribution to PAJ, published in our fifth issue, Fall 1977. It was a response to a solicitation among members of the theatre community on the subject of experimental theatre since the sixties . Bonnie Marranca

It feels awkward to make definitive statements concerning a subject like experimental theatre. If experimentation truly has to do with taking steps into the unknown with the hope of knowing, then it seems that each time those steps are taken they are brand new from the last time. There are certain things that you always drag with you but when the time comes to step off the edge you leave those things behind. If you hang onto them you find yourself in the same place you started. So you start over again. [End Page 3]

To me the influence of the sixties and the off-off Broadway theatre and the Lower East Side was a combination of hallucinogenic drugs, the effect of those drugs on the perceptions of those I came in contact with, the effects of those drugs on my own perceptions, the Viet Nam War, and all the rest of it which is now all long gone. The only thing which still remains and still persists as the single most important idea is the idea of consciousness. How does this idea become applicable to the theatre? For some time now it’s become generally accepted that the other art forms are dealing with this idea to one degree or another. That the subject of painting is seeing. That the subject of music is hearing. That the subject of sculpture is space. But what is the subject of theatre which includes all of these and more? It may be that the territory available to a theatrical event is so vast that it has to be narrowed down to ingredients like plot, character, set, costume, lights, etc., in order to fit it into our idea of what we know. Consequently, anything outside these domains is called “experimental.”

I don’t really feel that the American theatre underwent any enormous changes as a result of what went down in the sixties. It was only added onto. Generally speaking, the attitudes of the press are still the same as they always were toward new work. Bemused condescension or outright indignance. The main theme of the press in reaction to my own work has been “It’s fine if you like that kind of thing and he certainly has a way with words but when is he going to stop playing around and give us a really MAJOR NEW AMERICAN PLAY.”

By now, it’s obvious that there is an audience for new theatre. For a theatre that takes chances and risks going into dimensions other than the ones we’ve already seen and heard of. That audience creates the need for theatre as an art form and that...

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A Brief Intro to… Experimental Theatre

It was church services at Easter in the tenth century that popularised theatrical entertainment in Britain, and by the fourteenth century, it was standard practice to perform Bible stories. From the mid-fifteenth century hundreds of indoor and outdoor theatres were emerging in London, the most famous being the Globe, well-known for staging Shakespeare’s works.

Experimental theatre (also known as avant-garde theatre) began in Western theatre in the late 19th century with Alfred Jarry and his Ubu plays as a rejection of both the age in particular and, in general, the dominant ways of writing and producing plays. The term has shifted over time as the mainstream theatre world has adopted many forms that were once considered radical.

Like other forms of the avant-garde, it was created as a response to a perceived general cultural crisis. Despite different political and formal approaches, all avant-garde theatre opposes bourgeois theatre. It tries to introduce a different use of language and the body to change the mode of perception and to create a new, more active relation with the audience.

Traditionally, there is a highly hierarchical method of creating theatre – a writer identifies a problem, a writer writes a script, a director interprets it for the stage together with the actors, the performers perform the director and writers collective vision. Various practitioners started challenging this and started seeing the performers more and more as creative artists in their own right. This started with giving them more and more interpretive freedom and devised theatre eventually emerged. This direction was aided by the advent of ensemble improvisational theater, as part of the experimental theatre movement, which did not need a writer to develop the material for a show or “theatre piece.” In this form the lines were devised by the actors or performers.

Within this many different structures and possibilities exist for performance makers, and a large variety of different models are used by performers today. The primacy of the director and writer has been challenged directly, and the director’s role can exist as an outside eye or a facilitator rather than the supreme authority figure they once would have been able to assume.

As well as hierarchies being challenged, performers have been challenging their individual roles. An inter-disciplinary approach becomes more and more common as performers have become less willing to be shoe-horned into specialist technical roles. Simultaneous to this, other disciplines have started breaking down their barriers. Dance, music, visual art and writing become blurred in many cases, and artists with completely separate trainings and backgrounds collaborate very comfortably.

