Louie Crowder; Playwright, Vodou Priest

Since Hurricane Katrina I’ve been working on a collection of plays dealing primarily with mystical methods of coping and survival after catastrophe. There are six specific plays dealing with the first three years after the storm: The Disaster Number 1604 Series. The plays are blueprints for an alchemical experience on the stage. I’m not so sure that’s unique to just these plays but it is an intentional aspect of their inner-workings. That aside, and considering they have a specific order following the events of regrouping and rebuilding, all six of those plays also stand alone and work independently of that framework.

Other work included on this site are woven with the mystical as well. But they are void of catastrophe – unless one would want to include the living social drama of our world as an ongoing catastrophic event. There is a story of friendship and social battle with “Domine Miserere” – the unusual and overwhelmingly compassionate relationship between Marie Laveau and Pere Antoine. Other plays included deal more contemporarily with the injustices of inequality and hatred imposed on alternative communities in the US.

I realize in taking the space that’s to be intended to introduce myself I’ve instead introduced the work. As self-involved as it sounds, and probably is, the work and I are in a way mirrors.  I lost everything I had in the hurricane and have been a part of the rebuilding efforts in New Orleans without reprieve. All of these plays have been written and produced in the city in the timeframe from early 2006 through mid-2009. They are an accurate, I think, account of what happened to the city and to me and my friends and neighbors. – While disaster is not unique, and eradication of culture is living historical and contemporary fact, it remains the artists job to document the effects of exposure, experience, and survival. And in New Orleans it becomes the manifestation of the spirit world operating through the intellect and hands of the artists that makes expression divine intervention. I guess that’s how we have been keeping the light in the lamp burning at the core of New Orleans culture. And this work is a part of that.

Regardless of anything I’ve said to this point, The Disaster Series plays gives a reader, an actor, an audience the voyeurs experience of knowing how it was during those terrible three years, both in this world and in the world of the invisibles; for in New Orleans the two are intertwined.

Before I became a Vodou priest I was in the stages of discovering my path, exploring my ancestry and delving into Native American shamanism as much as one can from being on the outside. Regarding relationships, a mentor in this process of mine told me how it was for him judging his potential commitment to another person: is this someone I’d want in the room with me when I’m dying. It’s that simple. It all comes down to the most intimate inevitable few seconds of the life. I’m lucky because after the past five years I know I have more than one of those people who make the list. And they are the ones I am dedicating this work to: La Source Ancienne; truly my brothers and sisters. It also goes without saying, but worthy of shouting to the skies, this and all the work is for and with the loa.