New ECU performance series prepares student actors, dancers for career paths

Inaugural Uncharted Series offers nine public performances featuring new plays, dances

Published Sep 21, 2026 by

Jessica VanderKolk

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ECU’s new Uncharted Series offers nine public performances of new plays and dance works during the 2026-27 season.
The series gives theater and dance students experience developing new works, a common part of these professional careers.
Student performers collaborate with playwrights and choreographers to help shape productions before each performance.

East Carolina University senior Chloe Whalen felt fortunate to spend her freshman and sophomore years helping develop the world premiere musical “Wild Heart” from staged reading, to workshop, to full stage production in February 2025.

Allowing students to experience theater and dance productions at the early stages of the development process — sometimes long before they get to full production — is a main goal of the new School of Theatre and Dance (SOTD) Uncharted Series.

Whalen joined the cast of Uncharted’s debut performance, a staged reading of playwright Emily Bohannon’s new play, “Firehawks,” on Sept. 12. She performed the character Rose “Smith” — in quotes because it is the last name she uses after immigrating to the U.S. — and said she is thankful for these experiences while still in college.

A woman sits at a table, gesturing and speaking with college students sitting around the table with her.

Playwright Emily Bohannon works with students during rehearsals for her new play, “Firehawks.” (Photos by Rhett Butler)

“I think it is incredibly important that we keep bringing new works into our future seasons,” she said. “It offers students great opportunities to work with other professionals outside of the ECU SOTD faculty, as well as make important connections.

“It is also beneficial for the students who come to see these intimate performances, as it opens their eyes to new pieces. We, as actors, are always looking for new monologues and new plays to cushion our repertoire, and what better way to do that than to see our peers perform in them?”

The Uncharted Series features nine events in 2026-27, a mix of new play readings and new dance performances. They will take place in the more intimate Archie Burnette Studio Theatre at Messick Theatre Arts Center, with tickets priced at $12 for the public and $7 for students (including fees).

One of SOTD Director Kitt Lavoie’s career focuses is on development of new creative works, and he said he wanted to bring that “huge part of our industry, what it is to be a professional actor and professional dancer” to ECU students. While that process might not be as flashy as main stage or large venue productions, Lavoie said it’s paying work, and it’s what students will experience the most during a successful career.

“Schools don’t train students how to do that,” Lavoie said. “When ‘Hamilton’ came out, that was such a gift. That took years of multiple readings, multiple workshops, off-Broadway production, then a Broadway production for that extraordinary work to make its way to Broadway. And that’s every single play, every single musical that’s produced at any significant level.”

Lavoie referenced a video clip from a 2009 poetry, music and spoken word event at the White House in 2009, where “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda rapped one of the songs from what he called a “concept album” about Alexander Hamilton, six years before the hit musical opened on Broadway.

“A lot of what we want to do with this Uncharted Series is really give students that opportunity to be exposed to and to engage with that process,” Lavoie said. “That’s a process they’re going to be doing out there in the professional world.”

For dance students, that involves the opportunity to value the smaller and entry-level stages they might dance on throughout their careers.

The dance performances on the Uncharted schedule already were happening each year — most are associated with dance students’ capstone course, for which they must create a solo performance and a choreographed group work. As part of Uncharted, they will be more robustly promoted, expanding the “house of love,” as capstone instructor and associate professor of dance John Dixon described the senior dance solos.

“It’s always standing room only because six, seven, eight seniors are performing for their families and friends,” he said. “It’s really the best audience, with love and tears and standing ovations, and the work is always good because they know for four years they’re doing this solo their senior year.”

Sharing the love more broadly with the community speaks to the dance program’s goal of strengthening engagement and community connection. Dixon said offering dance programs in a more intimate setting can be more accessible to audiences who are intimidated by the large productions.

“I think it gives a way in,” Dixon said. “As my mom would say, ‘Take small bites and chew.’ So I love it for that. It’s a way of attracting different people.”

