TDM Thesis Festival

TDM launches its inaugural Senior Thesis Festival with two weeks of readings and performances in March. Play Reading week, March 6-9 features staged readings of two original plays by TDM seniors. Production week, March 20-25, includes two dance performances and an immersive theater experience performing in rep at Farkas Hall, and a durational performance staged in four locations across campus spanning the full week.

TDM Thesis Festival Play Readings, March 6 - 7

Title TBA
A TDM Senior Thesis Play Reading by Elaine Kim

Ugly Feelings
A TDM Senior Thesis Play Reading by Karina Cowperthwaite
Monday, March 6 at 8pm

Ugly Feelings is an original thesis play that explores the questions of racial belonging that I have never answered and continue to seek out the answers for. What does it mean to belong? How can multiracial identity be informed by the racialization of spaces you occupy? How can identity be projected onto you by yourself versus by others? Enter the abstract world of angst, confusion, and teenage fantasy as two mixed-race Chinese American twins navigate growing up in a world where they’ve never quite felt like they belong.

Mi Niño Bueno
A TDM Senior Thesis Play Reading by Ryan Morillo
Tuesday, March 7 at 8pm

A bilingual play that celebrates the joys and pains of living a life on the edge of in-between. Torn between Spanish and English, Queerness and Heteronormativity, American and Venezuelan, this exploratory piece dives into my personal story as a queer, FGLI Latino battling through life’s struggles alongside those I love most - my family and friends.

TDM Thesis Festival Productions, March 20 - 25

Unbind this book, Unstitch this body
A TDM Senior Thesis Production by Isaac Heller
Each of the four performances that comprise “Unbind this book, Unstitch this body” are an opening: openings in my body, openings in time, and openings across archives. Threading through these openings are questions about how to hold space for and with the past. As people, places, moments, and objects accumulate and come into contact with one another over the course of these performances, they create their own weight, catching at the edges of each opening and gesturing to the kinds of transformations that this touch can allow.  

Performance Dates and Times
Self-Guided Experience
Schlesinger Library
Monday, March 20 - Friday, March 24, 10am - 4pm
This is an asynchronous, self-guided experience that audience members are free to attend when they wish. RSVP in advance to receive the audio track accompanying the experience. Participants can also check in at the Reading Room to receive a link of the audio.

Live Reading of Stone Butch Blues
Widener Stacks, Floor 2 East  (If assistance is needed finding this location, participants can ask for help locating 2 East at the Circulation Desk.)
Wednesday, March 22, 1-5pm
No RSVP required. Harvard ID required. Audience members are free to come and go as they please.
Content Warning: scenes of violence and homophobia

Zine Workshop
Sackler 113
Friday, March 24, 4-5pm
RSVP required.

Final Performance
Leverett Library Theater
Saturday, March 25, 7-8 pm
RSVP required.

H O R I Z O N : The Bodies We Forget
A TDM Senior Thesis Production by Angel Hoyang
A past, present, and future exploration of and alongside the bodies we forget forms a choreographic performance focusing on movement research and improvisation, drawing from José Muñoz's queer futurity theory and the Japanese art form and philosophy of Butoh. Together we pour through a project of process — not an endpoint — which asks the creators and the audience to stretch their perceptions of time, space, memory, and agency.

Performance Dates and Times
Farkas Hall Stage, 12 Holyoke Street, Cambridge, MA
Wednesday, March 22 at 7pm
Friday, March 24 at 9pm
Saturday, March 25 at 1pm

A story from a room with a window overlooking a cemetery
A TDM Senior Thesis Production by Kasia Zarzycka
“What a brilliant idea! In a country without history... change history! Remake it from scratch!—in one fell swoop, by decree… just as the country was created... create it again…” 

Structured as a guided tour around a museum space which quickly overflows with stories it cannot contain, with a chaos of a provincial Chilean high school and nostalgic memories of a Polish grandma and her Little Metal granddaughter, A story from a room with a window overlooking a cemetery creates a polyphonic story about the intertwined public and private history. 

Performance Dates and Times
Farkas Hall Studio, 12 Holyoke Street, Cambridge, MA
Thursday, March 23 at 8pm
Friday, March 24 at 8pm
Saturday, March 25 at 3pm

Falling Together
A Senior Thesis Production in Theater, Dance & Media and Romance Languages and Literatures by Laura Coe
Created in collaboration with Finn Bamber, Juliet Coe, Peter Chang, Karina Halevy, Carlo Hensch, Alyssa Lucas, and Si Chiang Wu, with music by Elmer Martinez
Falling establishes a relationship between body and ground which defines identity in relation. Through their common theme of falling, this project combines the movement languages of breaking and Contact Improvisation, considering this defining nature of limits with the question, What does it mean to fall together? On a larger scale, through the lens of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the project examines collaborative strategies and accountability. 

Performance Dates and Times
Farkas Hall Stage, 12 Holyoke Street, Cambridge, MA
Thursday, March 23 at 7pm
Friday, March 24 at 7pm
Saturday, March 25 at 4pm