In 2002, students at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College led a community coalition that won a $150,000 grant to use the arts to address the epidemic of drug abuse in the Appalachian coalfield county of Harlan. That work, coordinated by the SKCTC Appalachian Program, includes:
Three original community musical dramas: Higher Ground, in which over 100 residents worked with playwright
Jo Carson, directors Jerry Stropnicky and Jerry Matheny, choreographer Kevin Iega Jeff, community coordinators Theresa Osborne and Connie Owens, and music coordinator Ann Schertz to create a musical drama attended by over three thousand local people in 2005 and 2006; Playing With Fire (2009), which included the stories of coal miners, and continued the exploration of how the community might respond to the drug crisis in the community; and Talking Dirt (2011), in collaboration with Linda Parris-Bailey and Carpetbag Theatre, directors Robert Martin and Pamela D. Roberts, and choreographer Kevin Iega Jeff, an exploration of the county’s African American history and the hard decision today’s young people’s face in deciding whether or not to stay in the community. A community photography project involving 600 county residents as photographers. Five tile mosaic public art pieces integrating oral histories and examining the role of women, African American, and southern European immigrants in the community as well as mosaics celebrating local wildlife and the history of the Clover Fork community. Nine youth arts events, planned by SKCTC students, and attended by 3000 area youth, as part of the Crawdad students arts series. As of Fall 2011, over 5000 local people have participated in the project. More than 6000 have seen at least one of the 30 performances of the Higher Ground plays. Over 15 guest artists and 40 local people have been employed by the project. In 2008, Kentucky Educational Television broadcast Finding Higher Ground, a documentary about of the project. The New York Times and two books (Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort and Alessandro Portelli’s They Say in Harlan County) have written positively about the work. Members of the community coalition have made ten presentations at Appalachian Regional Commission conferences in Washington, DC and four Appalachian Studies Association conferences. In 2010, fifty Higher Ground cast members worked together to create a performance combining parts of the first two Higher Ground plays and presented it in Dahlonega, Georgia at the Appalachian Studies Association annual conference. The cast performed at a 2006 conference on community-based responses to drug abuse in Johnson City, Tennessee, a 2011 literary festival at Lincoln Memorial University, and in 2006 at a statewide conference organized by the West Virginia Prevention Resource Center in Charleston, West Virginia. The Project has given rise to thousands of opportunities for community members to create and in the process, talk to one another about what they want for this place. The project has expanded our ability to reflect and plan, and to apply what we have learned in the creative arena to other aspects of community life. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of us have changed what we think of as possible. Continuing to tell new stories is important, particularly in a place where so many feel the story is at its end. In continuing to create, we believe, we embody hope.
