15-16 Season
Lamentation Variation Project
Choreography and performance by UNC students,
curated by Heather Tatreau
Last spring, the Martha Graham Dance Company visited the Carolina campus, bringing with them a suite of contemporary variations on Graham’s landmark 1930 soloLamentation. This harrowing portrayal of grief helped to define modern dance with its unsparing embodiment of raw emotion.
Inspired and informed by this visit, UNC students created their own Lamentation Variations under interdisciplinary faculty guidance, developing these responses to grief through
Dates
Friday, September 25, 2015 at 8:00pm
Saturday, September 26, 2015 at 8:00pm
Location
Gerrard Hall
movement, visual art, and the written word. UNC-Chapel Hill dance faculty member Heather Tatreau curates this series of dances—the first student dance project ever to appear in the Process Series.
And So We Walked
Written and performed by DeLanna Studi, directed by Corey Madden
Cherokee actor and writer DeLanna Studi explores the enduring impact of the Trail of Tears on contemporary communities using research, interviews and her own family’s experience. Along with her father and a documentarian, Studi retraced the steps of her ancestors from their homestead in Murphy, North Carolina to their present home near Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
The Trail of Tears may be a defining moment of Cherokee history, but does it define us as a people? Do we live in the past or do we focus on the future? Studi will spend a month inresidency at UNC-Chapel Hill turning her firsthand research on the Trail into an original dramatic work. Corey Madden directs this intimate yet communal journey of loss and renewal.
Dates
Friday, November 13, 2015 at 8:00pm
Saturday, November 14, 2015 at 8:00pm
Location
Studio 6
Swain Hall
Presented in partnership with the Center for the Study of the American South, the Southern Oral History Program, and the American Indian Center. Over the last year in development, And So We Walked was made possible by ongoing support from the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts.
Mary Domingo
A new play by Anne García Romero
Mary Peabody Mann, widow of education reformer Horace Mann, hopes to carry on his work by translating a book by Domingo Sarmiento, an Argentine intellectual. But as her relationship with the brilliant and attractive Domingo deepens, Mary struggles to make herself heard. She espouses gender equality, but is she ready to stand up to the men in her life?
This play, originally commissioned by Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, is the second in Anne García Romero’s trilogy about her Anglo maternal ancestor and her passion for Latin America. Witty and moving, Mary Domingo brings its historical period to life through excerpts from Mary and Domingo’s letters, Domingo’s great work Facundo, or Civilization and Barbarism, and the poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Presented in partnership with the Teatro Latina/o Series and the Program in Latina/o Studies.
Dates
Friday, February 26, 2016 at 8:00pm
Saturday, February 27, 2016 at 8:00pm
Location
Studio 6
Swain Hall
The Lowest Form of Poetry
Music by MW Due (Lee Weisert and Matthew McClure) and dance by COMPANY (Justin Tornow)
Starting from the pioneering work of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, COMPANY (choreographer Justin Tornow) and MW duo (saxophonist Matthew McClure and composer/sound artist Lee Weisert) explore the space between clarity and abstraction in this new performance installation.
Laser beams traverse the space in which dancers perform. By breaking the beams with their bodies, the dancers trigger samples from Cunningham’s text “Space, Time, and Dance.” Syllables,
Dates
Saturday, March 5, 2016 at 8:00pm
Sunday, March 6, 2016 at 8:00pm
Location
Kenan Rehearsal Hall
words, and phrases fuse and detach, and accumulation rather than linear narrative moves the work forward. Within this matrix of movement, light, and music, what leads and what follows, and how do we interpret our experience?
Torn Asunder
Directed by Nikkole Salter; adapted from the book, "Help Me To Find My People" by Heather Andrea Williams
This new play, crafted by Obie Award winning playwright Nikkole Salter and based on the book by former UNC history professor Heather Andrea Williams, chronicles the journey of African Americans from loss to the search for and discovery of their loved ones immediately after Emancipation, a search that still reverberates in African-American families today.
Using contemporary documents—letters, articles, interviews, legal documents, and newspaper advertisements—Salter brings the journey to freedom and family to vivid and visceral life.
Dates
Thursday, April 7, 2016 at 8:00pm
Friday, April 8, 2016 at 8:00pm
Location
Studio 6
Swain Hall
Presented in cooperation with The Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History. A part of Telling Our Stories of Home: A Celebration of African and African Diaspora Women Artists.