(PRINCETON, NJ) -- The Lewis Center for the Arts will present Katrina's Cabaret— A Blood Dazzler Production, an end-of-semester sharing of work by students and faculty in the spring Princeton Atelier course, "Blood Dazzler: Collaboration and Catastrophe," co-taught by award-winning artists Patricia Smith and Davalois Fearon, on Friday, April 25, 2025 at 2:00pm.
This developmental presentation of a new work-in-progress is a multidisciplinary performance of poetry, dance, music, and visual art exploring Hurricane Katrina on the 20th anniversary of this devastating category 5 storm. The event takes place in the Hearst Dance Theater at Lewis Arts complex on the Princeton University campus. The event is free and open to the public; no tickets are required.
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the surrounding gulf coast region in August 2005. Causing enormous destruction and significant loss of life, Katrina is the costliest hurricane to ever hit the United States. In all, the storm was responsible for 1,833 fatalities and approximately $108 billion in damage.
In 2008 Patricia Smith, professor of creative writing at Princeton, published Blood Dazzler, a collection of poems about Hurricane Katrina. The collection, a finalist for the National Book Award, tracks the storm and its heartbreaking aftermath, evoking the horror that unfolded in New Orleans and giving voice to the dying, survivors, politicians, families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome, and the hurricane itself.
Joined by choreographer Davalois Fearon, Smith has been working on a performance piece based on the poetry collection. An earlier iteration of the project sold out a two-week run at the Harlem Stage under the direction of Paloma McGregor in collaboration with Patricia McGregor. As is the goal of the Princeton Atelier, the artists designed the course to bring the collaborative creation and development of this new work into conversation with students. Students in the course researched the hurricane and its ongoing impact, which included watching documentaries, conducting interviews, attending events, reading, and writing. They then worked with the faculty to create performance works using poetry, dance, music, and visual art to bring expression to what they had learned.
The two faculty members will continue to work on this collaborative project. The April 25 developmental staging of this work-in-progress is intended to generate energy and ideas leading to a more comprehensive production in the fall, offering Princeton audiences the opportunity to see the evolution of a new multidisciplinary work.
Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at [email protected] at least one week prior to the event date.
Smith is the winner of the 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, an award for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Foundation. In addition to Blood Dazzler, she is the author of eight books of poetry, including Unshuttered (2023), a collection of dramatic monologues accompanied by 19th-century photos of African Americans; Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and three collaborations with award-winning visual artists—Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, with Chicago photographer Michael Abramson, and the books Crowns and Death in the Desert with Sandro Miller.
Smith’s other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, and Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings; and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in the anthologies Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. Smith has collaborated with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Angela’s Pulse Dance, the Sage String Quartet and singer Meshell Ndegeocello. Her one-woman show Life After Motown, produced by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, was performed in residency at the Trinidad Theater Workshop. She has also toured and performed with the blues band Bop Thunderous. Smith is a Guggenheim fellow, finalist for the Neustadt Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, a former fellow at Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo and MacDowell, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. In 2024, Smith received the Fuller Award from the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame for her outstanding lifetime contribution to literature, as well as a Furious Flower Lifetime Achievement Award.
Fearon, a lecturer in dance at Princeton, is a choreographer, dancer, and educator, known for using her art to address complex social issues such as water rights and white supremacy. Fearon’s immigrant experience deeply influences her unique movement vocabulary and dance-making approach. Her career includes 12 years with the Stephen Petronio Company, and she has received several awards, including a 2017 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for her performance in the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds, which birthed Skeleton Architectuer, a women and gender non-conforming Black improvisation-based collective. In 2016, she founded Davalois Fearon Dance. Fearon's work has been presented nationally and internationally, including at New York City venues such as the Joyce Theatre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, BAAD, and the New Victory Theater. Among many others, she has completed commissions for the Harlem Stage, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Barnard College. Her awards include Mosaic Network and Fund (2022), DanceNYC's Dance Advancement Fund Award (2020-22), Howard Gilman Foundation Grant (2023), and MAP Fund (2019). She has received residency support from Brooklyn Arts Exchange (2024), Wassic Project (2023), and continuous support from the Bronx Council on the Arts since 2014. Fearon has been featured in The New York Times, Dance Magazine, in poet Ntozake Shange's book, Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance, in the documentary If the Dancer Dances, and most recently in the book A Year of Black Joy by Jamia Wilson.
The Princeton Atelier celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2024. It was founded by Princeton Professor Emerita Toni Morrison and is directed by Paul Muldoon, Princeton’s Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Creative Writing. This unique academic program brings together professional artists, often from different disciplines, to create new work in the context of a semester-long course. A painter might team with a composer, a choreographer might join with an electrical engineer, a company of theater artists might engage with environmental scientists, or a poet might connect with a videographer. Princeton students have an unrivaled opportunity to be directly involved in these collaborations.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Princeton Atelier, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
