CAP UCLA Reveals 2026-27 Season With Kronos Quartet, Kathleen Hanna, and More

UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) announced its 2026-27 season under the leadership of Executive and Artistic Director Edgar Miramontes featuring performances at UCLA's Nimoy Theater, Royce Hall and the Freud Playhouse. With artists spanning generations, cultures and continents, this season highlights the power of art to foster connection and exchange. Audiences are invited to experience radically imaginative performances across dance, music, film, experimental opera, documentary theater, modern and, multimedia presentations and more that entertain, inspire and challenge, while asking profound and urgent questions about the world we live in today.

“Every season is shaped by the question of what this moment asks of us,” said Edgar Miramontes. “CAP UCLA's 2026–27 season is an attempt at an answer. It is a season about what it means to be alive together, right now, explored with artists whose works connect past and present, and reveal how joy and grief, beauty and struggle, are deeply intertwined. Together, through the art of performance, we are reminded that our shared moments are what unite us and help us imagine where we might go next.”

Contemporary classical music takes center stage this season, featuring some of the most compelling composers and performers of our time. Grammy Award-winning ensemble Kronos Quartet celebrates the 90th birthday of Philip Glass; Wild Up presents a program anchored by a new work by multi-instrumentalist and composer Patrick Shiroishi; Piano Spheres performs German composer Enno Poppe's “Rundfunk”; Grammy-winning cellist Andrew Yee appears on two programs: one with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw featuring music from their new album, Or, The Whale, and with the Rothko String Quartet, performing music from composer inti figgis-vizueta's debut record Music for Transitions; Gloria Cheng and Ralph van Raat perform a program of Boulez, Feldman, Cage and more; Nadia Sirota celebrates her new album, Music For Violas, and Grammy-winning ensemble Roomful of Teeth returns. 

The season showcases a dynamic range of contemporary dance voices including a duo project from two-time Bessie Award-winning choreographer Caleb Teicher and master percussive dancer Nic Gareiss; a double bill from Taiwan-based Cloud Gate Dance Theatre; the return of choreographer and performer Shamel Pitts and UCLA's own Victoria Marks, and London-based Akram Khan Company's final touring production.

CAP UCLA continues to welcome today's most provocative artists who push boundaries and challenge convention. Highlights include the world premiere of the punk operetta Pussy, King of the Pirates, written by Kathy Acker and The Mekons as both a novel and a musical album, starring Kathleen Hanna, Alice Bag, and Adele Bertei; Cabaret artist Meow Meow and her unique brand of subversive and sublime art; theater makers Cosme and Óscar Castro, Tiago Rodrigues, and Mohamed El Khatib whose works shed light on the unseen; a film-opera collaboration by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng harnessing art as a tool for resistance; and a cinematic presentation by the L.A.-based multimedia collective Beck+Col. Globally renowned singer, flautist, and composer Varijashree Venugopal brings her distinctive fusion of South Indian Carnatic traditions and contemporary sounds to the stage in an L.A. premiere performance, Yuka Honda's multimedia performance draws inspiration from farming, Yvette Janine Jackson premieres new music, while Dorian Wood pays tribute to Sinéad O'Connor with a performance of her groundbreaking 1990 album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got.

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