 Hello, we're here. Do you want to speak a little bit? I'll do my official little thing here. Hi everyone, we're back. In case you're wondering, from the little tiny break. And if you're out there in hell around land, you don't know where we are. There's no passport conference at USLSU. My God, what am I saying? It's a long day already. This is Kenny Thatts-Mitch. I'm the founder of No Passport and I'm a playwright. We are here for this panel, which is the Katrina Effect, Performance Response to Gulf Coast Man-Made Disasters. And it's led by Annalise Fox, and she'll walk you through it. Thanks. So, I'm a recent graduate here in the doctoral program of theater here at LSU, and my doctoral research was on Katrina performances after the Levy Break Disaster that were responding to it through personal story, site-specific, and memory. And so, this panel is, I'm very excited to be able to have this table here. And with the time we have, what I wanted to do is give more time for our artists to speak. Everyone here has a lot of, they're very committed artists with a lot of accomplishments. And we have seven projects on the table. And the man-made disasters that we call into the room are the Katrina Levy Break Disaster of 2005, and almost five years after that, the BP Oil Spill and Deep Horizon Explosion in 2010, and then this enduring, over many decades, and long-term issue of coastal loss and culture loss in Louisiana, Gulf Coast. So, I'm going to just very quickly give a pass around. Well, I would like to start with John Beganay. He's a university professor at Biola University. He's a multi-genre published author and as well as a distinguished playwright. And he has written a trilogy of plays called Rising Water that are in direct response to the Katrina Levy Break Disaster. The first one came out in 2006. It's Rising Water, seven. It's written in number six. And that was taking place in the middle of the flooding. The next play, Shotgun, takes place four months into the disaster. And then the final play, Mold, which premiered last spring, takes place as we approach the first year anniversary of the disaster. All three of these plays in the trilogy have received stagings around the nation, but as well as either a premiere or an important stage at Southern Rep Theater in New Orleans. And so we will, I'm going to let John later introduce more about the trilogy and I'm going to try to very gracefully work with our technology to show a few little short clips. Then we're going to, we move on to our next disaster, BP Oil Spill. We have with us three of the collaborators of this project. And of course, Spill is starring here at Swine Palace at LSE right now, and part of our conference activity is to see this play if you haven't already seen it. And as Nick and I were seeing this earlier today, that we feel like it is required viewing for all Louisiana residents. So, Lee Fandekowski, you might know her work more from The Laramie Project and the Tectonic Theater Project. She was a head writer of The Laramie Project and also that was been staged all over the place and was also honored with an Emmy for the HBO adaptation of that play. And Riva Wartell, who is the portrait, a visual artist but who did the portraits that accompany the drama, the play that hopefully you will see tonight. And a dramaturg as well as a performer with the Tectonic Theater Project who, an amazing performer you will get to see Kelly Simpkins. Or Lily. Thank you, you're so gracious. And even before the storm Kathy Randalls of Art Spot Productions had been in the works to produce a site-specific piece dealing with coastal loss and land loss and then the disaster happened and very shortly thereafter was a production called Beneath the Strata which was, I'll let her talk a little more about it I'll be a little quiet. And Kathy Randalls started, she's the artistic director and founder of Art Spot Productions which is nearing its 20th year based in New Orleans. Kathy is a Louisiana Theater Festival winner fellow an OB performer and winner and yes, had been touring nationally but based in New Orleans. Nick Sly is the co-artistic director and co-founder of Mondo Bizarro Performance Collective Very Bizarro and he's with Bruce France and he's also an LSU alum of the Performance Studies Program and Nick was an actor in Beneath the Strata and they collaborated more closely the two organizations with Lou Garou which is a solo performance with a lot of other great minds behind it and this final piece called Cry You One which had a performance premiere in the fall in Violet, Louisiana in St. Bernard Parish where norlynians who wanted to see the show had to drive and about an hour and walk about a mile and a half have a journey looking at the edge of our coast and I'm going to let them talk more about these productions so I'm going to try to very elegantly start these clips and then we'll start with John I have two mics and where's the other mic so we can be a little more elegant the way we pass so this you were a columnist for the New York Times in the immediate time after the storm and then there was a couple of news pieces that you did for the New York Times my wife and son and I were homeless and I wrote a piece about where the norlynians were evacuees or refugees actually it was a debate in congress about it and the Times called my agent and said we want him to become our first guest columnist but he's got to go right back to New Orleans so we got to New Orleans the night martial law was lifted and I began to file although we were sleeping in a daycare center I wrote column after column shooting videos in the columns I wrote on a little green 12 inch chair on top of a yellow 18 inch table in this daycare center after we spent the day gutting our house so I'm going to be it gets into the power of oh look at me storytelling and sharing stories so rather than you know just the first 30 seconds and then I'm going to try to get more into the place some of the video clips we have in the place so here we go here is where it began for those of us who live near Lake Ponticrain my neighborhood since childhood a neighborhood now abandoned to the bulldozers of the Corps of Engineers it's been a year now since defective levees here at the 17th street canal and elsewhere in New Orleans collapsed flooding the city and killing 1,300 it's been a year now but it feels like yesterday sorry sorry to interrupt you there this is a clip from Rising Water and John do you want to talk a little bit about Rising Water before I show a clip one of the things that became very clear as I started to report for the times was that the Corps of Engineers was lying about what had happened there's a levee two blocks from my house the Corps insisted that they'd been over top by floodwaters in fact it was clear that levees had burst at the bottom and forensic engineering studies later showed that while the Corps should have put 65 feet of steel in those levees in some cases they used only 4.5 feet of steel so it was nothing but mud holding back the engorged canals and when they burst they burst with such a force that in the lower 9th Ward a wall of water 18 feet high on the street at 5 feet a second people didn't stand a chance they cut houses those walls of water cut houses that have put trucks on top of rooftops and so I began to think about what would have happened if my wife and I had stayed rather than evacuating and had been trapped in an attic in my neighborhood the water came up 8 feet in 10 minutes and it came in the middle of the night it takes a long time to fill up an area 7 times the size of an entire island of Manhattan with salt water 16 feet deep and so if you were near a levee the water reached you probably Monday afternoon in daylight but if you were 20 blocks away and no one knew that this had happened there were no reports on CNN until Tuesday morning the water reached your house in the middle of the night on Monday night 12 hours or 14 hours after the hurricane had