Arts & Culture

“Return,” the 2021 WashU Dance Theatre concert and the Performing Arts Department’s first fully staged dance production in nearly two years, will run in Edison Theatre Dec. 3-5.

In “The Science of Leaving Omaha,” playwright Carter W. Lewis brings sly humor and deep sympathy to a story of young people, stalled lives and the desperation for escape. Commissioned by WashU’s Performing Arts Department, the play will receive its world premiere Nov. 18-21.

Afrobeat, Spanish dance, Ukrainian multi-instrumentalists and contemporary Son jarocho and Afro-Mexican music. Next spring, WashU’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2) and Department of Music will partner with The Sheldon to present the fourth annual Whitaker World Music Series.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present “Portrait, number 1 man (day clean ta sun down),” a two-day performance by artist Sheldon Scott, Nov. 18 and 19. An homage to Scott’s enslaved ancestors, the piece consists of the artist hulling and winnowing rice without break from sunrise to sunset.

Secret military experiments. A television star turned health-care activist. The yearslong battle to remove a Confederate statue in New Orleans. This month, the Film & Media Studies program in Arts & Sciences will screen more than 20 films as part of the 2021 St. Louis International Film Festival.

The Great Artists Series presents intimate recitals with some of the world’s finest classical musicians. The 2022 series will feature soprano Angel Blue; piano duo Kirill Gerstein and Garrick Ohlsson; the Attacca Quartet; and pianist Seong-Jin Cho.

When teenage Dungeon Master Tilly Evans dies in a car wreck, her sister must commence a mythic quest of her own. So begins “She Kills Monsters,” a bittersweet coming-of-age story filled with demon queens, secret tomes and ragtag adventurers battling for lost souls.

Talent agent Samantha Chalk, AB ’08, can find a star in an instant.

Can you ever escape your past? Tennessee Williams spent a lifetime trying. His years in New York, New Orleans and Key West are the stuff of literary legend. But it was St. Louis where Williams lived longest, and St. Louis that shaped him as an artist and a person. So argues Henry I. Schvey in “Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams.”

In “Kent Styles,” junior Zachary Stern explores questions of family, trust and the ghosts we can’t escape. This weekend, the play will receive its world-premiere staged reading as part of WashU’s annual A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival.