Enter a vampiric nightclub and dance like the undead as you follow Laura’s seduction by an intoxicating woman who shows her what it would mean to break away from her conservative upbringing and thrive as a creature of the night in this new dance-theatre whirlwind by Next Life Theatre Company.

Performances — PAY WHAT YOU CAN $5-$20 Suggested

Every night Laura goes to bed and dreams of a beautiful woman crawling into her bedroom. When Carmilla arrives on her doorstep after a freak accident, Laura and her Father uncover the truth about the intoxicating stranger.

Enter the vampiric nightclub the “Electric Chapel” and dance like the undead as Laura recounts her story of faith, danger, and discovery in a queer love story like you’ve never seen before.

Carmilla: A Dance with Death is a dance-theatre play based on the novella Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu. This production will be mounted for performance during Philadelphia Fringe Festival 2024 and is the first venture of the Next Life Theatre Company.

This will be a brand new iteration of a dance theatre piece previously workshopped and developed by Amélie Parczany, Brayden Stallman, and Gretchen D’Amato at Muhlenberg College.

Joined by Bethany Qian, this team has formed the new Next Life Theatre Company with the mission of breathing new life into old work.

Carmilla plays with the existing tropes in vampire genre work while highlighting it’s innate tradition of queerness. Through a combination of dance and language this piece seeks to push the boundaries of both the theatrical and concert dance forms.

With their first project Carmilla, Next Life is seeking to tell an old story that frames queerness as predatory in a new way that embraces not only the joy and heartache of authentic queer romance, but to tell it in a way that feels authentic to the queer community.

The existence of queerness is political and in this story the politics and safety of queerness is addressed, celebrated, and looks forward at what new spaces we may develop as a community going forwards.