As an incubator for adventurous and challenging new contemporary performance, CNP is proud to announce that Carolyn Bryant Project will have its World Premiere in 2018. Please click here to view the new project page for this important and timely production.
Collaborators Nataki Garrett and Andrea LeBlanc layer historical transcripts, video imagery, and re-imagined encounters to examine the exclusive exchange between Carolyn Bryant and Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. During their residency with the CalArts Center for New Performance Garrett and LeBlanc will conduct an exploratory script and development workshop with CalArts students.
Emmett “Bobo” Till, a 14-year old black youth, walked into a store in Money, Mississippi to purchase 5-cents worth of bubble gum from Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year old white mother of two. Within a few days, Till’s bloated body was found tied to a cotton-gin fan in a shallow part of the Tallahatchie River. There are several different accounts of what happened in those fateful minutes shared between Bryant and Till in the store. This production explores those accounts by concentrating on the active collective imagination, the diffused focus of shared experience and the silent voice of the “white rose” of the south.
Carolyn Bryant Project is made possible in part though funding by the MAP Fund and Trans-Atlantic Consortium.
