Premieres by Romeo Castellucci, Angélica Liddell and More Set for NYU Skirball 2026-2027 Season

NYU Skirball has revealed its 2026-27 season. Multiple productions return to material the culture thinks it already knows: Macbeth, Vivaldi, Ford, Mishima, Medea. They ask who gets to speak inside the canonical frame, what the form was always doing beneath the surface, and what remains alive once reverence is set aside. Much is political: they are concerned with what speech costs, what silence does, and what artists are for under pressure. Three of today’s most incendiary international performance makers—Romeo Castellucci, Angélica Liddell, and Milo Rau—come to NYU Skirball this season, each offering startling observations about human impulses toward violence and asserting dangerous theater’s capacity to confront our own treachery. Together, all 16 extraordinary and challenging works underscore NYU Skirball as a rare American institution where the international avant-garde appears without apology or dilution. As this country’s doors close to internationalism and blinkered worldviews shut down difficult discourse, NYU Skirball remains wide open to the boldest visions from around the world.

Whether depicting acts of vocal or silent protest or total complicity, many works examine the violence of power and the relationship between the individual and the collective. Romeo Castellucci will bring Bros to NYU Skirball March 31-April 3, in which 23 non-actors suited in police uniforms obey commands dictated into earpieces, asking what remains of freedom when thought itself is surrendered. Dead Centre will present Deaf Republic November 12-15. Performed by an ensemble of deaf and hearing actors and adapted from Ilya Kaminsky’s 2019 verse novel by Dead Centre and Sign Language poet Zoë McWhinney, the work stages a town that meets state violence by refusing to hear it. Tom at the Farm will track queer desire under the threat of rural homophobia. Adapted from Michel Marc Bouchard’s play and a major hit in Brazil that has since earned acclaim around the world, it will stop at NYU Skirball prior to its presentation at the Barbican. Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie will use Brecht’s 1947 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee to consider exile, ideology, and the artist under duress in Four Walls and a Roof, October 22-24.

The boundless potential of adaptation and contemporary response to artistic legacies and preexisting works will be on full display across the season. As Mroué and Majdalanie expand from Brecht, Angélica Liddell, who has never until now brought her performances to New York City proper, will take on the controversial figure of Yukio Mishima, considered against her own death obsession in Seppuku, March 18-20. And just as Deaf Republic takes on a 2019 work and Tom at the Farm reimagines a recent play, numerous visionary artists will converge around Garth Greenwell’s celebrated 2016 novel What Belongs to You, bringing it to life in a new opera from David T. Little, directed by choreographer Mark Morris, with tenor Karim Sulayman and performed by Alarm Will Sound under Alan Pierson.

Adaptation will also turn toward storytelling rooted much deeper in the past, catapulting it into arresting present visions. Milo Rau will continue to bring his uncompromising, probing theater to New York following last season’s two works at NYU Skirball, The Pelicot Trial and The Interrogation, and Hate Radio at St. Ann’s Warehouse, with Medea's Children, February 11-13. Colliding a mid-2000s criminal case with the myth of Medea and featuring a cast of child and teenage actors, the work examines how human violence is perceived and inherited. Returning to Skirball following last season’s Exit Above, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker will collaborate with fellow choreographer Radouan Mriziga on Il Cimento dell'Armonia e dell'Inventione, reopening, re-engaging, and making audiences hear and see Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons anew, April 22-24. In Minor Theater’s Pity Whore, Julia Jarcho will return for a world premiere that reconsiders another brutal classic text: John Ford’s 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Manual Cinema, meanwhile, will watch Macbeth from the survivors’ edge of the battlefield in The 4th Witch, combining theater, film, shadow puppetry, and live music, October 15-17.

Just as NYU Skirball offers a vast view of performance-making from around the world, 2026-27 will also be a testament to New York City’s own groundbreaking and inventive artists. Choreographer Faye Driscoll will team with Sweden's Cullberg for flesh chariot, chariot of flesh, a new work merging the bodies of 15 dancers, February 4-6. New York performance group Nature Theater of Oklahoma will bring its chamber opera, Pizza or A Door In The Dark Does Not Dance or The Meaning of Life, to NYU Skirball February 18-20. Composer and NYU Professor Julia Wolfe will return to Anthracite Fields, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015, performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars and Trinity Choir on October 29.