passed you were awakened asleep with water 3 feet deep and your house are ready if you went outside to see what was happening you drowned if you were in a walker or two old to get up the attic stairs you drowned in your bedroom but if you got in the attic that attic was going to reach 130 degrees the next day and if you couldn't find a way to cut yourself onto the rooftop you died of dehydration in the attic and this play looks at a couple who are awakened in that fashion first in the attic in the first act and they break through in the second act onto the roof that's a very New Orleans tradition we get through things by telling each other stories and this is what Big Adate does he found a lot of stories and he has made his own story a composite of a lot of stories that he was told what do you think about this play about ordinary people in an extraordinary situation and he thinks it's very fitting that it's being done in a Southern Rapid because people all over the world saw that building burning on CNN he thinks it's another way that we can reclaim our city you can see the theater group I don't have to explain to you Happy Days by Samuel Beckett's influence on this play and in fact what had happened was that Beckett had created a vocabulary that we didn't really need for 50 years but this play ran forever basically to full house almost from opening night the other great theatrical success that year was Weddy for Godot classical theater of Harlem and Wendell Pierce came to New Orleans they did one performance in the lower ninth award and one performance in Gen Tilly two blocks from where my mother's house was destroyed and three or four thousand people showed up to see it and I can tell you New Orleansians did not know who Samuel Beckett was but when they heard about two people waiting for someone who doesn't show up they knew it was a story about them yes that was the most I think the most successful play ever in Southern Reps theater history it was better than a musical in fact and we only and the city only had a third of the population it did when it had set previous records people understood it was something about themselves and it really made me understand theater in a brand new way I began to see a link between theater and cities which I'd never recognized again I write novels short stories all sorts of things and usually it's going to be read by people around the world but in the case of a play it's done by actors who have something of the English of the audience's English for a particular community asking questions the community needs to address when I went to Euripides Euripides was writing for the Athenian neighbors only one of Shakespeare's plays ever showed outside of London playwrights have written for their neighbors phrasing questions the community needs to speak about and I don't think there's another kind of narrative like that okay here's the one that kept spinning on mold but it's a lovely piece that WGNO did to announce the premiere so this is loading a TV station came a TV station came to film Rising Water and the cameraman looked like a biker bold head, tattoos, big shirt six foot six he started sobbing so hard he couldn't hold the camera steady when he was filming one of the scenes and so they couldn't show a clip because he just couldn't hold it while the actors were going through the launch for this piece mold this was the one that was in rep last spring 2013 and it said a year after the I don't know if this is going to work or not but it said a year after the flood a young couple that's been living in Texas come back to meet an insurance adjuster to see whether or not they can rebuild it turns out the young man's parents house his parents have died in the attic and one of the things we discovered is something I reported about on The Times and one of my students told me about her boyfriend's and an uncle were trapped in an attic and it became clear after a couple of days that nobody was coming for them and so they taped their driver's licenses to their bodies so that their bodies could be identified and it turns out that's how his parents have died and the young couple have got to decide do we rebuild in New Orleans or do we make a new life somewhere else here it is I'm sorry, there's a little ad I'm sorry I'm afraid to mute I'm feeling what you're going to feel leaving this play the immediacy of the human beings just a few feet away from you going through some of the things that the audience itself has gone through I think it makes an experience that would never be duplicated on film writer John Bigenet is at it again this time making the last play in his trilogy about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina come to light more of this is so much a part of our life and I'm sure that many people this play is a kind of fitting combination to the entire trilogy it stands by itself but it also nips together threads that began to unravel in the first two plays mold is about a couple who evacuate a day before Katrina hit and come back home nearly a year later to deal with reality it hits close to home for several New Orleansians including Bigenet and actress Carol Sutton who plays a woman who chose not to evacuate being everything destroyed it makes me wonder just what I spent my money on and what I could have had well if you see this play you'll see what my character has to go through and when I think about not evacuating if I would have stayed here I may have had to go through the same thing I don't know about the village brave as she was the two main characters the emotions that they go through it's fascinating to me I wish I could tell you more a little bit when I'm talking about rising water the first play in that trilogy became Southern Rep's longest running and most successful show and they expect similar results from this one the show is now running runs till April 14th and for tickets just log on to WGNO.com alright so I think there's a kind of relationship between Laramie Project and these plays in that I made up almost nothing Carol Sutton plays a character who stays to the storm the storm is long past but the water starts to rise and she's sitting on her sofa and it starts to come up as it did in my neighborhood very very quickly she winds up standing on a chair for 24 hours that story was based on something that someone said in a talk back at a matinee of rising water it was Sunday afternoon a lady that looked like my grandmother with her little white gloves on and she told the story of sitting in Gentilly where I grew up having to stand on a chair for 24 hours the water came rushing in in New Orleans and then it sort of swept back so the water lines that you would see were actually two feet lower than they actually were it came down enough so that the next morning a man came by on a flat boat and said is anybody still alive and she said I'm alive and said can you swim ever since I was a little girl and this is a lady telling us this story and so she went underwater, went through where her window had been blown out, popped up alongside his boat he dragged her up into the boat gave her a beer and she said and Dolan that's when my trouble really began so all three of these stories are almost entirely documentary knitting together different stories I think the way to learn any project can you talk about shotgun give us a little intro to the middle play well shotgun is about race if you're not talking about race you're not talking about New Orleans and four months after the flood something happened that transformed everything up to that point all the old animosities disappeared and were put aside because we were all in so much trouble if somebody was on the side of the road with a broken down car you stopped and helped and color, religion, nothing made any difference you just helped somebody else in trouble but our mayor, it was clear he was not going to be re-elected, Mayor Negan he's on the verge of I think a 30 year prison sentence now for federal crimes and he made it to Martin Luther King Junior Day a chocolate city speech in which he said white New Orleansians were conspiring to keep black New Orleansians from coming back to the city and all the tension and anxiety we all were feeling just exploded I was a child when the segregationists were losing power and it was just as tense in those months after that speech as it was when integration was beginning to happen in the city and I wanted to explore what happened and in that play a white man and his teenage son lost everything including wife and mother ran half of a shotgun duplex we call them doubles across the river now years where it didn't flood from a young african-american woman whose father's lost his house in the lower 9th ward and moved in with her the white man and the black landlady fall in love and being New Orleans everybody goes crazy the father of the landlady at one point takes the white man aside and tries to convince him to give it up and the white man says the dex look at us everything's changing black family living under one roof and the old man says yeah but with a wall running between us and so trying to examine what happened to race so these three plays I hope two things one was to phrase questions that the community need to talk about and we had to talk about race we had to talk about what we were all feeling at that period and we had to talk about a year later all those people who didn't come back only 350,000 people live in New Orleans now half a million lived there before the flood so there are 150,000 living somewhere in the United States that aren't coming home so that play was partly about that but the other thing and I think this is true of all of us was to get the story out and keep it alive these plays have had 30 or 40 productions around the United States from coast to coast and at talk backs the audience always says exactly the same thing I had no idea that's what happened in New Orleans I thought it was a hurricane but I think we're all working very hard to make clear what happened because as I always argue New Orleans is simply where the future arrived first if you don't take care of the environment you don't take care of the poor you don't take care of public education you let public corruption thrive you get New Orleans in 2005 thank you that's a really great lead in for the next project the spill project that's currently running thank you that was such a moving presentation still kind of in digesting it yes I agree I think you so articulately stated one of the fundamental basis of all the work that I've done which is ordinary people and extraordinary circumstances and the tragedy that you didn't mention in my brief bio I did work on the Laramie project and then I also spent five years studying the deaths in Jonestown the 1978 Jonestown tragedy and then moved on to the BP oil spills so but the question of what do we do with all that grief and what do we do with all that trauma and I've made it a point in my work to bring the story back to that community so the way my world view of the American theater I would go to the regional theater that was closest to the event that I was studying so in Laramie the closest regional was Denver Center and that's where we premiered Laramie in the case of the Jonestown piece many of the people who died in Jonestown and the people who survived came from the Bay Area so we premiered that play at Berkeley Rep and in the case of Spill we were pretty dedicated to premier it here in Louisiana so we approached Swine Palace which was the closest regional to a lot of our interviewees but it is the theater does become a place to bring all that grief and bring all that trauma and not that we can provide a resolution to these events but I think through the act of making art from the tragedy hopefully there is some way that that human suffering is addressed I don't want to say that it heals it but I think it touches upon the unresolved places within a community and within the individuals so I'll pass the mic to my collaborators they can touch on some other things about well we're going to see it, I'm very moved by this idea of grief in the theater right now Spill Spill is about the BP oil spill and I first came down here with a group of students I was invited to bring a group of students to teach them the techniques of making this kind of work but after working on Laramie and after working on Jonestown I really didn't want to do another piece like this that was based on interviews and that was about a tragedy I was kind of cooked with that form and that emotional investment too so I brought the students down and I was teaching them about how do you make art from tragedy and how do you interview people and how do you gain their trust and the process of being here actually went on a boat trip and came back to Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries in Grand Isle and they were autopsying dolphin bodies it's a pretty dramatic thing to see the dolphin body on a table and then body bags of dolphins next to it and it was almost an instant recognition that I had to make a piece about this it was like okay well life brings you a dolphin autopsy scene and you as an artist I felt okay I'm going to have to respond and that's when I called Riva Riva's a portrait artist and I had seen her work which is also interview based and I asked her to collaborate with me to come down and start interviewing people and I thought we were going to make a piece about the oil spill but as soon as I got here I realized that what I knew about the oil industry and the the ties between the land and the water and oil here I knew nothing and so I had to spend a long time understanding the oil industry actually investing in trying to tell the narrative of the connection between industry and the land and the water and so the first act of spill which hopefully you'll come see tonight is about the explosion on the oil rig and the second act is about the aftermath but I spent a lot of time trying to I was at a talk back for Laramie actually and somebody asked me what was I working on I said BP oil spill and the woman said oh that's a different kind of sadness and it was very struck by that it was like what do you mean oh that's a different kind of sadness almost as if to say that the 11 men who died are an afterthought or you know not victims in the same sense that Matthew Shepard was a victim and so how do we place a value on human life so that's when I sort of, Reeve and I sort of redoubled our efforts to talk to the families who lost their kids and to invest in those narratives and one of the central characters in spill is one of the men who died on the rig. Everyone I'm Reeve O'Wortel I've been working with we interviewing people and also painting life size a lot of the portraits are life size and some of them are not full life size but just head and shoulders I think what I'd just like to tell you about this process is that we interviewed people and then we would go into the process and start you know having trust in a relationship with them and hearing their story and then I would ask them if I could paint their portrait which most people aren't asked necessarily and that led us on the question I posed was how would you like to be seen and then that led us on many adventures because people wanted to be seen in the case of Kerry St. Pay he's one of our characters he wanted to be seen where he grew up which is near a port sulfur and the land is being lost there at a really rapid rate so he took us out on a boat to where he played as a child and I painted his portrait there so that led to a really deep and involved interview with him that we used in the play so the process of painting the portrait was also dramaturgical in a sense because it created a lot of interesting conversations that I don't know we would have had if we had asked them that question so the portraits are on display in the Riley and they're also on display inside the theater at the end of the show so yeah I think that's and also it's interesting to note that people when I asked them that question I think because this is we're speaking of disaster we're speaking of these issues that affect all of us and how they are entangled people when I would ask them about painting their portrait they would ask one of the characters said don't you have to be dead to have that honor so mortality became a question so that also was a really fascinating process yeah I'll just leave it at that Hi my name is Kelly Simkins and I am a performer in Spill and also a dramaturg I've known Lee for about 15 years and have been working with her and worked on The People's Temple which is the Jonestown piece and about two little over two years ago both Reeve and Lee asked me to come up board on this project and she's right it does we don't make theater a lot of times out of really happy joyous triumphant events these events that are incredibly traumatic and need a voice and need a representative in some ways draw us in and I really appreciated what you had to say about that you know part of the beauty for me of doing this kind of work which is very very different than playing a fictional character is the investment that it requires from a performer we came down here I think in April of 2012 and I'd never been here before and it was a place that I'd always wanted to go just because of the kind of mythology of New Orleans and all the artists that have been down here and obviously the kind of resilient nature of them to be the resilient nature of the community here and what I've learned on this project has been incredibly life changing so much stuff about the oil industry that I never would have sought out on my own and about the land loss and about the history of what's happened to the land here and the people here and particularly for me getting kind of falling in love with the community down here in the aftermath of a great great tragedy so I perform kind of a composite of Lee and Riva who are both the creators of this piece who is called The Writer and I also perform several other characters one of whom is Arlene Weissie who lost her son Adam he was one of the 11 men who died on the rig which was the only interview that I was present for and I play Natalie Rocheteau who lost her husband Shane didn't meet her that came from a trial transcript and I play Chad Murray who was one of the men on the rig who survived also came from Coast Guard Testimony Transcripts and Jury Danos who was one of the cleanup workers who worked with the Deepwater Horizon and I got to meet him and have spent a lot of time with him and he and his wife Jo-Leen are both in this scene and you know I guess the thing that happens to me with this kind of work is there is a certain kind of responsibility for a human being who is going to potentially come and witness you performing them and and that happened on opening night Arlene and her family came and Jury Danos and his family came and other interviewees have come and there is nothing like doing that kind of performance nothing kind of holds a candle to what that means in terms of the nervousness that I feel and the intense kind of devotion to the integrity of that character and it's one of the beauties of this work and I kind of fell in love with Jury I got to know him pretty immediately from the photographs and just his tape and it is kind of giving a representation or being a representative of somebody who didn't get a voice and I think part of the beauty of a lot of this work as you mentioned in the talk back particularly what you said is that people didn't know what was happening and that's it and I think the media comes down in the aftermath of tragedies and disasters like this and they have an angle they want a snapshot they want a little sound bite they don't want necessarily or seemingly don't want the reality of the situation they want something that's going to be able to be said in a headline or by a newscast or that's going to capture attention what you've done with all this work is come down without any agenda in most cases not even knowing that community or the people or the event but really learning and coming with an open heart and an open mind and a genderless visionless at first just question and presence and the gift is in my opinion really our so it's been an absolute privilege to premiere this play down here and to be part of a representative that is honoring this community in the tragedy that they you know went through in 2010 and are continuing to go through so I hope that you all come out and see it tonight and I'm privileged to be here thanks thanks I'm going to hand this over to Kathy and Nick when I walked in this morning y'all were singing so I said well I'm going to teach you all a song from the first show we're going to look at and if you could just help me out oh on the mic coming to this open space bring your body and your I remember the things you know forget those things you despise a lot of words but if you just can hum along with me that would be great and Nick I don't know if you can sing while doing tech and on lease too if y'all could just help sing along while doing tech that would be great coming to this open space bring your body and your I the things you know forget those things you despise coming to this open things you despise keep going follow Nick and on lease so these first images are from my name again is Kathy hi y'all I'm from New Orleans it's nice to be in the capital this piece I got to go back a little bit to the first time that I was aware or started paying attention enough to say I got to make some art about this of our disappearing land in south Louisiana was when I started I developed a relationship with an amazing couple in New Orleans named Joe and Lucianne Carmichael and they are the stewards of seven acres of land on the west bank and they lived there for many years they both worked in the New Orleans public school system for most of their lives also both visual artists and as they started aging Lucianne had one son and lost him and so they started thinking about what would happen to their home as they left this earth and they're pretty heavy duty environmentalists and amazing artists and they decided that they wanted to turn their home into an artist residency that is now called a studio in the woods and their work Joe and Lucianne are still with us and they're both in their 80s so I would call them a national treasure so you should go to the studio in the woods if you haven't yet and meet them because you know 80s is up there so I was just got to know them and Amy Rogan a dear friend from high school at least didn't say this but at least I went to grade school together out in Lakeview and we also went to school with this woman Amy Rogan who's the director of the studio in the woods started thinking about okay we want to make a piece about the loss of land in Louisiana and then August 29th 2005 happens and it is no longer a piece it is my life and everybody who lives in New Orleans life and everybody who lives in South Louisiana's life and Baton Rouge's life thank y'all for taking us in and Houston's life and Atlanta's life and everybody's life and so I think that's something interesting I'm realizing we are I guess art spot does what is now called devised theater and we use that word just came in after I had been in academia so I'm still getting acclimatized to it but we and our primary source material was ourselves so we made this piece called beneath the strata disappearing and I was very intentional about inviting women all women except for one but I'll get to that in a minute and all native Louisianians are you serious okay well so the piece it was really important to have this to have these women this work was healing this was our way of healing ourselves and we looked at we looked at the experience it ended up being mostly about New Orleans what had happened in New Orleans what had happened to New Orleans and I