Music And Theater Arts (MTA) Articles

Playwright and MIT Senior Lecturer Ken Urban's The Immortals, recipient of a CAST Fay Chandler Faculty Creativity Grant, is a work in progress by playwright Ken Urban, draws from the strange and troubling case of Henrietta Lacks. Credit Melissa Blackall.

Observations from The Immortals workshop at MIT

Students share their experiences from a workshop with theater professionals Director Logan Vaughn, dramaturg Ignacia Delgado, and actors Heather Alicia Simms, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Naomi Jacobson, and Jordan Geiger came together at MIT to work with Ken Urban, Senior Lecturer … Continued

A mural from The House of Correction AR Mural Project. The project is an ongoing collaboration between The Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department and several groups at MIT including Music and Theater Arts, The Borderline Mural Project, The Educational Justice Institute (TEJI), and Arts at MIT. Credit Leon Yim.

MIT Students Find Rich Rewards in Working on the HOC AR Mural Project

The community project provided a close up of prison life and revealed the power of art to inspire and transform. When MIT freshman Sherry Xiao and MIT junior Helen Read signed up to participate in the House Of Correction Augmented … Continued

Matthew Ritchie at the ICA, where the British-born, New York-based artist had an 18-month residency. Credit: Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe.

An Artist Inquires into the Computational Substrate at MIT

Matthew Ritchie researches technology’s growing scope as CAST visiting artist. Matthew Ritchie is no stranger to the MIT campus. The contemporary artist, who works in installation, performance, painting, drawing, sculpture and sound, created a site-specific installation at the Zesiger Center … Continued

Lisa Dwan’s performance at the Old Vic Theatre of "No’s Knife," a selection of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Texts for Nothing’ (1950-52). Credit: Manuel Harlan.

Breathing New Life into Samuel Beckett

Reserve your ticket to “A Body of Beckett,” part of the MIT Performing series February 21, 2019 / 7pm MIT Theater Building W97, 345 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA Actress-director Lisa Dwan shares her somatic take on the Irish bard as … Continued

Drunk and...soon to be FAMOUS!!! Featuring Shasta Geaux Pop Shot & Edited by Tatiana McCabe.

Shasta Geaux Pop Raises the Roof and Opens the Cultural Floodgates

Reserve your ticket to Line by Line, part of the MIT Performing series February 15, 2019 / 8:00pm MIT Theater Building W97, 345 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA Ayesha Jordan brings her mega-party persona and work-in-progress to MIT Performing When Shasta … Continued

Adrienne Truscott. Credit: Allison Michael Orenstein. © 2018 Adrienne Truscott.

MIT Performing Shifts into High Gear

The season continues, presenting the work of three powerhouse talents.    The inaugural season of MIT Performing—the new presenting platform for contemporary performance—returns for a swift-but-powerful mini-festival, which runs through February. Jay Scheib, professor for Music and Theater Arts at … Continued

Adrienne Truscott’s THIS.

What the Hell is THIS?

Provocateuse Adrienne Truscott brings her wickedly funny new work to MIT. One of the best anecdotes in Adrienne Truscott’s delightedly vulgar, rampantly feminist, genre-shifting solo-show THIS is about a toilet. Specifically, it’s about a toilet in a camper in a … Continued

NERVOUS/SYSTEM by Andrew Schneider and Company: Jamie Roach. Photo by Sham Sthankiya.

Andrew Schneider’s NERVOUS/SYSTEM Boldly Launches the Inaugural Season of MIT Performing

Bringing Andrew Schneider and Company to MIT Albert Einstein once said of his teaching style, “I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” That quote essentially describes how OBIE award-winning performer, … Continued

Jacob Collier's newest album "DJESSE Vol. 1" is the follow up recording to the 2017 double Grammy-winning "In My Room."

A Jazz Wunderkind, A Haitian Pop Star and Spider Webs at MIT Sounding Series

Album Release Celebration: Djesse Volume 1 What do a jazz wunderkind, a Haitian pop star and spider webs all have in common? They’ll all be making appearances throughout the MIT Sounding Series 2018-19 season. The series kicks off with a familiar … Continued

2018 Arts on the Radar. Credit: Heidi Erickson.

Arts on the Radar: hundreds of students kick off a year in the arts at MIT

Fourth annual event hosted by Arts at MIT, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, and MIT Music and Theater Arts Hundreds of students flocked to MIT’s building E15 to kick off a … Continued

Nader Tehrani and Gediminas Urbonas, Liquid Archive, 2011. Photo: Andy Ryan.

Integrating the arts and humanities at MIT, then and now

“In our increasingly complex society, science and technology can no longer be segregated from their human and social consequences. The most difficult and complicated problems confronting our generation are in the field of the humanities and social sciences.” This declaration, … Continued

Audra McDonald in conversation with Martin Marks and MIT students. Credit: HErickson/MIT.

