It sounds simple on paper: When it comes to employee relations, the most important thing to remember is that you’re dealing with, well, human beings. Simple, right? But, as Paul Jan Zdunek, CEO of the Pasadena Symphony Association, delineated in a one-hour webinar last month to mentees in Dance/USA’s Institute for Leadership Training (DILT), dealing with human beings means dealing with human emotions.

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It’s been a week since Hurricane Sandy left its mark on many dance companies and theaters in the New York and New Jersey area. We hear accounts of lost rehearsal time, cancelled shows, destroyed offices, lives altered. While the New Jersey and New York areas bore the brunt of the storm, we in the dance field will be experiencing the after-effects of this natural disaster for months and years to come. What have we learned from other events, like Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav?

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While the damage from Sandy is unprecedented and a complete picture of the losses the dance community in New York and New Jersey have suffered won’t be fully evident for weeks to come, Dance/USA’s From the Green Room has reached out to its colleagues and constituents in the affected region via social networking, email blasts, and personal messages to put together an anecdotal report of some of the damage.

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