Dixon said dancers have four typical career pathways: teaching, either in studios or schools; concert dance, most often working with small dance companies or in group shows — and most comparable to staged play readings; commercial dance, which often starts on cruise ships or in theme parks; and arts administration, which often starts with an internship.

“There’s not a simple answer,” Dixon said. “That’s why I, as the teacher of that course, really push them to focus on what they’re trying to do. If it’s going into studios, the choreography project is huge. The reality is you’re going to work at different levels, and you have to value that and you have to value these different contexts.

“Senior choreography is almost always in the studio theatre. It’s not that (students) don’t value it, but some say it’s not the same as the main stage. That’s right — it’s not the same; this is what you’re more likely to do.”

‘Firehawks’

During her week on campus ahead of the “Firehawks” performance, Bohannon told students her favorite part of writing is when she gets to be in a room with actors to “make something.” She told many stories about the importance of connections and prevalence of long development processes.

Bohannon wrote the first pages of “Firehawks” during the COVID-19 pandemic, inspired when she came across an article about the real story of young women who set fires at North Carolina reformatory Samarcand Manor while they were incarcerated in 1931. Bohannon read more about Samarcand and the eugenics movement; one of her main sources was the book “Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory” by ECU history professor Karin Zipf.

Bohannon read those first “Firehawks” pages during a sharing session at the Lavoie-founded Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival in 2021. She won the inaugural festival that year with a different new play, “The Romantic Movement.”

When Bohannon finished “Firehawks” in 2024, she brought it back to the festival and Lavoie directed a staged reading. Two years later, Lavoie thought the “knockout of a play” and collaboration with Bohannon would be a great start to Uncharted.

“It’s really a fortuitous, happy convergence of circumstances,” Bohannon said. “I love working with students; I wrote this play for college students. The cast has been super engaged, really excited about the play, asking super smart questions.”

Musical theatre junior Mia O’Brien, who read as Hazel Armstrong, said “Firehawks” was her first staged reading and that she was glad to have the opportunity to both work with Bohannon and learn from her and Lavoie.

“‘Firehawks’ is a special experience to me because it taught me how important stage readings are for theater, and how it gets new plays off the ground to get produced,” O’Brien said. “I am so glad that ECU is bringing new plays and readings into its seasons. Stage readings are important for us and they’re fun to be in as well.”

The Growth of a Show

Lavoie plans to invite other playwrights to campus to engage and collaborate with students as Uncharted proceeds. He hopes they and the dancers and choreographers will engage in talk backs after each performance, sharing with audiences how they create their work.

“I think being able to talk about your work is an important thing,” Lavoie said. “Not everybody’s interested in that, but I think there’s a lot of people who want to know, ‘How do dance pieces become dance pieces?’ ‘How do musicals become musicals?’

“I hope audiences will find it interesting. I hope, over time, we can have audiences follow the growth of a show.”

Dixon said he already sees stress, excitement and nervousness as dance students prepare for the Uncharted performances. He predicts “subtle, but profound” changes to come as students get used to more promotion of their performances.

“I think, over time, it will generate that deeper, cultural sense within our school that the work we’re doing now is what’s getting us the job, not the work we’re trying to get to do,” he said. “The culture of that has been growing for a long time; I think now we have this really nice scaffolding of progression. I think that is important.”

Three more staged play readings are on the inaugural Uncharted schedule, and SOTD students and faculty will read through hundreds of new plays to choose what will fill those slots. Lavoie put out a national call for new works for casts ages 15-25, the range college students can play.

“Hopefully some of these things we do in readings will end up in our seasons,” Lavoie said. “That’s the pipeline because that’s what happens in the world. The other thing I hope will develop is to help us become a resource for the industry. There are not a lot of young people who know how to work on plays and new musicals because people don’t teach that.

“I hope it becomes a part of the school’s identity that we’re a place that does new things.”