• Katrina, Katrina: Love Letters to New Orleans is a full-evening dance/spoken word/video work that embodies the unfathomable loss and overwhelming love felt by so many for America’s most beautiful city. A “live documentary”, all text and video are continually evolving as the work tours from city to city.

• Video footage of Katrina, Katrina: Love Letters to New Orleans production at the Kennedy Center, Millenium Stage. (Link opens a new window.)

Previews • Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, March 10-12, 2006 • University of Texas, Austin, TX, March 18, 2006

Premiere • Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA, March 2007

Tour • Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, Washington DC, May 18, 2006 + September 16, 2006 • Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, February 16+17, 2007 • Seven Stages, Atlanta, GA, September 2007 •  Dance Place, Washington, DC, October 2007

Funding for the creation and tours of the work has been provided by • The National Endowment for the Arts • The New York  State Council on the Arts • The National College Choreography Initiative • Tulane University •  The National Performance Network • The American College Dance Festival Association

Audience Responses

• “You have woven all elements together to such a beautiful piece of art, and
I am hoping that you will be able to tour not just the United States, but the
world with it.”
         Christine Washington, Cultural Attaché, Swiss Embassy, Washington, DC

• “I was moved to tears by the piece and I feel it is an elegant and important effort using artistic practice to reclaim the devastated soul of New Orleans.”
         Ray Eliot Schwartz, dancer, choreographer, somatic movement educator, and arts activist
           
• “I don’t know when I have been so moved and so touched by a performance.”
         J. Jacobson, South Central Regional Representative, American College Dance Festival
           
• “My 9-year old is still very distraught over the experience of the hurricane. Please come back to our schools with your piece - we need it.”
         Audience member, New Orleans
           
• “I just wanted to let you know that I was very moved by your work last Sat evening.  So moved, in fact, that I am planning a trip to New Orleans this August to volunteer my services as a Registered Nurse at a free clinic.”
         Wendy Westerman, Tivoli, NY

• This multi-sensory choreographic installation for 8-88 performers, 24 haystacks, 10 fans, 5 sprinklers, 4 TV/VCRs, and 2,000 ice cubes, creates images full of mystery and humor. With surprise after surprise, the ordinary becomes extraordinary and beauty is redefined. What at first appears out of place falls into place in exhilarating shifts of perception.

• See Video Excerpt

Tour Highlights • Wave Hill, Bronx, NY • Gilsland Farm Audubon Sanctuary, Falmouth, ME • Hopkins Center / Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

Commissioned by • the Bates Dance Festival (1997), Dancing in the Streets and Wave Hill (2001; additional funding provided by NYSCA and the Harkness Foundation), Hopkins Center / Dartmouth College (2003)

• HereAfter explores people’s relationship to life and death and what comes next, to beginnings and endings — of a life, a relationship, a job, a building, a passion. Finding words for the unspoken, and movement and music that fills the heart, the universal experience of love and loss are broken wide open with curiosity, compassion, and humor.

• Bessie award winning composer Robert Een created the original score.

Premiere • Joyce Theater Altogether Different Festival, January 2000

Tour Highlights • Flynn Center • Bräker Zyklus/Switzerland • L/A Arts/Maine

Commissioned by • the 2000 Altogether Different Fund for New Works, sponsored by The Joyce Theater Foundation, Inc. Additional support provided by the Rockefeller Foundation / Multi-Arts Production Fund, NYSCA, the Harkness, Sequoia, and Lifton Family Foundations.

• A dancetheater piece for 300 oranges, 6-16 performers, and 2 knives that “pushes the rituals of a traditional community over the edge into mysterious, subversive, and often funny acts.” (The Village Voice) and has been seen by over 15,000 people throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

• Set to the enchanting folk music of pre-war Italy, the 55-minute work explodes with images both wildly kinetic, deeply moving, and delightfully odd.

Premiere • P.S. 122, New York City, April 1995

Tour Highlights • Kennedy Center Millennium Stage • Joyce Theater • 9-city tour of Switzerland • Festival Internacional de Danza, Lima, Peru • Woking Dance Umbrella, England • Bates Dance Festival • Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center • Maine Festival • Grace Street Theater, Richmond, VA • Redfern Arts Center, Keene, NH • Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors • Central Park SummerStage

Commissioned by • P.S. 122 with funds from the Jerome Foundation, the Harkness Foundation, the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, and the Union Bank of Switzerland.

• If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride is a multi-disciplinary community-based dance theater work in which people remember, explore, and question pivotal moments of change in their lives.

• New video portraits can be created specifically with/for your community as part of a residency project (see Video Works).

Tour Highlights • I. M. Pei’s Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine • Wagon Train Project, Lincoln, NE • Padatik Dance Center, Calcutta, India

Commissioned by • the Bates Dance Festival, the Portland Museum of Art, the OnSite Performance Network (a program of Dancing in the Streets, with funding from the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation). Additional support provided by the NEA, the Maine Humanities Council and the Maine Arts Commission, the Davis Family Foundation, LEF Foundation, Tom's of Maine, Libra Foundation, Philip Morris, Inc., Swiss Center Foundation, Beatrice Gilmore Fund for Museum Education, and Key Bank.