guess maybe Nick why don't you scroll through some of the photos so they can see them this woman here is that you've just been looking at is Harise Harrison who was is still with us she's with the Guardians of the Flame Mardi Gras Indians and that is just pause there for a moment can you go back that is a shirt that was my mom's with rust stains from Katrina her house got eight feet of water you can keep going I'm just going to talk about the pictures that's Lisa Shattuck go back she is standing on a tree that fell in the studio in the woods she created a character that was kind of a composite of herself and the first woman steamboat captain who realized that we needed to learn how to live on water over a hundred years ago because the land was not to be trusted these are the three kalindas and our story ended up centering around right here this is the end of the piece with the beautiful color three real estate agents from New Orleans were taking the audience to look at the property of the studio in the woods and while they were there eerie things started happening to them they met ghosts and they they were told go go to another picture maybe that's Stephanie McKee who is the current artistic director of Junebug productions she was one of the kalindas give me another one that's a set to a more I'm in coon and Gabriel Turner who was another kalinda a set to a is kind of played the earth the dirt and she a set to a is the artistic director of kombucha african drum and dance collective and she is a major culture bearer in New Orleans has studied the relationship of West African culture to New Orleans culture all her life okay I guess I gotta stop okay Garoo came out of this production but I so the African I just need to finish this one which is that the kalinda is a dance from West Africa that was that that survived the middle passage and that became the power of that piece for me as someone who was undergoing my first major catastrophe thinking about cultural extinction how does culture survive and as I said in the earlier panel it survives in our bodies it survives in our songs there is another character so we had to bring a man in and his name is Nick sly and he played the blue guru which is a Cajun werewolf and he he represents the insanity that comes to a man who has lost everything we later developed a piece called the guru that was a solo performance we took his character from beneath the strata and magnified it and and looked at a man who's lost many family generations of family members to working in the oil industry and just the madness of the disappearance of his home the wolf is is becoming extinct and then Nick has let us all in the third piece of the trilogy which is called cry you one and I'm going to stop talking thank you Kathy I'm just going to sit right here and I'll give it as brief as I can Nick sly from New Orleans he's from Louisiana and was installed in an abandoned city golf course in city park at sunrise and sunset it was performed in New Orleans for a while and then we took it on the road and when we took it out on the road we were like how is this Louisiana specific story going to engage with anyone and we found that the extractive industries the story of Louisiana is really resonant and for the last piece that we've kind of conceived of as a trilogy now we did a production in October called cry you one which is both a live performance and an online storytelling platform to tell the story of the people most directly impacted by coastal land loss and so just to show you a few images from that piece this is in the middle of a field that you first arrive in about 30 minutes in and the woman standing on top of that palm metal hut is Monique Verdan amazing filmmaker artist native home Indian and just kind of scroll through these to let you see some of the landscape we were working in this is on top of the levy adjacent to the central wetlands where people came with us on so how long did people walk a mile about 1.7 miles from start to finish the piece sort of happens on top of the levy and then into installations on the side of the wetlands so it's a kind of combination of small groups an ensemble generated and devised pieces that we share together as the group this is the assistant district attorney of Louisiana throwing down on top of the levy I always love that picture and this is an example of the really fabulous designer Jeff Becker's work who put up a number of these large frames it says last land before the sea and he spent some time framing up the sort of natural landscape in a number of places we worked on the piece for about 12 to 18 months and now the piece continues it's going to tour to six locations across the country we continue to work with all of the partners and the people that we engage along the process and right now we're currently part of a Gulf Coast tour working with this organization called Gulf Futures so what we're working with people who are doing direct policy work around these issues using our storytelling and music and the forms we use in the piece to listen to people about what they want to happen with the Restore Act money that's going to come from BP so we're culminating that mini Gulf Coast tour in April and then we'll go out on the road across the country Thanks Kathy, I want to I thought I'd have a couple of we have some more pictures just while we're talking I want to I had some kind of framing questions that actually you all answered a lot and those questions were how are these performances able to resist national storying disasters and all of you mentioned that we brought this over here they thought it was just a hurricane or I have to say as a New Orleanian watching the spill piece I was very ignorant of the events that led up to the explosion and the people impacted by that the spill was more of my news and what I was more in tune with so each of these pieces how you all complicate or resist some of the national stories of these these plays and also take advantage of what is it that live performance can do that other media cannot and you mentioned that in the interview with Molda the minute you walk in for people who are New Orleanian they're going to it has a very physical reaction as you almost want to wheeze as you said when you walk on that set but I'm going to Kathy and for Nick so and ways of resisting this sort of national storying you all have very site specific pieces especially this last piece where we're taken out about an hour of New Orleans isn't it Violet about 50 minutes or 45 minutes and yet have found a way to have other ways to engage with this project outside of that the piece that's tied to the land and as a one thing that you all spoke about before in our own conversations about as a New Orleanian even though this is nearby and literally not far the end of our coastline is not far but New Orleanians we tend to get and maybe in Baton Rouge as well another part of Louisiana a bit isolated or margin we don't really see it so I'm just kind of curious if you could talk a little bit about negotiating even as a New Orleanian of a bit of that outsider insider status as you work with those communities and either of you want to talk about that well Nick Nick is more of an insider in Saint Bernard because he teaches that has been teaching at the Nunez Community College there for about seven or ten years now and so I guess I was more in the outsider position there but hmm I think that you become an insider pretty quick I think the act of listening is a huge part of moving from an outsider to an insider identifying for me Monique is also from Monique Verdan is from Saint Bernard and so everywhere we went she knew somebody but it's so those are kind of the positives of having entree because of knowing people who are family some of the I guess negatives or challenges are there's some sometimes the closer you are the heavier the heat of the conflict and so Saint Bernard and New Orleans are right next to each other and Saint Bernard