The Glasshouse

‘A Place To Fall To Pieces’

In 1877 Congress voted to transfer the ownership of the Black Hills from the Dakota Indians to the United States. What followed was a bloody war of acquisition which ended in most of the Dakota being driven from their native land. There is a quote from Shunkaha Napin (Wolf Necklace) from this time. He says. ‘All of my relatives are lying here in the ground and when I fall to pieces I want to fall to pieces here’. In a terrifyingly transitory world it is no small comfort to have a place to lay our bones. But what if it is not so simple? The story of our family is a migratory one. We were not born in the place our parents are from, and they were not born in the place their parents were from. We were not born in the place we grew up. We did not grow up in the place we experienced teenagehood. When we were older the house we abandoned was utterly abandoned and now when we return to what we call home it is a place still new to us. We seem to have been formed with no defining physical marker of Place on us. And we began to wonder what it was to be From Somewhere.To have a voice, a land, a story that is your birthright and is haunted by ghosts that bear your name. And we wondered too, if through lack of this, we may have created our own. It is our aim to lay out our nomad’s map of stories and songs of the places across our country that we have been but never been from. In the hope we can answer some questions of belonging and discover where the Permanence of Home truly lies. We are searching for a place to lay our bones. A Place to Fall To Pieces.

“We are looking forward to having the space and spending time collating developing and improvising work for our spoken word, storytelling and live music show, asking the question of what it really means to be from somewhere.”