Read the full story, published by Dartmouth Alumni News
This week, Dartmouth performance spaces from the Hood Museum of Art to the Hopkins Center for the Arts will host VoxFest, a collaboration between theater alumni and current students. In its third year, the festival provides an opportunity for theater professionals to workshop pieces in progress and gives students insight into the process of developing a production from start to finish.
Ryan Heywood and Karisa Bruin ’05 perform in In Deserto, part of last year’s VoxFest. (Photo by Rob Strong ’04)
VoxFest is the creation of Vox Theater, a company founded by three Dartmouth alumni working in professional theater. Co-founder Kate Mulley ’05 explains that the company, which provides opportunities for alumni in the theater world to collaborate, was born from discussion at a College holiday party in New York City. Along with Thom Pasculli ’05 and Matthew Cohn ’08, Mulley collaborated with Dartmouth’s Department of Theater to secure space and workshop a play for a week. That experiment was a success, and after several other productions were staged on campus, the group switched in 2013 to a summer festival format.
The pieces performed during VoxFest are in various stages of development and will be presented in formats ranging from bench readings to stagings with music. One piece, The Calamity by Christopher Wall ’92, was partially written at Dartmouth during a writer’s retreat two years ago and will be presented as a staged reading on July 12.
“We’re very excited to have him come back and dig deeper into the piece,” says Mulley. “It’s really important for playwrights to be able to hear their work out loud after spending so much time at a computer, and also to see how it can be staged and how it looks. This is a very theatrical piece and seeing how it actually works on stage will be [Wall’s] primary interest.”
VoxFest performances run July 8-12 and are free and open to the public. See the full schedule of events.
