The University of Iowa

Theater

CANCELLED: Bill Irwin

Beloved clown and Tony award-winner Bill Irwin applies his sensibility to the words of Samuel Beckett. “What this evening is,” Irwin explains, “is my attempt to share with an audience the place that these writings occupy inside of me. These stretches of language have stayed in my head a long time.”

The Vital and Energetic Interplay of the Somatic, the Affective and the Cognitive in an Audience’s Experience of Theater

This event is part of The Examined Life Conference and is hosted by The University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine.

The Examined Life Conference seeks to explore the intersections between the arts and medicine. How can they be of use to each other? How can they interact to make each more than they were without the other? 

Creative Matters: Anne Bogart, theater director

Anne Bogart is one of the three Co-Artistic Directors of SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is a professor of theatre at Columbia University, where she runs the Graduate Directing Program.

She was a recipient of a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the Richard B. Fisher Award, a USA Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and received the 2016 Alfred Drake Award from Brooklyn College.

Slingsby Theatre Company

Young Emil is traveling by train when a nefarious stranger makes off with the family’s hard-won money. With projections, shadow puppets, and unerring storytelling instincts, Slingsby Theatre Company will have your kids—and you, too—cheering for Emil’s band of crime solving friends.

Compagnia TPO

Compagnia TPO is renowned for interactive performances that bring children into the art—not as a gimmick, but as a central part of the artistry itself. Farfalle combines dance, images, digital design, and the joy and wonder of the young people in the audience.

Los Angeles Master Chorale

A Renaissance masterpiece—depicting the grief of St. Peter after his disavowal of Christ—is brought stirringly to the concert hall by one of the country’s finest vocal ensembles. Famed director Peter Sellars crafted this dramatically staged performance piece, focusing the themes through a contemporary lens.

The Actors’ Gang

Performed in twelve languages (with English supertitles) with live music, poetry, and movement, The New Colossus asks: Who are we as a nation? The play explores the true stories of twelve people in the United States today because their families fled their countries of origin to escape oppression.

SITI Company

In this new English translation, SITI Company invites us to Thebes where Dionysus—god of wine, ritual madness, fertility, and theater (and in this production imagined as a rock star)—is opposed by King Pentheus. SITI Company’s famed co-artistic director Anne Bogart will be on hand for a post-performance conversation.

Sankai Juku

For the first time in 20 years, Sankai Juku, Japan’s internationally renowned butoh dance troupe, returns to Hancher. Butoh, which has been called Japan’s most startling cultural export, is enthralling, surprising, and often deeply moving. Utsushi is the perfect introduction to the work of Sankai Juku.