flyover country trailer from Nat Evans on Vimeo.
In the summer of 2017, Evans discovered a huge wealth of family history - family trees extending back to the 1600s, stories that had been written down, and an archive of hundreds of photographs dating back to the 1870s. As he began to assemble a history of his family and their westward expansion, he concurrently took a deep look at indigenous cultures of North America, and traveled to different places that had similar ecological features to places his family settled, such as the oceanic tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills of Kansas.
The deeper Evans looked at the wider history of things, the more the holes in the mythology of his family manifested themselves. Timelines of movement matched up with historical genocide at the hands of white citizen militias, treaties with the Lakota broken as millions of bison were slaughtered for the market hunt and white settlers flooded the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota to mine for gold, and unsustainable farming practices led to tilled under grasslands from Illinois to New Mexico, precipitating the Dust Bowl.
In Flyover Country, a series of stories about Evans’ family, the United States, and strange dreams had while traveling are woven together in this performance with music, archival family images, drawings, and short films from site visits.
Nat Evans - Flyover Country - May 19th & 20thThe Grocery - thegrocerystudios.com
8pm - $5-20