Review: Hurricane Season
Unlike the words flashed on the projection screen throughout the evening, Hurricane Season: The Hidden Messages in Water defies a cogent definition. It is in essence a spoken word piece enhanced with a multimedia presentation of recorded testimony, dance, projection, and sound. Yet, to reduce it to these paltry terms is a disservice to the performance and vision of Climbing PoeTree: Naima Pennimann and Alexia Garcia. Sadly, this only played for one night in Austin, but if anyone you know lives in the cities where they have yet to visit (listed after the jump), do them a favor and tell them to get to the theatre.
When that great wall of water known as Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, more weaknesses than those in the levies were exposed. For many, Katrina served as a wake-up call, and the swirling streets of New Orleans in the days following became the microcosm through which we began to examine the macrocosm. For Climbing PoeTree, Katrina was the catalyst needed to begin examining a host of issues facing us not only as Americans, but also as human beings participating in a great and dangerous dance which each other and our planet. Nothing is taboo in this performance, and we would be hard pressed to find an issue that was not touched on in some form throughout the evening. The soaring poetry Pennimann and Garcia have collectively created and simultaneously deliver is at once a diatribe against injustice in its many forms, but it is also the beginning of a dialogue that will continue far beyond the night’s end. For one evening, the Off-Center was transformed into a sacred space of listening and participation.
Our complaints are few. The projection and sound sequence was timed so deftly with the poetry that if the audience responded in the middle (as the Austin audience was certainly wont to do) then the ladies would often finish their poems in the dark. This by no means diminished the power of the words, only our view of the performers. Also, the organization of the evening lacked clarity. Climbing PoeTree delivered the “main” portion of the evening, followed by an intermission. What followed was the “solution-cipher” and then the “finale.” It was not clear to us that the performance was inclusive of the entire evening. For those who left at intermission, they missed a gorgeous and uplifting answer to the bleakness of the main event, the silver lining to the gray cloud.
The central image of the evening was water, and the role it plays in our lives as nurturer, cleanser, and destroyer. Without this basic need, all life on the planet would cease to exist; yet we insist on squandering and commodifying this precious resource. But as the finale of Hurricane Season reminds us, water will not be contained. It will rise, and what it destroys it will help to build again.
Continuing Show Dates
New Orleans, 11/26/08
Gulfport/Biloxi, 11/29/08
Tallahassee, 12/2/08
Atlanta, 12/5/08
Asheville, 12/9/08
Washington DC, 12/13/09
Northeast Regional Tour, Spring 2009
