While Cornell’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts mostly highlights the artistic achievements of Cornellians, their repertoire also includes works by visiting groups and troupes, most recently the multi-media performance Unmoored (Love Letter to New Orleans) by PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATRE (Maryland). Captained by Artistic Directors Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig, Unmoored is both a tribute and an account of New Orleans post-Katrina. At once poignant and impressive in scope, this performance lets people untouched by Hurricane Katrina feel the hurt and hope of the Big Easy’s residents. I'm blue: Unmoored showed New Orleans' destruction post-Katrina through dance. - By: Lauren Bigalow

Unmoored was developed in multiple residences of New Orleans during the wake of Katrina, and continued to morph in the months of development. It is a piece that combines spoken word, video and experimental dance to form a live journal. Like a diary, the work contains real quotations from real people. While developing Unmoored, the troupe traveled around the country attending and participating in workshops for displaced New Orleanians, asking if anyone wanted to contribute their words and feelings to the piece. What came out of this were first hand accounts in the forms of poetry, text messages and conversations describing the devastating effects of the Hurricane on people’s lives.

Unmoored’s first movement is an inspired dance interpreting the first moments of Katrina. The fifteen dancers walk to the center of the dance floor and place a bottle of water on the ground, and then make their way back to opposite sides of the room. The tranquility of their movements reflects the calm before the storm. The interpretation of the physical storm makes it seem like the stage is a boat tipping on a gigantic wave. First the dancers on the left run in and fall, sliding towards the center of the floor, then those on the right. Soon, the melee of the storm has the dancers running and leaping in planned chaos for several minutes, until finally the lights dim.

Unmoored combines many different types of media that build upon each other, giving the audience access to a wider scope of information than would be possible if the entire was solely dance. The wide scope of stimuli also function to show us how much imagination and work went into the piece. Besides interpretive dance and spoken word, another arresting piece of Unmoored was simple video of people drawing lines on a map of the United States, tracing their New Orleans’ evacuation routes across the country. As their hands dance around the country, first drawing a circle around New Orleans and progressing over to Houston, then Minneapolis, to Atlanta, Tampa and back to ATL, finally over to Troy, NY, the audience begins to understand just how shipped around some New Orleanians were. At the end of the video, text appears on the screen asking Final Destination: New Orleans? 

Unmoored contains so much more. Using dance to interpret video and their visits down in New Orleans, PEARSONWIDRIG’s dancers portray the hundreds of ships blown onto land, oftentimes colliding with trees or houses; another dance sequence mimics New Orleans’ great Oak trees being ripped from the ground and destroyed into mulch in a tree graveyard. Unmoored also contains some commentary on the social-political factors surrounding the often-stagnant rebuilding of the city, referencing George W. Bush and the (in)actions of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In fact, many of the dancers wore the blue plastic material FEMA used to build temporary roofs with, an expensive, oft ineffective operation. In the words of one New Orleanian, “I got my FEMA trailer but it took six weeks for FEMA to deliver the keys.”