The UNC Process Series is excited to kick off its 2016 season with two exciting new works. Admission to both is free with a suggested five-dollar donation. Seats can be reserved on the Process Series website.
Mary Domingo, a new play by Anne García Romero, follows the story Mary Peabody Mann, widow of 19th century American education reformer Horace Mann. In the aftermath of her husband’s death, Mary hopes to carry on his work by translating a book by Domingo Sarmiento, a brilliant and attractive intellectual and admirer of Mann’s ideas. As she gets deeper into her relationship with Domingo, Mary struggles to make herself heard. She espouses the ideals of gender equality, but is she ready to stand up to the men in her life? Crackling with wit, Mary Domingo follows one woman’s struggle to find her own voice. This reading is sponsored by the Teatro Latina/o program in the UNC Program of Latina/o Studies.
Performances will be on Feb. 26 and 27 at 8:00 p.m in Studio 6, Swain Hall.
The Lowest Form of Poetry is a new collaborative multimedia dance work by choreographer Justin Tornow, saxophonist Matthew McClure, and composer/sound artist and music assistant professor Lee Weisert that uses interactive laser sensor technology, live electronics, and live musical improvisation to explore how meaning evolves uniquely in music, movement, and language. The pioneering work of Merce Cunningham and John Cage is taken as both an inspirational and literal starting point in the piece. Recordings of Cunningham’s speech are heard throughout the work, appearing in varying degrees of sequential logic and comprehensibility. The degree to which both physical and linguistic meaning can arise is controlled in real-time by the dancers, according to a complex and meticulous choreography.
“In this collaborative work, digital sensor technology enables us to integrate the various art forms (music, dance, poetry) in a very direct way—events in one medium can trigger events in another medium,” says Weisert, co-creator of Lowest Form of Poetry. “The piece is an exploration of these new possibilities, as well as a reflection on Merce Cunningham’s text, which unfolds gradually throughout the work.”
Performances will be on March 5 and 6 at 8:00 p.m. at Kenan Rehearsal Hall.
“Mary Domingo represents the eighth year that the Process Series has featured a work co-sponsored by Teatro Latina/o Series and the Program in Latina/o Studies,” says Joseph Megel, Artistic Director of the Process Series. “The Lowest Form of Poetry represents the third year that we are featuring new work by UNC’s diverse and talented faculty. These collaborations and connections deepen and enrich our artists and the community alike, as we explore what is possible in performance, interrogating multiple disciplines, multiple cultures and the diverse reach of the arts.”
Dedicated to the development of new and significant works in the performing arts, The Process Series features professionally mounted, developmental presentations of new works in progress. The mission of the Series is to illuminate the ways in which artistic ideas take form, to examine the creative process, to offer audiences the opportunity to follow artists and performers as they explore and discover and by so doing to enrich the development process for artists with the ultimate goal of better art and a closer relationship between artists and audiences.
