After a long hiatus from performing at UT Dallas, theatre artist and professor Fred Curchack returns to the University Theatre with Resurrection of Freddy Chickan, an outrageous multimedia one-person show, definitely not for kids or for the faint of heart.
Resurrection of Freddy Chickan is a retrospective, featuring excerpts from nine of the 78 theatre pieces written and performed by Curchack throughout his career. When curating the work, Curchack reviewed his original works to find pieces that would meet three criteria.
“Each excerpt should be sufficiently understandable so viewers can relate to what happens without seeing the whole play. Every piece selected would have to be suitable for solo performance. Most importantly, every performance should make the audience go, ‘Oh my God, what am I looking at?'” Curchack said. “Deep down, audiences crave experimental work. People are excited by what they don’t know and like to have their vistas opened up.”
The upcoming Resurrection of Freddy Chickan performances, scheduled for April 10 through 12 and April 17 through 19, will involve various techniques of theatrical magic, such as video interaction with live performances, live music, and special effects. Viewers can expect dramatic, highly political comic texts that relate to notions of being, awareness, and the nature of our existence.
“Theatre tends to be an artistically conservative art form generally. People are used to tame, very conventional kinds of approaches,” Curchack said. “Art is not about that. Art is about shattering fixed conceptions, and particularly misconceptions about reality.”
His wildly eclectic performances have been featured at dozens of international theatre festivals, and he has received special recognition from the Dallas-Fort Worth Theatre Critics Forum for being a “Renaissance theatre artist.”
Curchack, an internationally known theatre legend, has served UT Dallas as a faculty member for just shy of four decades. In 1986, the late Robert W. Corrigan, dean of the School of Arts and Humanities (A&H), hired Curchack as part of a mission to create an international performance program at UT Dallas.
“The idea was to create a cutting-edge program, that would not replicate what a million other schools are doing, and not attempt to create a conventional theatre program,” Curchack said. “My enthusiasm has always been and will be to find ways of going beyond limitations, going beyond preconceptions, going beyond any notion of what you think the art form can do and what you think you can do.”
Resurrection of Freddy Chickan is part of a string of celebrations organized by the Bass School to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of the UT Dallas legacy school A&H.
Since its inception, A&H has undergone several transformations. In July 2022, A&H merged with the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication, ultimately becoming the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. Our school alone brings more than 150 performances and exhibitions to the campus annually.
Curchack gives trigger warnings that his performance contains depictions of and references to: rape, abortion, suicide, decapitation, obscenity, profanity, insanity, racism, sexism, classism, fascism, and extreme irony.