SOLD OUT — unsettled: An African American Reflection on the Potawatomi Trail of Death
Between September and November of 1838, a total of 859 indigenous American Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their homeland in Northern Indiana and marched to Eastern Kansas.
Join theater makers Latrelle Bright and Nicole Anderson Cobb from 3 to 6 p.m. Saturday, April 15 in the Allerton Music Barn for “unsettled: An African American Reflection on the Potawatomi Trail of Death,” which recalls the Potawatomi journey through Danville and Monticello, where the Potawatomi camped for several days.
This interactive experience invites the community to reflect on the Potawatomi removal and to learn more about the broader subject Bright and Anderson Cobb researched as Allerton Park in-residence artists: “unsettled/Beyond Land Acknowledgement.”
The program will end with a community meal hosted by Allerton Park & Retreat Center.
There will be a limited number of participants in consideration of our environmental footprint and to provide an in-depth experience for participants.
Register here. Once you register, you will be provided with additional information and reminders for the program day.
About the speakers
Nicole Anderson Cobb is a creative writer for stage and screen, researcher and advocate who examines American institutions (often in crisis) and how people of color have navigated these spaces historically and contemporarily.
Using the lens of examining institutions at an inflection point, Anderson Cobb has written on such moments within institutions as varied as: College campuses, funeral homes, the non-denominational church, museum cultures, early 20th century arts collectives in Charleston, South Carolina, African American sororities, gun violence in America cities and police community relations.
For more information on these works go here. You can also learn more on her Facebook or Instagram pages.
Latrelle Bright’s work ranges from the direction of standard plays and musicals to creating work from scratch with a room full of people to applying theatre techniques and skills in small and large group dialogues to solo performance. I aim to craft spaces and experiences where folks can explore the world, ideas, data and information through the body, sound and text.
Bright is a theatre maker, teacher and arts advocate rooted in the Champaign-Urbana community. For the past 12 years the focus of her work as a freelance artist has been devised theatre – the solo or ensemble creation of new work primarily around the environment and water in particular.
Relevant projects include: matter, a solo performance piece our common home planet earth; Environment Matters, a week-long arts-based civic dialogue project with Figure One Art Gallery focused on earth, air, water and fire, The Water Project, devised with eight local community members; Water and the Common Good, an arts-based civic dialogue with Girl Scouts in Springfield regarding coal ash and just transition; Journey to Water, connecting African Americans with regional water sources, a collaboration with Prairie Rivers Network through a Catalyst Initiative Grant from the Center for Performance and Civic Practice; Stories in the Water, a solo performance piece about African Americans’ historical relationship with water in the U.S. that premiered at the Memphis Fringe Festival and performing as Water in The Nourish Project for WP Theatre in NY.
Latrelle received her MFA in Directing from The University of Memphis, is a TCG Young Leader of Color and an Associate Member of Stage Director’s and Choreographers Society.
You can find out more on her website.
