U of R’s Modlin Center celebrates three decades with two world premieres this season

Wynton Marsalis is winding down his run as the public face of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and one of the last stops on that tour is Richmond. That’s on March 31, 2027, at the Carpenter Center Theatre downtown, and it’s one of the anchors of a season the Modlin Center for the Arts has built around its 30th birthday.

The University of Richmond venue announced its 2026-27 slate of Modlin Arts Presents this week, and the headline isn’t the anniversary itself. It’s what the center is putting its own money behind. Two of the season’s performances are world premieres that Modlin co-commissioned, meaning these pieces exist in part because Richmond helped pay for them.

The bigger of the two lands in April. Marc Bamuthi Joseph has spent three years as artist in residence with Modlin and UR’s Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, and he didn’t spend it in a practice room. He spent it around town, digging into Richmond’s past and its present, and the result is a libretto organized around six ideas: memory, folklore, history, truth, facts, and erasure. If you’ve spent any time in this city, you understand why those six words belong together.

That libretto became Remembering Empathy, an orchestral work pairing Joseph’s spoken-word passages with a score by composer Tamar-kali. The Richmond Symphony performs it under music director Valentina Peleggi on April 9 and 10, 2027. Modlin and the symphony co-commissioned it together.

The other premiere comes in January. The Crossing, a chamber choir with a reputation for taking on work most ensembles won’t touch, brings poor hymnal to campus on January 29 and 30. It’s a 14-piece song cycle by Pulitzer winner David Lang, and while the music has been heard before, this is the first time it gets a full staging, with choreography by Annie-B Parson and Donald Nally conducting.

The season opens back in September with something more theatrical. Patrick Page, who has made a career out of playing men you shouldn’t trust, performs All the Devils are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain on September 3 and 4. Page wrote it and stars in it, working through more than a dozen Shakespearean villains under Simon Godwin’s direction.

What ties all of this together, according to executive director Paul Brohan, is that most of these artists stick around. “The majority of visiting artists commit to an extended residency beyond their performance,” he said, which is how you get a three-year project like Joseph’s instead of a one-night booking.

Tickets are on sale now through the Modlin Center’s website.