Everyone who has come for the bonfire will be in the Makeda's Nido shoot -- Maat.Ra Butterfly insists.
She and Marie Amaya, her best friend and partner in the all-vegan Solfood Catering and in this latest venture of producing an original Web series, have fortified their cast with enchiladas smothered in mole and tumblers of strong sangria.
Now the cotton aprons lie crumpled on messy counters and someone just called out the back door for everyone to come in. A dozen people crowd into the living room, where bright blue walls are covered in hand-painted goddesses and icons. Another dozen people are already there, clustered on chairs and couches.
The new arrivals sit in rows on the floor, so that soon, there is scant room for the cameramen to maneuver. People pound drums. Yoga instructor Kali Empl pumps an Indian harmonium (it resembles a horizontal accordion) and leads the group in call-and-response mantras.
"Hare Krishna. Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare," everyone sings, including those who know nothing about this series and just came because they heard about vegan food and a fire pit.
At first the group is self-conscious, trying not to stare at the cameras weaving among them, grabbing close-ups of rhythmic hands and mouths. Ten minutes in, the chanting fills the increasingly warm room and the energy grows concentrated, precise.
People close their eyes. Maybe it's the sangria evoking this flushed dizziness. Maybe there really is something mystical occurring.
Then Empl's voice falters, and she has to start over midchant.
The cameramen say, "It's OK. We got it."
The spell is broken. But the cast are calling this shoot "opening night." The nido is just beginning.
Welcome to Makeda's Nido
"Nido is Spanish for nest," says Butterfly, 43. Her legal name is Kelley Smith-Pruitt, but a guru dubbed her Maat.Ra Butterfly a decade ago. She's a producer, creator and cast member in the series Makeda's Nido.
The group chant, about three episodes in, celebrates the opening of the nido, a boardinghouse for lost souls, run by a chef named Makeda who needs a fresh start.
"Makeda's Nido is reflective of the community we started building after meeting each other," says Byron Norwood, 48,
producer, cast member and all-around handyman. "It's really about the lifestyle, a more holistic approach to meeting people and learning to appreciate who they are."
Amaya plays Makeda, and the story loosely mirrors her own. After her marriage ended, Amaya moved to China to teach English and then to Little Rock, to create a utopian society with Butterfly, who shares Amaya's opinion that "we should try to live more symbiotically with everyone else, including animals."
This is why the women refrain from eating anything sourced from an animal -- no meat, dairy or eggs -- and why, for a decade now, Amaya has been obsessed with earthships (self-sustaining dwellings constructed from recycled materials and mud).
Earthships are, she and Butterfly hope, their future. For now, there's Solfood Catering and Makeda's Nido.
The series' theme is archetypal and the plot details the women are willing to share, vague. Following some unspecified tragedy, Makeda moves to a new city and buys a house, intending to offer a safe space to anyone who needs it. While her guests figure things out, Makeda cooks vegan soul food. Along the way, she'll realize she's being helped as much as she's helping.
"People are coming here and truths are being revealed to them," Butterfly says.
The series is outlined rather than scripted. Actors -- friends of the producers, some experienced, some not -- are told what is going to happen in each episode, and they improvise dialogue. There are 13 episodes, ranging from 30 minutes to an hour, Butterfly and Amaya did editing and post-production work, and the first four episodes will premiere at Little Rock Urban Farming on Friday.
Other episodes will premiere at private residences, Vino's Brewpub and perhaps at Riverdale 10 Cinema, First Security Amphitheater or Ron Robinson Theater in the River Market District. They're exploring how to release each episode online. If Netflix isn't interested, they plan to post the series on YouTube.
The production raised $1,400 via Web crowd-sourcing. Norwood spent about $3,100 on six used cameras (including a knock-off GoPro for an underwater scene), and the Solfood ladies estimate they've spent at least that much feeding cast and crew.
Butterfly and Amaya didn't set out to make a series. Originally, they planned to open a boardinghouse.
"We started looking for a place on Broadway, one of those old houses, where we could probably pay rent, take in a couple of roomers and ... get the kitchen commercial, legal. And we thought well, shoot, a good way to manifest this in real life is to make a movie of it," Butterfly says.
Norwood says, "It's in manifesting the reality that you want ... I think that's the shared perspective that most of the people in the community have."
While they wait for the universe to heed their message, Makeda's Nido is being filmed at Norwood's 70-year-old, cozy clapboard house on John Barrow Road, rather than at a Victorian-era Quapaw Quarter mansion.
Norwood is the kind of homeowner who carefully mows around patches of wildflowers and spends lazy mornings lounging with his 2-year-old granddaughter in the backyard on furniture made from shipping pallets, eating strawberries from the garden.
However, he's not the type of homeowner who paints a mermaid goddess with a swirly bosom on his wall. Prior to filming, his walls were white. He doesn't know when they'll be white again. Shooting wrapped in May, but if all goes well, they're planning a second season.
