Pig Iron Theatre Company

Founded in 1995 as an interdisciplinary ensemble, Pig Iron Theatre Company is dedicated to the creation of new and exuberant performance works that defy easy categorization. Over the course of its lifespan, Pig Iron has created more than two dozen original works and has toured to festivals and venues across the US, Europe, and Asia. Pig Iron trains the next generation of daring physical theater artists through the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training, a venture that received Center funding. A "longtime fascination with the characters that live on the margins of society," as Pig Iron describes it, has led the company to devise Center-supported works including the Obie Award-winning Chekhov Lizardbrain, Welcome to Yuba City, I Promised Myself to Live Faster, and A Period of Animate Existence. In 2018, the company received a Center Project grant to create Superterranean, a design-driven theater work springing from MacArthur Fellow and Tony Award-winner Mimi Lien’s fascination with how architectural form influences human behavior. In 2020, Pig Iron received a Center Project grant to collaborate with filmmaker, writer, and director Josephine Decker on The Path of Pins or The Path of Needles, a devised performance work that will blend theater, installation, cabaret, and visual projection to reveal and celebrate the power of the pregnant body. In 2021, Pig Iron received a Re:imagining Recovery grant to hire its first director of a new digital, film, and interactive initiative to lead the company’s extension into digital content creation, in conjunction with an advisory group focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion.