And So We Walked

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AND SO WE WALKED
An Artist's Journey Along The Trail of Tears

Offical Website

Credits

CREATOR AND PERFORMER

DeLanna Studi

DIRECTOR

Corey Madden

PRODUCER

Octopus Theatricals

EXECUTIVE CREATIVE PRODUCER

Mara Isaacs

SCENIC DESIGNER

John Coyne

COSTUME DESIGNER

Andja Budinich

PROJECTS AND LIGHTING DESIGNER

Norman Coates

SOUND AND ORIGINAL MUSIC

Bruno Louchouarn with John-John Grant & Sarah Elizabeth Burkey

TOUR PRODUCTION MANAGER

Russell Snelling

ASSOCIATE SOUND DESIGN

Randi Byrd, Cultural Consultant

Aimee Lynn Phillips

DRAMATURG

Shirley Fishman

DeLanna Studi, Cherokee performance artist, activist and Artistic Director of Native Voices at the Autry, shares a powerful, multi-faceted dramatic memoir in And So We And So We Walked: An Artist’s Journey Along the Trail of Tears. The frank, heartwarming and inspiring story follows a contemporary Cherokee woman and her father who embark on an incredible 900-mile journey along the Trail of Tears to truly understand her own identity and the conflicts of her nation. The six-week journey retraces the path her great-great grandparents took in the 1830’s during the forced relocation of 17,000 Cherokee from their homelands. And So We Walked is a powerful, multi-faceted dramatic memoir that draws on extraordinary interviews, historical research, and the artist’s personal experience to convey the complexities and conflicts with which the Cherokee wrestle.

“Every great story has truth in it, and the truth demands to be told,” the Cherokee writer-actor DeLanna Studi says at the beginning of “And So We Walked,” her autobiographical solo show at the Emerson Paramount Center. “And a true story is dangerous.”

Dangerous to what, and to whom? Well, in the case of “And So We Walked,” the danger is to complacent assumptions — and to those who are determined to hold onto them — about our national past."

- Boston Globe

"Each play has the ability to make you laugh and open your eyes to see the world around you in unexpected ways."

- American Theatre

"And So We Walked" is a powerful recollection of one woman's journey to connect with her ancestry, and also a powerful reminder of the importance of history and an understanding of America's shared past."

- Broadway World

"It's a powerful, sobering, heartfelt theatrical experience that you don't want to miss."

- Broadway World

“And So We Walked is woven together wonderfully. It moves seamlessly back and forth in time and between real life and the world of myths, legends, and dreams”

-Broadway World

"...a sincere and passionate performance.."

Willamette Week

The storytelling in And So We Walked is circular, woven like a basket, Studi said, in the Cherokee narrative tradition. It is a history lesson within a literary memoir within a documentary film within a play that travels back and forth between past and present, between reality and the dream world.

Santa Fe New Mexican

"Studi is an excellent actress and storyteller. She does such ain credible job creating the vocal qualities and mannerisms of other characters that you forget it’s a one-woman show."

- Theater Mirror

Minetta Lane Theatre
NY, NY

Arts Emerson
Emerson Paramount Center, Boston, MA

Geva Theatre
75 Woodbury Blvd, Rochester, NY

James Madison University
Harrison, VI
\
Pittsburg Playhouse
Pittsburg, PN

Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, NY

Arizona State University Kerr Cultural Center
Scottsdale, AZ

Hopkins Center for The Arts at Dartmouth
Hanover, NH

Carthage International Theatre Days Festival
Tunis, Tunisia

Weidner Center for The Performing Arts
Green Bay, WI

Indiana Repertory Theatre
Indianapolis, IN

Indiana Repertory Theatre
Indianapolis, IN

The Lensic Performing Arts Center
Santa Fe, NM

Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program
New Haven, CT

Portland Center Stage at the Armory
Portland, OR

Brown Trinity Rep
The Native American Cultural Center, Providence, RI

Triad Stage at Hanesbrands Theatre
Winston-Salem, NC

Artist Residency, The Native American Theatre Project
a three-week long creative co-laboratory-presented in Cherokee with support from the Cherokee Preservation Foundation

Autry National Center
Selected as part of the Native Voices at the Autry Retreat and Festival of New Plays
L.A., CA

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Process Series
Chapel Hill, NC

Writer/Perfomer

DeLanna Studi (she/hers) is a proud citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her theater credits include the First National Broadway Tour of Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County, Off-Broadway’s Gloria: A Life, Informed Consent, and Regional Theaters (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Portland Center Stage, Cornerstone, and Indiana Repertory Theater). Her first play, And So We Walked: Along the Trail of Tears, retells her journey when she retraced her family’s footsteps along the Trail of Tears with her father. Recently, it made its Off-Broadway debut at Minetta Lane, where it was recorded for Audible. Her film and television credits include the Peabody Award-winning Edge of America, Hallmark’s Dreamkeeper, Goliath, Shameless, General Hospital, Reservation Dogs, and Disney’s The Roof. She is the Artistic Director of Native Voices, the only Equity Theatre in the country that develops and produces plays written by Native playwrights. DeLanna is a 2022 United States Artists Fellow, an Advance Gender Equality in the Arts Legacy Playwright Grant Recipient, and the recipient of the Butcher Scholar Award, MAP Fund Grant, Cherokee Preservation Grant, and the Doris Duke Performing Artist Fund. Since 2007, she has served as the chair of the SAG-AFTRA National Native Americans Committee. DeLanna is also the 2024/25 Playwright in Residence at Geva Theatre in Rochester, New York.

Director

Corey Madden is an award-winning writer and director as well as a national leader in the performing and visual arts. Corey has worked on And So We Walked since its inception seven years ago supporting DeLanna Studi’s research and writing, as well as directing the play at the Carthage International Theatre Festival, Portland Center Stage, Triad Stage, Trinity Repertory, Native Voices Theatre, and the Process Series at UNC Chapel Hill. Corey was Associate Artistic Director of the Mark Taper Forum from 1993-2007 where she produced 300 premieres by Robert Lepage, Anthony Minghella, Anna Deavere Smith, Tony Kushner, Lisa Loomer, August Wilson, Luis Alfaro, and many, many others. In 2007, with her late husband, Bruno Louchouarn Corey founded L’Atelier Arts which created multi-disciplinary projects including Sol Path and Rain After Ash commissioned by Fulcrum Arts’ A×S Festival; Tales of the Old West for the Autry Museum; Rock, Paper, Scissors for Childsplay Theatre (Best Production, Arizona Theatre Awards); and Day for Night presented at GLOW in Santa Monica and restaged in Poland for the Transatlantyk Film and Music Festival. Madden is the current Executive Director of the Monterey Museum of Art and the former Executive Director of the Kenan Institute for the Arts. Madden’s newest project Numbered Days will premiere in a podcast produced by The Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles next February.

AND SO WE WALKED
An Artist's Journey Along The Trail of Tears

Credits

CREATOR AND PERFORMER

Photography by Bert Vanderveen

“Every great story has truth in it, and the truth demands to be told,” the Cherokee writer-actor DeLanna Studi says at the beginning of “And So We Walked,” her autobiographical solo show at the Emerson Paramount Center. “And a true story is dangerous.”

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AND SO WE WALKED An Artist's Journey Along The Trail of Tears

Credits

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​CREATOR AND PERFORMER

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AND SO WE WALKED
An Artist's Journey Along The Trail of Tears

CREATOR AND PERFORMER