17-18 Season
The Black Pioneer Initiative
Co-Sponsored by Arts Everywhere
This year, the Process Series will be a proud sponsor (along with Arts Everywhere) of The Black Pioneer Initiative. This initiative will create a new site-specific installation version of the Black Pioneer Project in Carolina Hall in April. The Black Pioneer Project was first performed in the Process Series in 2015. In this new incarnation, students, professional actors, and a sound designer will create a movable installation performance including an audio collage from the actual Southern Oral History Program’s recordings of the Black Pioneers. Audience members will be led from classroom to classroom past exhibits about Carolina’s first black alumni. It will be produced again for incoming First Years as part of Week of Welcome in August of 2018.
Dates
April, 2018
Location
Carolina Hall
Closer Than They Appear
By Christine Evans
Media Design by Jared Mezzocchi
Directed by Joseph Megel
Closer Than They Appear tells the colliding stories of Michael, an African American veteran undergoing virtual reality therapy for PTSD, and Zaynab, a teenager from Fallujah blogging during the Iraq war. It explores the haunted human lives—both American and Iraqi—that shadow the digital surfaces through which we wage, view, and recover from war. The play blends scripted live performance with projections developed from the animated landscapes of Virtual Iraq, a virtual-reality program based on video-game graphics and developed as a therapy tool for US veterans suffering from PTSD.
Featuring Elisabeth Lewis Corley*, Trevor Johnson, and Smita Misra.
StreetSigns and The Process Series are proud to partner with Playwrights Welcome on this production. Playwrights Welcome is a new program to provide free access to theatre for Dramatists Guild of America Members, developed by Samuel French along with
A Co-Production with
Dates
September 14th – 17th, 2017
Thursday-Saturday at 8:00pm
Sunday at 3:00pm
September 20th – 24th, 2017
Wednesday-Saturday at 8:00pm
Sunday at 3:00pm
September 27th – October 1st, 2017
Wednesday-Saturday at 8:00pm
Sunday at 3:00pm
Location
This project is made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts; the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Orange County Arts Commission; and the North Carolina Humanities Council, a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Funded in part by The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science and Technology Project and supported by a grant from the Paul Green Foundation, Inc. – Serving the Arts and Human Rights since 1982.
* Member of Actors' Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States, appearing under a Special Appearance Contract
Die Winterreise:
A Digital Reinvention
Performed by Marc Callahan, Lee Weisert, and Sabine Gruffat
Process Series Faculty Submission
In a collaborative experiment, digital media artist Sabine Gruffat and composer Lee Weisert will reinvent Franz Schubert’s Die Winterreise during a live performance by baritone Marc Callahan. By sharing the same stage, these artists hope to draw inspiration from one another, giving the audience a new perspective on this iconic song cycle. Using a combination of biosignal sensors and facial recognition software, projected images will come to life over a harrowing, digitalized reinvention of this 19th century music. This performance will be accompanied by a display of Bill Brown’s visual art installation Aura Retrieval Machine.
Dates
Wednesday, November 29th, 2017 at 8:00pm
Friday, December 1st, 2017 at 8:00pm
Location
Studio 6
Swain Hall
Anonymous Ensemble presents
The Future
With design by Eamonn Farrell
The Future is coming. Please say hello and join The Future to share in words, sounds and images. The Future needs to understand you, your frequencies, and your biorhythms. What is music but the beating of your heart and the air from your lungs? The Future needs your features and your informational infrastructures. The Future requests your presence and impressions.
Anonymous Ensemble creates live performance, new media, and unique theatrical events. “We value creating community wherever we are and giving voice and agency to our audiences and collaborators in our explorations of the human condition, our collective storytelling, and our commitment to the limitless possibilities of imagination.”
Dates
Friday, February 16th, 2018 at 5:00pm
Friday, February 16th, 2018 at 8:00pm
Saturday, February 17th, 2018 at 3:00pm
Saturday, February 17th, 2018 at 8:00pm
Location
Studio 6
Swain Hall
Dates
Friday, March 30th at 8:00pm
Saturday, March 31st 2018 at 8:00pm
Location
Studio 6
Swain Hall
*Tickets are free and only available at the door*
Un-becoming Ailey:
Constructing a Creative and Feminist Trans*masculinity
By Daniel B. Coleman Chávez
Chosen Submission, LGBTQI Performance Commission sponsored by the Provost’s Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Life
Un-becoming Ailey is a six-month rigorous durational performance project. Working with his trained *black* dancing body, as a performance artist, Daniel will work through old body memories of injury and forcing left over from his dance career to begin a new phase of "movement." Archiving the process using photography, video and live performance, and poetry, he will transform his body through movement practices modeled after and inspired by male African American dancers of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and explore the creation of spiritual, energetic, and health habits and practices that encourage whole-body wellness as a state of being rather than a physical goal to achieve. Among many questions asked by this work is how can re-defining masculinity in trans*ness also be about generating physical spiritual proximity to black movement traditions?