Here in the UK, it was companies such Shunt and Punchdrunk as well as performances like ‘ You Me Bum Bum Train ’ that helped introduce experimental and immersive theatre to the masses.

Shunt, a London-based performance collective, was founded in 1998. Most of the co-founders of Shunt met at Central School of Speech and Drama in London on the Advanced Theatre Practice MA in 1997/1998, which specialises in collaborative practice. Shunt’s work is centered on immersive, site-specific performance, usually in a grand scale, and has been supported by Britain’s Royal National Theatre, NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) and Arts Council England. It has been the subject of much critical and academic discussion over the last decade. Some believe the idea of Shunt is to “challenge the model of the single author” but the founding idea was simply to “explore the live event”. The group agrees on a theme or subject and as individual artists they all contribute proposals for scenes. Though they strive for minimal hierarchy, there are normal roles that the artists fulfill later in the process, such as lighting designer, sound designer, director, performers etc.

Punchdrunk was formed in 2000, by Artistic Director Felix Barrett MBE. Since its inception, Punchdrunk has pioneered a form of “immersive” theatre in which the audience is free to choose what to watch and where to go. This format is related to “promenade theatre” but Felix Barrett prefers the term “site-sympathetic” when describing their work. In a typical Punchdrunk production, audience members are free to roam the performance site, which can be as large as a five-story industrial warehouse. They can either follow the performers and themes (there are usually multiple threads at any instant), or simply explore the world of the performance, treating the production as a large art installation. Masks are another signature element of Punchdrunk’s work. Barret says when the company “…introduced masks, suddenly inhibition fell away and people found a sense of freedom in their anonymity, allowing them to fully explore their surroundings and become totally absorbed in the world around them.”

You Me Bum Bum Train is an Interactive theatre performance devised by Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd in 2004. The pair met as art students in Brighton, where they were studying illustration and film. The show gained critical acclaim in the United Kingdom when it was awarded the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust prize while showing in a disused office in London. In 2010 it won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for outstanding newcomer.

Visitors to the performance pass through a series of scenes of which they have no foreknowledge, in which they are either passive or where they must improvise a part without any preparation.

Nowadays we have a vast array of theatres and venues enjoy experimental shows and festivals and in London we are especially spoilt for choice. One of the most atmospheric locations to see a performance is undoubtedly The Vaults, home to immersive theatre and alternative arts (and located right here on Leake Street!).

We chatted with Ami Stidolph, Head of Theatre at The Vaults , to get a better idea of the immersive theatre world today.

How did you get into theatre? I grew up in Chichester, which has a fantastic theatre and a fantastic youth theatre which I loved being a part of. I never really set out to pursue it as a carrer, but I had so much fun doing those shows that I couldn’t keep away.

What’s the best theatre show you’ve seen? Tonnes spring to mind – His Dark Materials at the National, Taking Sides at Chichester, a fringe production of Henry IV I saw in some tiny place one.

What are your favourite types of theatre production? I’m a huge Shakespeare lover, but I work in immersive theatre so I always enjoy seeing something very unusual. I’m a big puppetry fan as well.

Which theatre companies are really pushing the boundaries of theatre? Oof tough as that question could mean so many things, but I’ll always book to see the work of Kill the Beast , Complicite , and DryWrite .

What is the concept behind Vaults theatre? The Vaults theatre is built upon our beautiful space. Stepping in here is an experience and an atmosphere in itself so we bounce off that as a start. We’re neighbours with some fantastic theatres which we don’t want to (and frankly can’t) compete with, so it’s our job to try to offer something genuinely different. Immersive and experiential theatre is really growing and we want to be a huge part of that force.

What’s the best show you’ve seen at Vaults? Oh gosh there’s so many – recently Trainspotting and Red Wolf , which was part of VAULT Festival .

