Performing Arts News Stories Archive

More than 500 incoming students this academic year received a performing arts scholarship, which were created to enable musicians, dancers, actors, and even students with experience in technical theater to continue to pursue their passion for performance while at RIT. To date, some 1,800 students have received scholarships in the five years they have been available.

The inaugural production in the newest building on the RIT campus, AstroDance II: Across the Universe, premieres Dec. 1 to 3, featuring a variety of dance, aerial and circus arts, and augmented reality, which will be presented in the new state-of-the-art Sklarsky Glass Box Theater.

Renovations to NTID’s Department of Performing Arts have concluded, expanding the spaces for more accessibility and multi-purpose capacity. Panara Theater will begin hosting events in the spring.

From hockey games and performing arts presentations to receptions and reunions, RIT’s Brick City Homecoming and Family Weekend has more than 100 events planned from Oct. 13 to 15.

Thy Name is Woman, an immersive and site-specific adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, will be presented by NTID’s Department of Performing Arts and the School of Performing Arts. Shows are 7 p.m. Nov. 9-11 and 2 p.m. Nov. 11-12.

RIT students, faculty, and staff will contribute music, dance, comedy, poetry, photojournalism, and more during the 12th annual Rochester Fringe Festival, which begins Tuesday, Sept. 12, and runs through Sept. 23 in downtown Rochester.

In order to accommodate a surge in students engaged in performing arts, an official groundbreaking was held today for RIT’s new music performance theater, the first major theater project in the Rochester area in decades. The three-story, 40,000-square-foot building will consist of a 750-seat theater primarily to be used for musical theater productions.

Nearly one in six of the more than 3,300 first-year and transfer undergraduates this year received a Performing Arts Scholarship from RIT. That brings the total number of scholars to more than 1,800 in the five years since the program began. The program encourages high school students involved in performing arts to continue their passions at RIT.

Calling all potential cast members, stage managers, designers, dancers, costumers, theater technicians, and more: RIT’s first “Full Season Audition Debut” is set for 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Aug. 30 in Ingle Auditorium.

The 2023-2024 theatrical season featuring a partnership between RIT’s School of Performing Arts and NTID's Department of Performing Arts will include a celebration of Deaf rap and hip hop, an adaptation of Hamlet, a multimedia dance production, and several immersive theatrical performances, among others.

Many of the RIT students who received the first Performing Arts Scholarships four years ago are preparing to take the stage one last time as they graduate this week.

In Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, villagers’ deafness becomes an act of revolt against a totalitarian government, and their use of sign language unites them as a community. These themes, along with others throughout the book, resonate with the contemporary experience of deafness in the United States.

Nearly 70 different RIT student teams and clubs are poised to move into the Student Hall for Exploration and Development (SHED) this summer in preparation for the building’s official opening in the fall semester.

Three RIT students involved in last semester’s production of Everybody brought home awards from the Region II Kennedy Center College Theatre Fest, held Jan. 17-22.

The Department of Performing Arts at RIT/NTID presents a celebration of the career of Director of Dance Thomas Warfield in “Twenty-five Years Through Movement and Space,” Feb. 24-26. The production honors Warfield’s 25 years as a senior lecturer and director of Dance at RIT/NTID and features dances from Warfield’s creative journey.

The 2022 Deaf Play Creators Festival, which celebrates the performances of Deaf playwrights’ films, will be held Friday, Oct. 14, and Friday, Oct. 21, in the Wegmans Theater at RIT MAGIC Spell Studios.

RIT students, faculty, and staff will contribute music, dance, comedy, poetry, photojournalism, and more during the 11th annual Rochester Fringe Festival, which begins Sept. 13 and continues through Sept. 24 in downtown Rochester.

Major renovations this fall at RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf will impact several areas of Lyndon Baines Johnson Hall.

RIT President David Munson welcomed the community for the start of a new academic year with a call to re-energize the campus’s atmosphere to its pre-pandemic level. During his annual President’s Address in Ingle Auditorium this morning, Munson encouraged all RIT faculty, staff, and students to make a new academic year resolution to spend more time face-to-face with one another.

