Opening the 2005 season with a bang, the deep ellum ensemble presents the world premiere of The Josephine Footnote: (How an entire colony disappeared without a trace and how it has been winter ever since.)

The Josephine footnote wonders, with music, dance and spoken words, how and why people came to create the notion of permanence in both geo-politics and in love, and what exactly to do when things, people and nations disappear.

Inspired by historical records, folktales and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 epic poem Evangeline, The Josephine footnote is a multi-disciplinary theater work about the fictitious colony of Josephine (based on the Acadian village of Grand-Pré) that vanished without a trace in the middle of the 18th century. A unique culture that developed its own language and customs over a period of 300 years, Josephine has become so obscure to history that the only known reference to her is a tiny footnote in a tired, never- published dissertation by a doctoral candidate whose name has been lost. Furthermore, the only eyewitnesses to the crime were trees (Longfellow’s famous “forest primeval”), very old now but alive and languishing beneath an Ice Age of the future. After all these centuries, one of them will finally crack through the ice floe and break his silence about Josephine and about Hestia and Shovel, the doomed couple who were separated forever when a strange boat sailed into the bay.

Text and direction by Artistic Director Matthew Earnest, score by Resident Composer Joseph Trôski, choreography by Tina Fehlandt, designs by Severn Clay, Scott Osborne and Patrick Johnson, and performed by Company Members Mark Farr, Trae Hicks, Shawn Parr, Helen Pickett and Jennifer Vega.

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