Special Places Project & Stories of Resilience
A video by Morrison Visuals and Chris McCreary about the creation of the performance.
This summer’s “Stories of Resilience: Grundy Stories from Past and Present” was supported by South Cumberland Community Fund, through its Special Places Project fund. Originating in 2022, in conjunction with the Fund’s 10th Anniversary, the program supports placemaking work on the Cumberland Plateau. This year’s placemaking project was an ambitious and moving program spearheaded by two Sewanee professors, Katy Morgan and Sarah Hamilton, in partnership with Students Preventing Addiction and Raising Knowledge (SPARK), a program of the Grundy Safe Communities Coalition.
In May, a group of high school students and some college researchers from Morgan’s Civic Action Lab took over the second floor of the Littell-Partin Center to conduct a series of interviews of people who had attended Grundy County High School in its Tracy City location. It was conceived as the “locker project,” capturing stories of people who had attended the high school and then displaying excerpts from those stories on lockers that remain in the building. Members of the community, such as Grundy Mayor Michael Brady, and Jana Barrett, a retired high school teacher and Altamont city mayor, sat in front of the camera and in the spotlight to tell their stories. Their work yielded hours of stories, captured on video. Morgan then built posters to fit on the lockers, now a permanent exhibit in the building.
Then in June and July, SPARK students and some of their classmates began creating a theater presentation that responded to the interviews. Some of the students had participated in the interview process, so they had heard them first hand. Working with Hamilton, a theater professor at Sewanee, they created and performed a theater piece that, according to Hamilton, “explored growing up, staying, leaving, returning, and finding belonging in Grundy County.”
For these high school students, a key goal was to provide gentle pushback against a resistance to change expressed in some of the interviews. Abby Parker, who served as a Thornton Wilder-esque narrator put it this way: “I hope they take away that, yes, there are a lot of issues, and, yes, we are a flawed place, and have been before, but there are a lot of things to be proud of here and we can be proud of the good things and recognize the bad things at the same time. And, yes, we can make change if we want to.”
The results were inspiring. The performance was presented as a tour, with small groups being led through the exhibit and then to the second floor of the Littell-Partin Center (more accessible now thanks to a brand new elevator) for the student’s theater performance. The event was capped at 150 audience members and was at capacity. And they left the performance moved. An exit survey revealed that nearly 80% of the audience members felt more connected to the special place of the South Cumberland Plateau after seeing the exhibit and performance.
South Cumberland Community Fund was a proud sponsor of this moving and important discussion along with 2892 Miles to Go (a National Geographic project), Sewanee’s Office of Civic Engagement, Grundy Safe Communities Coalition, and the Tennessee Arts Commission.
Comments