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FRINGE REVIEW: Notes on the Emptying of a City
In a place where law has been suspended and at a time when people are scrambling to survive, Ashley Hunt could have gone in a variety of directions while covering New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
FRINGE REVIEW: Notes on the Emptying of a City
Every year, there's hundreds and hundreds of performances at the Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festival, and unless it's one of the big shows, it's sometimes hard to tell what you're going to get. Here at Critical Mass we're sending writers to as many shows as we possibly can for 75 pocket-sized reviews over the course of the fest. Check back in with us at On The Fringe every day for real talk on what these things actually are!
SHOW: Notes on the Emptying of a City
GROUP: Ashley Hunt
GENRE: Performance art
ATTENDED: Tue., Sept. 11. 7 p.m.
CLOSES: Sept. 11
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: In a performance acting as a dismantled film, a narrator pieces together the sounds, images, and voiceover of a documentary before a live audience. Seated at a desk with a text and a laptop computer, artist and activist Ashley Hunt weaves video-testimonies of survivors together with his own personal recollections as a documentarian and organizer in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
While new disasters and emergencies move through the headlines on a daily basis, the political and human crisis of Katrina has, for many, receded into the past. Notes on the Emptying of a City brings back to the present the ruined and emptied homes, the cataloguing marks left by soldiers and police, and the prison that the city refused to evacuate. Hunt’s performance re-opens complex questions of race, visibility, and speech, which still beg for answers.
WE THINK: In a place where law has been suspended and at a time when people are scrambling to survive, Ashley Hunt could have gone in a variety of directions while covering New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Really, he could have honed in on just about anything and made a documentary out of it. He doesn't do that, though. Despite being deeply immersed in the scene for several months, Hunt speaks from a position of being a step away from the action. As he states early on, "My audience won't be able to consume this greedily like something strewn together on Fox News to run in between commercials." He gives the survivors a voice, but also manages to tackle race relations, abandoned buildings, and the media's presence.
Split into two parts, it starts off as a fairly straight-forward production. However, after sharing his collection of notes and shot footage Hunt opens the floor up for discussion. He explains that whenever he takes Notes to a new city, he records this portion and it is added to the official record of his findings. Which is to say that the piece will never be completely finished, but then again the work in New Orleans won't either.
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