Playhouse Presents: 2022-2023 Season

Playhouse Presents brings the most extraordinary professional performing artists from across the globe to Pittsburgh. This year, the Playhouse Presents “Shaping the Arts: Black Femme Artists and Creators” will center the incredible work of these creative trailblazers, unite our diverse performance community, and proactively deliver a message of unity and healing.

Special Event

Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science

March 18, 2023 7:00 PM Terri Lyne Carrington’s audacious ensemble tackles subjects of racism, homophobia, gender equality, mass incarceration, and police brutality. Championed in her youth by the likes of Art Blakey, Jack DeJohnette and Buddy Rich, Carrington has risen to become a major instrumental and compositional figure, having collaborated with a who’s-who of jazz royalty, including long-term associations with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Esperanza Spalding.

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Special Event

MALEVO

March 23, 2023 7:00 PM The “South American Sensation” - created by director, choreographer, and dancer Matías Jaime. This thrilling all-male group specializes in Malambo—a traditional Argentine folk dance of great virility and dexterity—and takes it beyond its limits with a modern, avant-garde, and transgressive approach, while still staying true to the cultural foundations of this traditional gaucho artform.

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Special Event

Emma Donovan and the Putbacks

March 25, 2023 7:00 PM Acclaimed Indigenous vocalist Emma Donovan and Melbourne rhythm combo The Putbacks burst on to the Australian scene with their album Dawn in 2014, announcing a new voice in Australian soul music. Emma’s songwriting is optimistic, impassioned, and bruisingly honest, The Putbacks’ music is fluid, live and raw, and the collaboration has won friends and admirers all over the world.

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Special Event

Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower

March 30 - April 2, 2023 Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower is a triumphant, mesmerizing work of rare power and beauty that illuminates deep insights on gender, race, and the future of human civilization. This fully-staged congregational opera brings together over 30 original anthems drawn from 200 years of Black music to recreate Octavia Butler’s sci-fi, Afrofuturist masterpiece live on stage. With music and lyrics by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon, this compelling work gives life to Butler’s acclaimed science fiction novel of the same name.

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Special Event

An Evening with Twyla Tharp

April 23, 2023 7:00 PM Since graduating from Barnard College in 1963, Ms. Tharp has choreographed more than one hundred sixty works, expanding the boundaries of ballet and modern dance by combining different forms of movement – such as jazz, ballet, boxing and inventions of her own making. Join her live and in-person to learn more about her amazing lifetime of achievements in dance and choreography.

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Special Event

Vuyani Dance Theatre’s Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero

April 27 - 28, 2023 Experience South African star Gregory Maqoma’s choreographic genius in Pittsburgh for the first time. Vuyani Dance Theatre performs an innovative, visually stunning work that draws inspiration from the South African author Zakes Mda’s novel Cion, and music from French composer Maurice Ravel’s Boléro.

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