the creek between us audio tour

Details about the creek between us audio tour

We’re thrilled to share an amazing, free public art experience for you: a self-guided performance of the creek between us in Tuckerman Park.

The best part? It's designed with special attention to this unique year. It's socially-distanced, outdoor public art—and believe us, it's worth every minute.

The audio tour is available above (click PLAY when you’re ready to head east from the Tuckerman Park trailhead parking lot). You can also access the tour via the QR code anytime you have your phone. You'll need a cell phone (with headphones/earbuds, if possible!) to experience this performance.

You can listen once, twice, or fifty times. You can bring your friends, your family, your pup. You can come on foot or skis or snowshoe. Since it's designed for social-distancing, you can sing along. You can sing loudly! You can dance, stretch, bounce, and play. Listen on a special trip, or on your daily jog by the water. And most of all, come get your fill, along Bozeman Creek.

the creek between us, Tuckerman Park, August 2020

the creek between us provided an opportunity to experience relationships with Bozeman Creek, while deepening understandings of what it means for our diverse communities to recreate outdoors. The project explored creative expressions of having fun, getting serious, negotiating survival, establishing reciprocal relationships with nature, and securing identity/ies in relation to water.

the creek between us was produced with residents from the region and local organizations including Earthtone Outside, Eagle Mount, and Queer Climbers Coalition. The project was realized by a collaborative team of artists, designers and scholars including Absalooke scholar and musician Shane Doyle, architect Ben Lloyd, opera director and media artist Laine Rettmer, media artist, writer and director, Mary Ellen Strom, costume designer Alayna Rasile, and art historian Rachel Tang (Dine).

By placing city parks and public outdoor spaces in historic contexts and examining their implicit and explicit biases and histories, the creek between us explored how different groups have experienced these spaces and will rethink and imagine new ways for the present and future. 

the creek between us examined how ideas of “the environment” in Southwestern Montana have been constructed, disseminated, understood, and commodified over time. 

 This project raised questions including:

• Have we created landscapes of exclusion, and, if yes, how can we change this narrative?

• Who feels safe to enjoy our public recreational spaces? Who doesn’t?

• Can we foreground narratives that are alternative ways of knowing recreational spaces and offer frameworks of experience outside the heteronormative, white experience?

• How has meaning been attributed to the environment based on different perspectives including ideologies, beliefs, myths, and experiences?

the creek between us is a pilot project of an ongoing, multi-year effort to revitalize Bozeman Creek. the creek between us functions as a way to build relationships with our diverse communities to ensure that environmental efforts include cultural concerns. This project provides an opportunity to galvanize our diverse communities around Bozeman Creek, a significant body of running water that is in critical need of stewardship 

the creek between us has been conceived and produced through a collective process with Shane Doyle, Ben Lloyd, Laine Rettmer, Mary Ellen Strom, and Rachel Tang. MTA is grateful for the support of the creek between us from The MAP Fund. Like all MTA performances, the creek between us exists thanks to the amazing support of community members like you.

click for full press release →

the river between us 

in the river that your father fished
my father was baptized. it was
their hunger that defined them,

one, a man who knew he could feed himself if it all came down,
the other a man who knew he needed help.

this is about more than color. it is
about how we learn to see ourselves.
it is about geography and memory.

it is about being poor people
in america. it is about my father
and yours and you and me and
the river that is between us.          

—Lucille Clifton