An Evening of New Work
Digital Program
Friday 2/11 + Saturday 2/12 at 7:30pm
The 2021-2022 Process Series season continues with a performance featuring four UNC Chapel Hill students. Evening of New Work by Students is a diverse program ranging from dance duets to historically set plays. A graduate student performance by AhDream Smith explores identity, legacy, land ownership, and Black wealth in /up·rooted/. Undergraduate performances include Dear Life Traveler by Annabelle and Rainey Scarborough, which
focuses on the significance of unpredictable loss through movement explorations, Smirit Se by Grace Yannotta is a play that illuminates generational trauma, and Beyond the Roots by Imani Williams manifests as a reflection of the tragedies and triumphs of Summer 2020.
Beyond the Roots
By Imani Williams
Directed by Joseph Megel
Imani Williams is a senior majoring in Communications and minoring in Entrepreneurship. Beyond the Roots was created to reflect and digest the times of Summer 2020. In Beyond the Roots, Williams explores the reality of growing up Black in America through the eyes of a young girl living in the suburbs of Atlanta.
Performers
Imani Williams
Credits
Thank you, Joseph Megel, for directing Beyond the Roots. Thank you to Heather Tatreau and the Process Series for their continued support.
Dear Life Traveler
By Anabelle and Rainey Scarborough
Anabelle Scarborough is a 22-year-old dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, photographer and writer. She is currently pursuing a BA in Media and Journalism with an advertising and Public Relations Focus and a minor in Studio Art at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has also studied at The Martha Graham School and the Lorenzo de' Medici Institute. Her work covers the fashion editorial, dance, and film worlds. She enjoys merging genres, pushing boundaries and exploring mediums.
Rainey Scarborough is an aspiring creative at UNC-Chapel Hill pursuing media and journalism with a concentration in advertising & public relations, studying media production and minoring in studio art. She has a background in dance performance, having performed in Duke University’s November Dances in 2019 and has danced with Modern Extension and C-Style Dance Company at UNC. Rainey has created independent, self-choreography under the direction of Joseph Megel in the UNC performance studies department, as well as created work for Re:Rosas UNC Library Takeover that was performed across UNC campus libraries in 2019. She has also danced and performed with Tobacco Road Dance Productions in Durham, NC, and has worked as a dance administrator, teacher and choreographer in the Triangle area.
Music
-
Satie: 3 Gymnopedies: No 3 Lent et Grave – Erik Satie, Aldo Ciccolini
-
Erupting Light - Hildur Guonadottir
-
Liar - Kelsey Lu
-
Republique - Winter Family
-
And Still They Move - Colin Stetson, Sarah Neufeld
-
Varoeldur - Sigur Ros
-
Fragment II- Library Tapes
-
What Have You Noticed Lately/ Notes On Isolation - Written by Chip Bell and Rainey Scarborough
Credits
Sound Design by Anabelle and Rainey Scarborough
Projection Design by Anabelle and Rainey Scarborough
Danced and Choreographed by Anabelle and Rainey Scarborough
-
“All at once I imagined that day long since past – an early summer morning in the mountains as I knelt at the side of the bed on which my mother lay dying. Not having been able to think of that morning for so long startled me with shame—For I believe that no one, unless foolish or mad, is capable of taking his own life if he has witnessed the end of another person’s good life. Once again I saw my mother dying, watched the sober labor of death on her face, ennobling it. Death appeared harsh yet as strong and as kind as a father who fetches a lost child.”
-
“Now I realized that death is our wise and good brother who knows the right hour and on whom we can depend. I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.”
-
“The world has become lovelier. I am alone and I don't suffer from my loneliness. I don't want life to be anything other than what it is. I am ready to let myself be baked in the sun till I am done. I am eager to ripen. I am ready to die, ready to be born again.”
Wandering: Notes and Sketches – Hermann Hesse (1920)
✳
Dear Life Traveler. You are here. You are alive.
We invite you in to think about how you travel through life. You may not be content yet, you may not be where you want to be, you may not be everything you said you were going to be, but you are a traveling agent, constantly searching for answers and seeking to understand the unknown. The impedance of death inspires your freedom-- a freedom in the sense of living, enhanced by expiration at the forefront of your mind.
Dear Life Traveler is a piece filled with movement. Movement that expresses personal tragedy, set against the backdrop of collective grieving, and a world of change and chaos. During disruptive circumstances when one loses everything and understands nothing, we question how vast and unpredictable nature is, while appreciating how beautiful it is that human connectivity bridges us all. When navigating through a far away hope of floating on into the future, we hope that you gain a sense of freedom, take a moment to look around you and live--really live. Somewhere in darkness, there is light.
✳
We would like to thank everyone involved in seeing this project come to life over the duration of the last two years. Between originally ideating the piece in quarantine during the spring of 2020 in a Digital Media and Live Performance class, to flushing it out into a video project in the fall of 2020 in Advanced Performance Projects, we would like to thank all of our classmates for the wonderful feedback, for our friend’s and family’s words and inspiration and for Joseph Megel and Heather Tatreau for giving us the opportunity to produce our work on UNC’s campus.
Smirit Se
By Grace Yannotta
Co-directed by Joseph Megel
Grace Yannotta is a junior at UNC Chapel Hill studying English and History and is a part of the 2023 Writing For the Screen and Stage cohort. She is co-Editor-in-Chief of Limeaid, an unconventional publication for non-conforming voices, and is a freelance writer and poet, with over fifty publications in the last three years. She won the inaugural Zachary Doss Friends in Letters Memorial Fellowship for her poetry and was nominated for the Best of the Net awards in 2019 for her prose. In her free time, you can find her on WXYC 89.3 FM, hosting as Lady Disdain. She would like to thank her beautiful friends – her family – because she would not have been able to do any of this without them.
Cast
BRANISLAV PAVELSKI: Spencer Ellis
ARA: Cullen Keogh
TEODOR PAVELSKI: Naveed Moeed
ADELINE: Vivian Bunker
CILKA: Jennifer Daly
JENNIFER: Gale Riggs
Smirit Se is a reflexive verb in Czech meaning to come to fruition. In the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Branislav Pavelski has immigrated from the former Czechoslovakia to Iowa on a full-ride scholarship – and realizes that until he firmly grasps spoken English, his life in the States won't properly begin. As he learns to better his speech, Branislav processes the life he left behind, and is forced to reckon with cycles of generational trauma and the implications of his national identity.
/up·rooted/
By AhDream Smith
AhDream Smith is an actor, director, dancer, and visual storyteller who is always exploring new ways and mediums to express herself. She is currently a resident actor with the PlayMakers Repertory Company and set to receive her M.F.A. Acting in May 2022.
Music
"Unspoken Word" by The Soil; Amibent soundscape provided by Epidemic Sound
Credits
My Ancestors; for instilling the strong foundation of knowledge, strength, justice, and prosperity into the fabric of our family so that I might be here today, bold and grounded in doing/sharing this work.
Special thanks to Cousins: Edward Davis, Chris Davis and Cathryn Payne. The Smithwick Family and the Process Series.
This show is dedicated to my great-great-grandfather, John Natus Davis, whose shoulders I stand on and whose legacy I plan to continue.
Process Series and Production Staff
Joseph Megel - Artistic Director
Heather Tatreau - Producer
Will Bosely - Technical Director
Liam Bradford - Assistant Technical Director
Zoe Hiemstra - Board Operator
Kate Stevens - Intern
Marketing - Evan Davison, Alayna Fennell, Claire Walsh
Box Office Manager - Izzy Gianna D’Alo