The poetics of repetition will fittingly appear and reappear throughout the season, in which many works return to the loop, the metronome, the sync, the chant, and the ritual gesture, exposing through return states that spectacle often hides. With TOTEM―Void and Height, butoh company Sankai Juku will present the last work by its late founder Ushio Amagatsu, holding stillness and metamorphosis at the same weight. The work will offer New Yorkers an opportunity to witness a company that has worked since its founding in 1975 within Amagatsu’s vision now performing his final artistic statement, November 5-7. In This resting, patience, the opening piece of the season, choreographer Ewa Dziarnowska will set dance to Dionne Warwick’s “What the World Needs Now” on continuous rotation, with the audience seated onstage in a durational performance that recalibrates the physical pace of desire, October 1 & 2. Joris Lacoste’s Nexus de l'adoration, part of L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival, will create a tapestry of devotion with fragments of reverence from various forms of communication, art, and religion across time and culture, November 20-21.

Ewa Dziarnowska: This resting, patience (Poland)

U.S. Premiere
October 1 & 2

A carpet of deep ultramarine blue, a small audience seated onstage within arm's reach of the dancers, and Dionne Warwick's "What the World Needs Now" playing on a loop that never quite resolves. For three hours, Ewa Dziarnowska and Leah Marojević draw together and pull apart, fall into step and out of it, testing and tending in turn. The dance is slow and unafraid of its own duration, building its charge by holding to one thing until it changes.

From one of Europe's most striking younger choreographers, the piece offers something few dance works do: no stage, only proximity. Watching stops being a private act and becomes something reciprocal, something the two dancers can feel taking place. It turns desire, nearness, and the patience intimacy asks into something felt rather than observed.

Tom at the Farm (Brazil)

U.S. Premiere
October 8–10

Tom drives out from the city for his boyfriend's funeral and discovers the family never knew their son was gay. His brother intends to keep it that way. What grows between them is stranger than a standoff: threats that slide into tenderness, a grieving stranger pulled deeper into a family that will not let him leave or let him be known.

Rodrigo Portella stages Michel Marc Bouchard's play on a ring of open earth that comes to stand for a whole country turning back on itself. Winner of the top prizes of the Brazilian stage and having toured across Europe, Canada, and Latin America, the production makes its U.S. premiere at NYU Skirball on its way to London's Barbican.

In Portuguese with English supertitles.

Manual Cinema: The 4th Witch (USA)

NYC Premiere
October 15–17

Cameras roll, hands reach in, a shadow becomes a forest, a scrap of cardboard becomes a castle. You watch the movie get made. On a table full of overhead projectors, paper puppets, and tiny sets, the artists of Manual Cinema build Macbeth shot by shot in front of you, and a finished film assembles itself on the screen above.

The story starts where Shakespeare’s play ends. A girl loses her home and family to war, runs into the woods, and is taken in by three witches who feed her hunger for revenge on the warlord who did it. Shakespeare's tragedy unfolds somewhere offstage; the 4th Witch keeps its eye on the child left in the wreckage, and along the way, a taste for blood passes from one generation to the next. It is strange, handmade, and beautiful.

Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie: Four Walls and a Roof (Lebanon/Germany)

North American Premiere
October 22-24

In 1947, Bertolt Brecht sat before the House Un-American Activities Committee and ran rings around it: playing dumb, parsing translations, denying he had written what he had written, until the chairman thanked him for his cooperation. Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie take that hearing, already a theatrical encounter, and turn it into a piece of theater. What they build from it is funny in a bleak way and pointed in a serious one: a look at how an artist talks his way out of a room, and what it costs him.

Mroué and Majdalanie are Lebanese artists who spent years making theater in Beirut before the pressures of working there drove them to Berlin, and they set that departure alongside Brecht's. His evening in Washington starts to mirror their own exile: two generations of artists weighing what they can say against what it will cost them. What does a person tell the state when it demands an answer, and what do they surrender to keep speaking?

Julia Wolfe's Anthracite Fields (USA)

Bang on a Can All-Stars & Trinity Choir
October 29

Julia Wolfe - music and texts
Jeff Sugg - scenography and projection design

BANG ON A CAN ALL-STARS
Lizzie Burns – bass
Vicky Chow - piano and keyboard
David Cossin - percussion
Arlen Hlusko - cello and voice
Mark Stewart - guitar and voice
Ken Thomson - clarinet and bass clarinet
Andrew Cotton - sound engineer

TRINITY CHOIR
Melissa Attebury, conductor

NYU Professor Julia Wolfe joins the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Trinity Choir for her Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio Anthracite Fields. This evening brings together ambitious music and American history, with commentary from the composer herself.

