“We come from the place of many tongues”: The Land Memory Bank, Mondo Bizarro and the Mississippi
A Conversation with Monique Verdin* and Nick Slie** led by Lisa D’Amour***
Abstract
Monique Verdin and Nick Slie, two members of the interdisciplinary collectives The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange and Mondo Bizarro, call the riverbanks and bayou ridges of Bulbancha’s disappearing delta at the end of the Mississippi River in the state of Louisiana, their home. Bulbancha, which means “this place of many tongues/languages,” encompasses a territory including the colonial port city of New Orleans. The land continues to be a teacher and collaborator, inspiring over two decades of work building an artistic lineage and legacy unique in the United States. Over these years, Verdin and Slie have intimately documented the complex interconnectedness of race, environment, culture and joy in Southeast Louisiana through collaborations across sectors on a vast array of local performance and arts-based civic engagement endeavors. These collaborations range from site-specific local performances to arts-based civic activations and multi-year community engagements. Through their creative projects, they try to center the experiences of the people of their region who are most directly impacted by land loss, believing that together we have the solutions to address the challenges we face in our communities. In this excerpted conversation, led by their fellow local theatre-maker and playwright Lisa D’Amour, of the interdisciplinary performance-making company PearlDamour, Verdin and Slie reflect on their art making journey to research, respond to and reckon with this legacy. Their collective practices reveal histories, present stories and discover adaptation possibilities for communities through Southeast Louisiana and beyond.
Keywords: Bulbancha, land loss, artistic legacy, civic engagement, resilience
Lisa D’Amour: Nick, you are part of a lineage of artistic and community work that began in the 1960s with John O’Neal’s work with the Free Southern Theatre and Junebug Productions. Let’s start by getting a snapshot of your work and practice.
Nick Slie: I’m a performing artist, a producer and a cultural organizer. I generate work as a performer, creating original performances with an ensemble or a group of people—a performer/creator. We use a process where everyone is in the room together and we all bring our talents, hearts and expertise. We started a company called Mondo Bizzaro about 22 years ago. Along the way, I learned about cultural organizing. As Tufara Waller Muhammad says, “Nick, y’all are really good about getting them there. But what do you want to do when we get together?” So, now I ask, “What is art’s role in helping to make small, minute and large changes in the world?”
How did you get into climate and performance work?
Nick Slie: After Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, Kathy Randels[1] was making a performance called Beneath the Strata Disappearing with her company ArtSpot Productions. At the last minute, Kathy called and said, “I discovered a new character, and we need you to be in the piece.” That character was called Loup Garou (“the Cajun werewolf”). I was born in New Orleans. Diving into that experience was diving into my own ancestry, its relationship to the landscape and the environmental loss here in South Louisiana.
I saw that performance.
Nick Slie: In the spirit of the Land of Many Tongues, Loup Garou is also a part of Haitian and Creole mythology. Many regions have their own version of this werewolf. The next year, Kathy and I began developing a new show based on the character of the Loup Garou.
Both Beneath the Strata Disappearing and Loup Garou activate nature, place, performance, music and visual art in order to talk about climate. This strategy continues to be used a lot in climate-centered performance throughout New Orleans. Monique, you are a documentarian, activist, and organizer. How do you describe your work?
Monique Verdin: I am more of a witness and a record maker than an activist or artist. In the late 1990s, I returned home to South Louisiana after being on the Gulf Coast for many years. I was 18 years old and learning about these oil waste pits, literally in my cousins’ backyards. Along with the pollution, we also have this disappearing landscape all around us. I started taking photographs with a lot of borrowed equipment. I documented my Houma Nation relatives in the Yakni Chitto (Big Country) in the Barataria Terrebonne National Estuary, also known as Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes, found between the Atchafalaya and Mississippi rivers.
The Yakni Chitto is losing land mass at one of the fastest rates on the planet. At the beginning of shrimp season in 2008, I created an installation for the annual spring boat blessing, using a donated geodesic post-Hurricane Katrina recovery shelter to display images of my family that had toured from California to Georgia and back home, down Bayou Pointe aux Chenes. And on that unforgettable day, suddenly this tall man stepped out of a little minivan, and I met Raymond Jackson, who had just begun a residency at A Studio in the Woods where he was writing the Loup Garou script for Nick and Kathy, with set design and “nature collaboration” by Jeff Becker.
