Seeding Sustenance: A Cantastoria at 123 S Boundary St – Chapel Hill, NC

Join us for Seeding Sustenance: A Cantastoria, a powerful multigenerational performance that brings together larger-than-life puppets, murals, poetry, and live music to tell a story about our relationship to soil, seed, land, and one another.

A Cantastoria can be understood as a “sung story” or “story-song” — a performance form that uses image, sound, movement, narration, and collective art to carry a story forward. In Seeding Sustenance, this form becomes a container for community-made art, cultural organizing, and shared imagination.

This performance explores the sacred connection between people and the natural world, while also naming the harm caused by industrial agriculture and the systems that separate our communities from land, seed, food, and ancestral knowledge.

Through puppetry, poetry, visual art, music, and collective storytelling, Seeding Sustenance invites us into an act of love: a remembering of our relationships with the earth and an imagining of a just transition into a future rooted in care, reciprocity, and belonging.

This Cantastoria has been created in collaboration with community-based artists and organizers connected to the Collective on Racial Equity in Food Systems (CORE), NC Climate Justice Collective (NCCJC), Paperhand Puppet Intervention, and broader Rooted in Community partners. The work is also being developed in collaboration with CORE’s Art as Method team, which uses art, story, and cultural practice as tools for social change.

The gathering is also connected to the broader Rooted in Community space and the ongoing practice of bringing young people, artists, organizers, and community members together through culture, story, and social change.

Featured artists and collaborators include Isabel Lu, Bevelyn Ukah, Jodi Lasseter, Connie Leeper, Dasan Ahanu, Molefi Ramos, Sophie Joy, Jan Burger, Paperhand Puppet Intervention, and additional community-based artists.

This event is free, but tickets are required. Donations will be accepted at the event to support this community-rooted work.

We ask guests to arrive at 6:00 PM so everyone can settle in before the performance begins promptly at 6:30 PM.

Come witness an evening of cultural organizing, community-rooted art, and collective imagination.

—

Weather and Extreme Heat Plan

If it rains or we experience heat over 98 degrees, the cantastoria event will move to the UNC-Chapel Hill FedEx Global Education Center.

Address:

UNC-Chapel Hill FedEx Global Education Center

301 Pittsboro St

Chapel Hill, NC 27516