UC Berkeley Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS)

TDPS celebrated the incredible work of our emerging scenic, costume, and lighting designers, alongside our outstanding stage managers, at this year’s Design Showcase. Organized by Dominique Fawn Hill, Ray Oppenheimer, Arnel Sancianco, and Rebecca J. Ennals, the showcase highlighted the creativity, collaboration, and artistry of the next generation of theatermakers. Thank you to everyone who came by to support our students and celebrate their work! ✨ Costume Designers Sophia Chen Amanda Hayami Madison Ix Avery Jones Daniel Lopez 💡 Lighting Designer Molly Windsor-Marshall 🎨 Scenic Designers Jackie Chiang Winter Winter Felton-Priestner Anne Celine O’Riordan Geoffrey Eduardo Toribio Gilberto Avila Toledo 🎭 Stage Managers Daniel Lopez Caitlin Porter Nori Quist Penelope Venturini 📸 Photos by Alexander Rony

Reminiscing on our week with artist-in-residence Sam Aros-Mitchell! Last month @artsresearchctr & @berkeleytdps welcomed dancer & choreographer Sam Aros-Mitchell (@samarosmitchell ) as the fourth artist-in-residence of the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency (IPAR) program. Sam led students through an energetic master class and offered a lecture-performance for the general public. Here are photos and videos from both events, held in Bancroft Dance Studio. Playing with light and breath work, Sam graced us with thought-provoking movement and generous teachings during this memorable week! ABOUT IPAR: The Indigenous Performing Arts Residency is a multi-year collaboration between the Dept of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and the Arts Research Center to strengthen relationships with Indigenous community partners and create ongoing support for Indigenous performing artists, so that Native stories can be told on our campus now and into the future. Images: © Laurie Macfee, Arts Research Center 2026

Check out @ucberkeleyofficial TDPS Staff/Alumna Megan Lowe’s (@mlowedancekitty ) epic vertical dance production at @ybca , with shows May 15-17! 🎟️ Get Tickets via @mlowedancekitty bio link. ✨ Discounted Tickets available to Students! “Air Between Us” is a new vertical dance adventure from Megan Lowe Dances, where performers climb, float, and fall in a choreography shaped by gravity, trust, and interdependence. What unfolds is both breathtaking and intimate: bodies moving through air, gathering and separating, revealing how the space between us can hold tension, tenderness, and connection. ❗️Fun Fact: the General Manager for YBCA, Chris Griffin, is also a @ucberkeleyofficial TDPS alumnus. TDPS celebrates the successes of our alumni! 📷 Bill O’Such of @mlowedancekitty and @roelseeber in rehearsal for Megan Lowe Dances’ “Air Between Us” at YBCA, 2026 #MeganLoweDances #YBCA #VerticalDance #AerialDance #Aerialist

Announcing our 2026–27 Season: Crisis & Creation 👉 Slide through to learn more about the shows, directors, and choreographers shaping the year ahead. More details on casting, dates, and commitments will be posted on the TDPS Callboard in the coming weeks—stay tuned! Fall 2026  [currently untitled]  Directed by Timmia DeRoy  Student Workshop: Under Light  Choreography by Naomi Lyu  Orestes: An Antic Tragedy  Transadapted by Anne Washburn from the play by Euripides  Directed by Susannah Martin  Student Workshop: Boy  By Anna Ziegler  Directed by Mathew Chipman  Fall Choreography Showcase  Directed by Lisa Wymore  Spring 2027  Berkeley Dance Project  Choreography by SanSan Kwan & Lisa Wymore  Honors Workshop: Love Portal  Choreography by Ruchita Verma  Honors Workshop: TBD  Directed by Manny LaPorte  Melancholy Play  By Sarah Ruhl  Directed by Patrick Russell  Indeed, Friend!  By Eliza Bent  Directed by Nancy Carlin If you would like an accessible text-only version of this post, please contact [email protected].