A Studio in the Woods is an artist residency on the West Bank of New Orleans for artists who are working on climate.
Monique Verdin: I love making site-specific art! It gives us an opportunity to mourn what we’ve lost, where we’re at and what we’re up against. It also helps us to find this infinite beauty that exists in this wild world around us. Early on in my “career,” I wanted to identify as a cultural documentarian. But I’ve learned that it’s not good enough just to document. We have to be in it.
Climate work creates a unique petri dish for performance and climate here in New Orleans. I’m thinking about the arc from Loup Garou through to Cry You One to Invisible Rivers. Three significant pieces you have created about climate over this past decade.
Nick Slie: The artistic community in New Orleans is a porous, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, petri dish. It’s very easy to work with a lot of different people with different skills. It’s the fabric and culture of the place we live in. My most profound childhood memory here was the first crawfish boil in April, around Easter. There were musicians, the cook, partner dancing, decorations, the work of hosting plus probably kids putting on a play. That memory is not so far removed from the kind of performances we make today. For the people of South Louisiana, it’s almost like breathing to gather in these ways.
I feel like we all come from this tradition of oral histories and knowing where we come from. Nick, I’m thinking about the crawfish boil, where there’s witnessing and even record keeping because it’s a ritual that happens every year. Getting together outside and getting your hands dirty is part of a lot of the climate performances that I see here. Let’s talk about Loup Garou, the piece Monique mentioned that premiered on an overgrown golf course in 2009.
Monique Verdin: I had just had one of my first formal exhibitions here in New Orleans—I had ten years of documentation that I had been creating and collecting. The Loup Garou team invited me to repurpose and reimagine my installation as a waiting space for the audience before the performance started. Our friend Adam Tourek found an old shrimp net that we strung up between oak trees to hang my photographs on to create a little waiting room/gallery space.
Then fast forward to Cry You One, a later Mondo Bizarro/Artspot/Jeff Becker designed show. Again, we needed this waiting space, since we could only move 15 people at a time across the canal to get to the other side of the levee, which bordered this ghost forest. We repurposed a geodesic dome, covered it with Palmetto leaves, and people came to wait inside. I shared a story, gave them a buttonbush seed, told them it was medicine for the land and gave them some directions. That was such a powerful moment for me. You get 15 strangers under the same roof together for less than five minutes, and it can be such a transformative moment.
FLOAT LAB
The audience was welcomed with a gesture from an indigenous Louisianian at the beginning of each of these performances—a gesture that grew organically out of your shared creative process.
Nick Slie: For Loup Garou, we had no intentional mission to say, “this is climate work.” I think sometimes the terminology gets in the way of the being. The big takeaway I had from Loup Garou was that as a performer, in my own body and spirit, I was diving deep into real loss, real ancestral loss, including four men who I lost in and around the Mississippi River. And rippled out from that center are the layers of work that get seen by an audience. One of the biggest things I learned was that we are partially in our current environmental circumstances because of reason, and yet reason is not going to get us out of this place. We have to have spaces for irrationality, for wildness. The role of the artist is not to just get up there and to tell the story fact by fact, in a linear fashion. We can allow our bodies to speak our deepest fears, and as much as we yell, we need to whisper, and the full range of all those emotions can come out.[2]
One of the key elements in your work, of course, is the site itself. Nature is a collaborator.
Monique Verdin: The reason why the Loup Garou happened in this abandoned golf course nestled inside of one of the largest and oldest oak forests in an urban area, which is known as New Orleans City Park, is because of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2025, it will be 20 years since that event happened. We were in our 20s when the Gulf of Mexico washed in, and our lives were turned upside down.
Many places that used to be managed, like this golf course, suddenly were allowed to be wild as well. Our access to these wild spaces has provided such an incredible collaboration; from inside urban forest to the bottomland hardwood edges where we work on an earthen levee surrounded by cypress skeleton trees burned by salt water. We see that landscape every day and then invite our audience to go there with us.
In 2009, the story of the Loup Garou, a very old myth, helped us rebuild. Still, in regard to coastal restoration or environmental regulation, we’re no further along the line. Things just feel more overwhelming. We weren’t using words like “climate change” or “climate adaptation” in 2009 the way that we are now.
