By LAURA CARELESS

On a cold and windy January morning, I waited for the subway to take me to the residence hall for a meeting with the student group, ARTreach. I had signed on to be the staff advisor for the group’s service project to New Orleans, which meant I needed to be at some of their early-Sunday-morning planning meetings. I ambled into the 11th-floor lounge to find enthusiastic and energetic students planning to make this trip a great experience. But it wasn’t until we arrived in New Orleans several weeks later that I learned how extraordinary this experience would be. On Sunday, March 11, I climbed out of my rental van into what had been someone’s front yard in the Lower Ninth Ward before Hurricane Katrina hit. Seashells, carried in by the flood waters when the levees broke, covered the grass. I looked around and saw two Juilliard dancers standing on the top of concrete steps. I realized that this was all that was left of what had been the front porch of a house, and I felt tears well up. I watched the students and saw expressions of astonishment and sadness on their faces; in their eyes I saw the determination to make a major difference in the week we would be there. I was amazed by what I saw in that week. There were no complaints about the dirty work of gutting and rebuilding houses, or the long wait for a shower. Instead, the students worked harder, laughed, got to know the homeowners, and connected with other volunteers. If gutting a rotted house was challenging, facing grade-school children filled with attitude and cynicism was even more so. The Juilliard students broke up squabbles, seized the attention of kids who thought they were “too cool,” and hugged youngsters still traumatized by the hurricane. By the time Friday rolled around, our students had convinced a gym full of children to shout out loud and to believe that they were smart, that they were special, that they were beautiful. I was so proud. Instead of using their day off to relax, the students decided to perform for the volunteers and residents in the Ninth Ward. Under a blue FEMA tarp draped over a dusty concrete patio, they performed for a small but enraptured audience. Listening to one of the voice students singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with a collapsed house and the levee as her backdrop, the coordinator of the Ninth Ward volunteer program leaned over to me and whispered, “You are so lucky; you get to see this every day.” After the performance was over, he was so choked up with gratitude that he simply put his hand on his on his heart as tears welled up in his eyes. I was in awe of the way our students could inspire others, the way they changed my view of what service is and can be. I knew that rebuilding homes was going to be gratifying, but I discovered a fresh awareness of how special our students are, and how inspiring their talents. Seeing these young artists committed to giving themselves to a community, witnessing their joy when they made a child feel special or were thanked by a stranger for helping rebuild her city, was more rewarding than I could have imagined. It was a gift for me to watch all of them—Maechi Aharanwa, Collin Baja, Bobbi Baker, Lucie Baker, Amelia Uzategui Bonilla, J. Alex Brinson, Antonio Brown, Laura Careless, Maxwell de Paula, Caroline Fermin, Megan Griffin, Alex Kienle, Meredith Lustig, Nathan Madden, Dion Mucciacito, Seth Numrich, Sena Rich, Stacey Scott, Dawn Smith, and Dwayne Washington—use their physical beings, their spirit, their love, and their art to inspire and rejuvenate a community that has lost so much. — Sabrina Tanbara, Director of Student Affairs

Six a.m. Bright light and rock music blaring from loudspeakers suggest it’s time to get up. Propelled by the chant of Born to Be Wild and swarms of incredibly awake people heading for the bathroom or the breakfast line, we find ourselves an hour later on a work site, each equipped with shovels, respirators, and heavy boots, without entirely understanding how we got there. Falling clumsily out of a bunk bed in order to develop a deep relationship with a sledgehammer is not the way we artistes are accustomed to spending our days. But by the end of a week, we love our new routine and have realized that, at its purposeful heart, it’s really not so different from what we are used to.

Caroline Fermin, a fourth-year dance student who is a New Orleans native, and Maxwell de Paula, a fourth-year drama student, began planning the Juilliard New Orleans trip in September, soon after Max returned from volunteering with Hands On New Orleans (HONO), a branch of the worldwide Hands On network of disaster-response organizations. The First Street United Methodist Church of New Orleans hosts up to 80 volunteers at a time in a bunk house adjacent to the church building. HONO volunteers, who range from college students to Wall Street businessmen, need no previous experience and are supplied with room and board throughout their stay.

