The Department of Theatre and Dance announced a 2009-10 season in which audience members are invited to get into the act, as co-directors of Corpo/Ilicito: The Post-Human Society 6.9 and as dining companions in A Matter of Taste, “a performance and food event.”

The new season is set to open with Elephant’s Graveyard, written and directed by Jade Rosina McCutcheon, assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance. The work explores the ways we deal with our elderly, and our fears of old age and dying.

Elephant’s Graveyard is a production of Sideshow Physical Theatre, resident performing company at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts and resident professional company in the Department of Theatre and Dance.

The department is bringing in four Granada artists-in-residence in 2009-10:

• Sara Shelton Mann, writer-choreographer, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, writer-director, presenting a double bill: Mann’s Tribes: the unified field, described as a journey into the past and future, fluctuating between verbal and nonverbal language, exploring the spiritual basis of human origin beyond cultural differences; and Gómez-Peña with Corpo/Ilicito: The Post-Human Society 6.9, exploring a new culture of hope, imagination and faith in the post-Bush era.

• Anna Fenemore, creator-director, A Matter of Taste, an “intimate, immersive and interactive event” during which performers and spectators will eat together while addressing both the subjective and highly individual experience of taste and the social redefining of what might be considered good and bad taste.

• Katya Kamotskaia, director, The Seagull by Anton Chekov (translation by Michail Fraine), a play about faith and love in theater, in life, in yourself.

The season includes a double bill of new dance works by graduating Master of Fine Arts candidate Jess Curtis, presenting an excerpt from Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies, created in collaboration with an international team of multidisciplinary performers and performance artist Gómez-Peña as a dramaturgical collaborator; and Nina Galin, another graduating MFA candidate, presenting Blue Jointedness, a music-dance-theater work that explores different senses of “joint”: point of clear articulation in a body; meeting place; collaboration.

Two graduating MFA candidates are set to direct: Candice Andrews, Some Things Are Private, a docudrama based on Sally Mann’s controversial photographs of the early 1990s; and John Zibell, the annual Director’s Showcase (the work has yet to be announced).

The season also includes these other department mainstays, the THIRDeYE Theatre Festival, Solo Explorations, the Main Stage Dance Festival and the UC Davis Film Festival.

ON STAGE: The 2009-10 season calendar.