“Sunset on the Longest Day – An Act of Act of Relational Community/ An Act of Relatives in Communion”
A free, outdoor community performance event titled “Sunset on the Longest Day – An Act of Relational Community/ An Act of Relatives in Communion” will take place on the summer solstice: Thursday, June 20, 2024, on the site of Ruth K. Burke’s new earthwork Domestic Rewilding (A Living Land Acknowledgement) at the ISU Horticulture Center. Sunset on the Longest Day first took place in 2022. It is a free community performance event about land acknowledgement created in collaboration with earthwork artist Ruth K. Burke. The first performance made Native American people visible in a place that we have largely been erased from. The next version of the performance is intended to builds community and connections (relations) between people, as well as with land, animals, and plants.
About Shannon
Dr. Shannon Epplett is a theatre historian, director, devisor, and an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. He is an Instructional Assistant Professor at Illinois State University, where he has taught theatre history, devised theatre, film studies, and Native American literature and popular culture courses. He helped write ISU’s land acknowledgement and has been leading efforts to make the practice of land acknowledgement into a program of reconciliation and restoration of Native people to ISU’s campus and curriculum. He received his Ph.D. from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Shannon’s research focuses on the history of Chicago’s Off-Loop theatre community, through a sociological lens and has been published in Theatre History Studies, New England Theatre Journal, and the book Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theatre and Performance. He has presented papers and served on panels for national theatre organizations such as MATC, ATHE, and SETC. His performance work focuses on Native America; he recently created the devised piece True American! at Bradley University, directed the premiere of Marty Strenczewilk’s Pink Man or the Only Indian in the Room at ISU; and staged the outdoor relational performance piece Sunset on the Longest Day, a Native commentary on land acknowledgement, at the ISU Horticulture Center. He is currently working as a dramaturg with Rosy Simas Danse.
About Ruth
Ruth Burke is an interdisciplinary artist, from and of the Midwest, who collaborates with animals in her creative practice. She lives and works in Central Illinois, lands that were once home to the Illini, Peoria and the Myaamia, and later due to colonial encroachment, genocide, and displacement to the Fox, Potawatomi, Sauk, Shawnee, Winnebago, Ioway, Mascouten, Piankashaw, Wea, and Kickapoo Nations. Straddling the practice of contemporary art and the fields of human-animal studies, and agriculture, Burke has exclusively focused on human-animal relationships in her practice since 2015. As part of a broader socially-engaged practice, her current focus is a series of large-scale native plant earthworks powered by animal traction.
