News and Events

Co-directed by Sydné Jackson and Tioga Simpson, Pipeline is the first play to be presented by Theatre and Dance’s Dreams Affirmed collective, an alliance of students of color from across the Department. It is also a part of the annual Student Directed Series.

The MFA Dance Thesis Concert will feature new works by third-year MFA students Kate Mackey and Phil Wackerfuss. There will be four online performances: April 16-17, 2021 @ 7:30pm, and April 18, 2021 @ 2pm & 7:30pm.

Trifles, by Susan Glaspell, opens this Friday, April 9, 2021, for the first of four weekend performances. We interviewed student cast members Jessica Snyder and Tim Nunez about the one hundred year old show and their roles within it.

Susan Glaspell’s 1916 feminist murder mystery Trifles is the second production of UB Theatre and Dance’s spring 2021 online season, with online performances from April 9 – 11, 2021. We interviewed show director Dr. Meredith Conti about the one hundred year old play and how it speaks to contemporary audiences.

We’re less than two weeks from the opening of Theatre and Dance’s (THD) spring 2021 virtual season! The first production of the semester is Living in a Topsy Turvy World: The Theatre of Gilbert and Sullivan, guest directed by Gary John La Rosa, with music direction by associate professor and director of music theatre Nathan R. Matthews.

UB Theatre and Dance’s “Shutter Speed: An Evening of Dance on Film” will feature original dance film premieres from a dozen choreographers, comprised of undergraduate students and MFA candidates, plus a new interdisciplinary collaboration with professional choreographer and department chair Anne Burnidge, and poet Eli Clare, one of the 2020-21 UB Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholars, and a team of undergraduate and graduate students.

THD’s traditional spring 2021 musical will be a newly conceived virtual music theatre revue titled “Living in a Topsy Turvy World: The Theatre of Gilbert and Sullivan.”

“Pipeline,” by Dominique Morisseau, first opened off-Broadway in 2017. The groundbreaking play tells the story of a Black inner-city public school teacher named Nya and her son Omari. Nya is dedicated to her pupils, but equally determined to give her son Omari better life opportunities via private schooling. 

The fourth annual MFA Dance Thesis Concert will feature new works by MFA student choreographers Kate Mackey and Phil Wackerfuss, with undergraduate dancers Anna Caison Boyd, Lily Colligan, Alexis Corletta, Zuriel Enoe, Devon Hard, Katy Maddalina, Delia Mandik, Leah Mcnerney, Mia Pierce, Haley Sanders, and Natasha Skidmore, plus collaborator/editor Michael Spears. The faculty supervisor is assistant professor and director of graduate dance, Dr. Ariel Nereson.

THD will present a unique new dance project this spring titled “The Center in Motion: A Virtual Dance Concert,” featuring the talents of 60+ student choreographers, dancers, designers and technicians working in collaboration. The show is co-directed by THD clinical associate dance professor Kerry Ring, design technology theatre professor Lynne Koscielniak, and adjunct dance instructor and UB alumnus Michael Deeb Weaver.

When Mr. Wright, a rural Nebraskan farmer, is found strangled in his bed, his wife is jailed as the main suspect. But as the men charged with solving the case descend on the couple’s farmhouse, the men’s wives begin to find evidence of their own. Susan Glaspell’s one-act drama “Trifles,” which was loosely based on a real murder she covered as a journalist, is frequently listed among the best plays of early twentieth-century American theatre. A feminist whodunit with high stakes, “Trifles” is masterful in its realistic language, crisp pace, and dynamic women characters.