Last week, The Green Music Center welcomed Clear Creek Creative to share and discuss their theatrical work, ‘Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man’.

The creators and community builders of Clear Creek Creative and Ezell, Bob Martin and Carrie Brunk, joined Green Music Center Executive Director, Jacob Yarrow for the virtual event hosted on April first.

“Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man is an environmental, cultural and spiritual parable derived from living in the foothills of Appalachia, one man among many seeking to make sense of the time, place and condition in which we live. In the story, Ezell’s choices, traumas, ancestors and more intersect with themes of domination and resilience as he seeks to take advantage of an anticipated fracking boom and the opportunity to reconnect with the people and the land of his raising,” read the Clear Creek Creative website.  

The Creative and theatrical performances themselves are located in Kentucky, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

Martin stars as Ezell in the solo performance of a man struggling with patterns of domination, his relationship with the land and environment, his ancestry, and his beliefs.

“Ezell is a character that came up, I would say, organically through our dialogue with this place [the land in Appalachia] … It was a character who had a lot of hard questions to ask and had a real sense of, the world is telling me I have a lot of power based on how I show up in the world and yet I don’t feel my power,” said Martin.

The theatrical piece is intended to encourage and motivate viewers and participants to continue, or begin, looking deeper into their own relationships with the land and environment around them and to begin to break away from the themes of domination that surround them.

“I specifically don’t want to be, in any way, didactic in this work. This work definitely has a point of view, but this work is also meant to be accessible to anyone,” said Martin. 

‘Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man’, intersects art and culture with a result that creates and inspires the possibility of global change.  

“The art and cultural organizing is where we get to figure out how to envision and understand the world that we’re in and envision what could be better about it. To do the work of healing and to process and engage emotions in ways that people typically, or often I find in our current society, don’t have access to on a very deep level,” said Brunk.

‘Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man’ premiered at Clear Creek Creative in 2019 and is planning on going on tour through Appalachia and nationally in 2021 to 2022.