Fall 2024 Semester’s KDR schedule is listed below (registration is open for all students); you must register and be confirmed to attend:
The Krannert Dress Rehearsal (KDR) programs provide an opportunity to hear context about a performance from a director or other expert, and then to experience the production. The Krannert Center for the Performing Arts is an educational and performing arts complex located at 500 South Goodwin Street in Urbana. Chancellor’s Scholars are only required to do one KDR in your time at UI, but you may go to more during your time at UI, for a maximum of one per semester.
Students may register for a Krannert Dress Rehearsal on the Events Calendar at https://calendars.illinois.edu/list/4956. You can register now! You must attend the talk and the performance to receive credit for the KDR. If the program is full when you go to register, please email chp@illinois.edu to be placed on a waitlist, and if there is a spot open, you will be notified by the day of the event. (Please sign up for only one KDR in a semester.) If you register and can’t attend, please respond to rockman@illinois.edu when you receive your confirmation before the event.
1) “October Dance” (dance performances) Wednesday, October 9, 2024
Presenter Roxane d’Orleans Juste Presentation: 6:30 – 7:15 p.m., Krannert Room
Performance: begins at 7:30 p.m., Tryon Festival Theatre
October Dance 2024 reactivates dance history, honoring masterworks of the past in a contemporary context. The concert features work by José Limón (staged by Associate Professor Roxane d’Orléans Juste), Merce Cunningham (staged by Associate Professor Paige Cunningham Caldarella), as well as a new work for the first-year dance majors that will unpack “The Big Four” founders of modern dance (choreographed by Teaching Assistant Professor Rachel Rizzuto). Undergraduate senior Tessa Olson makes a mainstage debut with a work diving into the history, context, and techniques of “moshing” or “slam-dancing” with a live punk band, offering an expansive update on the dance “canon.”
2) “Orlando” (based on Virginia Wolfe novel) Thursday, October 31, 2024
Playwright Sara Ruhl Presentation: 6:30 – 7:15 p.m., Krannert Room
Director Kim McKean Performance: begins at 7:30 p.m., Studio Theatre Dramaturg M. Landon
The young Elizabethan courtier Orlando, frustrated with a dull life at court, wanders the world in search of a muse. However, when he unexpectedly awakens as a woman at the turn of the 18th century, Orlando must reevaluate who she is in relation to the world’s changing understanding of gender. Called the “longest and most charming love letter in history,” Virginia Woolf’s magical novel, dedicated to her lover Vita Sackville-West and poetically adapted by Sarah Ruhl for the stage, embarks on a wildly theatrical and imaginative journey of self-discovery through 400 years of history.
3) “Oklahoma!” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) Monday, November 11, 2024
Stage Director Sarah Wigley Presentation: 6:30 – 7:15 p.m., Krannert Room
Musical Director Michael Tilley Performance: begins at 7:30 p.m., Tryon Festival Theatre
Dramaturg Jeffrey Magee
Choreographer Whitney Havice
Oklahoma!, the first musical written by the duo Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, opened on Broadway in March 1943, ran for a then-unprecedented 2,212 performances, and earned a special Pulitzer Prize. It later enjoyed an Oscar-winning 1955 film adaptation, five Broadway revivals to 2020, and countless high-school, collegiate, community, regional, and international productions. It tells the story of farm girl Laurey Williams and her courtship by two rival suitors, cowboy Curly McLain and farmhand Jud Fry, in 1906, the moment when so-called Indian Territory stood on the cusp of statehood. Behind the show’s romantic complications—and its memorable musical numbers—stand broader questions of community, belonging, and national identity, and the costs of answering those questions.
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Scholar Adventurer Series (SAS) will be announced within the next couple weeks! There will be at least a dozen SAS programs to choose from, and they run from September through November. Students may sign-up for as many SAS as they’d like in a semester, but please respond if *not* able to attend when sent confirmation a few days before each program.
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