Arts, Resilience, and Environmental Leadership in New Orleans
This spring, we’re back in New Orleans for our first visit since publishing Performing New Orleans: Rethinking Resilience in Art and Everyday Life. While this book sets out key findings from our research across 2017-2025, its publication offers a critical opportunity to begin new conversations with the city.
Following our practice in previous research visits to the city, this trip is primarily focused on understanding the ways in which our work can be productively placed in dialogue with practices and strategies in the city. Too often, this ‘checking in’ doesn’t fit neatly into a research process and yet it has become critical to our practice. It is not enough to write about a city and imagine that the work is done, for that risks suggesting that the city is somehow done. If we’re to make good on the last line of our book, that it is impossible to be done with New Orleans, then it is essential to go back.
This time, we are particularly focused on thinking through practices of environmental leadership in New Orleans, and engaging in the city by way of thinking through the relation of the city to the Delta. Environmental management is not neat in any city, and we’re keen to understand more about the ways in which our approach intersects with the approaches that organisations and individuals take to practise environmental resilience in New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana.
This trip comprises a series of events and activities that focus on the book and potential next steps for Performing City Resilience in the city:
- Participating in a Community Table event with Lauren Turner-Hines, facilitated by Prof Amy Lesen for the Gulf South Open School at the André Cailloux Centre for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice. We’re grateful to the School for this invitation, to the André Cailloux Centre for holding this discussion, and to Brunel University of London and Southampton University for supporting the event.
- Contributing to a podcast for the Listen: Crisis Response journal podcast.
- Meeting with colleagues from from Anitioch, Dillard, Tulane, New Orleans, and Xavier universities. As part of these conversations, we are exploring potential institutional collaborations including funding bid development, collaborative online international learning (COIL) opportunities.
- Meeting with curators, artists, and performance makers in the city, whose work we consider in the book, as well as meetings with arts leaders in the city with whom we have not yet worked and hope to develop new relationships, to further explore the potential impact has had so far, and scope new opportunities.
- Attending contemporary arts events, including a new AR work at the André Cailloux Centre, a performance piece by Eboni Booth at the Contemporary Arts Centre exploring loneliness, isolation, and connection in the contemporary world, and catching the last day of Jazz Fest, a key arts event in the New Orleans calendar, and one that is particularly relevant this year in the context of the significant rainfall which led to reworking of the festival programme. We’re fascinated to experience the festival in person for the first time, having analysed its digital COVID incarnation in the book. Alongside specific events and exhibitions, we will also chart changes to places in the city and attend to the practise of performing environment in the context of change at the Jean Lafitte National Park and Historical Preserve.
Rethinking art and local resilience at GLOBESEC, Prague
Later this month, Performing City Resilience returns to the GLOBESEC annual forum, held in Prague. Stuart Andrews will be presenting on an international panel chaired by Tom DiMaria, Director of Arts for All. The panel will reflect on the ways in which the arts can speak to the extraordinary challenges that are faced by people in specific places. We’re honoured to be contributing to this vital forum on defence and democracy.
Public Lecture: Performance and Just Resilience at Brunel University of London: Have you ever seen the rain?
In May, Stuart Andrews will reflect on Performing New Orleans in a public panel lecture, together with contributions from Shona Patterson and Anamika Twyman-Ghoshal. These three scholars will explore how can arts and cultural practices can reimagine contemporary challenges and build justice into strategies and practices of resilience. The public lecture is part of Brunel Creates, a new arts festival at Brunel that marks it’s 60th anniversary.