CASTAWAY
A collaboration for InLight 2019 between Milk River Arts and Richmond Story House, honoring those entwined in the 1925 collapse of the Church Hill Tunnel.
We amplify the truths we uncover and imagine what might have been.
A collaboration using shadow puppetry, spoken-word storytelling, and light sculpture to explore and redress the incomplete and racially biased ways one of Richmond’s stories has been remembered. InLight 2019 took place in Chimborazo Park, directly above the collapsed Church Hill Tunnel, and buried train. CASTAWAY won the 2019 InLight People’s Choice Award.
Milk River Arts artists and mentors collaborated to create shadow-puppet performances illustrating each of Richmond Story House’s stories. Milk River Mentor Barry O’Keefe built a mobile shadow puppet theater, which paraded up broad street to Chimborazo Park at dusk, and led the InLight Community Lantern parade before settling into place for a night of performances.
Richmond Story House created a series of four historical fiction stories exploring the lives of the indeterminate number of black laborers killed in the collapse, whose stories were overlooked by narratives focusing on white engineers.