Sam Aros-Mitchell has arrived at UC Berkeley for the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency! Yesterday the Yaqui dancer & choreographer led @berkeleytdps Professor & Chair SanSan Kwan's Choreographies of Space course in a masterclass diving into Muscle/Bone technique. Aros-Mitchell led students across the dance floor stepping, reaching, crawling, and jumping in a river of movement. Tomorrow at 4pm, @samarosmitchell will present a free & public lecture-performance, aligned with his ongoing work in Performance as Ceremony. He will dance two short José Limón solos—El Indio (from Danzas Mexicanas) and the Deer Dance (from The Unsung)—in a hybrid format that weaves together movement passages and commentary on Indigenous futurisms, embodied archives, and the resonances between José Limón’s choreography and Native epistemologies. You don't want to miss this this! Taking place at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Studio, it rounds out the 2026 Indigenous Performing Arts Residency and is the last of ARC's events for the academic year! How wonderful to close out with dance and connection to the body.

This week kicks off ARC & @berkeleytdps ’s Indigenous Performing Arts Residency (IPAR) with artist-in-residence dancer & choreographer Sam Aros-Mitchell (@samarosmitchell )! Now in its fourth cycle, we thought this would be the perfect time to take a trip down memory lane and shine some light on the incredible artists we’ve hosted through IPAR during our partnership with @altertheater . In 2023, playwright Dillon Chitto (@dchitto ) premiered “Pueblo Revolt,” an equally hilarious and poignant play that wove together history and Indigifuturism to examine queerness, family, religion, and survival. Chitto was also joined by Laurie Arnold of Gonzaga University for a public lecture, Theater as a Site of Public History. (photos 1-3, pc: David Allen) In 2024, playwright Blossom Johnson (@squashblossomofficial ) fine-tuned the script and oversaw staged readings of “Diné Nishłį, (i am a sacred being) or, A Boarding School Play,” visited TDPS Professor Timmia Hearn DeRoy's directing class, and participated in a talkback alongside Director Daniel Leeman Smith. Johnson’s comedic and sincere play was exuberant, sunny, and just a little bit haunted, celebrating the dreams, hopes, and confidence of young Native women as they each find their own way to honor their cultural traditions and live their dreams in a modern world. (photos 4-6, pc: David Allen) In 2025, playwright and UC Berkeley alum Drew Woodson (@woodsondrew ) held a series of open script development workshops with local Indigenous actors, visited TDPS Professor Philip Kan Gotanda’s scriptwriting class, gave an artist talk with TDPS Lecturer Patrick Russell and ARC Director Beth Piatote, and presented a public reading of his new play “From Above.” Woodson’s “From Above” opened in a lone church just at the edge of a desert town and unfolded to tell a tale of calamity, religious reckoning, and a perilous decision that threatened to tear a community apart. (photos 7-9, pc: Joanna Wong) This year we are pivoting from playwriting into dance! Join us at 4pm this Thursday for artist-in-residence Sam Aros-Mitchell’s lecture-performance hybrid “Performance as Ceremony” at Bancroft Dance Studio on UC Berkeley’s campus.

Congrats to our Sticker Contest winners: Emilia, Daynna, and Hannah! This spring, TDPS students took on the challenge of designing a sticker that captures the spirit of the department. Learn more about the artists and their creative processes 🎨🧠⏩⏩ You can grab these stickers at Cal Day this Saturday, in the TDPS main office, and at future department tablings—collect them all while they last! 💥

✨ A DYNAMIC FESTIVAL OF MOVEMENT Berkeley Dance Project celebrates the vibrancy and range of dancemaking at UC Berkeley in an evening of bold, original work. Featuring over twenty student performers, this year’s concert includes a restaging of SISTERS by Bay Area choreographer Randee Paufve, a devised community-engaged project in collaboration with the Next River Institute by Sarah Crowell and TDPS faculty member Lisa Wymore, and selected works from TDPS’ Fall Choreography Showcase. BERKELEY DANCE PROJECT 2026 April 30-May 3 Zellerbach Playhouse Tickets: $10-20 🎟️ Tickets are now on sale! Space is limited. Reserve yours now (link in bio). 🗓 Showtimes: Thu, April 30 · 8pm Fri, May 1 · 8pm Sat, May 2 · 8pm Sun, May 3 · 2pm Photo by Robbie Sweeny

Learn more about artist-in-residence Sam Aros-Mitchell! During the week of April 20th, @artsresearchctr & @berkeleytdps will welcome dancer & choreographer Aros-Mitchell (@samarosmitchell ) as the fourth artist-in-residence of the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency (IPAR) program! Read more about and watch performances of Aros-Mitchell’s work at his website, / Videos featured: The Unsung, Performed by Sam Aros-Mitchell, Choreographed by José Limón, O’Shaughnessy Theater, St. Paul, Minnesota SOLO Concert, McKnight Foundation Juya Nokakameao, Performed by Sam Aros-Mitchell, March 2024, RSD Studios, Minneapolis, MN ABOUT IPAR: The Indigenous Performing Arts Residency is a multi-year collaboration between the Dept of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and the Arts Research Center to strengthen relationships with Indigenous community partners and create ongoing support for Indigenous performing artists, so that Native stories can be told on our campus now and into the future. 🔗click the link in bio for more info!

