Mission

SaltWater Road supports the creation of original experimental performance rooted in the American South. Through residencies, artistic laboratories, public humanities programming, and documentation, the Institute cultivates collaborative artistic research that engages justice through ancestral landscape, memory, movement, sound, and communal ways of knowing.

Vision

SaltWater Road envisions the Deep South as a thriving global center for experimental performance, cultural exchange, justice-centered artistic inquiry, and embodied public humanities practice. Our future vision includes expanded residencies, public programs, artist laboratories, documentation initiatives, a digital archive, beginning with our first annual SaltWater Road 2027 symposium on experimental performance in the South.

Values + Philosophy

At SaltWater Road, how we gather, how we listen, and how we create together matter. Our work is guided by womanist principles of care, collective responsibility, non-hierarchical practice, anti-oppression, spiritual grounding, and commonweal: the well-being of all. SaltWater Road values embodied knowledge, cultural exchange, deep listening, artist support, community accountability, and archival stewardship.

We identify this work as a healing justice intervention, and our social practice is based on the principles of Healing Justice (Page& Woodland, Healing Justice Lineages, 139): 
 
Principle #1: Collective trauma is transformed collectively.
Principle #2: There is no single model of care.
Principle #3: Healing strategies are rooted in place and ancestral technologies.

We believe artistic practice can support individual reflection, social connection, cultural memory, and collective well-being.

Work Cited: 
Page, Cara, and Erica Woodland. Healing justice lineages: Dreaming at the crossroads of liberation, collective care, and safety. North Atlantic Books, 2023. 

Our Approach

SaltWater Road views performance as a method of inquiry. Artists are invited to explore space, archives, oral history, improvisation, sound, movement, and ritual as tools for creative investigation and new performance work.

Our process asks artists to listen, adjust, respond, and be accountable in real time. Through field engagement, ensemble practice, and site-responsive experimentation, artists develop original work while deepening their relationship to place and one another.

Sites and community members are approached as collaborators and knowledge holders. This work is grounded in deep listening, ethical engagement, and care.

Why the South

The American South is a living archive of migration, resistance, cultural memory, ecological history, and creative possibility. SaltWater Road is rooted in Montgomery, Alabama, and engages sites across the Gulf South, including Gee’s Bend, Africatown, Mobile, St. Malo, St. Bernard Parish, and New Orleans. Our work invites artists and audiences to encounter the South and process stereotypes and traumatic histories.
 

This work is situated within a broader national context in which increasing numbers of Black families are returning to the South, reshaping its cultural and demographic landscape (Brookings Institution, 2022), while states such as Alabama and Mississippi remain among the least visited in the country. SaltWater Road responds to this gap by intentionally facilitating creative dialogue and cultural exchange across these states to challenge persistent stereotypes about the South and heal disconnections with the region.  In doing so, the organization contributes to the well-being of the region's cultural ecology by supporting artistic rigor, investigation, and practice, by creating space to process traumatic histories through community engagement with and through the arts, and advancing contemporary experimental Black performance as a vital and evolving part of the Southern cultural landscape.

William H. Frey, “A ‘New Great Migration’ Is Bringing Black Americans Back to the South,” Brookings Institution, September 12, 2022

Creative Humanities + Research

Conceived as an original, devised, participatory performance series, ProcessionLabs is a community-based, site-responsive public humanities performance process that centers the community folk craft of public procession and movement through shared civic space as a method of creative inquiry, social well-being, and public humanities programming. Grounded in ethnographic, participatory, and engaged research, the project investigates histories of Black gathering, social movement, and performances of freedom in the American South, with particular attention to histories of gathering and how public space has been shaped by laws, customs, and social practices that regulated who could assemble, move freely, and be seen together.

Black Southernist Experimental Performance Archive

We understand the archive as a living cultural practice that honors ephemeral performance, place-based knowledge, artistic experimentation, and intergenerational memory within the American South. SaltWater Road is building an evolving archive dedicated to documenting and preserving contemporary Black Southernist experimental performance. The archive includes artist process, site-responsive research, oral history, movement-based inquiry, public programming, ritual performance, photography, sound, video, writing, and embodied creative documentation emerging from SaltWater Road residencies and affiliated projects.

By documenting artistic processes rooted in movement, gathering, ritual, and collective inquiry, SaltWater Road helps preserve creative lineages that are often underrepresented in institutional archives and dominant performance histories. The archive supports artists, researchers, students, cultural workers, and communities seeking deeper engagement with contemporary Black Southern performance practices and public humanities methodologies.

Building a Southern Performance Future

Our long-term goal is to grow from an annual artist residency into a long-term Southern performance and creative humanities institution.

We are building an infrastructure for artists, scholars, culture bearers, students, community members, and audiences to gather around performance as a tool for inquiry, care, cultural exchange, and justice-centered imagination.