What's Current in

Theater and Dance

Four adults in farmers clothes, their faces lit, look up at a foreboding figure in a mask
Photo Credit
Jeff Liang
The allegory that is 'Animal Farm' examines the perils of unchecked power and privilege, the use of words as a political weapon, and revolutions that erode into regimes not unlike those they overthrew.

UCSB theater students take on Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm,’ a fable that still bites

Read Article

Two male dancers perform on a blackened stage
Photo Credit
Jeff Liang
A scene from Santa Barbara Dance Theater's 2023 show, “The Ties that Bind/Los lazos que unen.”

Celebrating diverse voices, identities and perspectives with dance
In Focus placeholder

Renowned dance artist Alice Condodina connects students with dance lineage 
The Naked Shakes theater company in full dress for "The Death of Kings"
Photo Credit
Jeff Liang
"The Death of Kings" will play for three nights on campus before traveling to the Verona Shakespeare Fringe Festival

Performance group Naked Shakes takes a royal thrill ride through Shakespeare’s England, and lands on a prestigious stage in Italy
Professor William Davies King with a collection of cracker boxes
Photo Credit
Matt Perko
William Davies King with part of his collection of Cheez-It cracker boxes

Expansive collections of ‘things of no value,’ nearly 10,000 items worth nothing, at heart of new Red Barn art exhibition
Actors in costume in a promotional shot for Last Days of Judas Iscariot
Photo Credit
Jeff Liang
The theater and dance department will stage a production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s 2005 play.

A biblical villain goes on trial in the darkly comic “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot”
Female dancers in costume circled in motion on a darkened stage
Photo Credit
Stephen Sherrill

UCSB Dance Company explores spectrum of human sensibility through the lens of female choreographers
Playwright Jacqueline Lawton sits at a desk holding a pen above a red notebook
Photo Credit
Courtesy photo
Playwright Jacqueline Lawton's “Freedom Hill” will be featured in the LAUNCH PAD Amplify Reading Series Festival.

LAUNCH PAD reading festival brings the Black American experience, family and community stories to center stage

Existing in Movement
Two men and one woman in traditional Russian clothes stand close together with sheepish grins on their faces

Greed Plus Corruption Equals Hilarity
Fullbright Award recipients

Research on the Road
Actors dressed in black posed onstage

Romeo and Juliet, Our Contemporaries
Playwright Idris Goodwin

New Plays Promise Laughs and Substance
Subscribe to Theater and Dance