What type of person does immersive theatre appeal to? Interesting question! We try to come at each production individually in terms of who we’re appealing to, as immersive theatre is a broad spectrum. But I suppose our core audience base is often adventurous young adults (20 – 35).

What’s the most insane thing you’ve seen/heard of in the immersive theatre world? Every time I do a show people come up with these ideas and technologies that seem so close to actual magic to me – our next show (Sounds and Sorcery) uses binaural sound technology on wireless headphones so I’m now learning about that. But the madness of it really is you’re asking people to literally step in to a new world, meaning you just can’t work out what the audience will do. They might punch an actor, or drop their trousers and wee in the middle of the show (really) or get so involved they point-blank refuse to leave the set. But those are, weirdly, the great bits, because every show is genuinely different from the last because it is responsive.

What’s the future of theatre? Crikey.  Sadly I don’t have a Charlie-Brooker-esque insight in to what the new trend, or technology, or fad will be, but I hope we can keep being responsive to what people both want and need in their lives and create work around that.  The future of theatre always has been, and always will be, about reflecting what is going on the world, and people, and what people are like and why they’re like that. It’s cheesy but it’s true.

#VaultsTheatre #LeakeStreetArches #culture #theatre #Art #experiemental #VAULTfestival #immersive

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Performing Arts Carnival 2023

Auditorium 15.10.2023 (Sun) 2pm-5pm Free Admission

Tuen Mun Town Hall The Performing Arts Carnival 2023 presents a diverse range of top-notch performing arts programmes by emerging talents from the Schools of Dance, Music, Drama and Chinese Opera of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA), and artists from venue partners, local arts groups and district organisations. The Carnival will tour around five performance venues in the New Territories, with the Tuen Mun Town Hall as its first stop. Core Programme 15.10.2023 (Sun) 2pm-5pm Free Admission Auditorium (Suitable for ages 3 and above) Admission ticket is not required for the Auditorium programme. Limited seats available on first-come-first-served basis.

