The Department of Theatre and Dance announced a 2011-12 season with an expanded focus on free production events for the community, to further share the making of performance works.

“The department is continuing its commitment to refreshing the classics and exploring innovative performance in our quarterly Granada productions,” said Lynette Hunter, professor and department chair.

“The mix of experimental and traditional work is aimed at our campus and community audiences, which have always shown a hunger for experiencing new ways of doing theatre and dance, generating new conversations about cultural and social values.”

Four Granada artists in residence are due in 2011-12:

• Fall quarter — Michael Barakiva directs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard’s existentialist tragicomedy, in which Hamlet is the springboard into an absurdly comical examination of life’s most fundamental question: How do we know what we know?

Auditions for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are scheduled for Monday and Tuesday (Sept. 26 and 27). Read more.

Barakiva also will direct The Zona Rosa Project, exploring Mexico’s history of combating the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus, and the remarkable evolution of gay rights in the deeply Catholic country. Zona Rosa will be a workshop production from the department's SideShow Lab, with admission free and open to the public.

• Winter quarter — Juliette Carrillo directs The House of Bernarda Alba, the Federico García Lorca drama, completed two months before his murder by the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. Wrought with sexual tension, the play explores themes of repression, passion and conformity, and inspects the effects of men upon women as five daughters are confined to their mother’s house for an eight-year period of mourning.

Auditions for The House of Bernarda Alba are scheduled for the week of Jan. 9. Read more.

• Spring quarter — Hip-hop artist Rennie Harris presents a new work, while video artist Ellen Bromberg collaborates with Professor Della Davidson, a choreographer, in a new work that investigates death and beauty. The choreographies will be presented back-to-back in a production titled Rites of Spring.

Other 2011-12 productions: MFA Thesis Choreographies, the Edge Performance Festival (including The Rocky horror Picture Show) and the 12th annual UC Davis Film Festival.

Free events, besides The Zona Rosa Project, may include interdisciplinary lectures, workshops and symposiums. “Through these events, the Department of Theatre and Dance seeks to foster an artistic dialogue with its audiences on the social, political and human issues that affect us all,” a new release stated.

Read the complete news release, with dates and details for all of the productions listed above.