Dance students Nathan Madden and Laura Careless at the First Street United Methodist Church performing for the Hands On New Orleans staff and residents of the surrounding neighborhood.

While there, Max heard from Rev. Lance Eden about the need for New Orleans children to have an expressive outlet for their experiences of the past two years. Back at school, Max voiced ideas for a Juilliard project in New Orleans at meetings of ARTreach. Many students expressed interest and commitment, and Caroline and Max’s combined vision, resourcefulness, and leadership resulted in a week-long trip for 20 Juilliard student musicians, dancers, and actors to New Orleans over our spring break March 11-18. We were to spend our mornings gutting and rebuilding houses affected by Hurricane Katrina and our afternoons working with children from the local Y.M.C.A. school. We also gave master classes at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts throughout the week, as well as several free performances for the community.

Viola students Dawn Smith (left) and Megan Griffin during a performance at the Citizens Distribution Center in the Lower Ninth Ward. (Photo by Seth Numrich)

A week before our trip, we gathered to watch Spike Lee’s eye-opening documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, and felt inspired to serve a community that was clearly still healing and rebuilding in the wake of tragedy. We arrived in New Orleans motivated to give everything we had, especially our art, in whatever way would be of greatest benefit in the circumstances we would encounter. But nothing prepared us for the scale of devastation we found in New Orleans.

By the end of 2007, HONO expects to have gutted more than 300 of the thousands of houses left empty since Katrina hit, and is only beginning to see the first residents move back into homes where volunteers have helped complete the lengthy process of decontaminating, constructing new walls, insulating, and redecorating. Many people will remain in trailers next to their moldering houses until they are next on the list for help with renovation; few have access to sufficient funds to begin the work themselves. We talked to volunteers and residents in the Lower Ninth Ward who had just received notice from the state that their land would be taken from them if they did not meet a 30-day clean-up deadline. We wondered how the state expected the residents to meet it.

It was shocking and sickening to see how the city has been quite literally left by the country to rot, and how abandoned its people feel as a consequence. Our carefully planned camp schedule of theater games and singing songs together disintegrated as we struggled to meet the needs of children living in such an unstable world. After several afternoons of feeling more like sheepdogs than teachers and driving around fields where houses used to stand, it was tempting to write New Orleans off as an irretrievable victim of tragedy, to leave it drowning in apparently insurmountable problems. As for art … it seemed like pointless escapism at best, and at worst, an insulting waste of time when people had homes to rebuild.

But we reached a turning point when we gave a performance for the children at the Y.M.C.A. Several hundred schoolchildren watched as we danced, played, and read for them—perhaps startled into attention by things that we take for granted but which, we realized, were unusual and important for them. We had come back—for them, and them alone—five days in a row. We still smiled and hugged them, despite their difficult behavior. We worked, danced, and sang with each other across the wide spectrum of racial diversity represented by our group. Suddenly the arts, as a manifesto for consistency, tolerance, creativity, and hope, seemed important again, even here—especially here.

Dance student Caroline Fermin, a New Orleans native, and drama student Maxwell de Paula outside a house in the Lower Ninth Ward that the volunteers were gutting. (Photo by Sabrina Tanbara)

It was hard to leave these children so soon. It was hard to leave New Orleans knowing that so much work still needs to be done. We have returned to our busy schedules with images of our trip scrolling through our thoughts: a pile of photo albums salvaged in a corner of a house stripped to its bones; the grip of a child’s hand soaking up your presence as you walked them home from school; rusted nails crumbling in your hands as you tried to pull them, one by one, from sodden walls. But we have fresh motivation for our work through renewed confidence that the arts are a natural and vital response to human needs, and are an essential tool for communication and expression when words are just not enough.

On our last night at HONO, we gave a performance outdoors for the other Hands On volunteers and for the local community. As I watched my friends perform, I realized that artists, like volunteer workers, find fulfillment by extending themselves to the edge of their limitations in the service of the needs of others. United by this common purpose, we celebrated the end of a special week with the people who had showed us that where there is still love and people who care, there is always something worth saving. New Orleans is bursting with personality, with determination, and with individuals seeing beyond recent tragedy to a future of possibility. Hand by hand, nail by nail, New Orleans will be rebuilt.

Laura Careless is a fourth-year dance student.