A playful reimagining of Shakespeare in the city. 🌉 WHATEVER YOU WANT, MAN is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s AS YOU LIKE IT, in which the Forest of Arden meets San Francisco (and New York, kind of). Through the interweaving of Shakespearean text and modern dialogue, the characters and comedy come to life in an imaginative collaboration between theater past and present. WHATEVER YOU WANT, MAN An Adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It By Erin Weitzman Workshop performance presented by TDPS ⏱️ Showtimes: Wed, April 15th, 8pm Thurs, April 16th, 8pm 📍Zellerbach Hall, Room 170 🎟️ Free & Open to the Public RSVP at tdps.link/wywm (or link in bio!) ABOUT TDPS WORKSHOPS: Workshops are designed as “capstone experiences” for advanced students in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS). As performance laboratories, workshops provide opportunities for student directors, choreographers, writers, and performers to develop ideas and put them into practice. Performances focus on engaging language and staging with minimal technical/design elements.

Announcing artist-in-residence Sam Aros-Mitchell! During the week of April 20th, @artsresearchctr & @berkeleytdps will welcome dancer & choreographer Aros-Mitchell (@samarosmitchell ) as the fourth artist-in-residence of the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency (IPAR) program! SCHEDULE: Masterclass: Choreographies of Space 📅Tues April 21 at 3:30pm 🎟️closed to the public, open to UC Berkeley dance students Lecture-Performance Hybrid: Performance as Ceremony 📅Thurs April 23 at 4pm 📍Bancroft Dance Studio 🎟️free & open to the public 🪢Sam Aros-Mitchell will weave together short movement passages, video from recent works, and commentary on Indigenous futurisms, embodied archives, and the resonances between José Limón’s choreography and Native epistemologies ABOUT THE ARTIST: Sam Aros-Mitchell is a Yaqui choreographer, cultural producer, scholar, and performer based in Minneapolis. His work moves between Indigenous cosmologies, experimental dance, and performance installation, activating space as a site of ceremony, resistance, and collective witnessing. He is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a McKnight Dance Fellow, and the founder of SAROS field/works, a platform for Indigenous and BIPOC-led performance. For over eight years, he has been a core collaborator with Rosy Simas Danse. Aros-Mitchell’s choreography dissolves the boundaries between dance, theatre, and visual art. He is among the first Yaqui artists to reconstruct and perform José Limón’s The Unsung (Deer Solo) and Danzas Mexicanas (Indio Solo), infusing these historic works with Indigenous embodiment and recontextualization. Recent original works include Juya Nokakamea, a multi-sensory performance drawn from Yaqui creation stories, and Entering Aniam, an immersive sound and movement installation. ABOUT IPAR: The Indigenous Performing Arts Residency is a multi-year collaboration between the Dept of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and the Arts Research Center to strengthen relationships with Indigenous community partners and create ongoing support for Indigenous performing artists, so that Native stories can be told on our campus now and into the future. 🔗click the link in bio for more info!

“And we fairies, that do run By the triple Hecate’s team, From the presence of the sun, Following darkness like a dream.” — Puck ⚙️ A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM ✨🌙 Congratulations to the incredible cast, crew, and creative team on a magical run this past weekend! Directed by Patrick Russell, this production brought Shakespeare’s forest to life with delightful mischief and whimsy. Scenic, costume, and lighting were all designed by students: Geoffrey Toribio, Daniel Lopez, and Molly Windsor-Marshall (in respective order). Actors featured: Anisa Barney Lila Marion Tatum Meyer Kelly Mou Mark Picard Lucas Robertson Daynna Rosales Bernard Timmons II Jordan Wegner 📸 Photos by Jay Yamada