Resisting Catastrophe: Performances of the Crescent City
Introduction
Hello everyone, welcome, and thank you so much for coming along to our plenary session, which is titled Resisting Catastrophe: Performances of the Crescent City.
I’m Dr Stuart Andrews, and this is Dr Patrick Duggan. We are scholars from the UK, and together we co-direct the ongoing research project, Performing City Resilience, from which today’s plenary emerges.
Our interest in this plenary is to open up conversations with people we identify as key strategists in the city, to reflect on ideas that have emerged from our research here, in the context of ASTR and in the city in late 2022. To begin, we’d like to invite Constance Thompson from Ashé Cultural Arts Centre to offer the Sifa (Praise), as a way of acknowledging the beginning of our session.
Constance Thompson:
SIFA (Praise)
May we always remember those who have gone before us;
May we be inspired by their vision and valor;
May their lives continuously remind us
That service is more important than success;
That people are more important than possessions;
That principle is more important than power.
May whatever we do be shaped and molded by
honesty, competence, and commitment.
May our children and our children’s children carry forth with pride,
The nobility of our history and tradition.
To the creator of all of us, we dedicate our lives
to make this world better and more beautiful.
(Mtumishi St. Julien; Copyrighted 1989)
Thank you very much Constance.
Conversations in the City: Plenary Structure (read slide – CLARIFY EXACT WORDS)
Our plan for this session is to begin by introducing our work in New Orleans, and setting a provocation or two. We’ll then facilitate a conversation with key voices from the arts and resilience communities here; although we will have to keep answers somewhat pithy, our colleagues have enormously rich knowledge and insights to share. We’re going to try and keep this as conversational as this set-up allows and, as you’ll have sensed already, this is about perspectives rather than formal papers.
There will be some time for audience Q&A, before we finish by coming back to the panel with something of a cheeky final question, something that we hope offers, in New Orleans parlance, lagniappe, a little something extra.
Panellists
We’d like now to offer brief introductions to our fantastic panellists; there’s a QR code on each slide that will take you to more detailed information (the QR code is same on each slide):
Constance Thompson is a Creative Producer at the Ashé Cultural Arts Centre, a non-profit organisation that uses arts and culture to support human, community, and economic development. Ashé is an extraordinary institution, offering powerful, hopeful work to New Orleans. Constance is also performing in The Family Line, tonight, a production by the Goat in the Road theatre company. She will need to slip away just before the end of this panel.
Joycelyn Reynolds is President and CEO of Arts New Orleans, the city’s officially designated arts agency. ANO supports artists, culture bearers, arts practices, and culture in the city. Their work includes grant-making, and supporting public art and events here. The organisation does excellent work embedding arts and culture as pivotal in all areas of policy, planning, and placemaking.
Jan Gilbert is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and educator. She develops objects, installations, rituals and networks. She is co-founder of the artist/writer collective, The VESTIGES Project. In 2013, with Kevin McCaffrey, Jan edited a special issue of TDR on New Orleans after Katrina, and in 2019 she curated the critically reflective exhibition ART OF THE CITY: Postmodern to Post-Katrina.
Austin Feldbaum is an ecologist and floodplain manager, focused on coastal hazards, built environments, and wetland restoration. As Director of Hazard Mitigation for the City of New Orleans, Austin co-ordinates plans and projects to reduce disaster risks and facilitate post-disaster recovery. His work, and that of his team, is a vital performance of resilience, at once deeply practical and, at the same time, expansively engaged in understanding practices of place and community.
Performing City Resilience: New Orleans (2min35)
Close your eyes and imagine New Orleans.
What comes to mind? What do you see?
We have been investigating connections between ideas, practices and strategies of performance and resilience in New Orleans since 2018. We are outsiders to this city – white outsiders. There are risks of this position, particularly from our whiteness. But, as others have demonstrated, if carefully considered, there is also value to being an outsider. Importantly, we are not funded by any organisation in the city. People here tell us that this matters, that ‘we don’t have a dog in the fight’.
In 2018, we surveyed performance and resilience practices in New Orleans. In 2019, we facilitated bespoke workshops for arts organisations in the city. We were also invited to facilitate a workshop with key city officials to inform development of the city’s 2021 Hazard Mitigation Plan. In 2022, we reviewed the city’s Covid-19 response – to inform our recent work on UK resilience practices.
Our methodology involves a series of intersecting, related practices, of observation, experience, conversation, interview, and analysis. While we focus primarily on artistic practice, and ‘official’ performances of city resilience and emergency planning, we also look to less marked performances, those of everyday life, and those that move from one form to another.
Through these visits, we have become acutely aware of the importance of returning, of coming back again and again, particularly in this city, dominated by narratives of temporary engagement by outsiders.
Our work began with a hunch, that performances in a city reveal the ways in which a city thinks through the challenges that it faces. The work has revealed a need for new means of facilitating dialogue between these performances in a city. For stakeholders here, the work has offered means of rethinking familiar ideas and practices. Indicatively, the city’s Hazard Mitigation team has embarked on what they call ‘a long-term path of embedding arts and cultural practices in [their] strategic planning’.
We have published findings from our research in New Orleans, focusing on questions of place and site; of tourism and practices of being in the city; and of artistic, institutional, and social performances and strategies. Currently, we’re developing a monograph on our work in the city, contracted by Louisiana State University Press.
To frame the conversation of this panel, we want to offer a short ‘provocation’, reflecting on ‘catastrophe’ as a conference theme in this city.
