Nothing Abides

In 2023, Cortland Gilliam and Brian Howe spent several months as writers in residence at Culture Mill, in collaboration with Southern Futures at Carolina Performing Arts. Their immersion was focused on a community dance-theater work, Eclipse, and a “social geography” class at UNC-Chapel Hill, which both converged in a critical examination of the built environment of Chapel Hill. Their brief was to produce writing from the experience—whatever kind of writing they wanted.

Cortland and Brian spent the next several months collaborating on what became Nothing Abides, a poetry text and performance that they have since brought to art, music, and poetry spaces throughout the Triangle. They began by each writing one poem, then exchanging them with each other to remix and recombine, inspiring further writings to also blend into the whole. Then they developed it into a performance involving musical interludes and closely layered duet vocals.

Nothing Abides as presented here reflects its dual status as a poetic text and a performance score; the red words in some poems indicate who reads them, though not necessarily who wrote them. Like ECLIPSE, which Culture Mill calls “an effort to temporarily eclipse the power projected by our public spaces…centering on the labor and legacies of Black and indigenous people,” the piece finds its motif in the brick, that fundamental unit, symbol of invisible labor and indivisible power.

Northing Abides at Attic 506

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