PearsonWidrig to present 'Katrina, Katrina' on campus

The acclaimed contemporary dance company PearsonWidrig DanceTheater will present two performances of its ?live documentary? Katrina, Katrina: Love Letters to New Orleans, beginning at 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 1, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 2, in the Dance Theater.

An important component of Skidmore?s 2008-09 First-Year Experience program, Katrina, Katrina is a poignant and powerful meld of dance, the spoken word, video, and New Orleans music. The presentation explores and embodies the profound empathy and universal sense of loss after one of the nation?s most beautiful cities was devastated by the 2005 hurricane. 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.?

Admission to both performances is free to members of the Skidmore community. General admission is $15 and $8 for senior citizens. Seating is limited and reservations are not accepted; tickets go on sale 30 minutes before each performance. For more information, call the Dance Theater at 518-580-5392. The Dance Theater performances will feature more than a dozen Skidmore student dancers onstage with the PearsonWidrig company.

Katrina, Katrina: Love Letters to New Orleans is among an array of FYE-related events that take the hurricane and its aftermath as a starting point to explore themes of race and class differences, jazz, nature, identity, and personal and political responses to disasters. Other FYE events throughout the fall semester have included campus visits and performances by New Orleans jazz composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard, the 2008-09 McCormack Visiting Artist-Scholar; his CD soundtrack, A Tale of God's Will: Requiem for Katrina, is the centerpiece of FYE 2008. Other FYE events included showings of Spike Lee's Katrina-inspired HBO documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (with a score by Blanchard) and Faubourg Treme, a film about the history of black people in New Orleans.

The PearsonWidrig company originally performed Katrina, Katrina at Skidmore in February 2007. Its repeat performance is ?a critical part of our yearlong focus on the devastation of Hurricane Katrina,? according to FYE director Beau Breslin. ?The company?s vivid multimedia exploration of topics related to the hurricane is a vital aspect of our first-year students? experience.?

Dancer/choreographers Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig aim in their work 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 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 in front of a video backdrop showing old-time ice-harvesting footage, 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 its New York City home base, 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 Nov. 1-2 performances at Skidmore are sponsored by the Dance Department, First-Year Experience, and the Dean of Special Programs.