Cardinal Cross Arts Collective was created to offer a dedicated space for interdisciplinary, first-voice exploration of 21st century Appalachian identity in live performance. The incubator existed to seek out, collaboratively develop, and present new community-based works and performance art that reflected the aesthetic and cultural values of contemporary Appalachian musicians, storytellers, performers, thinkers, digital media makers and designers. the core questioning of this project was:
What would an Appalachian avant-garde look like? That is, what movement, if any, are Appalachian artists at the vanguard of; and what principles do we reject? How does an Appalachian avant-garde draw on and diverge from folk roots?
How has immersive daily technology changed our relationship to Stories? to Community? to Intimacy? How can contemporary artists embody these changes in performance; and how do they affect our perceptions of the Rural places and natural world in which our work is grounded? What role does digital technology play in the art we produce and perform in communities with limited or unequal access to those technologies?
How can mobile, itinerant, or unrooted Appalachian residents and/or former residents connect with their birthright of mountain heritage? Through what new disciplines and perspectives do they view this heritage, and how can their truths be expressed onstage?
In 2018, Amy Brooks and I set out to develop this incubator as a way of questioning and forging conversation about the cultural rift between rural and urban artmakers and communities. While Cardinal Cross was operating, we collaborated with artists such as The TEAM, Crystal Good and Black by God, Ashley Hanson of PlaceBased Productions, The Rural Assembly, Kentucky Rural Urban Exchange, The National Theater of Scotland, and more. In March of 2019, Cardinal Cross Arts Co. partnered with Lincoln Memorial University’s Arts in the Gap program to produce Crossing Roots, a 4-day theater workshop and intercultural exchange in Cumberland Gap, TN, and various central Appalachian cultural sites.
Crossing Roots featured NYC ensemble Theater of the Emerging American Moment (or The TEAM), as well as diverse Appalachian and Southern theater artists and cultural workers, training alongside performers from the National Theatre of Scotland.
The workshop, loosely structured around The TEAM’s “Devising In a Democracy” training, engaged 12 diverse local, regional, and national participants with degrees of performance experience from amateur to professional on a sliding pay scale. Participants explored devised theater-making; exercises which explore memory, trauma, and identity as embodied traits we carry and perform; and intercultural musical, culinary, and storytelling exchange as tools for transforming our rural and urban communities.
The TEAM and NTS actors kicked off the week with an intimate “pub” version of Anything That Gives Off Light at a free public event in LMU’s Sam and Sue Mars Performing Arts Center.
“Amy, Hilarie, and their colleagues have worked closely with the TEAM administration to bring us not only to the community but into the community. As an artist who has trained, taught, and practiced for 20 years in New York, both making work experimentally and as a profession, it has been a real and legitimate spinal-fluid-level turn to accept and self-select that I am responsible for finding pathways toward intimacy with the America I am seeking to make art with (not about). If we're not in honest, equitable, frank conversation in which we are authentically willing to be proved wrong, we risk stealing stories and reconfiguring them until they're so laden with our own kaleidoscopic bias that we've made a violent extraction of invaluable essence, without regard for the practical and spiritual consequence.” Jessica Almasy discusses the challenges of bringing Anything That Gives Off Light to the stage
