Review: AND SO WE WALKED: AN ARTIST'S JOURNEY ALONG THE TRAIL OF TEARS at Geva Theatre

Rochester's Geva Theatre Center is currently presenting a powerful one-woman show centered on the heritage and spiritual journey of a Cherokee woman wanting to connect with her past and her ancestors. It's a powerful, sobering, heartfelt theatrical experience that you don't want to miss.

DeLanna Studi, Cherokee performance artist and activist, shares a powerful, multi-faceted dramatic memoir in "And So We Walked: An Artist's Journey Along the Trail of Tears." This frank, heartwarming and inspiring story recounts the experience of a contemporary Cherokee woman (Studi) who, with her father, embarks on an incredible 900-mile journey along the Trail of Tears to truly understand her own identity and the conflicts of her nation. The play recounts the six-week journey, which retraced the path her great-great grandparents took in the 1830s during the forced relocation of 17,000 Cherokee from their homelands. "And So We Walked" draws on extraordinary interviews, historical research, and the artist's personal experience to convey the complexities and conflicts with which the Cherokee wrestle. Studi received the 2016 Butcher Scholar Award from The Autry Museum of the American West in acknowledgement of her work on "And So We Walked."

Studi gives the audience the full encapsulation of her life, starting with her childhood as a young Cherokee girl and how that experience shaped her life in school and at home; all the way through the journey with her father along the Trail of Tears and how that experience shaped her understanding of her past, her ancestors, and the world we all live in today. The experience, and her story, is told with honesty and through a simple yet powerful production design brough to life by John Coyne and Norman Coates.