a broken city. a tree. evening.

Last week I was the first CODA student to present in a semester-long process of student presentations, providing us each with the opportunity to improve in our public speaking abilities and also present something about the arts that we find interesting. I spoke about the production of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans from November of 2007. It is a wonderful story of an idea taking root and coming to completion.

This particular production was produced by the Classical Theater of Harlem in the ninth ward of New Orleans, evoking those themes of people who have been waiting for over a year for their particular "Godots" to show up. The performance took place in two locations, a former busy intersection of two roads that now lies empty and in front of a house that had been destroyed by the flooding. The show ran for five performances and thousands of people came in support of the project.

This entire endeavor was the brainchild of Paul Chan. Chan is an artist (educated at the Art Institute of Chicago and Bard College) and political activist. He found this project as particularly intriguing because it combined his two interests. Chan visited Tulane University in 2006 to give a talk about his art, and while he was there he decided to go and see the Hurricane Katrina destruction. What he saw moved him deeply and also caused him great unrest, an unrest that required action.

Chan says that this experience reminded him of Samuel Beckett's tragicomedy, Waiting for Godot.

"The sense of waiting is legion here," Chan said. "People are waiting to come home. Waiting for the levee board to OK them to rebuild. Waiting for Road Home money. Waiting for honest construction crews that won't rip them off. Waiting for phone and electric companies."

This caused Chan to contact the arts-funder and programming institution, CREATIVETIME. This New York based organization is designed to support public arts projects, and they jumped at the chance to support Chan. With the funding coming from CREATIVETIME, Chan contacted Christopher McElroen, the artistic director of the Classical Theater of Harlem, who had previously directed Godot in New York, staged on a rooftop surrounded by water.

With the organization in place they went to New Orleans to meet with the civic leaders, but these leaders were wary of the work of these individuals, seeing them as privileged artists coming in to make a statement, soak up the glory, and live. Chan and CREATIVETIME worked to reverse this assumption. Chan volunteered to teach art in the public schools in the area for several months before and after the production, and CREATIVETIME created a fund that would encourage private donors to match the $200,000 production costs.

The event once again reminded us of the work that is still necessary in New Orleans. It reminded us that we are all waiting for something, that we are all bonded together and that often that is all we have to rely on. As one blogger put it who went to see the production, "we came in the hundreds last Saturday night, over a thousand; turning our back on the well-lit streets of the sliver by the river, forgoing the restaurants of Magazine and the lively nightclubs of Frenchman to go to the edge of the empty zone to try, at least, to sit through this difficult work, a comedy as black as the streets were for months in this part of town, as dark as the windows remain in so many of the empty brick boxes that line the streets. We came because all of us are so like these characters, lost in a landscape from which familiar references have been erased, clinging to the one thing that keeps us all from dropping over the brink: each other."

This production shows us the power that the arts can still create in the world, in a broken and devastated situation, to provide uncommon hope, hope in each other. This is the work we are called to create.