Arts & Culture

Thom Wall started out as a busker, juggling in the street. Then he performed around the world with Cirque du Soleil. His next act is all about preserving the art form he loves.

“Homecoming Voices,” a series of four short plays by four celebrated alumni of the Performing Arts Department, will debut April 9.

“Hey God, why did you create COVID-19?” So asks Lucifer in “The Covid Mysteries,” an irreverent take on the 14th century York Mysteries cycle. The new play – the first campus performing arts event for a live audience in more than a year – will take place April 1-4 on Mudd Field.

“Pathways,” the 2021 MFA Student Dance Concert, will begin streaming March 27. The program will feature original choreography by Luewilla Smith-Barnett, Thomas Proctor and Leah Robertson.

Six students from the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences will perform works by Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin, Schumann and Liszt at noon Friday, Feb. 26, as part of the department’s new “Musical Lunch Box” series. Intended to simulate the live concert experience, the performance will be filmed in a single take from the 560 Music Center’s E. Desmond Lee stage.

“Aperture,” the 2020 Washington University Dance Theatre concert, will begin streaming via the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences at 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 18. Typically presented in Edison Theatre, the annual event has been reimagined for this year as a “Dance for the Camera” film festival.

Protest and contagion. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Anti-maskers and contact tracing. In “Remember… That Time Before the Last Time,” students from the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences join forces with Ron Himes and The Black Rep to reflect on the year that has been and to explore their own experiences of social protest, law enforcement, COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Cheryl is charming and vivacious. Cheryl is selfish and unreliable. In her new comedy “Cheryl Robs a Bank,” which will debut this weekend as part of the A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival, Holly Gabelmann explores questions of identity, self-presentation, anti-heroism and who gets to tell the story.

Henry I. Schvey, professor of drama in the Performing Arts Department, reflects on his 30-year friendship with A.E. Hotchner in this remembrance.

As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc with the academic conference schedule, the daily online colloquium “Music Scholarship at a Distance,” co-founded by Washington University’s Paula Harper, has emerged as an important venue for musicologists to continue sharing their work.