“The Show Business I Know”: Audra McDonald in conversation with Martin Marks and MIT students

Audra McDonald, recipient of the 2018 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT, visited MIT campus on several occasions this spring, meeting with students and faculty. In February, she joined Martin Marks’s class, The Musical, for an intimate exchange … Continued

Sudler Prize Winner Bertrand Stone.

The Louis Sudler Prize

The Louis Sudler Prize is presented annually to a graduating senior who has demonstrated excellence or the highest standards of proficiency in music, theater, painting, sculpture, design, architecture or film. An endowment fund provides a $2,500 award to the honoree. The … Continued

Ini Oguntola. Photo by L. Barry Hetherington. Jacob Collier's MIT concert 2

Student spotlight: Clarinetist Ini Oguntola ’19

When people think of the clarinet, they may conjure images of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Pete Fountain or Sabine Meyer. On Friday, May 11, 2018 however, audiences will be treated to the talents of MIT’s own Ini Oguntola, who will … Continued

MTA Playwrights Lab, 2018. Photo: Sarah Wagner.

MTA Playwrights Lab Gives Young Writers a Professional Experience

On a recent Friday evening, six people gathered around a table in a mostly-empty studio in MIT’s new Theater Arts building on the western edge of campus. In a few hours time, the group—local actors Marge Buckley and Sarah Bedard, … Continued

(Clockwise, from top left) Clarinetists Don Byron, Billy Novick, Eran Egozy and Evan Ziporyn.

The Great Clarinet Summit Shines A Light On An Oft-Overlooked Instrument

The Clarinet The clarinet is not generally considered the most heroic of instruments. In classical music, that honor belongs to the violin. In jazz, it’s the saxophone; in rock, the guitar. But the clarinet, a single reed woodwind that is … Continued

Bat Out of Hell, Directed by Jay Scheib. Credit: Specular.

Q&A: Director Jay Scheib on award-winning rock musical Bat Out of Hell

Jay Scheib, Professor of Theater at MIT, directs Bat Out of Hell, a rock ’n’ roll musical based on Jim Steinman’s eponymous albums made famous by Meat Loaf. First written over forty years ago, Steinman’s dystopian, futuristic adaptation of the … Continued

Marcus Thompson. Credit: Donna Coveney.

A Recital By Violist Marcus Thompson Is A Chance To Reflect On Progress, Both Personal and Political

A Momentous Day April 4, 1968 was a momentous day for Marcus Thompson. That was the day that the young violist made his debut in a recital at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It also turned out to … Continued

MIT Theater Arts: The Next Act

A performing arts building ushers in a new era of theater at the Institute In 1597, when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s lease expired on their theater building in Shoreditch, then still a suburb of the City of London, the company … Continued

Garrett Parrish '17, 2017 Sudler Prize winner. Photo: courtesy of Garrett Parrish.

Garrett Parrish receives the 2017 Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts

Robotics and Jazz “In high school I was always flying to robotics tournaments and then to jazz festivals in the same day,” says Garrett Parrish, the 2017 recipient of the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts. Over time, his engineering … Continued

Guillermo E. Brown. Bee Boy, directed by Charlotte Brathwaite, MIT 2017. Credit: Dekoit Pictures.

Bee Boy uplifts in the face of inequity’s sting

The word Ba, represented by a bee-sign in hieroglyphs, meant ‘soul,’ ‘honey’ and ‘bee’ to Ancient Egyptians. This ancient commingling of our fate with bees isn’t lost on MIT assistant professor of theater arts Charlotte Brathwaite, whose new project Bee … Continued

NoteStream app in use at the Blackstar concert. Photo: Justin Knight.

The concert program gets a digital makeover fit for Bowie

When I was an art student in New York in 1999, David Bowie visited our school and offered to host images of our work on BowieNet, an ISP he had launched the previous year. Glimpsing Bowie was enough to blow … Continued

Bat Out of Hell, Directed by Jay Scheib. Credit: Specular.

Jay Schieb’s Bat Out of Hell

MIT Theater Arts professor Jay Schieb directs Bat Out of Hell, a new multimedia musical, which premiered at the Manchester Opera House in March 2017 and ran in Manchester through April 8, 2017. It moved on to the London Coliseum … Continued

John Harbison. Photo: Tom Artin.

MIT Orchestra Plays Homage to the Mischief And Wit of Haydn and Harbison

The program for this year’s MIT Symphony Orchestra concert can be traced back to the day that John Harbison first encountered the music of Joseph Haydn. “I was a string player as a kid. I played violin, but I wanted … Continued

'Mytho? Lure of Wildness,' 2016. Photo: Paula Court.

Actor-Director-Physicist Adam Strandberg

Adam Strandberg graduated from MIT in 2014 with a degree in physics. While a student, he was in 20 theatrical productions, from David Mamet’s Speed­-the­-Plow to Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He received the Wiesner Student … Continued