OAK GROVE

Oak Grove showcases a forgotten cemetery on Wilmington’s busy 17th avenue. Created in 1870, Oak Grove Cemetery was for anyone who could not afford to be buried. In Oak Grove Cemetery both black and white, child and elderly, freed slave and Confederate soldier rest side by side.

In the 1960s the graveyard was “relocated,” and the unique decorations that marked burials were all discarded. A few headstones were haphazardly moved, but controversially the 10,000 bodies still remain. The piece is on its way towards its first rendition which will be a stylistic staged reading, and performance mash-up, of both documentary styled sequences and dramatic vignettes rooted in historical research.