(Excerpt) The story revolves around four neighbouring tenants of subdivided units. Under the same roof, they face their own problems in life while searching for the place called "home". Music, Lyrics & Musical Director ： Chui Wai-yin Peco Playwright ： Cheung Fei-fan Director ： Li Wing-hong Choreographer ： Chow Wing-sze Seesy Actors (Inaugural class of the Acting for Musical Theatre major) ： Cheng Hoi-man, Chu Po-ching, Chung Ho-shun, Leung Ho-yi, Ngan Hei-yuen, Wai Cheuk-nam, Wong Tsz-yui Musician ： Stanley Cheung, Anson Tang, So Chuen-on Assistant to Musical Director ： Tam Pak-huen Music score processing assistant ： Yoko Yung Dedicated to promoting the rich concert repertoire, the HKAPA’s Percussion Ensemble features the Academy’s most talented percussion students, who ardently bring their performances to the community. With both original and arranged works, the programme of the concert will be a diverse and balanced blend of musical pieces of different styles. Composer ： Nigel Westlake Musicians ： Ng Chun-sze Emma, Chung Cheuk-ka Cherry, Im Pui-yan Priscilla, Wong Kwun-hang Dennis Marimba Quartet: Sculpture In Wood Composer ： Rudiger Pawassar Musicians ： Ng Chun-sze Emma, Fu Siqi Sich, Tung Hiu-wai Valencia, Chung Cheuk-ka Cherry Percussion Sextet: Catching Shadows Composer ： Ivan Trevino Musicians ： Ng Chun-sze Emma, Chung Cheuk-ka Cherry, Fu Siqi Sich, Tung Hiu-wai Valencia, Wong Kwun-hang Dennis, Im Pui-yan Priscilla Percussion Ensemble: Beethoven In Havana Composer ： Joachim Horsley Arranger ： Brian Flack Musicians ： Ng Chun-sze Emma, Chung Cheuk-ka Cherry, Fu Siqi Sich, Tung Hiu-wai Valencia, Wong Kwun-hang Dennis, Im Pui-yan Priscilla, Cheuk Yee-lam Seiko, Wong Jun-hin Jeffrey, Lui Tin-yau Mark (Student from the School of Chinese Opera) , Ho Tze-fai Sunny (Alumni) Master of Ceremony ： Tung Hiu-wai Valencia Student co-ordinator ： Ng Chun-sze Emma Teachers/Coaches ： Prof. Yiu Song-lam Choy Lap-tak Tong Shun-ching Margie Fung Ka-hing Master of Ceremony: Tung Hiu-wai Valencia Student co-ordinator: Ng Chun-sze Emma Teachers/Coaches: Choy Lap-tak Tong Shun-ching Margie Fung Ka-hing Created in 2018, explores the subtle relationship between the dancers and the barre in ballet training. This is an experiment work that breaks up the traditional form of ballet technique by challenging the traditional use of the barre. --> Choreographer ： Nguyen Ngoc Anh ： Eve Chan Music ： The Last Breath Composer ： Ezio Bosso Set Designer ： Nguyen Ngoc Anh Dancers: ： Chen Wai-sze, Ho Hei-yu, Lam Cheuk-ying, Lau Oon-hei, Lee Sin-tung, Leung Sin-hang, Ngan Sze-yu, Tam Ashley Tsz-yiu, Leung Hei-tung, Yuen Mei-wai Le Corsaire - Medora Variation Choreographer ： Joseph Mazilier Rehearsal Director ： Eve Chan Music ： Le Corsaire : Alt. Tempo: II - "5 Grand pas: Variation: Medora" Play by Evergreen Symphony Orchestra, Anna Marie Holmes & Kevin Galie Composer ： Baron Boris Vietinghoff - Scheel Dancer ： Wong Chai Choreographer ： Jiang Huaxuan Rehearsal Director ： Yu Pik-yim Music ： Flying Dragons and Jumping Tigers - Percussion Concerto Composer ： Li Minxiong Dancers ： Chen Ka-hei, Cheung Ka-man, Fung Kei, Lai Wing-Yan, Lam Tsz-ying, Lam Wai-ching, Pang Cherry, Wan Chun-hei, Wang Luoyan, Wang Xifang, Wong Wai-shan "Beautiful Reminiscence" Choreographer ： Li Yongjing Rehearsal Director ： Lam Po Music ： 3WW, Reference, Experience Composer ： Alt-J, L C Fung, Ludovico Einaudi Dancers ： Calysta Clara Neisha, Huang Ziyan, Lai Lok-yan, Ho Wing-kam, Lam Hoi-ching, Lin Ka-ying, Lai Natalia, To Wing, Tsang Wing-hang, Liu Zhi, Wong Ching-tung, Xiong Yilin, Wong Cheuk-lam, Wong Noi-bei, Zhao yuefan, Wong Lai-kei Kristy, Yip Sze-wai, Xu Xitong Composer: Alt-J Ludovico Einaudi 6. An Excerpt from Urbs Original Choreographers: Yan Xiaoqiang A sickly child was sent to a nunnery by her parents to ensure her survival under the protection of Buddha. However, she can barely live an ascetic life full of worship and chanting, and decides to sneak out. She then meets a novice monk who happens to be absconding from his monastery as well... The first half of the performance features the nuances in singing style and the