Creative Capital

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For Nick Szuberla, Amelia Kirby, and Donna Porterfield—all members of the 35-year-community based media and cultural center Appalshop—art is an excellent way for communities to imaginatively examine the issues that affect them. “Art is a discourse,” says Szuberla. “It has to generate dialogue, otherwise we would feel something’s gone awry.”

Community involvement is the cornerstone of the trio’s Creative Capital project, Thousand Kites. A collaboration between Szuberla and Kirby’s “Holler to the Hood” multimedia project and Porterfield’s Roadside Theater ensemble, Kites is the culmination of an ambitious “performance-creation process” involving multiple communities across the country.

The subject of Kites is the criminal justice system and those most affected by it, including prisoners and prison employees, their families and their communities. (In prison slang, “to shoot a kite” means to send a letter to a loved one.). No strangers to this topic, Szuberla and Kirby’s 2006 documentary, Up the Ridge, explored the domestic prison industry and the social impact of moving large numbers of inner-city prisoners of color to distant rural settings.

As co-hosts of the Appalachian region’s only hip-hop radio program, Szuberla and Kirby received hundreds of letters from inmates recently transferred into nearby Wallens Ridge, one of two new prisons built as an antidote to Appalachia’s shrinking coal economy. As Kirby said, “We realized prisons were being built, and it seemed easy to predict there would be a lot of racial tension between local guards and prisoners from urban areas. We could see how it could unfold.” Thus the seeds for Kites were planted.

The project integrates two powerful modes of art-making: Roadside Theater’s process of creating and presenting plays in collaboration with the people whose stories come to life on stage, and Holler to the Hood’s innovative use of digital and broadcast media. Making simultaneous use of live and digitized performance media, Kites intends to bring attention to under-recognized issues of the criminal justice system.

Both Szuberla and Kirby emphasize that Kites is about unearthing people’s stories. They impose no theoretical frame on their practice, but instead allow it to evolve through constant research and work with project participants. “It’s often far more experimental to work with a community and to see what aesthetics result,” says Szuberla. And, as Porterfield explains, Kites is “political theater of [the] first voice—we hear voices of those who have direct knowledge of the prison industry,” ranging from guards and prisoners to their families and communities.

Kites explores such issues as freedom of expression, the meaning of public space, and the effects of imprisonment on both the home communities and “prison towns” of the seven million people who are currently incarcerated, on parole or on probation. Iterations of the work will be workshopped and presented with churches, activist organizations, and radio stations in communities where Appalshop has built relationships over the years. The artists plan to complete Kites in late 2009, anticipating how much time is needed to let their artistic process find its form. As Szuberla emphasizes, “By working with people in different communities, time expands. This isn’t an artist-driven project.”

Download the Weekend Workshop Agenda (.pdf)