UPDATE: UI Theatre is sorry to announce that the Holly Hughes Gay Marriage Performance Workshop (April 2-5) and the Holly Hughes performance (April 6) have been cancelled due to the artist’s illness. UI Theatre plans to reschedule the workshop and performance during the 2013-2014 season.

The University of Iowa Department of Theatre Arts will present a free, public performance of work from the Holly Hughes Gay Marriage Performance Workshop at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 6, in Theatre B of the UI Theatre Building.

The performance is the culmination of a workshop being held at the UI Tuesday-Friday, April 2-5. During the workshop, Hughes will work with interested students and community members on developing performances around the issue of gay marriage in conjunction with workshopping her own solo piece engaging the issue.

To reserve tickets to the April 6 show, send an email to sm.leighann@gmail.com. Requested tickets will be held until 7 p.m. the night of the show.

Hughes is an internationally acclaimed performance artist and professor of art and design, theater and drama, and women's studies at the University of Michigan. Her specializations include art and experimental theater, feminist humor, animal studies, LGBT studies, performance and social change. She co-leads the new BFA program in Interarts Performance.

Hughes began her work in the 1980s at New York City's WOW Cafe in the Lower East Side, a cooperative art space that gleefully described itself as "a home for wayward girls," or "a refuge for feminists who had been run out of other feminist organizations." At WOW she worked with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the Five Lesbian Brothers. She has performed at a variety of venues including the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center, Yale Rep, New Victory Theatre, numerous colleges, universities, and community based performance spaces.

In 1990, she was propelled into the center of the Culture Wars after the National Endowment for the Arts rescinded funding granted to Hughes and three other artists under pressure from conservative politicians. She is a 2010-11 Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of seven grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as funding from the Jerome Foundation, the MAP Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts.

The Department of Theatre Arts is part of the Division of Performing Arts in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For accommodations at the production, contact the Department of Theatre Arts at 319-335-2700. For a UI arts calendar and details about upcoming events visit the new Arts Iowa website.