RIT's 2022-2023 theater season will include Everybody, a morality play on death; a production celebrating Thomas Warfield’s 25th anniversary of dance at NTID; a musical on unexpected connections; a play of episodic poems on deafness, violence, and resistance; and a dance production of an extended 1970s progressive rock song.

When audiences head to Cinemark theaters to catch a movie this July, they’ll also see a commercial produced by students from RIT and NTID. The short film, Say Cheese, was awarded the grand prize in the Coca-Cola Refreshing Films (CCRF) program.

For villagers in poet Ilya Kaminsky’s book Deaf Republic, deafness becomes an act of revolt against a totalitarian government. Deaf Republic is the subject of the NEA Big Read project during National Deaf History Month in April 2023, hosted by NTID.

RIT has named Erica Haskell professor and inaugural director of the university’s new School of Performing Arts. Haskell comes to RIT from the University of New Haven. She was selected as school director following a nationwide search and will begin her new role on July 1.

As RIT prepares to open a School of Performing Arts, the new instructors that will come with the school will join an already talented pool of faculty and staff members who have been helping students eager to pursue their passions of music, dance, and acting, for years.

Say Cheese, a pioneering, heartfelt film directed and produced by two RIT students, took home the top prize in the Coca-Cola Refreshing Films program announced during the final night of CinemaCon in Las Vegas late Thursday. The project featured the combined creative efforts of students, faculty, and staff in RIT’s School of Film and Animation and NTID.

After going virtual for 2021, thousands of people came to the RIT campus on Saturday for an in-person Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival, which featured more than 250 exhibits throughout the campus from more than 1,800 students and faculty.

RIT is creating a School of Performing Arts to offer additional creative opportunities for thousands of students who wish to pursue their passions in performance while majoring in a range of other fields. The new school will be housed within RIT’s College of Liberal Arts beginning July 1, and a national search is underway for a director. 

The chance to capture an illuminated image of “Wallace on Ice” drew more than 300 people inside Frank Ritter Ice Arena Saturday night to help make RIT’s first-ever interior Big Shot photograph a resounding success.

NTID’s Department of Performing Arts presents its production of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning musical In The Heights, April 15-17, at Panara Theatre, Lyndon Baines Johnson Hall. Directed by Principle Lecturer Luane Davis Haggerty, NTID’s production features deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing actors performing on stage simultaneously.

It was a memorable and historic Academy Awards for Hollywood and a number of RIT alumni at the 94th Oscars from Los Angeles’ Dolby Theatre.

Film and Animation students Anna McClanahan (BFA) and Gabriel Ponte-Fleary (MFA) are finalists in Coca-Cola's Refreshing Films program. They are producing what is thought to be the program's first finalist film dealing with deaf and hard-of-hearing themes.

RIT/NTID alumnus Daniel Durant ’11 (applied computer technology) is undoubtedly celebrating the latest accolades for the 2021 film CODA. Durant plays a major supporting role in the newly Oscar-nominated comedy-drama, a coming-of-age film.

A variety of RIT performing artists will showcase their talents at IGNITE, organized by NTID's Department of Performing Arts and Dance at RIT. IGNITE will have four shows Feb. 11-13 at Robert F. Panara Theatre in Lyndon Baines Johnson Hall.

RIT students are already benefitting from a new partnership with Garth Fagan Dance. RIT Performing Arts Scholars Program students are taking master classes and students are working on a semester-long arts management capstone project to deliver suggestions for the internationally known dance company to potentially implement.

RIT is well on its way to developing the leading performing arts program in the nation for non-majors, attracting talented and creative students who can continue their passions for music, dance, theater, and other performing arts.  

RIT’s annual Let Freedom Ring event has been rescheduled to take place from 12-1 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 1, in Ingle Auditorium. The event was originally planned to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but was rescheduled when RIT closed due to a powerful winter storm.

Productions at RIT and NTID have been accessible for decades to deaf and hard-of-hearing audience members. But this weekend’s production of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches in Lyndon Baines Johnson Hall will provide even more accessibility for blind and low-vision audience members.

RIT students are already benefitting from a new partnership with Garth Fagan Dance, with RIT Performing Arts Scholarship students taking master classes downtown and students working on a semester-long arts management capstone project to deliver suggestions for the internationally known dance company to potentially implement.

