Young Appalachian Story Summit

The Young Appalachian Storytelling Summit is a youth-led event that focuses on a critical issue: how youth can use storytelling as a leadership tool to create Appalachia’s future. Summit participants have the opportunity to hear from young, diverse voices within Appalachia; to understand how the arts of storytelling can help them take action in their own communities; and to join a network of like-minded young Appalachians to collaborate with beyond the event.

Hilarie will lead one of two concurrent morning sessions. Her workshop is titled, It’s Your Story: Tell It.

Crossing Roots

In March 2019, Kentucky-based artists Amy Brooks and Hilarie Spangler – aka 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.