Ten years or 20 years from now, what will we be responding to? In 2005, it was Hurricane Katrina, and then we had the BP Oil spill, five years after Hurricane Katrina, in 2010. That horrible reality informed Cry You One.
Living with our worst fears has led us to confront them together—not just within our ensemble, but by inviting our wider community to join us. We’re saying: “Let’s take this walk together, to see and hear the tragedy, and to witness both the beauty we’ve lost and the beauty that still surrounds us.”
Nick Slie: It’s very hard to want to protect something that you don’t love. So many of us are not given access to the wild spaces in the place where we live. We’re surrounded by water in Southeast Louisiana, and yet not all of us have the privilege of getting on that water.
When you live in a place that is constantly getting battered by extreme weather events and petrochemical accidents, you really do feel it. There’s something about the way we live here—the way we feel things and respond as artists. A lot of why we make performance work outdoors is because of the lack of formal theater spaces in our city. So, out of this scarcity comes beauty, a new way of making work and talking about climate through our work. Plus, as New Orleanians, we’re trained to be in the streets thanks to community events like Mardi Gras. We’re not afraid to make a play at a park. We say, “Sure. Cool. I’ll be there. Do I have to wear a costume?”
Nick Slie: Adventurous audiences, very adventurous.
How about Cry You One? Where did that piece begin?
Nick Slie: It was a literal dream. I have a very, very clear remembrance of a dream where we had to take a 90- to 100-mile second line (a New Orleans-style musical procession) from New Orleans to some part of coastal Louisiana. Then, when you got there, you had to bring stuff to put in the cook pot. Once you got to the beach, there were floating platforms. You could choose which one you were going to go on. But they all had a band, and they all had something nice for you. And that was the beginning.
Where does the phrase Cry You One come from?
Nick Slie: I heard it from Cajun musicians saying, “Let me cry you one.” Like a way of expressing, emoting or singing a song. Not, “I’m going to play you one”—“I’ma cry you one.”
Cry You One was a processional performance. The physical journey started from land near the Los Islenos Cultural Complex, and then the audience crossed a canal on a raft shuttle Mondo Bizarro designer Jeff Becker built. It was a small canal, but you still had to cross a “river” to get to this other performance space. And then the audience processed down the levee. Quite a journey.
Monique Verdin: It was a commitment. You were definitely signing up for a day-long adventure along the topography of South Louisiana. The highest elevation of the land is always going to be closest to the bayou. As you go back, the land gets lower and lower in elevation and changes from a bottomland hardwood ridge with palmettos and hackberry trees and live oaks to becoming more of a cypress forest. From cypress forest, the land transitions to be more brackish and then salt marshes. So, essentially, our journey went from the high ground to the low ground. It’s how the plantations were drained. This back canal was used as a transportation and drainage canal as well. Kind of interesting that people didn’t really know that. The transition of biodiversity was part of the journey.
Nick Slie: First, the audience met scientists from MOSQUITO—a fake organization we invented—who all were arguing on behalf of their own particular point of view about how we could save coastal Louisiana.
Monique Verdin: Each one of the MOSQUITO scientists was representing a different “tool” or strategy reflected in the Coastal Restoration and Protection Authority “master plan” to save coastal Louisiana. In the post-plantation corporate colonial world in which we all live here, I think “master plan” is not the greatest terminology, but that’s what they call it.
River diversions, diverting the river to create land.
Monique Verdin: And other folks were trying to advocate for building levees.
And then the MOSQUITO scientist was just like, let it go wild.
Nick Slie: We each had a particular solution, until that solution got sort of interrupted by mystery. At a certain moment, we had a dance, like a little Fais Do Do, right in almost the beginning. My character, Tom Dulac, tells the audience, “The news we’ve gotten is that we’re going to have to leave and we’re not going to be able to come back.” We danced through the joy and the mournfulness and the sorrow of that notion. Because we all may have to leave and not come back. When the scientists left, we crossed over a canal and transformed into indigenous animals. The audience then heard the story from the perspective of non-human creatures that have inhabited the land.
Monique Verdin: I’m from Saint Bernard Parish, which is a pretty conservative place. When the artists said, “We’re going to do a weird procession on that levee to this pumping station,” I had to say, “No, no, they’re not going to let you do that.”
Nick Slie: We had to get state permits and federal permits, and FEMA was involved!