Parish actually like per land base per capita suffered more damage than New Orleans did post Katrina and yet didn't get hardly any attention from the national media so and had many of the same problems with FEMA and Road Home and all of that so I think there's still sore relations around that between those our two communities if I might talk a bit about I think one of the problems in what happened in New Orleans is that it's never happened in the United States before we've never lost a city and so when I tried to write about it I had to look at models from Germany after the war from Japan after the Kobe earthquake Russia after Chernobyl to see how their writers tried to address the destruction of an entire city because it never happened in the United States before when reporters got here for some narrative form that already existed and the hurricane story is a three-part story that everybody gets and the first day is the idiot reporter leaning into the wind saying yeah it's really blowing here and then the second day it's a couple on the slab of their house weeping and saying always at least we have our lives to be thankful for and the third act, the third day is they're starting to rebuild well in case what happened to us on the third day we were still trapped on a rooftop waiting for the United States to show up so there was no narrative structure anybody could reach forward to make sense of all these disparate pieces of information even with goodwill and on the other side the audiences couldn't make sense of it either because they didn't have a structure to put this information one thing that's helpful in writing about such disasters is that a novel like War and Peace was written 60 years after the French invaded Russia a journal of the plague year was written a century after the Black Death so it takes a long time to develop a narrative form to communicate what's going on it may be why we have no lasting work yet about 9-11 it's just too soon and then the other thing which I think bears on the Laramie project is there is a war that goes on between conflicting narratives between conflicting stories one of the biggest single expenditures of the core of engineers after the disaster here was to hire a PR firm in Manhattan and it was money well spent because their narrative prevailed that it was our own damn fault for living in a city below sea level and they did everything they could but how could they save people like that especially black people like that and that war of narrative I think is a crucial one and I think what thing the Laramie project attempted to focus on was another kind of story for what happened I don't know if you'd like to speak about that I can speak about that a little bit I think it's present in the case of the BP oil scale as well because BP has spent millions and millions and millions of dollars to teach the rest of the country that it's over here and that nobody is suffering and even talk about there's a character in the play who says it's like giving a man water when he's drowning but the ads that they've taken out of the New York Times full page ads about that they're the victim that there's all these false claims and it was billionaires from this and things like I mean our experience I'm sure there were false claims and I'm sure that you know they from what we've studied they willingly gave away money to make it look like they were paying out claims but the people who had legitimate claims they were being offered $5,000 or $25,000 to sign away their rights to a legit claim and if you're a fisherman who looks at you know who understands what's happening out there and you know as an oyster man said to us you know there's no spats so that's our future you know how long for this to come back two years three years five years I'm gonna take your $5,000 or $25,000 and sign away my rights to a legit claim so anyway the propaganda machine and how you know how do we how does history get told and that is something that happened with Laramie we went back to Laramie ten years after the crime and the town said it wasn't a hate crime it was a drug deal gone bad and suddenly the prevailing narrative was that he wasn't killed because he was gay and you know I remember a 20 year old on the University of Wyoming campus saying that to me and I said you know but do you understand that the perpetrators hid Matthew Shever with the butt of a gun 21 times in the head and she said no I never heard that part so it's just a very interesting question of how history gets told and who owns that history and how does that narrative get constructed over time and you know I don't know for me I feel that our work is in part like a document it's the actual words of the people and it's at least on the record it's at least part of the dialogue about how history gets told and how history gets written I wanted to just kind of build on that what is it about this as opposed to a documentary film for example that engages the audience in a different way or can reach into places that perhaps another medium wouldn't and I would love to hear your thoughts on that sure I mean I think what distinguishes people talk about our theater as docudrama and they talk about it as verbatim theater and I always kind of am taken aback by that because if you listened verbatim to the interviews we conducted there is nothing theatrical about them and very little that's interesting about them so it's not verbatim it's the words of the people but they're heavily edited and the idea of a documentary I think imposes a kind of idea that this is factual or that the function of it is to convey factual information and we're pretty rigorous about fact checking and making sure that what we're putting out there is factual but we're actually trying to make art we're actually trying to make an artistic representation of an event and so it feels almost like a little bit of being confined to the idea of documentary theater that I've spent a lot of time trying to distance myself like I the chairs fly in our piece and different things happen that aren't real and that aren't just based on the facts and I guess the other thing I would say about that is that Tony Kushner said which sort of always haunts me probably will haunt me for the rest of my life but he said the audience can only follow seven characters if you give them more than seven characters your play is never going to work and every play I've ever written has 30, 40, 50 characters but it's really about the community becomes the protagonist so the ensemble is loosely wearing the clothes of the various characters and taking on and off and taking on their voices but it's really about the community talking as opposed to different individual protagonists as Spill and your trilogy and Cryowan leave the Gulf Coast and perform in other areas and for you and for you all have already experienced some of that I'm curious for each of you maybe to talk a little bit about what do you think the pulse will be how open, the further we move away from the Letty Breaks disaster I'm curious like is there oh that's done, I'm just curious about how much interest there is to hear these stories and to know more about the truth we could start yeah we could just move down the line you didn't get to see the images from Lugeru, sorry about that we actually toured Lugeru the summer that the oil was gushing and Nick and I was happy to be gone because I had a 4 year old daughter at the time and I was scared of what the air in New Orleans was going to do to her lungs and Nick felt like he really wanted to be present on the ground witnessing what was happening but I would offer that everywhere we went it was it was like we were we were a little piece of what was happening in Louisiana, live and in person talking to people and the place where the pulse was the strongest was when we went to the border of New York and Pennsylvania where fracking was starting to the battle the fracking battle was just starting to happen with