shifts in the characters’ thinking, while the second half puts emphasis on bodily movements and gaits. Don’t miss out! Director ： Ying Kam-sha, Hong Hai Actors ： Liang Zhenwen, Ng Man-ting Orchestra ： Music Leader ： Tsang Tsz-ho Yangqin ： Chan Fung-yan Electric Ruan ： Mach Tuy Nghia Pipa ： Tsoi Sheung-yin Zhonghu ： Lei Ziteng Erhu ： Chau Ho-yeung Dizi ： Cheok Wai-hang Guzheng ： Leung Wing-nga Cello ： Zhu Xiaolin Percussion Leader ： Zhao Riwei Accompanists ： Lei Caiping, Lai Hon-yin, Ching Weng-sung Fringe Activities 15.10.2023 (Sun) 2:15pm-3:15pm & 4pm-5pm Free Admission *Cultural Activities Hall , a Cantonese opera classic by legendary Cantonese opera playwright Tang Ti-sheng Actors ： Ng Kwok Wa Szeto Hoi Yee Actor ： Charles Teo Excerpt from Cantonese Opera I have a Date with Spring Actor ： Dianna Tse Fringe Activities 15.10.2023 (Sun) 2pm-3:15pm & 3:45pm-5pm Free Admission *Exhibition Gallery *Exhibition Gallery 2pm-3:15pm & 3:45pm-5pm --> --> Dance Performances: Western Folk Dance, Chinese Folk Dance, Ballet, Latin Dance, Jazz Dance *Programme Arrangements (Cultural Activities Hall and Exhibition Gallery) Admission by ticket with free seating. Limited places available on a first-come-first-served basis. Tickets will be distributed at the Enquiry Counter of Tuen Mun Town Hall from 12 noon on the day of the activities. Each person is allowed up to two tickets. Tickets will become invalid if the ticket holders fail to show up within 5 minutes after the designated session has begun, and their places will be allocated to other persons waiting at the venue. In the event of any dispute regarding ticket distribution and seating arrangements, the Leisure and Cultural Services Department’s decision shall be final and conclusive.   Presenter reserves the right to change the programme and artists should unavoidable circumstances make it necessary. The content of programme does not represent the views of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department. Step into a world where the vibrancy of youth clashes with the oppressive constraints of society - Spring Awakening , the groundbreaking musical with a soul-stirring score by Duncan Sheik and a Tony Award-winning book by Steven Sater. The musical's fusion of rock and folk music perfectly complement the poignant narrative of love, rebellion, and self-discovery. FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY. Winner! Eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book and Best Score. The Spring Awakening creative team includes Ian Moore, Director; Bridget Hughes, Choreographer; Mark Megill, Musical Director; Caroline Laberdee, Production Stage Manager; Jason Greenhouse, Scenic Designer; Roman Klima & Rachel Krupnick, Lighting Design; Emily Davis, Costume Design; Gina Lupi, Prop Design; Jan Topoleski, Sound Design and Joseph Ficarra, Producer. 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Population: 22,964 (2010 Census). Kubinka was founded in the 15th century and may have been named after Prince Ivan Kubensky, a prominent local land owner. It grew in importance in the second half of the 19th century when the Moscow-Smolensk railway passed through the area. The military test range for tanks was opened in 1931 and the military airbase opened soon afterwards. Town status granted to Kubinka in 2004. Within the framework of administrative divisions, it is, together with twenty-three rural localities, incorporated within Odintsovsky District as the  . As a municipal division, the Town of Kubinka is incorporated within Odintsovsky Municipal District as  . The town is linked by the suburban rail to Moscow's Belorussky railway station. The train ride takes approximately 75 minutes. In 2015, new 10 km train line was opened in Kubinka. It goes from Kubinka railway station to Patriot Park, through the station "Museum", located near Kubinka Tank Museum. Kubinka was the location of the Soviet Union's tank proving grounds, and today is the home of the Kubinka Tank Museum. It is also the location of the MAPO aircraft Maintenance Factory #121 and the Kubinka air base. This base serves as a base for the 