Packing and Cracking
created by Rachel Gita Karp and Joseph Amodei
directed by Rachel Gita Karp
designed by Joseph Amodei
web designed and game built by Josh Kery
Drama League First Stage Residency - Summer 2019
SFX Festival - Winter 2020
Anonymous Ensemble Avant Gardens Residency - Winter/Spring 2020
LPAC in your Living Room - Spring 2020
North Dakota Museum of Art: Art in Isolation Exhibit - Spring 2020
Philadelphia Fringe Festival - Fall 2020
UNC Process Series - Fall 2020
Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics - Fall 2021
“In this day and age you can’t make it make sense. 150 years ago you probably did need legislators to draw the maps. Because legislators had a particular expertise that helped then in a sense. But right now I can get my 7-year-old to draw a map. And right now I feel good that he would draw a more fair map than 9 out of the 10 maps that would come out of here [the NC General Assembly].”
Do we choose our politicians, or do our politicians choose us? Packing and Cracking is a mapmaking party about gerrymandering: the pervasive practice of politicians choosing their voters rather than the other way around. Through drawing and map-drawing games, Packing and Cracking uses critical cartography, historical accounts of the first gerrymanders, and interviews with people dealing with gerrymandering today to show how easy and disenfranchising gerrymandering can be and ask what we should do about it.
While providing a national overview, Packing and Cracking focuses on redistricting and gerrymandering in one state at a time. The first focuses are North Carolina, whose maps have been so racially and partisanly manipulated in recent years that it has led to the state no longer being classified as a democracy, and Pennsylvania, whose maps drawn in the last round of redistricting created some of the strangest-shaped gerrymanders in the country.
Packing and Cracking began as an in-person event, transitioned to an online event during COVID, and has now returned as an in-person event—that takes places on a party bus and drives audience members to sites of gerrymandering.
ON-A-BUS version
(PHOTOS by Kitoko Chargois and the artists)
in-person version
(Photos by the artists)
online version
(Photos by Ryan Prado)
Packing and Cracking received developmental support as part of the 2018 Artist Residency Program of The Drama League of New York (Gabriel Stelian-Shanks, Executive Artistic Director; Travis LeMont Ballenger, Associate Producer). Space for Packing and Cracking’s development has also been provided by the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics, Sokoloff Arts (501c3) and Anonymous Ensemble, and funding has been provided by The Center for Artistic Activism, the Network of Ensemble Theaters, and the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.
Packing and Cracking has been developed in collaboration with Rory Kulz, Aubyn Heglie, Joshua Kery, Jacob Russell, Eben Hoffer (check out his podcast!), Caitlin Ayer, Kalyne Coleman, Ryan Dumas, Madison Fae, David Jackson, Rachel Michele Lin, Yaron Lotan, Roma Scarano, and incredible students at Chatham University: Anna Betar and Clara Laube, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: Maria Cade, Alayna Fennell, Kim Siboura, and Wesley Wood.
Read more at packingandcracking.com.