I love the way you all had to work with city offices and parks just to make this happen. It seems that whenever we all make this work, we’re reaching out to local climate nonprofits to work with us to create an experience.
Nick Slie: Over the years, we’ve all become more sophisticated around this type of work. We became more aware of certain movements. For example, we learned more about John O’Neal and Junebug Productions at the Echo Arts Festival, which commissioned and presented work about environmental racism in the 1990s. Being part of Alternate Roots, the RESTORE ACT salons and our Another Gulf Is Possible partnership, that all influenced our thinking.
There were a lot of things in Cry You One that were more formalized. It was a live, journey-based performance and online storytelling platform. Later, it became a music concert. We were very intentional in doing these cultural organizing salons, working directly with artists and activists. While that awareness was always in our work, it was never more explicit than it was when we did Cry You One.[3]
And there is a line directly back, through Loup Garou, through Beneath the Strata and back to the ECHO Performance Festival in the 1990s, led by many elders, including John O’Neal, in which Kathy Randels premiered her outdoor environmental justice piece Lower 9 Stories. It is this lineage, this shared DNA, that gives New Orleanian theater makers a special super power and instinct for involving non-theater organizations in our work, so we can get more people involved in the stories we are telling.
Nick Slie: I always remember something Mark Davis, a research professor and director of Tulane University’s Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy, said. When we asked him, what do you think would be most impactful about doing a performance? He said, “Give them enough facts to stay with you, but make sure to give them enough fantasy so that they go for a ride.” He said, “Most of what we know about the Dust Bowl comes to us in three songs. So don’t underestimate the power of you as the artist, the storyteller, the dreamer, to help us reimagine things as well.”
Monique Verdin: Artmaking has forced us to do this research into not just making a performance. We find ourselves thinking, “Wait, what’s going on? What policy are they trying to push right now?” Post-Hurricane Katrina, we saw how quickly decisions get made and how the decisions in Washington D.C. trickle down to the coast. We also recognize the long arc of time and how decisions made in the 1920s are affecting us now.
We are living in the question of Cry You One: “What are you going to hold on to and what are you going to let go of?” We’re all wrestling with that question right now. Not just here in South Louisiana, but on a planetary scale—in different ways, of course. On a personal level, artmaking has been both informing and helping me to frame and to mourn. There are things that we are watching disappear before our eyes here. And more and more threats are on the horizon to this way of life that we love so much.
Nick Slie: Cry You One is often referenced and written about because of the archival nature of the stories. Not that many people really get to see our live performances. But, years from now, people will go to look at photographs, they will watch videos, they will go to the oral history archives.
You have a documentary about the making of Cry You One. And Cry You One was adapted into concert versions that were also adapted to the locations where you were touring.
Nick Slie: Part of our touring is that it always includes multiple site visits to places where we’re also doing community engagement. We ended up doing 13 locations outside of Louisiana for Cry You One.
The final performance of Cry You One was back in Louisiana working with the Kumbuka African Drum and Dance Collective on the site of the soon-to-be-completed Mirabeau Water Garden, which is on a piece of land gifted to the City of New Orleans by the Sisters of Saint Joseph specifically for water retention in that neighborhood.
Monique Verdin: That site sits on top of Pine Island, which is the oldest geological formation of the land here in New Orleans. The Delta is not that old, geologically speaking, but here in this place, it is really old.
And now you are both working on Invisible Rivers, again designed by Jeff Becker, co-directed by Jeff and Joanna Russo, with text by Joanna and the Invisible Rivers ensemble. What was its beginning?
Nick Slie: The seeds of this piece were planted with Monique’s development of the Float Lab, which is a physical piece of infrastructure as well as an invitation to talk about adaptation.
Monique Verdin: I have felt like the bearer of bad news so often. At a certain point during Cry You One and after the birth of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange, I recognized we need civic space where different people can find each other and can look at maps together and think about what really matters to them and their community. If we were able to have a say in the future design of this disappearing delta, what would that really look like? Governmental entities offer staged “community meetings” where folks get three minutes for public comment to advocate for their lives—usually after the decisions have already been made.
So, in the spirit of seeking solutions, the idea of the Float Lab emerged. My long-time collaborator and architect, Anthony Fontenot, and I dreamed up a piece of infrastructure that is a floating platform that can be used on land or on water. It can be activated as an exhibition site or a performance space, or just a meeting ground. We’re also thinking about how that piece of infrastructure could be activated as a resource in times of emergency. Artists as first responders. How can we integrate solar technologies, working on radio and other kinds of alternative and autonomous communication systems that could be used on the Float Lab and in other spaces, too? Because at the core of this work, we’re trying to survive.
