mayjoseph, Founder and Artistic Director, Harmattan Theater

The last 72 hours leading towards Hurricane Sandy hitting New York City, was a scene of chaos and national unpreparedness. 2.8 million people without power in New York City, hospitals in New York whose back up generators did not work, inadequate attention paid to Storm surge warnings by the Atlantic City mayor, over 10,000 flights cancelled with many more cancellations to follow, leaving travellers in stranded disarray. Many things that could have been more efficiently managed, were not adequately attended to. The scale of the black out in New York along with the extensive water damage, leaves New York in a place of reinvention once again. The sea is a central component to New York’s future. We are not ready to deal with the scale of water management required to secure New York’s extensive shoreline. How the city recovers from this devastating disruption to its public transportation networks and its low lying neighborhoods will tell us how far we have come since Robert Moses’s city designed for the car, cutting New York’s residents from its spectacular shores. The sea now comes to the city, demanding we engage with its shifting rhythms.