REDCAT Presents a Conversation With Paul Chan About WAITING FOR GODOT

REDCAT presents a stirring live multimedia presentation by award-winning video and media artist Paul Chan about an extraordinary community art experiment he spearheaded in New Orleans in collaboration with the Classical Theatre of Harlem and the public arts group Creative Time. Paul Chan's Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: An Illustrated Lecture will be held on February 1, 2010 at 8:30 pm.

In November 2007, Chan and his colleagues staged five site-specific performances of Waiting for Godot in the Katrina-devastated New Orleans setting the 20th century's most emblematic story of waiting in the middle of an intersection in the Lower Ninth Ward and the front yard of an abandoned house in Gentilly. The production played to large crowds of local residents, for whom the classic Beckett-penned lines rang with fierce immediacy. The performances were part of a larger project, which also included a fund to help local rebuilding and reorganization efforts, plus a series of dinners, lectures, classes, and events that unfolded throughout the city during the fall of 2007. The project was entitled Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: a play in two acts, a project in three parts.

At REDCAT, artist-activist Paul Chan, who had previously gained prominence by going to prewar Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness in defiance of U.S. law, also discusses the social and aesthetic ideas underpinning the Godot project. The New York Times praises Chan as "an unusual model for an artist, being one for whom creating objects in the studio and dynamic situations outside it are equally important."

According to Chan, "The longing for the new is a reminder of what is worth renewing. Seeing Godot embedded in the very fabric of the landscape of New Orleans was my way of re-imagining the empty roads, the debris, and, above all, the bleak silence as more than the expression of mere collapse. There is a terrible symmetry between the reality of New Orleans post-Katrina and the essence of this play, which expresses in stark eloquence the cruel and funny things people do while they wait: for help, for food, for tomorrow. "

The event at REDCAT is funded in part with generous support from Wendy Keys and Donald Pels. Additional support provided by The Herb Alpert Foundation. The Alpert Award in the Arts, a fellowship program that supports innovative practitioners in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theater and visual art, is administered by CalArts on behalf of The Herb Alpert Foundation.

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