Nick Slie: The Float Lab holds the power of this story about how hard it is to get free access to water in a place that’s surrounded by water. At first, in my mind, I was just like, “Oh it’s a boat. You put it in the water, you take it out there, you just do your thing.” And it’s just so much more. Part of the invitation is the idea of adaptation, the idea that our ancestors have been floating things on water for way longer than we have ever dreamed of being alive. So many people in this region have made us acutely more aware of the Indigenous histories here.
Monique led us to the name “Bulbancha” and its meaning: “the land of many tongues.” And at the start of Invisible Rivers, she offered us the question: “What do the stars see when they look down at the Mississippi?“ Monique’s collage maps—part of her artistic practice—notate the histories, seen and unseen, in the landscapes we live in here in Louisiana. And so Invisible Rivers asks that question: What are our histories here, the ones that we don’t speak of, the ones that we don’t mention? Let’s keep excavating.[4]
Crevasse 22, where Invisible Rivers was presented, is an art-house and gallery space surrounded by this beautiful outdoor area. What’s the body of water next to it?
Monique Verdin: 2,500 years ago, it was the headwaters of the Bayou Terre aux Beoufs (Bayou Land of Beef), which was a channel of the Mississippi River. It was cut off from its life force long ago and is now known as Crevasse 22, which is where the levee broke in 1922, just upriver from where the levees were blown to “save New Orleans” from the Great Mississippi River Flood in 1927.
We, the audience, gathered inside the art house. Of course there was King cake ready for us. There’s always a lot of food at Mondo performances! And then we went outside, and the performance began with us meeting each other and being invited to draw some memories that we each individually had of water that were pinned up and became part of the “set or environment.” Soon after, we heard music and saw a musician floating across Crevasse 22 on a small platform, singing “Eh La Bas.” When he landed, he asked us to carry these long sticks, painted blue, representing the Mississippi River.
Then, the performance moved into the woods, and we were introduced to the question and refrain of the show—”What do the stars see when they look down at the Mississippi?” This allowed us to reflect on both the natural form of the Mississippi and a lot of the industrial blockages that have been built by humans over the years. It was very interesting to have the voice of the cosmos as one of the narrators of the show.
Later in the piece, two performers embodied water snakes speaking to us from their unique perspective. The performance wove music, physical movement, storytelling and a lot of concrete information about the shipping industry in New Orleans. There is a new port that may be built near Crevasse 22, and the show addressed the possible effects of this port on the land, and the humans, animals and plants who live on it.
Nick Slie: My teacher, playwright and theatre-maker Jo Carson wrote this beautiful book, Spider Speculations: The Physics and the Biophysics of Storytelling. When I’m working with my students, I always tell them, we all understand and accept the notion of disease. Dis-ease. We have a dis-ease, and we know that we’re stuck somewhere. And a lot of times we try to solve that dis-ease by medicine, but in many ways—and we all accept this in therapy—if you have a trauma and you release the trauma, it’s good for the body.
So, I think what you hit on in the explanation of the show is that it’s going to that place. My obsession is with the audience doing something together—that we are not static. We are the show. As Monique says, you are a stakeholder. You know, we’re all stakeholders. We’re all artists. And so the act of doing shakes up the molecules and reorients us in real time. To me, it’s a kind of harmony—for just a moment—where we all witness love, experience joy, and leave together knowing that we can do something together.
That somatic rehearsal—or re-listening to each other in the landscape—is as important as anything. I don’t believe the imagination is theoretical. It contains the full power of the world we’d like to see—and makes it concrete. We’re not just witnessing. We’re witnessing and building these molecular structures to make possibilities come alive.
Which leads back to childhood crawfish boils.
Monique Verdin: When I started doing the work, it was because I wanted to stop the toxic poisoning of my family. Then, it became, “Oh no, we got to save the wetlands.” And then, I thought, “Oh no, but the water just keeps rising. Or, the oil is washing into our estuaries.” That has been the story of my adult life. The more I learn about all those things, the more I have been called to the Mississippi River in different ways.
