Dear Friends, 

Welcome to the 25/26 season at On the Boards. I’m excited to share these eight works that respond to the current moment with a distinct sense of invitation. The projects weave between rage and exuberance, humor and tenderness as a way to call us in.

I can’t be the only one who loves a little genre collapse. This season continues the OtB tradition of the joyful rejection and bending of form. San Cha queers the telenovela into an experimental operatic spectacle. John Jarboe mixes camp, drag, musical theater and gender cannibalism, which by the way, what does your trans journey taste like? Amy O’Neal conjures the feminine through street dance, community, contemporary dance, and ritual. Fauxnique blends drag, dance, performance art, and cultural critique, swimming in the violence and pleasure of visibility and perception.

Artists this season put lineage directly into motion. Aya Ogawa explores failure on an autobiographical journey by playing both their father and their son. Eiko Otake and Wen Hui search bodies for memories shaped by post-war Japan and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Ogemdi Ude is positively obsessed with the majorette form and the current moment for Southern Black femmes. Bebe Miller draws from her curiosity about Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Maurya Kerr is celestial, orbiting intimacy fury, whereas Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters build from their shared history and dance heroes.

And, of course, NWNW will return again to wrap the season, with eight boundary-pushing artists to reflect the questions and provocations of the moment.

It’s a season of visibility and vulnerability. It’s a season of resistance. It’s a season that invites us to stage selfhood on our own terms. 

See you in the lobby,