Workshop production at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church (Brooklyn), directed by Azure D. Osborne-Lee, May 2019 (photography by Leonardo March, stills from video by Jorge Luna)

One of several tape recordings used in the 2019 production (my grandma talking to her dad)

EXCAVATION / what gets buried

a story-telling project by

E. Wray & collaborators

This multi-medium storytelling project uses my Appalachian heritage and family oral history as an arena for confronting lineages of settler-colonialism in the Americas.

run time

75 minutes

presented at

St. Paul’s Lutheran Church of Williamsburg 
Developmental Workshop Production

May 2019



EXCAVATION spring 2019 workshop created in collaboration with 

Azure D. Osborne Lee (director)

Ali Dineen (music director)

Dominic Bradley (devising ensemble)

Jai Mohan (devising ensemble)

Mariah Plante (devising ensemble)

Alessandra Ruiz (devising ensemble)

Dramaturgy: Marisela Grajeda Gonzalez

Design: Athena Zammit

Stage Management: Chiara Johnson

EXCAVATION previously received developmental support from

Rising Sun Performance Company & Governor’s Island

Laboratorium Artist Residency

September 2018

with the collaboration of 

Marisela Grajeda Gonzalez (dramaturg)

Keelie Sheridan (director) 

C. Bain (guest artist)

Jonathan Maldonado (guest artist)

Leonardo March (guest artist)

Sabra Shelly (guest artist)

and Julian Vargas (guest artist)

and

BAX/Brooklyn Art Exchange

Needing it Program

Spring 2018

with advising from Heather María Ács

about

This project looks at how the stories we tell (and the stories we don’t tell) shape our understandings of ourselves and the world we live in. Working within Appalachian storytelling forms, I unpack how my family has used stories to obscure our roles in the history & persistence of colonization, and to deny culpability. But I also go to these same forms, these same stories, to ask how these traditions could be transformed and used in the service of decolonizing.



I played with several versions of this project over a few years. The full (and final) workshop production was held in a church hall in Brooklyn. I brought the audience in in small groups. The space they entered was set up like a church potluck. The piece begins with me frying corncakes for everyone and telling them stories: stories from my own life, and family stories that were passed to me by my grandmother. As the piece progresses, a second world (largely embodied by the ensemble, using acapella folk song & physical images) rises up from underneath and begins disrupting my stories, or re-contextualizing them. (Progressively, I also participate in this disruption). We contained the piece with folk ritual- using soil, water, food, candles, song, & prayer.