This question, “What do the stars see when they look down at the Mississippi?” was inspired by this woman, Anishinaabe, a woman known as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. Her Ojibwe name is Bamewawagezhikaquay, or Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky. I have thought a lot about this woman and her invisible story. Her husband, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, is credited with discovering the “headwaters” of the Mississippi. But really, it was because of Bamewawagezhikaquay’s family and relationships that he was even led to this so-called source of the headwaters.
This, of course, is debatable. Where does the river begin? Is it in the sky? Is it in the ocean? We are part of the water cycle. The three of us sitting here are carrying the Mississippi River inside of us. And that’s such an important thing for us all to fight for. We need clean oceans so that we have clean air, so that we have clean rivers, so that we have healthy environments to call home.
Endnotes
[1] More about Kathy Randels here and here.
[2] Find more information here.
[3] Cry You One is an interdisciplinary project of the New Orleans-based companies ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizarro that uses the stories, music, dances and traditions of Southeast Louisiana to respond to our region’s interconnected struggles against coastal land loss, cultural loss, environmental racism and displacement. It is a site-responsive performance and an online storytelling experience/platform that gives physical, oral and musical shape to the themes of our home: converging cultures, creativity in all its forms, human error, forced evacuation, living with water and the desire for permanence. See also here.
Bibliography
Carson, Jo. Spider Speculations: A Physics and Biophysics of Storytelling. ReadHowYouWant.com, Limited, 2010.
Jackson, Raymond “Moose.” Dreaming in the Bone Boat. U of New Orleans, 2022.
*Monique Verdin (Mondo Bizarro) is an artist, citizen of the Houma Nation and Bvlbancha Liberation Radio collaborator. She supports the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo, network of Indigenous gardeners, as the WECAN Gulf South food sovereignty coordinator. Monique is primary steward of the Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange, facilitating community-built record-making, experiential education, research, and site activations celebrating the diversity of coastal communities and native ecologies present in the wetlands, swamps, and prairies of South Louisiana. Monique co-stewards the Nanih Bvlbancha earthen mound in New Orleans and is a Gulf South Open School collaborator.
**Nick Slie is a New Orleans-born performer, director, producer and cultural organizer. He is the Co-founding Artistic Director of Mondo Bizarro and a Theater Professor at Nunez Community College. For over two decades, Nick has created interdisciplinary work that spans solo performance, community gathering, digital storytelling, and large-scale site-responsive productions—touring nationally and internationally. Rooted in ten generations of connection to Southeast Louisiana, he has collaborated across sectors on projects like Cry You One, Loup Garou, Race Peace, Invisible Rivers and the Gulf Coast Climate Justice Convening, using art to spark dialogue and action around climate, culture and justice. Nick has held leadership roles with Alternate ROOTS, the Network of Ensemble Theaters, and currently serves on the boards of Goat in the Road and NACL. He recently directed the national tour of Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man and continues to dream into Invisible Rivers, Mondo Bizarro’s current interdisciplinary project.
***Lisa D’Amour is a playwright, educator and interdisciplinary collaborator from New Orleans. Her plays have been produced across the U.S., U.K. and in South America, including at Manhattan Theater Club (NYC Broadway), Playwrights Horizons (NYC), Steppenwolf Theater (Chicago) and The National Theater (U.K.). Recent work with her company PearlDamour includes Ocean Filibuster, a genre-crashing human-ocean showdown; MILTON, a performance rooted in 5 U.S. towns named Milton; and How to Build a Forest, an 8-hour performance installation. Lisa’s play Detroit was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. She lives in New Orleans, where she is on the leadership team for Trinity City Comics.
List of collaborators
Jeff Becker is a key collaborator and the designer of all of the work featured in this dialogue. One of his primary jobs on all of these projects was to conduct site visits to determine how our creations could be in harmony with the land on which we work. Jeff was a key collaborator on Cry You One — aside from helping to develop the story, he envisioned a new and unique design for every single site where the show toured. For Invisible Rivers, he is a co-director and designer. He continues to steer the ongoing design and dreams of the Float Lab as both an exhibition/performance space and a tool for community engagement. To learn more about Jeff Becker: https://www.setsalive.com/.
https://landmemorybank.org
https://www.mondobizarro.org/about-us-draft
Copyright © 2025 Monique Verdin, Nick Slie, Lisa D’Amour
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #31, June 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
