RHDT Summer Intensive/Workshop
RIGOROUS PLAY: Cabaret Tools for Tender Performance
with Rosie Herrera and Dito Von Reigerberg
August 9-11 @Lehman Theater
10am-4pm EST
In this workshop, Rosie Herrera and Dito van Reigersberg will unpack the paradox of cabaret: its capacity to mask and reveal, seduce and confront, entertain and unravel. Through voice, movement, and text, participants will explore how spectacle and satire can become tools for excavating truth rather than hiding from it. Emphasis will be placed on performative endurance, timing, the power of persona, and the political stakes of being seen.
Drawing from their respective practices—Rosie’s lush, surreal dance theater that blends sacred and profane, and Dito’s cabaret and experimental performance work—participants will engage cabaret as a space of emotional rigor, risk-taking, and radical permission.
Whether you’re a dancer looking to expand your expressive range, a theater-maker interested in embodiment, or a cabaret artist seeking new choreographic strategies, this workshop offers a vibrant and rigorous container to explore what happens when the stage becomes a space of soft landing—and bold exposure.
Limited capacity so register now! 18 and older welcome!
Workshop Fee: $300
Day Rate: $100
All purchases are non refundable.
Participants are responsible for food, travel and accommodations.
For more info please email Hotandheavymiami@gmail.com
Hot N’ Heavy is possible with the support of Live Arts Miami.
Why This Workshop Matters for Miami-Based Performance Artists
Miami is a city of layers—of spectacle and survival, of glamour and grief. It's a place where the performance of identity is often heightened, politicized, and saturated with heat, history, and hybridity. In this context, Rigorous Play, offers Miami-based artists a rare opportunity to engage with cabaret not just as entertainment, but as a rigorous method for navigating visibility, cultural performance, and vulnerability.
Through the combined perspectives of Rosie Herrera—whose work is deeply rooted in Miami’s spiritual, sensual, and theatrical ecosystem—and Dito van Reigersberg—whose cabaret practice explores persona as a conduit for emotional truth—this workshop gives artists tools to mine their own complexity in ways that resonate with Miami’s particular tempo.
Whether navigating diasporic identity, queer embodiment, or the push/pull of performance in tourist economies, participants will explore how camp, satire, dance, and voice can be wielded as expressive strategies for both deflection and revelation. In a city where art often intersects with spectacle, this workshop offers a crucial space for artists to strip down—not of polish, but of pretense—and rehearse what it means to be seen on their own terms.
ABOUT DITO:
Dito van Reigersberg is a co-founder of Pig Iron Theatre Company. He has performed in almost all of Pig Iron’s productions since its founding, including the OBIE-winning original pieces Hell Meets Henry Halfway and Chekhov Lizardbrain. He also dreamed up Pig Iron’s most recent endeavor, Poor Judge, a dance-theatre cabaret based on the songs of Aimee Mann. In 2022 Dito sang in Heather Christian’s “rapturous” Oratorio for Living Things (Drama Desk, Lortel Awards, NYT Best of 2022). He has also performed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Guthrie, Oberon in Boston, NMAJH, Joe’s Pub, and City Hall. He recently sang as a featured soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nezet Seguin, and released an album of original songs entitled Lashed But Not Leashed.
Click thru the gallery below for more pics of Dito:
