Nigel Semaj, Assistant Professor, Theatre
Professor Semaj will use the 2026 CIRCA Summer Fellowship funds to support a critical phase of international research and artistic training to produce the cracking: a violent double feature, a new creative research project which places their dance-driven adaptation of Macbeth (the serpent under’t, in development since 2024) in conversation with their reimagined Titus Andronicus (10,000 moor, in development since 2018). Together, these works interrogate cycles of violence, surveillance, power, gender, and the body as a site of control and resistance. By staging the two pieces as a unified theatrical event, the cracking becomes both an artistic experiment and a scholarly inquiry into how classical texts can be reactivated through physical theatre, multimedia performance, and contemporary socio-political frameworks.
Nikki Ann Hartman, Associate Professor, Theatre
The 2026 CIRCA Summer Fellowship will support a fully-staged production of the play, Doll Parts…, written and performed by Nikki Ann Hartman, which will have its premiere during a 2026 Summer Artist Residency at The Voxel Theatre, in Baltimore, MD. Doll Parts… is a 90-minute, monologue-based, solo, personal narrative performance piece about memory, remembering, and transitioning as an older woman. The play utilizes a performance style that engages the audience with direct address, making them both scene partners in and an integral part of the emotional intimacy that unfolds throughout the play. In such intimacy and shared space, the play gives voice to the joys, setbacks, and dreams of an aspiring, though clearly targeted, community. As a production, Doll Parts… began in January 2023, when Hartman was years into her own gender transition and was searching for relevant works of theatre to produce that would give voice (theatrically and otherwise) to her own rapidly changing and increasingly unexplainable new world. It was motivated by a deep need to provide an opportunity to explore our connected human ethos, so that together we might contemplate and confront our own political, social, and personal constructs.