The Davis Performing Arts Center and Georgetown
The Davis Center introduces a site for interdisciplinary performance exchange for the extended Georgetown community. By engaging the College's liberal arts mission, we develop performance laboratories to explore self, other and the world. Special strengths include the development of new work and socially-engaged theater as well as artistic excellence. We cultivate creative, intellectual, emotional, corporeal, and spiritual growth through our work, honoring the power of performing arts in society and Jesuit traditions, both. Washington DC's international and multicultural communities lead us to feature theater that works to and from diversity, distinctively engaging a range of artists and audiences in creative community.
Collaboration is our defining act: in the rehearsal hall, during performance, and in programming. Every Davis Season will feature Theater Program collaborations within Georgetown's academic community, and beyond. Join us for classics and new works, for musicals and multimedia dance, for play-readings and master-classes.
HIGHLIGHTS
- Development of New Work
- Free Series of Master-classes, Guest Lectures and Talkbacks
- Guest Artist Residencies
- Socially-Engaged Performance
- Theater Program Season, foregrounding Excellence and Ensemble
- Collaborations with Interdisciplinary Programs at Georgetown
- Partnering with International Embassies and DC Schools
- Creative Research Laboratories for Students and Faculty
- Embodied Learning at the Nexus between Theory and Practice
- Open Events for Artistic Teams and General Community
- Seasons that embrace Classics, World Theater, and Experimentation
Look for creative excellence and interdisciplinary exchange in our programming. Since theater is a fundamentally social and interdisciplinary art, the Royden B. Davis, S.J. Performing Arts Center stages and enables collaboration foremost.
We will produce work at all levels of production: open rehearsals, staged readings, workshop productions, full productions. Thereby we will foreground the creative process and social exchange, both, engaging artists and audiences alike in the Davis. We will stage theater as a nexus of the liberal arts, engaging culture and politics, ideas and emotions, spirit and body, text and production, tradition and the immediacy of live performance. From classics to new works, dance to theater, spoken word to multimedia musicals, come to the Davis Performing Arts Center for inspiration, creativity, and outreach.
"Theater speaks through the mind and the body, helping its participants not only to engage with issues mentally but to feel and live those issues on the level of the body."
- Christina Ciocca '05
As home to the Theater Program, the Davis provides learning laboratories in and through performance, understanding theater as both a liberal art and a creative form. Each of our featured Theater Program Productions develops from research to performance, and hosts special events for the creative team and community that critically and artistically frame its distinctive terms. Unlike touring venues, we will host performance that grows from educational commitments foremost, featuring research-to-performance developmental labs. The Davis provides seven classroom laboratories for performance studies, drama, and theater art production, for example. Our scene shop is a nontraditional classroom, distinctively equipped to teach students about the history and future of making theater, as well to engage them in its theory and practice. Additionally, each season we will incorporate curricular links to production, fostering the lively cross fertilitization of creative and scholarly work by our students, faculty, and staff, as they collaborate with each other and the wider community.
