MANNAHATTA YATRA/GANDHI/ SALT MARCH/DUTCH

Harmattan Theater is preparing a performance for October 2, the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi's birthday. The performance is going to involve a walking ritual from Christopher Street Pier on the Hudson River Park up the waterfront to Pier 54. The performance will include the poetry of Dante Alighieri, and the words of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi's famous act of walking as anti-colonial resistance was the signal of the dissolution of British rule in India. This idea of symbolic cleansing is very powerful. After a month of festivities celebrating the Dutch presence in Manhattan through September 2009, Harmattan Theater think it is a historically pertinent move to perform the physical act of distancing from colonial narratives of heritage by walking the contemporary Manhattan waterfront. The Dutch were traders of salt and sugar among other commodities for which they used slave labor ruthlessly. Using salt as a performance tool to mark the shift from the Dutch colonial moment to the contemporary New York of ecological reclamation, Harmattan is performing a New York ritual of walking the waterfront at dusk to the edge of Pier 54, where the waters of the Hudson will cleanse performers and participants of older, violent colonial histories, while citing them as well.