Anthracite Fields gives voice to the lives, labor, and endurance of Pennsylvania coal miners and their families, drawing on oral histories, speeches, work songs, and local lore. Written for chorus and six instrumentalists, the piece moves between intimacy and monumentality with extraordinary force, transforming industrial history into a vivid musical portrait of community, hardship, and survival.

Sankai Juku: TOTEM ―Void and Height (Japan)

North American Premiere
November 5–7

For nearly fifty years, Ushio Amagatsu shaped Sankai Juku into one of the most singular forces in world dance. TOTEM―Void and Height is his farewell.

A single monolithic form presides over the stage. Beneath it, the company moves in Amagatsu's unmistakable idiom: bodies shaved and chalked white, descending into gravity rather than resisting it, a raised arm taking a full minute to fall. Butoh at its most austere and most transcendent, where stillness and transformation weigh the same.

Completed just before the choreographer's death in 2024, TOTEM―Void and Height stands as a final testament, carried by the seven dancers who spent their lives inside his vision.

Dead Centre: Deaf Republic (Ireland)

Adapted from the book by Ilya Kaminsky
By Dead Centre & Zoë McWhinney
North American Premiere
November 12–15

A gunshot in occupied territory. A soldier shoots a deaf boy in a public square. The next day, the whole town wakes up deaf, refusing to hear the soldiers, teaching one another a sign language of resistance. From that premise, drawn from Ilya Kaminsky's acclaimed poetic narrative, Dublin's two-time Obie Award-winning Dead Centre and Sign Language poet Zoë McWhinney build one of the most striking imports of the season: a fable of occupation in which silence becomes both a hiding place and an act of defiance.

A deaf and hearing ensemble lead a production that folds sign language, puppetry, live cinema, and music into a single charged form, turning quiet itself into something political. Fresh from its acclaimed premiere at London's Royal Court, where it was named as one of The Stage's top shows of 2025, Deaf Republic is theater of rare invention and rare feeling, holding a whole town's refusal to listen up against a world that will not stop shouting.

Deaf Republic was originally co-produced by Dead Centre and Royal Court Theatre. This tour is supported by Culture Ireland.

Joris Lacoste: Nexus de l'adoration (France)

North American Premiere
Part of Crossing the Line 2026
November 20–21

Nine officiants take the stage and begin to praise. They sing, chant, testify, and dance their way through the world's vast repertoire of devotion, gestures, and phrases gathered across faiths, cultures, and contexts and set loose in a single rite. Part concert, part ceremony, part something with no name yet, Joris Lacoste's Nexus de l'adoration asks a live question: with the old certainties gone, what does a fractured age still gather to worship?

Fresh from its premiere at the Festival d'Avignon, the piece is by turns hypnotic, funny, and genuinely strange, a service for no religion in particular that turns collective attention into its true subject. Avignon called it a world where nine officiants sing, dance, and speak; the Festival d'Automne, a ceremony that looks a little like a musical. It closes NYU Skirball's fall with communal attention itself as the medium.

In French and English with English supertitles

Minor Theater: Pity Whore (USA)

World Premiere
Part of the 2027 Under the Radar Festival
January 13-16

Julia Jarcho takes classic Jacobean shocker 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and runs it straight into the present. Annie waits tables at the Cheesecake Factory while her brother’s away at school; their mom is kind of a slut. Annie’s cute, Gio’s sad, and when she goes up to visit him at college, longing and tenderness tip toward the unthinkable and the grotesque, all laced with humor from somewhere unhinged. Jarcho, an Obie winner and one of the most unclassifiable voices in American playwriting, has never once written the expected play. For her NYU Skirball premiere, she teams up with director Kedian Keohan (Rocky Horror Show) to make something sexy, savage, funny, and fully alive: a tragedy that knows precisely where it is going.

Cullberg/Faye Driscoll: flesh chariot, chariot of flesh (Sweden/USA)

North American Premiere
February 4–6

Fifteen bodies collide, merge, tremble, and come apart, a single shifting human mass that never holds one shape for long. flesh chariot, chariot of flesh is **Faye Driscoll'**s largest work yet, made with Sweden's Cullberg company, and it turns a stage full of dancers into one restless, breathing organism.

Driscoll is one of the most singular artists working in dance today, an American iconoclast who pushes movement, theater, and visual art into forms that feel raw, unstable, and intensely alive. In flesh chariot, chariot of flesh, she brings that restless imagination to Cullberg, one of Europe’s most adventurous dance companies, working at a scale her own pieces have never before reached. With this North American premiere, the collision arrives here.

