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Home, New Orleans?
By Jan Villarrubia
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After Hurricane Katrina missed us, Lake Pontchartrain poured into New Orleans through breached, poorly designed federal levees (www.levees.org), and Lakeview, my neighborhood, was one of the hardest-hit areas. The fetid water remained in the homes for three weeks, and subsequently, I, along with hundreds of homeowners, chose to demolish. Today, Lakeview is limping toward recovery. When one drives around this middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhood, whole square blocks remain leveled.
Eighty-two percent of New Orleans was flooded. Eighty-two percent! Only the oldest areas of the city, the historic districts tourists visit, which were built on the highest ground, escaped the deluge. Eighty-two percent of New Orleanians experienced stench and mold and desecration inside their homes.
To date, the most moving written piece I've read, which conveys the sentiment of going into your home after it has been defiled by the contaminated lake water, was conceived by Jan Gilbert and Debra Howell. It is called Waterwords. Jan is a friend, Lakeview resident, native New Orleanian, visual artist, and curator of The Vestiges Project. If you wish to access a part of Waterwords, go to www.thevestigesproject.org and click on New Orleans Memory Project. The repetition of "in your home" creates a haunting, hypnotic hum, taking you to an overwhelming and surrealistic place in your mind, similar to the experience of a New Orleanian moving, dazelike, through her ravished home.
Which takes us to the concept of home. What is home, anyway? Where is home? When is home? How? We evacuated before the storm to Denham Springs, Louisiana, about two hours from New Orleans, and stayed comfortably in a distant relative's house for about a month. But, when my son enrolled in the local public school, he was listed as "homeless" and given free meals. Then, we lived for about three months at my sister's house in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. Four family units were under one roof. My brother-in-law partitioned off a part of their living room for me. I had my own space and slept on a cozy air mattress. Was this "home?" Now, I am in an apartment, temporarily, until I can rebuild on my property. Is this? Home? Or, is home somewhere deep inside each of us? Is it somewhere else?
When Jan Gilbert approached me to participate in a collaborative, multi-arts project called "Home, New Orleans?," I jumped at the opportunity. "Home, New Orleans?," which resulted from a discussion between Richard Schechner and Gilbert, is a huge undertaking, uniting local artists, community organizations, and high schools with Xavier, Tulane, Dillard, and New York Universities. Schechner, who was a student at Tulane and later a drama professor there, is professor of performance studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, editor of The Drama Review, and artistic director of East Coast Artists. In keeping with Schechner's original thoughts for healing New Orleans through the arts, Gilbert views these post-flood projects as "rejuvenation rituals" for the community. "Home, New Orleans?" explores what it means to be "home" in New Orleans and hopes to create positive change in the neighborhoods. During its first year, the network concentrated on some of the most devastated areas of the city; namely, the seventh ward, the lower ninth ward, Central City, and Lakeview. Committees were formed for each neighborhood, and widely differing projects, each of which individually addressed the needs of its community, were developed and carried out.
Jan Gilbert, performance artist, Kathy Randels of ArtSpot Productions (www.artspotproductions.org), artistic director Andrew Larimer of The NOLA Project (ny2no.net/nolaproject/), and I, all Lakeview artists, were placed on the Lakeview committee, along with students from Tulane and Xavier Universities. Quickly, we made inroads to partner with other Lakeview residents and groups as well as Metairie Park Country Day School, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA Riverfront), and the Contemporary Arts Center, all in surrounding neighborhoods. Individuals and organizations completing our circle were Reverend and Mrs. Dick Randels, Kathy Randels' parents, and the Lakeview Baptist Church congregation; dancer Maritza Mercado-Narcisse; an AARP group meeting in Lakeview; composers William Gilbert and Christopher Trapani; Beacons of Hope Graffeo Recovery Center; and more. In addition, Rachel Carrico and Will Bowling, recent NYU masters graduates, came into town to help with the production.
Our committee settled on several visual, musical, and theatre pieces presented in site-specific locations throughout Lakeview. And, we decided to provide school buses to move the audience. As a promotion for LakeviewS, the name of our upcoming event, university students Marikit Bankston, Danisha McCall, Jessica Seedyke, Melissa Stein, and Takako Uemura prepared an interactive exhibit for DramaRama, an annual performing arts celebration here. They constructed a "home" made of chicken wire, complete with a blue tarp roof, and invited theatregoers to complete the sentence "Home is …" People wrote on paint sample charts, light switch plates, duct tape, and wallpaper pieces and pinned or tied their comments to the chicken wire. A few of the most memorable quotes were: "Home is where my blood pressure stays normal," "Home is where the story begins," and "Home is safe."
After months of planning, the sold-out event took place on June 1, 2, and 3 (ny2no.net/lakeview/the-event/). The sunset bus tour through our flood-damaged neighborhood started at the end, on the lakefront, near the site of the old Bruning's Restaurant that was washed away in the hurricane. Bruning's, one of the oldest restaurants in the country, had been managed by the same family since before the Civil War. Here, our guests boarded school buses and began their artistic trek through Lakeview. The bus was part of the show, too, with prerecorded music and interviews. Also, a mysterious white woman, dressed in black, was the last to board one of the buses. She seemed to float and sat quietly near the driver. It was Randels as "The Black Lady," a character created by Tina Milevojevic of Dah Teatar in Belgrade, Serbia. In the late 1990s, Randels appeared as The Black Lady in Dah's original piece The Helen Keller Case, but the performance in New Zealand stopped when NATO bombed Serbia and Kosovo. Randels inherited the character and has since appeared as The Black Lady in performance protests and in other presentations.