RIT joined the William Warfield Scholarship Fund, The Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester, and the City of Rochester in a collective celebration earlier this week honoring iconic performer and trailblazer William Warfield with a bronze sculpture.

The Department of Performing Arts at NTID has named Jill Bradbury as chairperson and professor. Prior to her role, Bradbury was a member of the English department faculty at Gallaudet University. She also taught at RIT/NTID in both the Department of Liberal Studies and Department of Cultural and Creative Studies.

A venue for Deaf playwrights; an interpretation of a Tony Award-winning musical; performance by talented student dancers; and New Yorkers struggling with relationships and identity during the AIDS crisis are all part of a new collaborative season by NTID’s Performing Arts Department and the College of Liberal Arts.

RIT/NTID student Shaylee Fogelberg has always loved being in the spotlight. And she plans to continue to shine at the prestigious IRT Theater in Greenwich Village after she graduates this spring with a degree in design and imaging technology in NTID’s visual communications studies program.

This year’s recognition of RIT’s Alfred L. Davis Distinguished Public Service Award winners will be a double celebration, as faculty and student recipients from 2020 and 2021 are honored April 13. Luane Davis Haggerty will receive the 2021 Four Presidents Distinguished Public Service Award, and Bhuvish Mehta will receive the 2021 Bruce R. James ’64 Distinguished Public Service Award. Thomas Warfield was awarded the 2020 Four Presidents Distinguished Public Service Award, and Çlirim Sheremeti was awarded the 2020 Bruce R. James ’64 Distinguished Public Service Award.

RIT/NTID presents “She Kills Monsters: Virtual Realms,” for four performances, next Friday through April 18. While the audience will watch virtually, the actors will be performing live in several “actor stations” in Lyndon Baines Johnson Hall and its Robert F. Panara Theatre.

RIT students have the opportunity this spring to learn from professional artists in a series of free virtual workshops with Broadway performers and dancers. The “Broadway Comes to RIT” series will be held on Sundays, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. via Zoom.

RIT and NTID have announced a partnership with Garth Fagan Dance for a “cooperative-creative-connection” to begin Aug. 1.

A story written 100 years ago featuring epitaphs from dozens of deceased individuals is finding life this week as Spoon River Anthology premieres Saturday virtually on YouTube for the fall production from NTID.

The show must go on – even if it means virtually. While performing arts offerings at RIT may look and feel differently from how they normally operate, RIT is committed to making sure they are available in a healthy and safe manner.

I and You, a collaborative production between NTID's Department of Performing Arts and the College of Liberal Arts Theatre Arts Program, has won a 2020 Outstanding Production Ensemble award from the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.

The Alfred Hitchcock classic Dial M for Murder has a new twist as NTID Performing Arts translates the play into American Sign Language, making it accessible to deaf audiences. Deaf and hard-of-hearing audience members can also experience cutting-edge closed-captioning technology using smartglasses developed by Vuzix Corp.

Classic sci-fi; an interpretation of a Tony Award-winning musical; a story of faith and friendship; and New Yorkers struggling with drug abuse, AIDS and homosexuality are all part of a new collaborative season by the NTID Performing Arts program and the College of Liberal Arts.

Fences, the American play written by August Wilson, will be presented next month by the Performing Arts department of RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Shows will run at 7:30 p.m. April 11-13, and 2 p.m. April 14, in Panara Theatre, Lyndon Baines Johnson Hall, on the RIT campus.

Meet three students who were nominated to attend the Kennedy Center American College Theater Regional Festival.

Mystery, murder, dance, a look at deaf life, and the struggle to survive Nazi Germany are all part of a new collaborative season by RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf Performing Arts program and College of Liberal Arts Theater Arts program.

A collection of interpretive dances based on children’s prose and poetry is featured in a new production by NTID’s Performing Arts department.

RIT/NTID alumnus Fred Michael Beam finds connections where others may not. As the coordinator of RIT/NTID’s traveling performance troupe Sunshine 2.0, Beam connects performing arts and science, technology, engineering and math—or STEM—themes, for deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing children and adults around the country.