Two years ago, the UT Department of Theatre and Dance inaugurated a festival showcasing new performances of plays, dances, and interdisciplinary art by current department students, recent graduates, and faculty, and the effort, which sprawled over six weeks and spaces all over the city from the B. Iden Payne Theatre to the Central Market Cooking School, led its organizers to consider scaling it back somewhat. But while the sophomore model of the David Mark Cohen New Works Festival — named for the influential playwright, critic, and educator who headed the department’s playwriting program from 1990 to 1997 — is down to a manageable 10 days, the festival has actually gotten bigger. Those days are packed, 10am-10pm, with original dances, dramas, solo performances, site-specific productions, and musicals, supplemented by panel discussions, master classes, and open classes having to do with the work presented — 45 events in all, with participation from the majority of students and faculty, plus visiting artists and guests from the community. (Not-so-full disclosure: This writer is performing in one of the festival works, but I won’t tell you which one.) For a list of shows and dates, see the Arts listings. Many events are free, while others ask a nominal charge at the door. A word of warning: Give yourself a little extra time to get to your show. Parking is never easy around UT, but if the campus remains on Orange Alert, then vehicles without a UT pass will be unable to drive on campus until after 9pm.
This article appears in April 4 • 2003.