Feeding the inner sun
Butterfly and Amaya met online three years ago. Butterfly was shooting freelance commercials and living in Dallas and Amaya was a stay-at-home mom in Albuquerque, N.M. Butterfly found a video art piece that Amaya had created and posted on YouTube called MaatKare 2012: The Real Secret. It's 2 1/2 hours of news footage, anthropological photographs and charts layered with philosophical voice-overs touching on, among other topics, technology's toxic byproducts, how to reactivate "calcified" pineal glands (known by some cultures as the third eye) and lucid dreaming.
Butterfly was intrigued. She contacted Amaya and a few months later traveled to Albuquerque, where they wrote a (not yet produced) screenplay. In February 2013, Amaya moved to Little Rock, into Butterfly's studio apartment and the women, both recently single, began to remake their world.
Their first venture was Solfood Catering ("sol" as in "sun"), run out of various rented kitchens in the metro area.
"Solfood was a way to divest from the system. ... I wanted to develop a business as a way towards self-sufficiency but also to support how I was living," says Amaya, who once owned a raw-food restaurant in Florida.
Solfood started selling snacks at the Hillcrest farmers market and hosting food-related events at Green Corner Store. Now it offers occasional vegan cooking classes, throws theme "dinner and a movie" parties (formerly at Market Street Cinema) and caters private affairs. Amaya and Butterfly grow some of their food in friends' yards but mostly buy items from local growers, such as Dunbar Gardens and Little Rock Urban Farming.
In September, Amaya and Butterfly teamed up with Norwood to produce the Little Rock Urban Raw Festival at Wildwood Park for the Arts, a conglomerate of performing arts, music, yoga and raw food. The festival inspired Makeda's Nido.
"We had so many people coming from out of town, and we had to house them. We were just like, man, if we had our own space," Butterfly says.
But even more than a house with plenty of bedrooms, the Solfood ladies want an earthship colony and have begun scouting Southside Main Street and Quapaw Quarter for parcels of land.
"We want an area that's walkable and needs development," Butterfly says.
The first earthships were built in the 1970s in New Mexico. Exterior walls may be constructed of old tires filled with concrete or dirt, while interior walls may be made of tin cans and other recycled materials. Earthships are designed to ventilate naturally, filter rainwater and capture solar and wind power.
Butterfly and Amaya envision a central structure that's about 15,000 square feet, with roughly nine smaller pods housing dance, yoga and music studios, and resident artists running the whole affair.
"If you put it out there ... people will come. They'll bring their sleeping bags and tents and tools and people that know how to do it will come help," Butterfly says.
"They'll come internationally," Amaya says. "Basically they camp out on the property, you feed them and they offer up their services. Some of them might be good with plumbing. Some of them might be good with solar panels."
They estimate the total cost at $15,000.
"I don't think it's more than two years off," Amaya says.
'Everything is one, but nothing is one thing.' -- Maat.Ra Butterfly
What truly binds Butterfly, Amaya and Norwood is a core belief in fate, the idea that nothing happens by accident.
"Most of these characters [in Makeda's Nido], it's not what you see in front of you. You'll see their lives are deeper than they first appear. It makes a chain. What one person decides to do can affect everyone's lives," Butterfly says.
Ask Norwood how he met the Solfood ladies, and he and Butterfly will say in unison, "She brought us together," and gesture to the mermaid on the wall. (They list her various names, Eastern and Western: Yemaja, Isis, Mary, Aset, Ma'at -- the essence of motherhood, the protector of life.)
They recount how, long before they met, Amaya and Butterfly delivered their youngest sons three years apart in the same Dallas birthing center, in the same bed, using the same midwife. And how Butterfly was working at a theater in Switzerland in 2007 when cast member Empl attended a play there.
"We were in the same theater at the same time and had no idea," Butterfly says.
This belief in interconnection is the root of the women's veganism.
"Why do I feel I'm more superior to a cow?... Animals have families just like I have family. ... People like to say man and nature, as if we're not a part of nature," Amaya says.
"Or man versus nature, like we're against each other," Butterfly says. "It's all about bringing people together and exposing them to the food. The people who eat our food feel good after they eat it."
Amaya says, "It's the thing, too, of kind of creating a new culture. ... Anthropology, the first thing they do when they go digging, they find out what a culture was by the type of food that a culture ate. ... We're talking a generational shift in how people think and feel about themselves. Coming together and instituting peace and togetherness. Not being so adversarial."
Peace is the mantra, Solfood is the business and Makeda's Nido is the experiment. At least until the earthship lands.
Makeda's Nido will premiere at Little Rock Urban Farming at 800 Buchanan St. at 8 p.m. Friday. Check the Solfood Catering page at facebook.com/SolFoodCatering for further releases. For more information, call (903) 272-0930.
Style on 06/24/2014