After the storm

February 16, 2007

Dance troupe captures pain and hope of New Orleans in 'Katrina Katrina'

Reprinted from the Albany Times Union , February 15, 2007

By Tresca Weinstein

In August 2005, PearsonWidrig DanceTheater was just a month away from premiering a new work about New Orleans that had been three years in the making.

The site-specific piece centered around the city's architecture and natural beauty, and was to feature video footage of its homes and bayous. The cast of 60 locals included elementary school students, professional dancers, engineers, scientists and dance students at Tulane University, where the work was to be performed outdoors in September.

The stage was set. Enter Hurricane Katrina.

"We were in New York when Katrina hit," recalled Sara Pearson, who co-directs the Manhattan-based company with her partner in life and work, Patrik Widrig. "It took months before we could locate the people in our cast, and we still don't know where some of them ended up."

Instead of abandoning the project, Pearson and Widrig changed directions with a speed FEMA might have done well to emulate. They checked in with the foundations that were funding the original piece including the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts and got the go-ahead to make a new work about the hurricane and its aftermath, "somehow framing the love and the loss that we felt and that the people who were living through it and in it were experiencing," Pearson said.

The result was "Katrina, Katrina: Love Letters to New Orleans," which the company performs Friday and Saturday at the Skidmore College Dance Theater in Saratoga Springs. Eleven Skidmore dance students will perform with the company, which is in residence at the college this month.

Multi-media: Katrina, Katrina" integrates movement choreographed by the couple, plus text, music and video footage taken by Widrig. There is a voice-over by the Romanian-born poet Andrei Codrescu, who reads an excerpt from "New Orleans, Mon Amour," his paean to his adopted hometown. The piece also incorporates real-life stories of New Orleans residents that were developed in workshops conducted at Tulane; the first was held just six months after the hurricane.

PearsonWidrig built its reputation on ambitious, unconventional programs: "Ordinary Festivals" was performed with 300 oranges and two knives, while "A Curious Invasion" incorporated 24 bales of straw, 10 fans, five sprinklers, four television sets and 2,000 ice cubes.

"Having done 20 years of community projects, we knew the best way to start was to get people dancing immediately," Pearson said.

They also got them writing, assigning one-sentence stories on specific themes for example, what they'd lost or found after Katrina. Many of these musings, both poignant and mundane, became part of the text spoken by the dancers in the piece:

"I lost my shoe collection, but only for three weeks."

"I lost the ability to live in New Orleans and have people say they envy me."

"I found a picture of my car, underwater, on an aerial map."

'We thought people would be all talked out," Pearson said, "but so many people said the workshops were the first time they were talking about this. I expected people to be angry and depressed and in shock and unresponsive, but I found people's hearts were ripped open. Everybody had a story to tell that was completely articulate and profound and engaging."

Emotional landscapes

A Tulane professor came to one of the workshops carrying his water-stained Pilates ball; after he'd been evacuated, he'd dreamt about it floating through the rooms of his house. Widrig later videotaped him rolling on the ball through his wrecked home. The video images serve as what Widrig terms "emotional landscapes" for the piece, re-creating "some of what the mood and atmosphere might have been like before the people came back, a devastated world with no life left in it before the life returned."

He shot footage of ships that had crashed into buildings and highways, and homes in various stages of destruction, a long shot from the pristine architectural montages the couple had planned for the original project.

"Instead of beautiful homes, we've got the Superdome and the flooded houses," Pearson said. "Instead of going into the swamp, which we couldn't get to, we videotaped the Lower Ninth Ward, just keeping the camera going as we went through. It's beautiful and it's heart-wrenching."

Nearly everywhere they went throughout the city, the couple listened to people's stories and then taught them a simple dance and videotaped them performing it. Widrig taped residents doing the dance at the first Mardi Gras after Katrina, and shot students performing it atop a vast heap of wrecked cars beneath the Interstate 10 overpass. A collage of this footage comes near the end of the 75-minute piece, and is set to Mae West's rueful rendition of "My Old Flame."

"It became all about people's love for New Orleans," Widrig said. "These people have something very deep in common, and what binds them together, that feeling of what it means, gets distilled into these few simple gestures."

Turmoil and prayer

The choreography for "Katrina, Katrina" expresses both internal and external turmoil, paired with sections that are almost prayerful; Widrig describes it as "a combination of flinging, almost violent moves juxtaposed with quiet, subtle moments, putting together the force of the wind and the power of the water with the absolute stillness that must have been there just after the storm." In one section, the dancers create a sort of levee with two lines of water bottles and then destroy it.

The piece has continued to evolve since its premiere at Tulane in March; the Skidmore performance features two new sections: a solo for company member Ogbitse Omagbemi; and what Pearson calls "our experimental deconstructed ode to Mardi Gras," built on a phrase developed by dancer Matthew Rogers. The couple also dance in the piece along with a fifth company member, Ana Keilson.

The company has taken "Katrina, Katrina" around the country, with stops in Texas and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. In each city, the troupe recruited Katrina evacuees to perform.

The response, Pearson said, has been overwhelming; she called the New Orleans performance "one of the most moving experiences of my life." She has received letters from audience members who were so moved by the piece that they went to Louisiana to help rebuild the city.

"We hope that the piece captures the soul of New Orleans, and that people see how the arts are integral in healing and reviving individuals and society in delightful and profound ways," she said.