Cry You One is an outdoor performance and online platform inspired by the disappearing wetlands of south Louisiana. The result of nearly eighteen months of artistic exploration and social, political and scientific research, Cry You One was created by award winning New Orleans-‐based companies ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizarro and premiered in southeast Louisiana in fall 2013 as a 2.6 mile theatrical procession that employed poetry, song, small group interaction and imagined scenarios to educate and inspire audiences to get involved in the movement to save coastal Louisiana.
“What is arguably the greatest environmental and economic disaster in the nation’s history is racing toward a tragic climax that few of the tourists who flock here know about — and that Congress has shown little interest in addressing. It is a struggle with massive environmental and economic implications for the nation. Yet those involved in this fight now candidly admit two points: They are losing. And if they don’t stage a comeback, most of the land in this part of the state will be underwater by the end of the century, resulting in one of the largest permanent human migrations in the nation’s history, and one of its worst economic calamities.”
—Bob Marshall, Pulitzer Prize Journalist
As a result of Louisiana’s experience of natural and human made disasters over the last ten years, in a very real sense we have become America’s national community, a symbol of and laboratory for culturally grounded restoration after disaster. With Cry You One, we are developing strategies to bring more national and international visibility to our project and to the movement to save coastal Louisiana. By giving physical, oral and musical shape to some themes of our home—converging cultures, creativity in all its forms, natural disasters, human error, forced evacuation, living with water and the desire for permanence—Cry You One celebrates the people and cultures of Louisiana while national attention to the crisis of our vanishing coast.
Throughout 2014 and 2015, Cry You One is partnering with environmental organizations, universities, and presenting organizations to engage audiences from all walks of life in conversation, in song and dance, in theatrical scenarios, in active participation and political action. Both the physical manifestation of Cry You One and its content is adapted for each place, illuminating connections between communities and environments: we are simultaneously mourning, remembering and celebrating—rejoicing at how south Louisiana became one of the most vibrant convergences of people, places and traditions in the world, and asking: what will become of these people and traditions when the land that sustains them disappears? Part song, part story, part procession for our lost land, Cry You One utilizes the unique music and stories of Louisiana to inspire connections between people working to steward the natural world wherever they live.