our really dear friends at the North American Cultural Laboratory Theater one of whom Tannis Kowalczyk owns an independent farm and while we were there a fracking machine had been erected not in full view of her farm and she had no idea what that was going to do to the groundwater for their vegetables and her child so and then maybe Nick why don't you want to talk about Clear Creek and the connections we're making with Clear Creek and Sandy Glass I guess I just think that's the story of who was going to predict that there was going to be two hurricanes in New York City in four years who was going to predict any of the things that are going on one of the things we've been talking about is what is happening what happens to a dynamic natural system when you just graft a human built idea on it and if we want to say people say we're crazy for living in Louisiana try Phoenix or even Atlanta like we have a natural resource next to us the Mississippi River there are so many communities that don't have that natural resource and so I feel like what I feel like why there is even interest other than relationships that exist in the work touring to other places is I think people do recognize that by now some folks in New Orleans we don't understand at all how to figure some things out that are valuable to other people in the same way that it will be really valuable for our life in New Orleans to be in Putney, Vermont which was flooded by Irene but is also moving on a transition movement to another type of energy so I feel like the dialogue is pretty robust because New Orleans, Louisiana we're canary in the coal mine and so I personally feel like the interest that I have and we have that dialogue is robust because it's needed one last thing Ricardo Levens Morales if anyone knows him he's a brilliant organizer from Minneapolis he said to me one day he said you guys in New Orleans ready to go when the big earthquake happens in San Francisco and I was like that sounds so repulsive to me you know and he was like no he's like you don't understand what you all understand about disaster now and you need to be prepared because when other people in your big American community are going to be experiencing these disasters how are you going to go apply what you know to the future so he got me thinking my new play is called Broomstick it's the Confessions of a Witch it's a one woman show and the whole thing is written in rhyme, diambic pentameter it's just about being an old woman and it seems to me about potentially the most independent a human being could possibly be because you've seen everything, done everything, know everything and apparently don't need a man for anything so it just premiered at New Jersey Repertory in an extended run and they decided to do my trilogy in staged readings on the dark nights on Monday nights and they had exactly the same experience with their audiences that we had with mold last year this is eight years after the flood people would watch the first act come out with their families or friends at an admission and we'd see them trying to go back in for the second act and they couldn't go with their friends and they'd sit in the lobby during the second act because they couldn't bear to sit through it the same thing happened in New Jersey because of Hurricane Sandy people would buy their tickets for the trilogy and then they'd call the theater and say we're sitting at the kitchen table and we can't make ourselves get in the car so I think Nick is absolutely right and as I said before New Orleans is simply where the future arrived first these are not local plays these plays are about what happens if you don't pay attention to the environment is there anything for you all future stagings of spill or how you think it'll be are people ready to hear the story? I'll just say one thing that's maybe a little different than what these guys have said that for us when people read spill just from a dramaturgical mind they think about the dramatic narrative dramatic that a rig blows up and the guys jump overboard 20 feet below to the sea and it didn't take us long being here for people to start talking about land loss it's like yes you're here to talk about the oil spill but you have to understand this this place is disappearing it's like the second thing out of their mouths and so trying to weave that narrative in and also the fact that depending on what study you read 50-80% of the coastal erosion cutting of canals for the oil industry so there's a big lawsuit in play but I've heard when I try to talk about land loss in spill or write about land loss in spill that my narrative is meandering and that that piece needs to go away so that the drive of the rig disaster and I've heard that many many times from many people that I respect and admire so I think that it's that idea of what you're saying the future arrived here first it's almost like people don't want to take that in that people living in any coastal city in America are going to face this very same dilemmas within our lifetimes, not in some distant remote time an environmentalist we talked to said in 100 years Baton Rouge will be the coast when we visited within this time he said I changed that to 50 years and Louisiana is now the highest sea level rise in the world it's very uncomfortable I mean Al Gore wrote an inconvenient truth it's still inconvenient and it's blaring all around us but it's you know I have experienced some resistance to that truth inside of spill can I just give you a couple of for those of you who are not from this area a couple of quick measures of what's happened the last 60 years Louisiana has lost as much square mileage as the entire state of Delaware we lost Delaware in the Gulf of Mexico New Orleans my children were taught they were 50 today it's 12 miles to the east while we're sitting here talking since this began three football fields of Louisiana have fallen into the Gulf of Mexico that's how quickly this is happening thank you I want to open it up for if you all if anyone would like to ask questions I don't want to hog them yes if you want a mic you just want to talk loud I heard the NPR interview on this bill and I agree with you in terms of like how do we people's stories that you cultivate I think for the lack of I'm sorry I think it's it's that pedestrian aspect that people are trying to codify what sometimes artists are cultivating but in the end it's people's stories you know the process with Moises Kaufman and doing that I mean I adapted that process in the process of any immigrant you collect your family's stories each one of us probably in our families were the ones that gravitated to collecting our stories it was my grandmother who endowed upon me that I had to tell our story so these things like docu-drama and in many ways they're pedestrian terminologies that are trying to codify something that's extremely intrinsic like telling a story you know in inventive ways and I heard about spill and I come on as this happened here I mean we become the epicenter of both man-made and natural disasters right when we got here in 2010 with the spill it was basically the nearing the fifth anniversary of the storm and you know I was away at the time and I was like oh it was very painful but it's happening everywhere the spills are taking place they had another spill and they suppressed it here because this is an oil state you know so I mean just thank you for doing that kind of work because when you say that and John you said something really again you know the war of narrative right who's the narrative right who's dealing that narrative and you know in Exxon after the Exxon Valdez like six months afterwards Exxon was putting out commercials about you know everything that they were doing and they put out commercials about their gasoline and it looked like Chardonnay right like when it was you know it gets filmed right it does it looks like Chardonnay like you could drink it like everything just went away and basically