Founded in 2019, the Commons Festival at Carolina Performing Arts originated as an initiative devoted to supporting artists by fostering local creative community and discourse in and around the Triangle, North Carolina area. Inspired by the idea of a “commons” as “land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community”, an early goal of the Commons Festival was draw on collective resources to strengthen the performance arts ecosystem within the Triangle as a site of community, discussion, and process.

After going virtual with the Digital Commons for the 20/21 season, the Commons Festival returns in-person and anew for the 23/24 season as The Commons: Southern Futures. While reviving the notion of the commons as communal resource and collective benefit, this new season advances the idea of commons as procession. Oxford Classical Dictionary defines a procession as “the ritualized escort of someone or something from one place to another by some group before some audience—an ordinary walk transformed” that impacts “both the urban imaginary, creating community, and urban practices, marking spatial significance”. Therefore, The Commons: Southern Futures will invite participants to step into and move within currents of grief, joy, and memory through a procession of performances, creative and skills-based workshops, and celebrations occurring across sites of historical and cultural relevance throughout the town of Chapel Hill.The Commons: Southern Futures asks, how can we reimagine our collective creative, cultural, political and economic resource not as a static, scarce pool of benefits but as sets of binding relationships to people and to places that move, flow, and flourish? How do we convene, move together and with intention, making possible new and old ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, and being in/with places that deepen our understanding of place and ourselves?

Since its inception, the Commons Festival has promoted local artists, which have traditionally been selected through an open-call process. The current curatorial vision represents an alternative approach to the idea of openness and engagement than that of previous festivals. The Commons: Southern Futures will carry the spirit of openness forward, while also deepening commitments to local Black artists, businesses, and community under the artist direction of an interdisciplinary cohort of six Black, locally-based artists. This cohort – consisting of Sylvester Allen Jr., Johnny Lee Chapman III, Cortland Gilliam, Anthony “Otto” Nelson Jr., Jasmine Powell, and CJ Suitt – has come together as a part of Culture Mill’s residency in Southern Futures at Carolina Performing Arts. This iteration of the Commons represents the continued unfolding of Culture Mill’s creative process of reimagining our collective futures through art and storytelling, grounded in a deep and clear-eyed understanding of place and history.

It is our hope that this call to community will bring new audiences, interlocutors, and critical perspectives into participation with the festival than those reached through conventional open call processes. The Commons: Southern Futures, at last, is an open invitation – to move and be moved with us, to witness and listen with us, to write and think with us, to eat and drink with us, to be and become with us.