Milo Rau: Medea's Children (Belgium)

North American Premiere
February 11–13

A group of children walks onstage and begins to tell a story adults would rather not hear. Drawing on both a real criminal case and the ancient myth of Medea, the mother who murdered her own children, Milo Rau hands his tragedy to the young. They narrate it, reenact it, and stand as its witnesses, turning one of theater's oldest horrors over in their hands and asking what any of it looks like from where they stand.

Rau is among the most provocative directors alive, and Medea's Children may be his most disarming work: intimate and epic at once, cruel and lucid and unexpectedly tender. It hands the story to the ones who inherit its consequences and lets them decide what to make of it.

In Flemish with English supertitles.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma: Pizza or A Door In The Dark Does Not Dance or The Meaning of Life (USA/Austria)

North American Premiere
February 18–20

A pizza party. A dying guest. A portal to the next world. Nature Theater of Oklahoma returns to NYU Skirball with Pizza, a chamber opera that is miniature in scale and uncompromisingly epic in ambition.

Act one starts innocently, with friends, festivity, and slices going around, until a guest reveals she is dying of a mysterious illness and vanishes from the party. Her presumed death cracks open a doorway to the next world, where the ghosts of the dead, or possibly undead, are still working through unfinished business: scores to settle, questions that demand answers. By turns intimate and cosmic, irreverent and aching. Small opera. Largest things. Pass the parmesan.

Angélica Liddell: Seppuku (Spain/Japan)

North American Premiere
March 18–20

Angélica Liddell almost never performs in the United States, which makes Seppuku a rare and urgent occasion. The Spanish artist steps into charged company with Yukio Mishima, the Japanese writer who pursued beauty and extremity to their outer edge, and finds in him a kindred pursuit of the erotic, the transcendent, and the unbearable.

Made with Japanese collaborators and rooted in Japanese ritual, the piece is less a performance than an ordeal, a ceremony pushed to the far limit of what a body and an audience can hold. Liddell is among the most uncompromising figures in performance anywhere, and Seppuku is her at full force: raw, excessive, exalting, a reckoning with desire, violence, beauty, and transcendence.

In Spanish with English supertitles.

Romeo Castellucci: Bros (Italy)

U.S. Premiere
March 31–April 3

Men pulled from the street, none of them actors, put on police uniforms and agreed to one rule: obey. Commands arrive through hidden earpieces, and they follow them, whatever comes, with no rehearsal and no way to know what the next order will be. Out of that pact, Romeo Castellucci builds Bros, a monumental and genuinely unsettling farce about obedience, force, and how quickly a person hands responsibility to someone else's voice.

The result is hallucinatory, a run of images at once slapstick and terrifying, laced with pop culture, Christian iconography, and the visual language of the nightly news. Castellucci is one of the towering figures of European theater, and this long-overdue U.S. appearance is his art at full scale: overwhelming to look at, impossible to settle, asking where violence begins and who agrees to carry it out.

In Italian and English with English supertitles.

David T. Little / Garth Greenwell / Karim Sulayman / Mark Morris / Alarm Will Sound: What Belongs to You (USA)

NYC Premiere
April 15 & 17

Named Best New Opera of 2025 by the Music Critics Association of North America, David T. Little's What Belongs to You arrives at NYU Skirball as one of the most acclaimed new American operas in years. It begins in a public restroom in Sofia, where an American teacher meets a young hustler named Mitko, and a transaction turns into something neither of them can name or control. Drawn from Garth Greenwell's celebrated debut novel, Little's opera for solo tenor and chamber orchestra follows that entanglement through desire, shame, and the distance between two people who keep returning to each other.

The talent gathered here rarely lands in one room: Grammy-winning tenor Karim Sulayman in a role written for him, the ensemble Alarm Will Sound under Alan Pierson in the pit, and Mark Morris directing. After the rock-driven charge of his recent work, Little turns inward, writing his most searching music yet, a haunting reckoning with loneliness, longing, and how little we finally know ourselves.

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Radouan Mriziga: Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione (Belgium)

NYC Premiere April 22–24

Everyone knows Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Radouan Mriziga make it strange again. In Il Cimento dell'Armonia e dell'Inventione they take the most familiar music in the world, Vivaldi's storms and birdsong and thaw, set to Amandine Beyer and Gli Incogniti's electric recording, and open it out into pattern, geometry, and moving bodies until the score sounds new. Spring arrives, and it is no longer a ringtone but a question about a planet whose seasons no longer hold.

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