This year a cultural exchange between Roadside Theater and Idiwanan An Chawe, a group of traditional Native American artists from Pueblo Zuni in New Mexico, resulted in the collaborative creation of a play, Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain. Funded by the Rockefeller MAP Fund, the new play was performed by Roadside and Idiwanan An Chawe (Children of the Middle Place) in Pueblo Zuni and at Appalshop in Whitesburg.

The seeds of the collaboration were sown over the previous 10 years when Zuni artists and Roadside Theater visited each other's home communities to talk about common problems, to perform, and to conduct cultural workshops. Two years ago the two groups decided to write a play together.

Zuni artists wanted to use this playwriting project to create a new Zuni language theater for their pueblo. This theater would provide a public occasion for Zuni secular storytelling, singing, and dancing.

Roadside's goals for the project were to draw attention to its Appalachian Native American history and further explore a form of theater that could accommodate performers from different cultures telling their stories and singing their songs in a way that honored and explored their respective traditions and discovered cultural connections.

The playwriting began orally with playwrights from Idiwanan An Chawe and Roadside Theater telling stories to each other about their place and people. These stories began to paint a picture of the far reaching change that occurred in both cultures when the people began to abandon their agricultural way of life.

Because this change had taken place within the lifetime of both the Zuni and Appalachian writers, their memories were full of stories and songs of planting and harvesting crops, of seasonal celebrations, of working in groups, of facing little in life without the support of the community. They also remembered the folktales their grandparents told them in the winter months when the crops were stored and the snows came. This oral material became the foundation of the script. Both Zuni and Appalachian cultures have rich oral traditions which are dependent upon families and communities passing information from generation to generation in thousands of informal and many formal ways. But with the abandonment of an agricultural way of life and the advent of time-clock jobs, generic school curricula, television for the masses, and the popularization of single family dwellings, this passing along has been interrupted.

Generations born in the 1970s and '80s, spending far less time with their elders, have little or no knowledge of their peoples' stories and songs. This is doubly serious in Zuni because the understanding of the Zuni language is embodied in this material; the Zuni alphabet was not invented until the early 1970s and is still not in wide use. It became obvious to the writers that the play must be bilingual.

The partners worked on the script for a year, and the result was Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain, Following the Seasons, a play that uses traditional and original Zuni and Appalachian humor, storytelling, music, and dance to tell the story of an agricultural way of life that once provided spiritual and physical sustenance to people in Zuni and in the Appalachian Mountains. The play, told from two distinct cultural points of view and in two very different languages, points out cultural and historical differences and speaks of a time when everyday life for Zuni and mountain people followed more closely the cycles of nature. It asks the audience to imagine how we might incorporate the values that sustained us in the past into the solutions we seek to the problems that face us today.

The play was enthusiastically received in both Zuni and Whitesburg. Idiwanan An Chawe and Roadside Theater are now looking at the possibility of publishing the script in Zuni and English and beginning to plan the next performances.