MRN’s River Days of Action Lunch and Learn
12pm, Thursday, June 17, 2021
Mississippi River Network and beyond
MRN Welcome
What is MRN and 1Mississippi?
Join into River Days of Action
Take Action: Sign the Petition!
Relay of Voices
The basics: a storytelling project based in running the length of the Mississippi River
Radical Listening
Foundational to the project was a radical kind of listening, using the whole body to tap into physicality, movement, and rhythms of everyday life
Story revealed
A brief look into specific stories of Hokan Miller, Frankie Johnson, Angela Chalk, Roger Krieger, Keith Butler, Mel Losh, Fred Leonard, Dr. Leon Tarver, Sandy Hart, Lee Salisbury, Stratton Hall, Louis Geudon, and Albertine Kimble
A Recap and Lookahead
Looking to the work of last year with Zoom Reunions, Alluvium Theatre, and what’s next on tap with Relay Walks
A Final Story
Our first story as our last words to share.
What an honor to participate in this series of 40 events calling people to action around the Mississippi River. Yesterday’s Lunch and Learn, hosted by the Mississippi River Network was an exciting opportunity to reconsider what was most important about our journey down the river now two years ago. But not only what was important about the journey itself, but what remains constant and continuing, what carries on in the work I am doing with the wealth of material we gathered and the continued connections with our river communities—having such an opportunity really does re-energize and refocus the effort that has been something of a struggle during the isolation of the pandemic.
I am the type of person, type of artist, that fuels off of interaction with others, so you can imagine what a charge I got from that experience traveling the river, interacting with groups of new people every day, not to mention physically running the distance to reach those people each day. The physicality of it all! The running, the moving through people’s lives, the listening deeply to every minute facet while also trying to see the larger whole. And yet it’s true that seeing that larger whole has been easier since being off the river. Here now, tucked away in isolation in my studio, even without a sense of energizing focus, I have been able to see the network of the river through the connectivity of communities and landscapes, through the voices overlapping and echoing each other.
The presentation here that we made for MRN just touches on how we get to these connections, through a process of radical listening that leads to the essential element of story. And the idea of these connections is yet another presentation to be made. So stay tuned. Perhaps a series! In all cases, we thank you for your interest and attention and continued support.