here you know BP acts like it just went away I mean I deal with that with the Bruho character when I bring in everything that's green with the BP Oles book because you know it's up to us to be able to tell the narrative so how is it the question would be how is it that these narratives eventually reach that universal concern is that a question for okay it's always you know if it's gonna survive it's gotta be universal right okay so what I'm hearing is that we have yes we have an urgent message I love the Canary vision the future New Orleans is the future of everywhere else so how do we keep these stories being told and what we heard was already resistance and Reba did you want to add anything what you're saying is just making me think that I'm from Portland Oregon and there's a lot of environmentalists there a lot of action fantastic people but I sort of gone back to visit family and there's tell the story because I feel like it's just a deep irony that we're all living with I was driving and there was a person in front with a bumper sticker that said stop offshore drilling and I thought wow wow that person is driving a car stop offshore drilling you know which is fine I believe in that free speech it's fine but still let's talk about it right and oil and that's the thing that I think that we've been really struck by as someone who I guess would be more on the environmentalist side of things coming into this story and really understanding oil in a really intimate way and I think a dramaturgical device we use as we like Lee said we thought we were gonna tell the story of the spill but actually in order to do that we had to track the oil and the oil came from the Macondo so we had to go to the Macondo we had to go to those guys we had to go to those guys right there at that well to start to really get so that because we're it's such an invisible thing in our culture in our society we don't we don't think about it in that way so so in order to have a relationship with it we and to feel connected and not just judgmental of those men that work out there extracting that oil and all the judgments that an environmentalist or someone someone like me that would have about that because I don't know anything about it I think that to me that is really what the unraveling of oil and how that is the thing that connects us and I feel like to be really honest about that instead of pretending like oh well I'm you know I'm not really into oil I'm just gonna drive my car or those kinds of things and that sounds sort of ridiculous right but that's true when we leave here people are like well why why was why why why did people why were people upset about the moratorium people say that in New York like why why why didn't they want that I mean people died why wouldn't you want that and it's because it's the economy these are people's lives this is these are these are families that are making money that's why they didn't want that to happen and I think making those connections which now you know they seem so obvious they're not obvious in places like Portland, Oregon and New York and away from here so I think it's actually really profound to take this story and take it to other places and have a dialogue because people are shocked we were in Boulder, Colorado people there were like what they were so shocked about the story of the spill and so I actually think you know saying to Lee like it's so important like for our hearts to be here in Louisiana and to be with the people and to have the interviewees come and to have this experience but the thing is is that I feel like it's almost like we came and we we commuted here to get permission in a way to now go and take the stories to the rest of the world so that's really I think it's really important it's great it's just for the for the document it's for the document it's not really a question actually or maybe it's a question or maybe it's a question for you as well as for the group because I'm a storyteller also and I often have that response like you're saying in this I think you said about the second act people feel like oh it's going places they're not really sure but at the same time I think that there is a part of the work that you do and what others do that we're inviting the audience along to hear a story in a different way so we have the first part that's about almost thinking about it almost cinematically we have the big disaster and now we're going in and we're seeing the individual lives and I don't while I understand that because I hear that as a conversation about oh it can't go here and then it goes there but in a way it sort of follows the track of the disaster it goes there and it goes there and then it goes right there and I think to that individual or that individual and I think there is tremendous value in challenging an audience to stay with you through the details and not just link on to the big glob of story but now just kind of deconstruct it down to its hair follicles and ask people to pay attention so I I commend that the courage it takes to follow that artistic choice and I hope that we all follow it right to the box office and see the show Cathy want to help me on the other side oh yes, yes, Nick this is all gloom and doom but we live amongst the most joyous people in the history of the planet and I just want to say that I have faith, my faith is that we've been assimilating changing, transitioning story, ways of fiddling playing the horn, making food for 250, 300 years and there were people here doing it before that and while the situation is dire if anyone is trained at this moment in history to deal with and survive through this I think unequivocally the people of southeast Louisiana Baton Rouge even northern Louisiana, I think people in Louisiana or no deaths of my people it's two different states above I-10 and below I-10, everybody knows it it's two different states, I said it but you know what I mean, Jose? I think you're so right on man because it's like that's the, we have the skills to do it, we need to get away from trying to formalize and codify them so much and breathe and be the people that we are, I think and I'm sorry and I just wanted to say you were talking about coming and performing for playing the people that you're performing for them well Nick's character and cry you one is Tommy Doolack and he is a man who works in the oil industry and is thinking about ways to use the oil industry to help with the land loss problem and often in the performance he would have relatives or friends and as the older the relative the more often you would hear Nick, Nick, tell me this they wouldn't refer to him in character they would just, they would make him himself and Latino immigrants did a lot of that cleaning, know that the fishermen, the Cajun fishermen that were brought out there they got sick, they got contaminated by the oil, it was a big media firestorm they pulled him away and I interviewed immigrants and the Latino immigrants started cleaning and if once the videos got out there they wouldn't show their bodies, they would just show the bottoms of them and they wouldn't even give them the proper equipment, they gave them plastic bags to walk in that comes up in spills so I was hoping when I was listening I was like I hope they know that some Latino immigrants clean that stuff I'm hoping, is there a character in there sir? I have a lot more to say but I do want to just bring out for each of these pieces there are seven pieces that were on the table and talking about these big issues and just thank you so much for bringing your openness and generosity and knowledge, thank you thank you on Lee's Team Stock so we're going to transition very quickly, actually into a performance from Teatro Luna all female Latino performance crew from Chicago doing a 30 minute extra from Generation Sex so we're just going to have some chairs and all sorts of things that are going to happen so just stay with us though all you two out there on online land too