The Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department and the Columbia College Chicago Business and Entrepreneurship Department present the third annual Third Mask Festival, running April 26 through May 1, 2021. The festival showcases the thesis projects of students in Columbia College Chicago’s MA/MFA Program in European Devised Performance Practice, a program of the Theatre Department in collaboration with students from the Columbia’s Master of Arts Management program through the Business and Entrepreneurship Department.
Established in 2019, the Third Mask Festival is a platform for new performative works exploring the concepts of the poetic body, movement-based theatre, the personal as performative, and ensemble creation.
Devised performance is a growing movement in modern theatre that centers on ensemble creation of new work through elements of dance, visual art, physical and body-based performance. Rather than beginning with a script, the ensemble collaboratively develops the performance together, evolving it over time. The graduate students in the European Devised Performance Practice program trained specifically in the practice of Jacques Lecoq’s 20th-century European physical theatre during their studies in Berlin and Chicago.