Anomalous Co.

07/22/2026

🇨🇳 Back in China for Year Two!

For the second year in a row, AnomalousCo’s Artistic Director Diana Zhdanova and Dr. Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva are leading actor-creator workshops across China.

This year’s intensive takes place at Penghao Theatre in Beijing and focuses on the Stanislavsky Etude Method taught in dialogue with contemporary devised theatre rooted in U.S. devising traditions.

The workshop is taught in English with simultaneous Mandarin interpretation by filmmaker and theatre-maker Lu Li, a longtime friend and collaborator of AnomalousCo, and the producer of our China workshops.

Looking forward to another inspiring chapter of exchange, collaboration, and theatre.

07/17/2026

"THEATER THAT FLIES IN THE FACE OF FASCISM"

Incredibly grateful to Amelia Parenteau and the team at New York Theatre Review for featuring such warm coverage of AnomalousCo's work, along with an interview with Co-Artistic directors Diana Zhdanova and Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva - about The Rise and the Fall, feminism, q***r aesthetics, and the rich phase of change and growth we find ourselves in.

https://newyorktheatrereview.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-rise-and-fall-amelia-parenteau.html?view=magazine&m=1

07/03/2026

AnomalousCo is thrilled to announce the cast of “The Rise and The Fall” - a major new project in development. 🔥 Our Artistic Directors Kathryn and Diana spent the months of April and June reaching deep into NYC’s artistic community and beyond in search of a perfect team for this punk feminist protest theater extravaganza. What a joy it is to have met some many wonderful, likeminded multidisciplinary artists. We are beyond excited by each every one of the individuals who have come on board for this new adventure - including a few not pictured here. Cheers to a great start and shout out to our marvelous new performers teaming up with the Anomalous ensemble! 🥂

THE RISE AND THE FALL

Written and directed by Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva

Produced by
Diana Zhdanova and Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva

Development Partner - Ylfa Edelstein

Composer - Liam Grandsard

Music Director - Emmanuelle Zagoria

Aerial Choreographer - Janette Hough

Devising Ensemble:
* ⁠Bri Joy
* ⁠Ylfa Edelstein
* Merve Atabek
* ⁠Lesya Verba
* Vivi Vozniak
* Shadae Alexa Makeda Hyde
* Miller Kiesz
* Emmy Brett
* Jianing Zhao
* Wilemina Olivia-Garcia
* Dora Batinović
* Samm Martinez
* Joanne Octave
* Rhiannon Ling
* Sky Pasqual
* ⁠Emmanuelle Zagoria
* Greta Rustani
* ⁠Piotr Siwek
* ⁠Diana Zhdanova

Development of THE RISE AND THE FALL is made possible in part by the generous support of the Nancy Friday Foundation.

Photo:

06/05/2026

05/20/2026

“The Rise and the Fall” is a savage feminist cabaret-songspiel that hijacks Brecht’s “Mahagonny” and detonates it inside the wreckage of late capitalism: a gangster dystopia of oil rigs, whorehouses, boxing rings, climate collapse, and political rot, performed in high-camp drag by a multi-ethnic, immigrant, multilingual ensemble of women and gender-diverse performers. Blending post-punk concert-theatre, burlesque, circus aerials, and staged spectacle, the piece tears into necropolitics, extractionism, misogyny, and authoritarian spectacle with ferocity and q***r excess, transforming Brecht’s critique of capitalism into an incendiary feminist indictment of the systems that consume bodies, desire, dignity, autonomy.

Written and Directed by Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva
Produced by Diana Zhdanova and Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva of AnomalousCo

Established in 2015, AnomalousCo is a q***r-women-led, nearly-all-immigrant, entirely-feminist theatre ensemble, collaboratively creating original works at the intersection of drama, political cabaret, circus arts, immersive performance, and music theatre. Our work has been seen across the US, Europe, and globally online.

05/09/2026

EXCITING NEWS! 🔥

Casting cis women, transmasc, nonbinary, and genderq***r performers whose experience of gender is informed by having been raised and socialized as female.

This production approaches all gender as drag—stylized, performative, camp.

We are especially interested in multilingual, intergenerational, immigrant artists from the global majority and from a range of cultural and diasporic backgrounds.

We are seeking multidisciplinary performers with professional performance experience across the following disciplines:

-actors
-musicians & singers
-dancers & movement theatre artists
-burlesque performers
-aerial artists

APPLY: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwrHoF53si4YBRMbG4KgaL_3HaTnPOElKEywT_VdV8x2xjwQ/viewform?usp=header

05/09/2026

ANOMALOUSCO is Thrilled to announce that we have received a THREE-MONTH - FIFE CoHo - RESIDENCY for development of a major new work (details soon!). We are proud to be a Founding Member of the Bechdel Project’s BECHDEL PROJECT FIFE CoHo (Feminism is for Everybody Cooperative Cohort) Pilot Program (April–June 2026).

04/08/2026

Best Director in Feminist Drama

Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva has won the Jean Dalrymple Award for Best Director in Feminist Drama for “(beyond) Doomsday Scrolling” (2025), presented at the American Theatre of Actors’ 50th Anniversary Gala at the Penn Club in New York.

“This recognition belongs to all of us at AnomalousCo,” Syssoyeva said, honoring the collective devising process behind the production.

We thank Jessica Jennings and American Theatre of Actors - ATA - est. 1976 for that recognition.

More 🔜