237th Centre for Display of Aviation Equipment, which consists of Swifts and Russian Knights, who took place in the aerobatic show during 2010 Moscow Victory Day Parade. The completion of the theme park Patriot is planned for 2017, a preliminary opening of the so-called "military Disneyland" took place in June 2015 by Vladimir Putin. It is located south of the Minsk highway at the border to the neighbouring settlements Golitsyno and Kalininets in the east and shall complement the local tourist attractions Kubinka Aviation Museum and Kubinka Tank Museum. Tank museum is located near the city. One of its most notable exponents is Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus which is the only one in the world. 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Things to Do in Balashikha, Russia - Balashikha Attractions Things to do in balashikha. 5.0 of 5 bubbles 4.0 of 5 bubbles & up 3.0 of 5 bubbles & up 2.0 of 5 bubbles & up Good for a Rainy Day Good for Kids Budget-friendly Good for Couples Good for Big Groups Adventurous Hidden Gems Honeymoon spot Good for Adrenaline Seekers Things to do ranked using Tripadvisor data including reviews, ratings, number of page views, and user location. 1. Balashikha Park 2. Malenky Puppet Theater 3. Mystical Castle 4. Rock Fountain 5. Monument to Street Cleaner 6. Palace Pekhra-Yakovlevskoe 7. Temple of Archangel Michael 8. Homestead Gorenki 9. Monument to Fallen Soldiers-Brothers 10. Arena Balashikha Ice Dome 11. Transfiguration Church 12. Alekseyevskiy Pond 13. Alexander Nevskiy Cathedral in Balashikha 14. Grave of Michael Lunn 15. Saltykovka Flea Market 16. Lover's Bridge 17. Protection of the Holy Virgin in Balashikha 18. balashikha museum of history and local lore. 19. Art Gallery of The City District 20. Temple of St. Catherine 21. Lisya Gora 22. Temple of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin in the Trubetskoy 23. Ecodrom Ekvilibr 24. fairy tale children's model puppet theater. 25. Zoodvorik Zolotoi Fazan 26. Temple of St. Vladimir 27. Temple of Pochayevskaya Icon of Our Lady 28. Perevornutyy Dom 29. Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker 30. temple of the prelate nicholas. Time in Balashikha , Moscow Oblast, Russia now The clock will update automatically if you turn on javascript in your browser.. Tokyo 06:35 Beijing 05:35 Paris 23:35 London 22:35 New York 17:35 Los Angeles 14:35 Time zone info for Balashikha Balashikha does not change between summer time and winter time. The IANA time zone identifier for Balashikha is Europe/Moscow. Time difference from Balashikha −10 hours −10 hours −8 hours −8 hours −7 hours −7 hours −7 hours −7 hours −6 hours −6 hours −3 hours −3 hours −2 hours −2 hours −2 hours −2 hours −1 hours −1 hours −1 hours −1 hours −1 hours −1 hours 0 0 0 +1 hours +2.5 hours +5 hours +5 hours +5 hours +6 hours +7 hours Sunrise, sunset, day length and solar time for Balashikha Sunrise: 05:57 Sunset: 18:50 Day length: 12h 53m Solar noon: 12:24 The current local time in Balashikha is 24 minutes ahead of apparent solar time. Balashikha on the map Location: Moscow Oblast, Russia Latitude: 55.79. Longitude: 37.95 Population: 150,000 Best restaurants in Balashikha #1 Banketnyj zal Admiral Holl - American and armenian food #2 Ale & Lager - European and american food #3 Kuhnya & Mb11 - American and european food #4 Restoran Razgulyay - European and russian food Find best places to eat in Balashikha Best chinese restaurants in Balashikha Best pizza restaurants in Balashikha Best restaurants with desserts in Balashikha The 50 largest cities in Russia THE 10 BEST Things to Do in Balashikha (2024) - Must-See Attractions Things to do in balashikha. 5.0 of 5 bubbles 4.0 of 5 bubbles & up 3.0 of 5 bubbles & up 2.0 of 5 bubbles & up Good for a Rainy Day Good for Kids Budget-friendly Good for Couples Good for Big Groups Adventurous Hidden Gems Honeymoon spot Good for Adrenaline Seekers Things to do ranked using Tripadvisor data including reviews, ratings, number of page views, and user location. 