First stop in the Lakeview bus play, as some called it, was at the beginning of Lakeview, in a cemetery, of course. In New Orleans, cemeteries are gathering places, somewhat like community centers. Holt Cemetery, predominately African-American and poor, is an oxymoron in the predominately white neighborhood. In What Would My Father Have Said?, Mercado-Narcisse, an African-American Lakeview resident, performed a wistful monologue. She became a series of ghost fathers looking back on their lives.
When the buses emptied into Lakeview Baptist Church, the gutted sanctuary echoed with doleful piano playing by The Black Lady. In Coming Forward, Randels and members of Lakeview Baptist Church, staged a poignant one act memory play with a flavor of Our Town. After the piece, The Black Lady and the ghost from Holt Cemetery invited guests to view the exhibit I had coordinated called Heroes: Ages 1-91. Covering two walls and hanging from light fixtures were photographs, paintings, sketches, and collages of Lakeview residents created by art students from Pam Eveline's classes at Country Day and Michel Varisco's classes at NOCCA Riverfront.
As Rosemary Clooney belted out "Come ona Ma House" on the bus, the audience rode to the childhood homes of Gilbert and Randels, just two blocks from each other. Gilbert called her installation Biography of a House. She surrounded the entire house, sold and under renovation, with large photographs of her family taken inside and outside the house for the past 50-plus years. As one walked around house viewing the photographs that were stretched along the 8-foot flood line, strains of music and chattering and children's laughter came from within the house. Composer William Gilbert, nephew of Jan Gilbert, had carefully selected a few sections from the hundreds of audiotapes recorded through the years by Jan Gilbert's father. In Spaces In Between at the gutted Randels house, The Black Lady became a spirit performing pivotal moments in Kathy Randels young life while she lived in the home. Theatregoers followed the Randels shadow from one room to another, even the bathroom, and watched her through the skeletal walls of the house.
We ended the tour at the beginning on the raised slab of the missing Bruning's Restaurant. Generations, set in the old Bruning's, was produced by The NOLA Project and featured Andrew Larimer with music by Chris Trapani. The backdrop was the graceful, crumbling concrete railing left over from the Works Progress Administration. Beyond the barrier stretched Lake Pontchartrain and, finally, the sunset. When a human-sized crab and crawfish clambered over the broken rail to join the goings-on at the restaurant, the mood shifted from drama to hilarity.
The way to end the evening? Food. Of course. The audience was invited to join the actors on the stage for a Finale Feast of gumbo and salad, complete with spring breezes from the lake.
That was year one of Home, New Orleans?/LakeviewS, a three-year project. Plans for years two and three are still in the works. Sponsors of the event this year were Transforma, National Performance Network, American Center Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Bruning family, and other individual donors. LakeviewS had additional support from ArtSpot Productions, Metairie Park Country Day School, Contemporary Arts Center, Marriott Residence Inns, Propaganda Group Inc., Express Lighting, e/Prime Media Productions, and Boonfellow.
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Jan Villarrubia is a native of New Orleans. She has won numerous fellowships, grants and awards for her plays including the Theatre Fellowship from the Louisiana State Arts Council and the National Endowment of the Arts. Her full-length plays include: Miz Lena's Backyard; Night Blooming Cereus; Odd Fellows Rest; Turning of the Bones and Yellow Roses That Big. In the early 1990s, Villarrubia co-founded DramaRama, Inc. in New Orleans. DramaRama festivals were held for 15 consecutive years, paving the way for the New Orleans Fringe Festival established in 2008. Her series of short pieces, Postcards from Katrina, was produced in collaboration during the 2006 Femme Fest at Ashe Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans. She is a key artist collaborator in the Lakeview team of Home, New Orleans?, which was conceived as a healing tool shortly after the levees broke, flooding more than 80 percent of the city the day after Katrina. In 2009, Turning of the Bones was produced in New Orleans as one of the Home, New Orleans? projects that year. Villarrubia's play illustrates a white woman who tries to piece together a rounded picture of the elderly black man who worked for her Jewish-Catholic family when she was a child in the 1950s in New Orleans. Wrestling with flawed memories, fantasies and guilt, she searches for the man's essence but learns more about home, racism, human nature and herself. Her first poetry collection, Return to Bayou Lacombe, was recently published by Cinnamon Press in Wales. Her home in a bird sanctuary near Lake Pontchartrain was not touched by Hurricane Katrina. However, her home, along with almost all flora and fauna, was devastated when five feet of putrid water blasted in after the federal levees failed. The following year, Villarrubia had her house demolished. Since then, she has built a cottage on her property. In spring 2011, she saw the first pair of cardinals since the flood. She is currently at work on a creative non-fiction book. For more information, visit Jan Villarrubia''s blog at janvillarrubia.wordpress.com |
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