| | | | CREATIVE TIME BOOKSPaul Chan: Waiting for Godot in New OrleansA Field GuideEdited by Paul Chan. Text by Kalamu Ya Salaam, Paul Chan, Nato Thompson, Christopher McElroen. Foreword by Anne Pasternak.
 In November 2006, the artist Paul Chan visited New Orleans, in particular those parts of the city devastated by Katrina. "Friends said the city now looks like the backdrop for a bleak science-fiction movie. (...) I realized it didn't look like a movie set, but the stage for a play I have seen many times." That play was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a play that has often been successfully staged in politically charged circumstances, such as a prison (San Quentin), and during a war (the Siege of Sarajevo, directed by Susan Sontag). In 2007, Chan staged four free outdoor performances of Godot in two New Orleans neighborhoods. This volume records Chan's project in essays and photographs, elucidating the terrible symmetry between Godot and post-Katrina New Orleans, and, as Chan writes, "the cruel and funny things people do while they wait: for help, for food, for hope."
Featured image documents Paul Chan's staging of Waiting for Godot, reproduced from Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. |
| | | FROM THE BOOK"As an artist, Paul has traveled extensively. But, as an activist, he has traveled in particular to places of disaster and ruin. After returning from his first trip to New Orleans, Paul said the city’s devastated landscape was unlike any he had experienced; yet it had reminded him of something familiar. At last he realized that it reminded him of every production he had ever seen of Samuel Beckett’s classic play Waiting for Godot. What particularly stuck Paul was the city’s silence—the disquieting lack of movement within what appeared to be a domestic war scene. Everywhere, people were waiting— for resources to rebuild, for governmental processes, for insurance, for neighbors to return, for any kind of help. An artist affected at an early age by Beckett’s work, Paul envisioned presenting this legendary play outdoors in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward—in the middle of the desolate landscape dotted with cement foundations, knit together by empty roads, and populated only by a few surviving trees." Anne Pasternak, excerpted from Paul Chan: Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. | | |  | WALKER ART CENTERISBN: 9781935963240
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