Performed: Spring 2018
Written by: Melody Bates
Director: April Sweeney

“I dreamt my lady came and found me dead.” It is not the obsession with the dead and thus (un)dead that Melody Bates asks of us in her comedy R & J& Z, but I find it is the obsession with the dream, the moment of transition between two worlds. This new play before us erupts out of Shakespeare’s tumultuous, violent love story and brings forth a world with the logic and physics of the dream. A dream where the familiar blows into the absurd and the nightmare, for all too understood reasons, is reality. What choices are we bound to make? Are we bound by our choices? What holds us in place? Can we escape our bonds? Are we bound to have them follow and consume our world and one another? Might we prove a path that breaks from form to reveal a light, a great lantern, a shiny place of our own making with harmony and beauty? Using Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a springboard Bates tackles the high and low, brings our collective drive for shock and feeling much closer for us to see because these days what is on our screens in front of us is all we know.

Directed by April Sweeney; scenic design by Miranda K. Hardy; lighting design by Cha See; sound and video design by Eric Magnus; fights by Dan Renkin; special effects by Stephanie Cox-Williams; stagemanaged by Haoqi Xi; and technical direction by Joel Morain.

Photos by Mark DiOrio

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Performed: Spring 2018
Director: Casey Avaunt

ARCH: A Dance Concert showcased original works by contemporary dance students at Colgate. These experimental pieces integrated a variety of styles including hip hop, ballet, and classical Chinese dance. Additionally, the concert featured choreography by Colgate faculty and internationally recognized guest choreographers.

Hyoin Jun premiered his trio, Personal Stories, created by developing gestural movements based on the dancers’ personal stories. Jun is a co-artistic director of Goblin Party, a dance company based in Korea, and winner of the Gold Medal at the Berlin International Dance Competition in Germany (2010).

The final work, Journey Passage, was choreographed by Lai Tsui-shuang, an artist based in Germany and Taiwan. Lai formerly danced with the Wuppertal Tanztheater (Pina Bausch) and now directs her company Lais Creative Dance Theater. In this rigorous new work, Lai considered notions of geographical travel and life transitions.

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The tale of several socially awkward young people finding joy, heartache and a purpose in competing at the regional spelling bee features a score by William Finn and a book by Rachel Sheinkin.

Performed: Fall 2017
Director: Simona Giurgea

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Performed: Spring 2017
Written by: Eugene Ionesco
Directed by: Simona Giurgea

Somewhere, not far away, there is a town where regular churchgoers are happy and commerce is fruitful; a place where buildings are white, friends meet on Sundays at outdoor cafés, and ladies might take along their cats when shopping for groceries. Skilled in small talk, the inhabitants weave their lives together in a precise melodic rhythm. They cherish appearance, punctuality, exactitude, good manners and strive to align their communal life with logical thought.

All is well until a rhinoceros, or maybe two, appear in their midst. Regular citizens seduced by the power of brute force, pressured by the energy of the crowds and swept away by the frenzy of mindlessness gradually give in to Rhinoceritis, the strange epidemic that turns man into beast. Only one of them is eventually left to uphold the values of humanity.

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Performed: Fall 2015
Director: Adrian Giurgea

Two couples meet for dinner to take their minds off the war raging around them. An unexpected profession of love, an untimely proposal, and one kiss later, one of the foursome lies dead on the floor. KISS breaks open cultural barriers as a group of western actors interpreting a Syrian play slowly realize the limits of their own understanding, and the suffocating effect of an oppressive regime.

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Performed: Spring 2015
Director: Simona Giurgea

College: a playground for trying out reality; a time to test what we are, what we could be, what we are not, and what we wish to become. A space designated for stretching the mind and exercising the heart, for meeting friends and making enemies, for falling in love. Really, Really by Paul Downs Collaizo is a play about college, about youth, about the effort of being oneself while keeping the pace with the fast shifting world and the expectations of others. It is a play about wanting the future.

The play focuses on a group of college students the morning after a huge party. It mirrors the turbulence and uncertainty of college life, while allowing each audience member to come to their own conclusion.

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Performed: Fall 2013

Director: Adrian Giurgea

This 1986 play by Caryl Churchill and David Lan explores a series of seemingly ordinary characters, each of whom experiences an “undefended” day, when the body is possessed by spirit, addiction, love, or desire. Like Euripides’ Bacchae (on which A Mouthful of Birds is based), violent and unexpected transformations reverse conventional understandings of gender and sexuality, leading some characters to destruction and others to fruitful — but painful — moments of self-discovery.

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