Shoebox Lounge

This year New Orleans Louisiana had its first annual Fringe Festival. Galleries, theaters, bars, community centers and art spaces across town were hosting visual, performance, film and theater artists making cutting edge new work in Southern Louisiana.

Jennifer Pagan, a born and raised resident whose Creole family has been a part of the tapestry of New Orleans for generations, moved back from Los Angeles shortly after Katrina. She had been working with writers and directors out west to sculpt performances, comedy sketches and written plays. During the flood her family and grandmother had lost their homes and her heart called her back to New Orleans. She became a teacher and performer with Young Audiences, an organization that provides teacher salaries and supplies for art classes in the New Orleans Public Schools and schools across Southern Louisiana that have gone without art programming since the flood. Quickly Pagan established herself in the small but fierce theater world that was working through the emotional and physical turmoil following the floods. Pagan, also the marketing director of Whole Foods in New Orleans, has become one of the queen forces in building and strengthening the theater and performance community in NoLA. “I’d love to see the theater and performance community in New Orleans, reach the level of the visual art community here.” Post-Katrina visual art has exploded in the crescent city. Galleries are springing up around town of artists making work out of the debris left behind by the hurricane, of installation artists, painters, photographers. Many consider it to be an art renaissance and one of the great things that has occurred in the city as a result of the flood.  Jennifer, who devotes endless hours of time, energy, resources and money to helping facilitate some of the new theater companies and performance artists that have sprung up since the flood, would like to see that world some day get the same attention and notoriety. Whether its giving an opening speech, sitting on a panal, evaluating a grant, donating food, time, money or a projector, Pagan is behind it and her efforts are allowing these companies and artists to survive and make powerful moving work against great odds.

Her own show, Shoebox Lounge, was workshopped in the New Orleans Fringe, a Festival that Jennifer was extremely excited about and proud of for the city of New Orleans. Her show, however was an equal success. Sold out and receiving wonderful reviews she jumped on a plane to NYC to perform it as part of the NoLA Rising Festival in NY to raise money for Young Audiences. On the plane she re-worked parts of the script and had two more killer performances in NYC. The piece is a beautiful, sad and humorous account of her personal relationship with the city of New Orleans as told through the generations of her Creole family. People in New Orleans cried as she dealt with the flood, her grandmother, alcoholism, the way the city has changed since Katrina, and they laughed with her as she revealed some of the characters, wit and resilience that keeps New Orleans rain or shine ticking.