The Royale, King James, The Wolves | Playmakers | PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill | Sept. 10–Oct. 26
PlayMakers Repertory Company’s fall season helps settle a timely debate. Chapel Hill is no football town—it’s a basketball and women’s soccer town. With Rajiv Joseph’s King James, about the rise of LeBron James and the culture of fandom around him, and Sarah DeLappe’s critically lauded The Wolves, an exhilarating look inside the drama of a high school girl’s soccer team, PlayMakers illuminates two of its hometown’s favorite pastimes in two riveting plays.
Audiences throughout the Triangle will have a special opportunity to see King James: After a short run in Chapel Hill from September 25 through 28, PlayMakers is taking its show on the road, with stops at venues like Motorco Music Hall in Durham, Chatham Public Library, and more.
Preceding King James and The Wolves on the PlayMakers stage is yet another play about sports, though admittedly one that is less endemic to the Triangle: inspired by the life of barrier-breaking boxer Jack Johnson, The Royale by Marco Ramirez follows a boxing champion as he fights for wins both inside and outside of the ring.
Raymonda Variations | Carolina Ballet | Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh | Sept. 11-28
George Balanchine may be best known for his forward-thinking, often tutu-less ballets that forged a new style of American ballet. But the pioneering choreographer still made plenty of ballets that feel more nostalgic than subversive (think: ballet with a capital “B”), and his Raymonda Variations is among the best of them. With a soaring, playful score by Alexander Glazunov, Raymonda Variations is classical ballet at its simplest and most delightful, its nine titular variations in turns tender and thrilling.
Carolina Ballet will tackle the Balanchine classic as part of an ambitious mixed bill, also including artistic director Zalman Raffael’s Book of Contradictions, resident choreographer Amy Hall Garner’s Enrapture, and a world premiere by Ted Seymour.
more from the indy fall arts issue
Blood Earth Water | UNC Process Series | Black Box Theatre in Swain Hall, Chapel Hill | Sept. 19-20
Witnessing a work that’s still in process is like getting a peek behind the curtain. You might leave with a deeper understanding of an artist’s intentions, or glimpse a brilliant moment that eventually ends up on the cutting-room floor, or enjoy a more intimate connection to the work and its maker.
That’s the idea behind UNC’s Process Series, which stages professional presentations of works in progress. The first performance of its season sounds like a particularly rich one for a deeper dive: Aviva Neff’s Blood Earth Water, a solo performance exploring the author’s complex experience of being Black and mixed-race in America through ethnographic research, history, physical theater, and autobiography.
Dambudzo | Duke Arts Presents | The Fruit, Durham | Oct. 2-4
Multihyphenate artist nora chipaumire describes her Dambudzo as an “anti-genre” work. If you’ve never heard that term before, you’re not alone. But the moment you step into one of the expansive worlds chipaumire creates in her intense and enigmatic performances, you’ll understand exactly what she means.
Blending sculpture, sound installation, dance, painting, and more, chipaumire’s immersive Dambudzo (meaning “trouble” in Shona, which is spoken in chipaumire’s native Zimbabwe) confronts legacies of colonialism through a Zimbabwean shabini, described as “an informal bar set up in private homes where citizens gather to evoke the possibilities of resistance and insurrection in the face of political powers.”
NOLI TIMERE | NC State LIVE | Stewart Theatre, Raleigh | Oct. 10-11
The title of choreographer Rebecca Lazier’s latest work, a collaboration with sculptor Janet Echelman, is Latin for “be not afraid.” Though the directive probably refers more to the existential challenges of our world, there is indeed more to fear here (and on the other hand, more to be awed by) than at your average dance performance: the dancing takes place on two of Echelman’s stunning, dynamic net sculptures, suspended 25 feet in the air.
Those sculptures, and the precarious and thrilling ways the dancers navigate them, are meant to represent the fragility and interconnectedness of our lives. In addition to being a dance performance, a sculpture installation, and a feat of engineering, NOLI TIMERE may also be a lesson in survival.
Burnout Paradise | Carolina Performing Arts | Joan H. Gillings ArtSpace at CURRENT, Chapel Hill | Oct. 28-29
Fans of that OK Go music video, this one’s for you. In Burnout Paradise, an interactive performance by experimental Australian theater company Pony Cam, four performers must complete a series of tasks—make a meal, do some paperwork, attempt self-care—all while running (and, of course, dancing) on four treadmills.
The metaphor for modern life may be obvious, but that doesn’t make it any less prescient. And as the Pony Cam artists grapple with their own relationships to burnout and make difficult choices about what to prioritize within the ridiculous game they’ve created, they find both levity and profundity in the messy piles of to-do lists that comprise being human today.
Once on This Island | Theatre Raleigh Arts Center, Raleigh | Nov. 12-23
Mid-November sounds like a good time to be transported to a Caribbean island. Rather than heading to RDU, navigate to Theatre Raleigh, where the company will take on Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s magical and beloved musical, Once on This Island.
Based on the book My Love, My Love by Rosa Guy (which itself is based on The Little Mermaid), Once on This Island follows peasant girl Ti Moune and rich boy Daniel, who fall in love despite the stark class divisions of their island. Don’t worry: things end (slightly) better than they did for those other star-crossed lovers, and there’s lots of enchanting Caribbean melodies, charismatic gods, and contagiously joyful dancing along the way.
The Thanksgiving Play | The Justice Theater Project | Church of the Nativity, Raleigh | Nov. 14-23
If you’ve had the cringeworthy experience of recalling (or seeing photos of) the historically inaccurate Thanksgiving pageants you participated in as a child, allow The Thanksgiving Play to give you a different reason to cringe (at least now you’ll also be suppressing giggles). Written by Native American playwright Larissa FastHorse and fresh off a 2023 Broadway run, The Thanksgiving Play pokes fun at performative wokeness by following a few well-intentioned teachers as they try to create a Thanksgiving play of their own. You guessed it: things go horribly wrong. Raleigh troupe The Justice Theater Project will put on the well-timed production, which is as hilarious as it is brutally biting.
Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce | Duke Arts Presents | Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham | Dec. 4-6
If your holiday viewing appetite is typically filled by The Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol, and the Hallmark Channel, gird your loins. Taylor Mac, the performance artist best
known for the marathon durational work A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, has a different kind of December tradition with Holiday Sauce, a work dedicated to the memory of the Pulitzer Prize finalist’s drag mother, Mother Flawless Sabrina.
Full of Mac’s equally gorgeous and irreverent interpretations of the songs you love and love to hate (plus some clever originals), Holiday Sauce reclaims the holidays from the claws of capitalism and gives them a hearty injection of absurdity and fabulousness.
Aakash Odedra Company’s Samsara | Carolina Performing Arts | Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill | Dec. 6
Fusing styles and cultures is nothing new for choreographer Aakash Odedra, who often employs his training in kathak, bharatanatyam, and Bollywood in his work for his UK-based contemporary dance company. In Samsara, the cross-genre, cross-cultural connections go even further, as Odedra collaborates with (and usually, dances with) Chinese choreographer Hu Shenyuan, who brings his own traditions and stylistic leanings to the piece.
Han Taiwanese dancer Po-Nien Wang will dance Hu’s part when the work, which is based on the Chinese novel Journey to the West, tours to Chapel Hill. In it, the two dancers channel Buddhist philosophy, Chinese mythology, and their own personal histories into an exploration of samsara (meaning the wheel of birth, existence, and rebirth), all through gorgeous, mesmerizing dancing.
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