Greetings from Washington, DC where we just performed at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage with our magnificent dance artists Lindsay Gilmour, Matthew Rogers, Tzveta Kassabova, and the remarkable students from Tulane University.

Since our last newsletter, we’ve premiered Thaw at The Duke on 42nd Street, toured from South Carolina to India, got invited back to Japan, and our New Orleans project that was two years in the making got washed away with Katrina. As many of you know, we are currently immersed in our re-envisioned project Katrina, Katrina: Love Letters to New Orleans. A “live documentary” of spoken word, dance, video, and water bottles, the pilot project was created with Tulane University students and faculty in February and March, previewed with three sold out performances in New Orleans, and then toured to Austin, TX, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC as part of the regional and national American College Dance Festivals.

These are some email responses we’ve received from audience members:

“You have woven all elements together to such a beautiful, powerful piece of art. 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

"Six months of watching the news didn't come close to showing me what you did in one incredible hour onstage. Now—I get it!"
    Austin Shirley, graduate student at UT Austin

"The highlight [of the festival] for me was 'Love Letters to New Orleans.' At the end of the day, it is truly our art that can heal the world and make a difference, and I think everyone should have the opportunity to see this work. I don't know when I have been so moved and so touched by a performance."
    J. Jacobson, regional representative, ACDF

“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

"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

Our vision for this project is to tour it throughout the US to cities with significant populations of New Orleans evacuees, inviting them to participate in movement/writing workshops, video portraits, as well as in the live performances, thus creating a continually evolving “live documentary” as the work tours from city to city.

We are deeply in love and in grief with New Orleans and are trying to figure out a future that can give us the possibility of staying actively connected with the city and its residents, wherever they may be. We love each street, each tree, each house, each hand painted sign, each person who tells us their story. We want to listen and listen and listen. We want to be there, breathing in its internal music, feeling its rhythm, its color, its sorrow, its huge heart.

Something extraordinary is happening in New Orleans now. There is so much devastation, so much suffering, so much love, so much deep beauty. People whose lives have been affected by Katrina want to, need to be heard. We want to listen, and to make a live work of art that will cause people who have had little or no previous connection to New Orleans to passionately care, to want to help, to visit there, to vote. It needs to be happening now.

New videos need to be shot and edited, dances need to be choreographed, project coordinators need to be hired. We need to get back to New Orleans next fall and spring, and we need your help to make all of this possible. The need for this work has already been proven. Please join us, as Eruch Jessawala would say, in making the impossible, possible. Your contribution this year will count more and reach further than ever. In Rumi’s words: “There are many ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”