In 2009, The Black Forest Fancies were granted studio space and theatre access at the Colton Academy on St Claude Ave. in which to pursue our projects. The Colton project was facillitated by Creative Alliance New Orleans in cooperation with the Recovery School District. Artists were granted use of the building in exchange for their efforts renovating and reviving the space as an educational facility. Further information about Colton can be found at

www.cano-la.org/studio_at_colton.html

At Colton, we held a series of performance-oriented workshops that fostered collaboration between ourselves as puppeteers and storytellers and the youth of our community.The skills featured in these workshops included playwriting, paper sculpture, costume design, character development, vocal performance, puppet construction and operation and physical theatre. The parade we developed in these workshops drew narrative content largely from the responses of our participants to Hurricane Katrina, and the shift in government from to Bush Era to the election of America's first black president. The intention of this performance and its unique developmental approach was to bring us all into a zone of communication and interplay that is sublimely human, celebratory, and beyond the limits of our cultural differences.

Participants are guided through and encouraged in developing their own unique puppets and invited to contribute a piece of their personal biography to a larger narrative. We will reinvent found objects and recycled materials and put these into conversation with our bodies to create our new heroes and their world. This work offers a unique opportunity for a dialogue to occur between cultural perspectives in a format that transcends the limits of language. The goal of this physical and musical work is to find an escape for a "common language" from the limitations of words, to generate a playful vocabulary through which the narratives of the overlooked, the unheard and the emerging identities of a youth audience can find their voice. Cultural curiosity and exploration between communities is at the heart of our experimentation with narrative development. We hope to have left our participants with a broader communication base, fresh skills and new concepts for speaking and a heightened sense of the significance of their personal mythologies.

The Colton Academy was a site on the route of Prospect One, an International art fair which took place in New Orleans through Jan 18th, 2009. Thank you to all who visited.

The Colton School is currently being renovated and is slated to reopen as a fully-functioning educational facility in 2012.