Call to Action: Bring the Singleton Lumber Yard Barn to Life

Les Deux Bayou STEAM Park and Levity are converting their historic barn into a traditional Cajun dance hall and community performance center—a place where families two-step, students learn from masters, and local stories take the stage. We’re seeking founding donors, craftspeople, culture bearers, and volunteers to help build a venue worthy of Acadiana’s living traditions. If you care about preserving Cajun and Creole music, creating paid work for local artists, and giving young people a stage to shine, this is your moment. Join us to raise the walls, tune the room, and open the doors.

How you can help now: make a gift; sponsor the dance floor, stage, or sound; donate materials (cypress, lighting, HVAC, acoustic treatment); volunteer skilled labor; share your family’s stories; or sign up to host a dance, class, or play when we open.

Project Description: The Barn Dance Hall & Performance Center

Vision

Transform the park’s barn into a warm, acoustically excellent, fully accessible Cajun and Zydeco dance hall and flexible performance space. By day, it serves as a teaching studio, rehearsal room, and oral-history lab. By night, it becomes a fais-do-do—live bands, community dances, folk plays, and recorded sessions that document and celebrate Arnaudville’s voice.

Why a Cajun/Zydeco Dance Hall?

For over a century, Cajun and Creole dance halls have been social anchors across Southwest Louisiana. Often simple wooden buildings with a raised bandstand and a smooth floor, they hosted Saturday-night dances, family gatherings, and community news. Cajun two-steps and waltzes flourished alongside the Creole sounds that evolved into Zydeco—accordion, fiddle, rubboard, and call-and-response vocals. These halls nurtured generations of musicians and dancers, kept French and Kouri-Vini heard in everyday life, and offered intergenerational spaces where elders taught the next set.

Re-creating that environment matters. The hall is not just a stage; it’s a classroom, archive, and economic engine. It keeps local culture local—performed by the people who live it.

Space & Design

• Floor & Stage: Sprung cypress dance floor (1,800–2,400 sq. ft.) and a raised modular stage sized for dance bands and small theater casts.

• Acoustics & Sound: Wood diffusion, bass trapping, and a compact PA tuned for fiddle, accordion, and voice—good for lively dances and clear spoken word.

• Porch & Open Air: Side porches and roll-up doors for ventilation and “front-porch picking” before shows.

• Kitchen Nook: Simple concessions/plate lunch counter to support events and fund operations.

• Accessibility & Safety: ADA-compliant entries and restrooms, sprinkler/egress upgrades, and family-friendly seating zones.

• Recording & Archive: Discreet multitrack capture for live albums, oral histories, and educational content.

Programs

1. Weekly/Monthly Dances: Cajun and Zydeco nights, family dances early, open jams after.

2. Classes & Workshops: Dance fundamentals, accordion/fiddle, rubboard rhythm, French/Kouri-Vini song circles, sound tech bootcamps.

3. Artist Residencies: Songwriting, choreography, and community engagement projects culminating in performances.

4. Youth Pipeline: After-school programs, summer intensives, and internships in stagecraft, lighting, audio, and front-of-house.

Folk Plays: Arnaudville Stories on Stage

We will develop an original cycle of community plays—“Bayou Fuselier Stories”—inspired by locally collected ethnographies, much like Colquitt, Georgia’s renowned community-theater model Swamp Gravy, but distinctly rooted in Arnaudville. The process:

• Story Harvest: Train volunteers and students to conduct oral-history interviews with elders, musicians, farmers, veterans, cooks, and craftspeople; gather photos, songs, recipes, and family lore.

• Dramaturgy Workshops: Local writers, tradition bearers, and directors shape transcripts into short scenes threaded with live music and dance.

• Community Casting: Neighbors perform alongside seasoned actors and musicians; bilingual elements (English/French/Kouri-Vini) are encouraged.

• Rotating Seasons: New themes each year—water and work; music and migration; foodways; storms and resilience—so the repertoire grows with the community.

• Education & Archive: Each season’s materials enter a public archive; schools receive study guides; select performances are recorded for radio/podcast.

Community & Economic Impact

• Cultural Continuity: Keeps language, repertoire, and dance styles active and visible.

• Artist Income: Regular, local gigs and teaching opportunities.

• Youth Retention: Hands-on pathways in arts and production.

• Tourism & Main Street Spend: Nightlife that supports nearby restaurants, lodging, and vendors.

• Research & Learning: A living lab for ethnography, public history, and performance studies.

Governance & Partnerships

• Advisory Circle: Musicians, dancers, culture bearers, educators, and venue pros guide programming and authenticity.

• Schools & Universities: Service-learning for oral histories, media capture, and set/lighting design.

• Cultural Organizations: Alignment with regional festivals, language-preservation groups, and heritage nonprofits.

Phased Timeline (indicative)

• Phase 1 (Design & Prep, 2–3 months): Final drawings, permits, materials secured.

• Phase 2 (Build-Out, 4–6 months): Floor, stage, acoustics, HVAC, life safety, lighting/sound.

• Phase 3 (Soft Launch, 1 month): Test dances, pilot folk-play scenes, technical tuning.

• Grand Opening: Founders’ Dance + premiere of Bayou Fuselier Stories.

Ways to Help

• Founding Gifts & Sponsorships: Name the dance floor, stage, porch, archive, or season of folk plays.

• In-Kind Materials & Labor: Reclaimed cypress, acoustic panels, stage lighting, rigging, HVAC, fire safety, ADA ramps/railings.

• Volunteer Roles: Oral-history collectors, translators, set builders, ushers, concessions, tech crew.

• Program Support: Underwrite artist residencies, youth scholarships, or recording/archival costs.

• Share Your Story: Contribute a memory, song, photo, or recipe for the first season’s play.

Let’s build a hall where the floor remembers every step and the stage speaks in our own voices. Ready to pitch in? Tell us how you’d like to help—donation, materials, skills, or stories—and we’ll plug you in right away.