In 2021, Gwendolyn Kuhlmann was preparing to move from California back home to Georgia. After experiencing a record-breaking wildfire season in California, she was ready to leave.
Kuhlmann’s family moved to Newnan in 1995 when she was 10 years old. While they searched for a place of their own, she, her husband and her child were planning to stay in Newnan with her parents. A couple of days before they were set to leave, Kuhlmann got a phone call from her father. A huge tornado had come through the city.
“Newnan’s not gonna look like it did,” she remembers him saying.
On March 25, 2021, a violent tornado with winds over 170 mph tore through three counties – including Coweta, which contains Newnan and received the worst of the storm. It damaged roughly 1,700 homes and cost millions of dollars in recovery effort. Newnan High School, Kuhlmann’s alma mater, was effectively destroyed. Buildings and businesses were lost. And the tree canopy that Kuhlmann once loved so dearly was gone.
A week after Kuhlmann got home, officials opened LaGrange Street – one of the main streets that took the brunt of the damage – for the first time since the tornado. Kuhlmann decided to go on a drive and see the destruction for herself. She drove over the bridge that leads from downtown – a bridge that usually offers rich, forest canopy views – and was instead met with nothing. The tree canopy was gone, taken away by the storm.
After that drive, Kuhlmann reached a breaking point.
“After everything that had happened in California over 2020, and now coming back and also having my favorite forest in Newnan being destroyed, [I started] thinking: I can’t be sad anymore,” Kuhlmann said. “I don’t have the capacity for the sadness. I’m gonna have to make something beautiful out of this.”
That something beautiful has arrived. From March 21-22, “Seasons of Strength,” a multi-medium performance featuring dance, music, and the voices of over 100 Newnan residents who were interviewed about their experiences with the tornado, will play at the Unity Baptist Church in Newnan.
Kuhlmann, who is an artist, opera singer, and performer, came up with the idea, inspired by a similar project she spearheaded back in California called “The Winter’s Journey Project.” That project took interviews with mothers who had experienced homelessness and interwove them with Franz Schubert’s “Winterreise,” a song cycle about hardship during winter. For “Seasons of Strength,” the amount of interviews has increased twentyfold, and will be accompanied by Max Richter’s interpretation of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.”
The experience of making “The Winter’s Journey Project” gave Kuhlmann perspective on how classical art can connect with modern issues. She brought that sensibility to “Seasons of Strength.”
“That just lit a fire in me and helped me realize what is possible when we take this art that has really stood the test of time, but I think, as an art form, lost its compass and lost its purpose, and hook it in and see how it can actually uplift an issue that we’re dealing with today,” Kuhlmann said.
With the help of funding from the Caring Communities Foundation and through relationships with organizations like the Newnan-Coweta History Center, the Coweta County African American Heritage Museum, and the nonprofit Coweta FORCE, Kuhlmann was able to gather a team and set up recording stations all over Newnan. They did most of the interviews in big groups, inviting friends and families to make appointments and share their stories.
Kuhlmann wanted the performance to bring together different art disciplines and to showcase the local art community. The LaGrange Symphony Orchestra and the Southern Arc Dance company will perform while interviews and videos play. In addition to Richter’s music, Isabella Ivy also composed a wind and string piece inspired by the sound of four tornado sirens harmonizing. There will also be a fiddle composition improvising to Newnan local Alan Jackson’s famous song “Chattahoochee.”
It was important to Kuhlmann that the performers were also connected to the event, giving them a chance to tell their own story.
“How can we keep telling the story?” she remembered asking herself. “How can the story be baked into this at every part of it, so that the product comes out, and you have a community absorbing their story told to them and taken care of by people who experienced the story?”
What that story is, exactly, changed for Kuhlmann as she dove deeper into the project. Initially, she was amazed at the fact that no one died as a direct result of this massive tornado (although, one person died from a medical emergency during the storm). But she quickly realized that the heart of the story lay elsewhere.
While FEMA granted Public Assistance to Coweta County to help with disaster relief, it did not grant Individual Assistance for victims of the tornado. Big fundraising efforts, such as country artist Alan Jackson’s hometown concert, helped with the recovery effort, but Kuhlmann said the biggest boon came from the city’s resilience and interconnectivity.
“Fundamentally, it was how well leaders and community members knew each other and cared about each other, and were just willing to go all in and help each other,” Kuhlmann said. “I think that is a story that we all need to hear, right now.”
The name of the concert takes note of this sense of resilience. “Seasons of Strength” pays homage to “The Four Seasons,” but also to #NewnanStrong, a phrase that became popular when residents voiced their opposition to a group of neo-Nazis who held a rally in the town in 2018.
“I think that what we’re doing here is lifting up the intention that was set then,” Kuhlmann said.
Early bird tickets for “Seasons of Strength” are on sale now for $25 until Feb. 15. More ticket information can be found online.