This summer, the movie theater is not your only air-conditioned cultural refuge from the heat (though it remains a good one).
Support your local theater company or dance festival with some of the many engaging performing arts events on the docket this June and July throughout the Triangle, featuring both big names from out of town and talents from within our communities. Find five of the INDY’s favorite options below, including highlights from a packed American Dance Festival (ADF) season, which runs May 27 through July 25 in Durham, and two standout local theater productions.
Anastasia | Justice Theater Project | Umstead Park United Church of Christ, Raleigh | June 5-21
Have you heard? There’s a rumor in the Triangle—something about a Romanov daughter who somehow survived the Bolsheviks.
Sadly, the Anastasia conspiracy theory most likely doesn’t have legs. But the beloved 1997 film and more recent stage musical adaptation it inspired sure do, with earworms like “Once upon a December,” “Journey to the Past,” and yes, “A Rumor in St. Petersburg.” Raleigh’s Justice Theater Project mounts the show, which touchingly explores what “home” means and how we find it. Though it doesn’t have the obvious social justice angle that the troupe is known for, it’s likely that Justice Theater Project’s penchant for addressing social issues in insightful ways will come through—maybe just not in the way we expect.
Jesse Factor’s The Marthaodyssey | American Dance Festival | Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham | June 17
Jesse Factor has a bit of a thing for divas. The choreographer and performer’s work often channels, exalts, and excavates larger-than-life women, like in his RELIC, which is set to an old Joan Crawford interview on loop.
But the diva at the center of his latest work, which comes to the American Dance Festival in June, is one with whom he has an especially personal relationship: the seminal choreographer Martha Graham, whose work Factor performed as a member of Graham’s eponymous company and whose distinctive technique always seems to be present in his movement. In The Marthaodyssey, that’s especially true, as Factor plumbs the Graham canon—and some Madonna songs—in a modern dance-meets-drag show extravaganza that’s both reverent and riotous.
My Name Is Rachel Corrie | Burning Coal Theatre Company, Raleigh | June 17
For the past 10 months, Raleigh’s Burning Coal Theatre Company has been hosting monthly readings of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, which is based on the journals and emails of the titular American activist, who was run over and killed by an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer in 2003 while trying to protect a Palestinian neighborhood. June 17 will be your final chance to catch the play, which was written by the late actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katharine Viner.
Though originally conceived as a one-person play, Burning Coal’s series features multi-actor casts drawn from local communities. Past readings have included artistic directors from local theaters, military members, and educators; Corrie’s parents have also attended one of the shows. For the last reading, readers will be, somewhat puzzlingly, agents from a local real estate office. Still, the performance marks the end of what has been both a unique model of community-engaged theater and a captivating telling of an all-too-timely story. Admission is free with a $10 donation, which goes to Doctors Without Borders or other international aid organizations feeding Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Camille A. Brown’s I AM | American Dance Festival | Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham | June 20
With her latest work, I AM, New York City-based choreographer Camille A. Brown is telling us who she is—in all caps. Based on the rest of her visionary oeuvre, and her status as one of our country’s most important contemporary dancemakers, it’d be a good idea to pay attention.
Coming to ADF for two performances on June 20, I AM is an exploration of Black joy, drawing from a multitude of African diasporic dance genres and powered by a vibrant percussive score, performed live. In addition to her work for her own company, which often investigates and celebrates aspects of Black identity and culture, Brown has in recent years become one of Broadway’s most in-demand choreographers, including for the forthcoming revival of Dreamgirls, which she will also direct. But in I AM, we’ll get to see something more personal— and likely, something transformative.
Monica Bill Barnes & Company’s Many Happy Returns | American Dance Festival | Rubenstein Arts Center von der Heyden Studio Theater, Durham | July 7-10
Whether she’s leading a dance tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, physicalizing the stories of This American Life alongside collaborator Ira Glass, or staging a cringey mock office party in finance bro drag, the work of choreographer Monica Bill Barnes tends to be unexpected, funny, and intimate. Her highly narrative works, which are often as based in text as they are in movement, are hard to categorize, but it’s usually safe to expect that the line between audience and performer will blur, the fourth wall will not be a sound structure, and some form of antics will take place.
Her Many Happy Returns, which comes to ADF July 7-10, checks all those boxes in the form of what the company calls “a dance version of a memory play” centered around a woman having a sort of midlife crisis. Barnes, who has a way of moving that can be both deeply emotive and borderline vaudevillian, performs as the woman’s body; Barnes’ longtime collaborator and the show’s writer, Robbie Saenz de Viteri, will be the character’s mind.
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