Cry You One

Created by award-winning theater ensembles ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizarro, Cry You One is an unforgettable look at the interconnectedness of land and culture in Louisiana. Part song, part story, part procession for our lost land, Cry You One celebrates the people and cultures of South Louisiana while turning clear eyes on the challenges we face.

Cry You One premiered in St Bernard Parish in 2013, on the edges of the Central Wetlands a half-hour’s drive downriver from New Orleans.  In that expansive geography of native and non-native plants, brackish water both salt and fresh, of healthy cypress and salt-burned matchsticks, we built Cry You One from the multiple perspectives of our ensemble artists, and invited more: the bones of our own ancestors, and of those who lived in that place before us; the bones of the plants, the animals, the soil, the water, the air and the pipelines in that site that chose us.

In the years since, as we’ve performed versions of Cry You One in parts of America far from the place where it was born, we’ve tried to maintain and embody that awareness of our environment.  The land is going quickly, the sea is rising daily; how long do we fight, and when do we fly?  What responsibility do we have to the land, and how will we fulfill that responsibility?  In Cry You One, we listen to the land, we move in it, and—much as we sing to comfort a newborn fighting sleep, or an elder who is not long for this world—we sing to it.

Cry You One is a project of Creative Capital and was made possible by major support from the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project, with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; by the MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; by a grant from the Network of Ensemble Theater’s Touring & Exchange Network (NET/TEN); by the Alternate ROOTS Community/Artist Partnership Program (C/APP), with funding provided by the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the generous support of ROOTS members and friends; and by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council, as administered through the Arts Council of New Orleans. Additional support was provided by the Kindle Project of the Common Counsel Foundation, the Quixote Foundation, and by the Catalyst Initiative of the Center for Performance and Civic Practice. Additional support for this production was provided by Gulf Restoration Network, Working Films, the Chorus Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, the City of New Orleans Office of Resilience and Sustainability, and by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.