(Credit: Kathryn Raines)

 Lucy Dhegrae, vocalist and founder of the acclaimed Resonant Bodies Festival, will open The Processing Series on Nov. 23 at National Sawdust, with a program entitled “More Beautiful Than Words Can Tell.”

The four-concert residency will explore the nature of trauma, and how music can help us to recover and process the aftermath of a traumatic experience. The series came out of Dhegrae’s own experience as a survivor of sexual assault, the trauma of which left her unable to sing. 

Dhegrae noted, “Trauma is an experience that evolves within oneself over a lifetime. The Processing Series embraces the ever-morphing relationship of a person to their traumatic memory, and each concert in the series zooms in on one aspect of the experience at a time, acknowledging the incomprehensibility that is the aftermath of trauma, and the infinite vastness of experiences therein.”

Each of the four concerts has a theme and the opening concert on Nov. 23 will focus on the struggle to articulate an experience after trauma. It will feature the world premiere of Osnat Netzer’s “Philomelos,” “Dithyramb” by Jason Eckardt, “Her Disappearance” by Bethany Younge, “Rapana” by Maria Stankova, and “?Corporel” by Vinko Globokar, and “No” by Caleb Burhans.

The Processing Series will continue with additional concerts in January, March and July 2020.