New Theaters – Zuni’s Idiwanan An Chawe

One result of Roadside Theater’s community residencies is the creation of new regional theaters. The most recent is Idiwanan An Chawe, a Native American theater in the Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, which creates and performs Zuni language plays.

Idiwanan An Chawe grew out of an ongoing 17-year cultural exchange between Roadside and traditional Native American artists of Zuni. Through this exchange, the two groups co-created and toured Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain, a bi-lingual play with music and dance that explores the differences and common ground of Zuni and Appalachian culture.

In 2002, Zuni A:shiwi Publishing released Journeys Home: Revealing A Zuni-Appalachia Collaboration, a 112-page book that combines the Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain play text with interviews, language essays, drawings, and a music and spoken word CD to probe and document the collaboration between Idiwanan An Chawe and Roadside Theater. Journeys Home is distributed by the University of New Mexico Press.

February 2003, the Smithsonian Institution presented Roadside Theater and Idiwanan an Chawe's latest collaboration, Zuni Meets Appalachia, a performance of traditional and original Appalachian and Zuni stories and music, at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City and at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

For more information about the Roadside/Zuni collaboration, see:

Journeys Home: Revealing a Zuni-Appalachia Collaboration

“Are the Storytellers There? Are the Stories Going to Be Told?” by Edward Wemytewa (from Roadside's Spring-Fall '99 newsletter)

"News from Zuni" by Edward Wemytewa (from Roadside's Fall '97 - Spring '98 newsletter)