Four farmers picked at a field full of mugwort, seemingly getting nowhere. One had a tinkling voice and muttered about healing crystals. The next, a clear voice wondering aloud of the possibilities afforded by science. The third, a coarse voice calling everyone to put their backs back into the work. And the last, a soft, mediating presence. They wiped their brows and began to exchange gentle banter that headed toward conflict.
Underneath them, a musician crooned to the sound of a simple, country melody plucked out on a guitar. Something about what happens when we talk, he sang.
All of them were part of This Place is a Message, an outdoor play written by Taiga Christie and Zoë Batson. Last week, the work came to New Haven as a joint project among Yale Schwarzman Center, the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanities, Arts and Public Health Practice at Yale (HAPPY) Initiative, and Faultline Ensemble. The last is an arts collective inspired by community-based performance traditions using art as an alternative model of “health education, emergency response, and collective process.”