1. Balashikha Park 2. Malenky Puppet Theater 3. Mystical Castle 4. Rock Fountain 5. Monument to Street Cleaner 6. Palace Pekhra-Yakovlevskoe 7. Temple of Archangel Michael 8. Homestead Gorenki 9. Monument to Fallen Soldiers-Brothers 10. Arena Balashikha Ice Dome 11. Transfiguration Church 12. Alekseyevskiy Pond 13. Alexander Nevskiy Cathedral in Balashikha 14. Grave of Michael Lunn 15. Saltykovka Flea Market 16. Lover's Bridge 17. Protection of the Holy Virgin in Balashikha 18. balashikha museum of history and local lore. 19. Art Gallery of The City District 20. Temple of St. Catherine 21. Lisya Gora 22. Ecodrom Ekvilibr 23. Temple of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin in the Trubetskoy 24. fairy tale children's model puppet theater. 25. Zoodvorik Zolotoi Fazan 26. Temple of Pochayevskaya Icon of Our Lady 27. Temple of St. Vladimir 28. Perevornutyy Dom 29. Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker 30. temple of the prelate nicholas. 478 IMAGES 79 Kwan Ho Tse Stock Photos, High-Res Pictures, and Images Arts Tuen-gather 35 Arts Tuen-gather 35 Experimental Theatre 2012 Manhattan Experimental Theater Workshop VIDEO Ten Dancers Acting Reflections on Spring Snow Jamie Thacker & Brandy Davis film Fairy Fountain2 (Ocarina of Time experimental arrangement) My Toxic Cycle Of Compulsive Social Media Use passage of time (experimental short film) COMMENTS 春天舞台製作有限公司 設有殘疾人士及看護人、全日制學生、六十歲或以上高齡人士及綜合社會保障援助受惠人士半價優惠 (數量有限，先到先得、額滿即止) 主辦及製作：. 春天實驗劇團. 票務查詢及客戶服務：. 3166 1100. 電話購票：. 3166 1288. 網上購票: www.urbtix.hk. 春天舞台 演出地點： 屯門大會堂演奏廳: 演出日期及時間： 2024年7月19日(五) 7:30pm 2024年7月20日(六) 3pm/7:30pm (特設現場手語翻譯) Tuen Mun Town Hall Spring-Time Experimental Theatre and Glory Chinese Opera Institute. Spring-Time Experimental Theatre. Spring-Time Experimental Theatre, established in 1999, aiming at gathering new generation of professional stage producers (spanning from creative arts, performing arts and design) to produce professional and high-quality theatre plays. Spring-Time Stage Production Spring-Time Stage Production. 1,914 likes · 31 talking about this. 春天實驗劇團為註冊非牟利團體。組成的目的，是要以新一代專業的舞台工作 Government Youth Website Spring-Time Experimental Theatre and Glory Chinese Opera Institute are the Venue Partners of the Tuen Mun Town Hall Programme Enquiry Telephone: 2793 1123 Fax: 2793 1134 Notes for Discount Ticket Price * = Student Tickets, # = Elderly, + = Disabled, % = Comprehensive Social Security Assistance Recipents' end) 60+ Can't-Miss Shows on Philly Stages for Summer & Fall 2024 Gather your clues, get your mugshot and race to see who can take the most selfies (October 5 - November 16, 2024). as Ebenezer Scrooge meets his untimely demise, unsolved until Sherlock Holmes shows up at Scrooge's nephew's holiday party asking for your help to uncover the mystery (November 23 - December 29, 2024). Experimental theatre Experimental theatre (also known as avant-garde theatre), ... The term has shifted over time as the mainstream theatre world has adopted many forms that were once considered radical. Like other forms of the avant-garde, it was created as a response to a perceived general cultural crisis. Despite different political and formal approaches, all ... The Rise of Experimental Theatre Here are some benefits of experimental theatre: 1. Creativity and Innovation. Experimental theatre allows performers to explore new techniques and ideas, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in theatre. This creativity and innovation can lead to new forms of theatre and storytelling. 2. The People and Places of Experimental Theatre Scholarship: A The second sentence talks about Sighing, an experimental adaptation of 戏曲 (xiqu, Chinese opera) by Tian Mansha, one of the most internationally renowned Sichuan opera performers at the time of writing. These two sentences are, respectively, one of the oldest and one of the most recent entries in a dataset of sentences about experimental ... Project MUSE Experimental Theatre Then and Now. The death of Sam Shepard, on July 27, generated an outpouring of genuine sadness at the loss of an incomparable voice in the American theatre. Some will say he punctured the myth of masculinity, and others that he represented a