Making Tracks
A reading series produced in partnership with PlayMakers Repertory Company
A reading series of four new plays that focus on issues of social justice and will be produced in concert with the run of PlayMakers’ production of Leaving Eden by Mike Wiley (presented in the Process Series in May 2017). The series will include an international playwright, a national playwright, a faculty playwright, and a student playwright.
The four plays being presented this year are:
Trial 9 by Jonathan Moises Olivares
Noms De Guerre by Jacqueline Lawton
Eight Nights by Jennifer Maisel
Illegal Helpers by Maxi Obexer, Translation by Neil Blackadder
Dates
Friday, April 13th, 2018 starting at 1:00 pm
Saturday, April 14th, 2018 starting at 5:00 pm
Sunday, April 15th, 2018 starting at 7:00 pm
Location
The Kenan Theatre, Studios 101 and 104
UNC-CH Center for Dramatic Art
Trial 9
By Jonathan Moises Olivares
Directed by Vivienne Benesch
Times: April 13, 1:00pm, April 15, 7:00pm
Is Love Enough?
Inside the world of conversion therapy, same sex attraction is a disease, and “therapists” are determined to find a cure. When they find one, Elijah’s world is turned upside down. He loves Orlando and Orlando loves him, but Trial 9 asks the question: is love enough?
The Performances:
Noms De Guerre
By Jacqueline Lawton
Directed by Kaja Dunn
Times: April 13, 3:00pm, April 15, 7:00pm
When politics become personal, what price must we pay?
Every time Mira’s husband returns home from war, it’s a difficult transition. But this time, as her race for Governor gets underway, they are both thrust into the spotlight, which illuminates longstanding tensions, shifting allegiances and a new secret that threatens to derail her campaign. As the man she knows disappears into a man forever changed by war, she must decide what price she’s willing to pay to stand by him.
Eight Nights
By Jennifer Maisel
Directed by Joseph Megel
Times: April 13, 7:00pm, April 14, 5:00pm
When all you can do is hope.
In a cramped apartment on the Lower East Side, a young refugee woman yearns to start a new life in the United States. As she works to vanquish the past that haunts her, she is accompanied by her father, husband, friends, daughter, and granddaughter. Set in a single apartment and spanning the years 1949 – 2016, Eight Nights tells the story of refugees from the past and present, taking disparate circumstances and laying bare their all too similar horrors. Life is brutal, but they live with the hope that a better future awaits.
Illegal Helpers
By Maxi Obexer, Translated by Neil Blackadder
Directed by Talya Klein
Times: April 14th, 8pm
We call them criminals for one reason: they help people.
They save migrants without legal status from deportation. They provide shelter. They bring them across the border when all other options are exhausted. Some of them have been convicted on several occasions; others risk their profession and status. They come from the middle of society: doctors, judges, social workers, students. But what they do brings them to the brink of the law and sometimes beyond. They take these risks because they must and because they dream of a world where compassion is not a crime. Prize-winning German-Italian playwright Maxi Obexer weaves together documentary interviews in this passionate appeal for human dignity in the face of the refugee crisis threatening to engulf Western Europe.
Kara Walker
reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW
Performed by SLIPPAGE
and Dr. Thomas F. DeFrantz of Duke University
In this unique performance, Thomas F. DeFrantz and SLIPPAGE explore the provocation of Kara Walker’s Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War Annotated with shadowplay, dance and image subtraction technology. Wondering at the place of Black women in the landscape of the Civil War, SLIPPAGE will reverse and review the potent imagery that Walker has created in response to the exhibition of prints on view at the Nasher. How can the physical gestures of dance expand the ways we might look at these visual works of art? How can dance open up interpretation and suggest even more revisionist histories of the African American presence in the visual archive of the Civil War?
Dates
Friday, April 27th, 2018 at 8:00pm
Saturday, April 28th, 2018 at 8:00pm
Location
Studio 6
Swain Hall