PearsonWidrig returns with topical production for Skidmore audiences

Katrina, Katrina: Love Letters to New Orleans is a full-evening presentation of dance, video, and the spoken word, designed to embody the sense of loss and empathy felt by so many after one of the nation's most beautiful cities was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Created as a "live documentary," Katrina, Katrina continues to evolve, as the work tours from city to city, by updating its text, video elements, and even its cast of participating dancers - for instance, the Feb. 16 and 17 performances will include Skidmore student dancers. Katrina,   Internationally acclaimed for its dramatic and often amusing contemporary dance works, PearsonWidrig Dance Theater will present a timely and powerful new dance/video work at the  Skidmore College Dance Theater at 8 PM Friday and Saturday, Feb. 16 and 17.

Tickets are $15 for general admission and $8 for students. Tickets will be available at the Dance Theater box office (580-5392) 45 minutes prior to each performance. Reservations are not accepted, and seating is first-come, first-served.
The Washington Post has called Katrina, Katrina "heart-wrenching and wryly comic," and dancer/choreographer Ray Eliot Schwartz described it as "an elegant and important effort, using artistic practice to reclaim the devastated soul of New Orleans." 

The Skidmore performances will be a highlight of the company's three-week dance residency at the College. During the Feb. 2-19 residency, the company will teach dance classes at Skidmore, the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, and the Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y. The company will also present assembly programs for several elementary schools in the area.

Dancer/choreographers Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig are known for their ability to "transform the familiar into the mysterious, the absurd, and the intimate." Their style has been described by The New York Times as "impressive, virtuosic, amazing imagistically rich." The Neue Zurcher Zeitung called the company "American dance theater at its funniest and most compelling."

Since 1987, PearsonWidrig DanceTheater has created more than 40 dance works and earned wide acclaim for their original movement vocabulary, often augmented with such unexpected elements as 300 oranges, haystacks, and rowboats on a Central Park lake. The company’s previous performances at Skidmore have included The Return of Lot's Wife (2003) which featured eerily beautiful swirling arcs of table salt, and Thaw (2005), in which dancers performed with a video of old-time ice-harvesting footage as their backdrop, and broke small sheets of ice with their bare heels.

Performing extensively across the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia, the company tours for between six and 10 months a year. In New York City, where the company is based, PearsonWidrig DanceTheater performs at major dance venues including the Joyce Theater, Dance Theater Workshop Central Park SummerStage, P.S. 122, and Lincoln Center, among others.
The PearsonWidrig residency and the company's performance at Skidmore are made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.