certain kind of lost manliness. He was a playwright, actor, and musician who ... Experimental Theatre and the Challenge Facing Modern Playwrights Indeed, there are many styles of theatre that are still considered to be experimental, but have actually been around longer than any of us have. When discussing this topic, many theatre scholars still seem to think back to certain historical "avant-garde" styles of theatre - such as expressionism, Dada, absurdism and surrealism - which ... A Brief Intro to… Experimental Theatre Experimental theatre (also known as avant-garde theatre) began in Western theatre in the late 19th century with Alfred Jarry and his Ubu plays as a rejection of both the age in particular and, in general, the dominant ways of writing and producing plays. The term has shifted over time as the mainstream theatre world has adopted many forms that ... Spring Awakening (play) Spring Awakening (German: Frühlings Erwachen) (also translated as Spring's Awakening and The Awakening of Spring) is the German dramatist Frank Wedekind's first major play and a foundational work in the modern history of theatre. [1] [2] It was written sometime between autumn 1890 and spring 1891, but did not receive its first performance until 20 November 1906 when it premiered at the ... Performing Arts Carnival 2023 The Performing Arts Carnival 2023 presents a diverse range of top-notch performing arts programmes by emerging talents from the Schools of Dance, Music, Drama and Chinese Opera of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA), and artists from venue partners, local arts groups and district organisations. The Carnival will tour around five ... Spring Awakening August 10 - August 18, 2024. Step into a world where the vibrancy of youth clashes with the oppressive constraints of society - Spring Awakening, the groundbreaking musical with a soul-stirring score by Duncan Sheik and a Tony Award-winning book by Steven Sater. The musical's fusion of rock and folk music perfectly complement the poignant ... Five of the most experimental London theatres Immersive theatre has become a key part of the London scene in recent years. Rather than a passive experience where audiences sit back and watch others do the work, visitors to an immersive theatre are part of the unfolding action. Space 18 was purpose-built for this kind of show, with multiple buildings covering thousands of square feet. Sign up now for English 492: Spring Break '24 in New York City Theaters English 492, New York Drama, Spring 2024 puts you in New York City from March 9 to 17, during UT's spring break. In this theatre-intensive off-campus course, we will see eight plays in a variety of venues, from experimental theaters to major Broadway houses. Experimental film Ballet Mécanique (1924) directed by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, one of the earliest experimental films Limite (1931) directed by Mário Peixoto, an early example of experimental feature filmmaking. Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives ... Kubinka Toll Free 0800 011 2023 ... Day tours. Tours by Region THE 15 BEST Things to Do in Balashikha (2024) 29. Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker. 30. Temple of the Prelate Nicholas. Things to Do in Balashikha, Russia: See Tripadvisor's 2,476 traveler reviews and photos of Balashikha tourist attractions. Find what to do today, this weekend, or in September. Time in Balashikha, Moscow Oblast, Russia now Sunrise, sunset, day length and solar time for Balashikha. Sunrise: 05:38AM. Sunset: 07:16PM. Day length: 13h 38m. Solar noon: 12:27PM. The current local time in Balashikha is 27 minutes ahead of apparent solar time. THE 10 BEST Things to Do in Balashikha (2024) Temple of St. Vladimir. 28. Perevornutyy Dom. 29. Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker. 30. Temple of the Prelate Nicholas. Things to Do in Balashikha, Russia: See Tripadvisor's 2,476 traveller reviews and photos of Balashikha tourist attractions. Find what to do today, this weekend, or in September. essay homework paper phd project resume review speech study thesis