Recent scholarship, and much popular and tourist writing on New Orleans demonstrates that this is a city that occupies the cultural imaginary in very particular ways. The city exists in films, media, theatre and literature so prominently that understandings of this place have been particularly driven by representation in and from cultural production. More invidiously, perhaps, is the way that these cultural narratives have been inculcated into touristic representations of the city and that the tourist vision of New Orleans is now the dominant image of the place. As Lynell L. Thomas puts it:
the historical reality [is] that most outsiders’ – and a good deal of insiders’ – perceptions of the city have been filtered through travel accounts, literature, film, and other popular depictions… even in the midst of unprecedented crisis the portrayal of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina continued to be dominated by troubling images and ideas of the city’s tourist iconography (3)
‘Catastrophe’ and New Orleans
News media representations of the city often tend to catastrophise the place, from impending environmental doom to headlines about the city being the ‘murder capital of the US’, New Orleans is a city that is often placed into a contradictory tension between cultural and touristic narratives of place, and readings of the city as failing to address the multiple challenges facing it. Neither of these narratives do justice to the complexity of this city, but neither are they entirely inaccurate. This is an extraordinary city, rich in culture, art and performance; this isa place facing profound resilience challenges. Not least the tension between the city’s economy being significantly dependent on tourism and conferencing industries, and at the same time being irreparably damaged by both. People flock to New Orleans because of its cultural richness and its sense of abstracted otherness, of hedonism and frivolity but that puts profound pressure on the infrastructures of the place.
Covid-19 has further contributed to catastrophised narratives of New Orleans; yet with campaigns like #SleevesUpNOLA, the city has once again responded with and through performance. As we begin, perhaps, to see routes beyond the pandemic, this is a vital moment to ask pressing questions of the risks, rewards, possibilities and limits of performance in and of the Crescent City. Too often, New Orleans is described as a city of ‘catastrophes’ – flooding, hurricanes, poverty, racism, tourism, violence – without critical attention to wider understandings of the city, particularly as made manifest in social and aesthetic performances. In that context, having a conference on catastrophe in New Orleans, means and does something. By the same token, a performance studies conference seems precisely capable of addressing the performative tension between what Thomas, in a different context, terms ‘desire and disaster’ in the art and performance of this city. We hope to dwell in this tension in this plenary.
We hope the panel will reveal some of the richness of the city’s cultural and civic performances, those that are ‘beyond’ popular, all too habitual, representations of the place and in so doing, illuminate different ways that New Orleans’ performance cultures move us beyond catastrophising narratives about the city.
‘Beyond’ catastrophe
We wonder how this conference might transform understandings of catastrophe, here and in broader terms. Just as we would not necessarily assume that the tourist experience of New Orleans offers a real sense of the place, so we must not get caught up in narratives that continue to catastrophise it. There is of course a particular politics at play in bringing a conference of some hundreds of people into the city to talk about that theme of catastrophe. While the city’s coffers are reliant on conferences like this one and those much bigger, we hope to reveal ways in which the city should be considered an active participant in this particular conference.
We are using our Performing City Resilience project, and questions from the book emerging out of it, as a frame for this panel conversation. So, with our panellists, we seek to address the idea that performance (cultural practice) is critical to addressing the resilience challenges of cities (this city). Ultimately, we want to bring the voice of our panellists to the conversation that the conference is hopefully having about New Orleans and the idea of catastrophe more broadly.
We are hoping that the panel serves a means to reveal different perspectives on this city that you may or may not be familiar with…by specialists, key voices in the cultural and resilience economies of the city. People who, we would argue, are senior city strategists; people who use their professional practices and personal understandings of the city to help navigate, understand, and position the city in relation to ‘challenges’ that it faces…
In the context of an important, international conference that brings ‘outsiders’ into the city to focus minds on catastrophe, it is vital we consider, as a whole conference, the ways in which our impact on the urban environment of the ‘Big Easy’ might problematically perpetuate or positively disrupt repetitive and hegemonic understandings of this city.
One reason why we might need to do this work as a conference is because there is a possibility that catastrophised narratives of New Orleans dismiss the importance of performance practices here, and/or suggest that there might not be anything more to be learned through the analysis of performances in and of this city. Indeed, early in our research we encountered just such a diminishing of the city in terms of its potential importance for performance scholarship. In late 2018, we approached a very well-respected theatre and performance journal with an idea for an essay on performance and New Orleans. Our intention was to explore the potential ‘resilience’ role arts organisations might already be performing in the city. We wanted to understand what might be revealed by understanding arts organisations as city situations rooms, like those that help manage the city during major events. While that essay has been published elsewhere, this journal’s editor explained that theatre and performance scholarship was ‘done’ with New Orleans, especially because so much had been written about Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot. Such a dismissal would not be written about performance in London or New York, so why suggest that performances of importance here stopped when Godot arrived in 2007?
The city’s cultural infrastructure not only reflects the place, its histories and stories, but in imagining possible futures from multiple perspectives in multiple media, performances of New Orleans are world making and address the city’s future, and resilience challenges in dynamic, positive and creative ways.
We’re intrigued to know what performances you’ll create and experience here.
How will these change your sense of the ways in which
theatre and performance can speak of and to a place?
In the next part of the plenary, we turn to our panel to open up and explore questions of performances and practices of life, work, culture and place in New Orleans, now and for the future.
QUESTIONS
So, to get that conversation started, our first question for the panel, and for the audience to think about is:
1..What is it like to live and work in a city that is culturally rich, vibrant and diverse, and that faces considerable challenges?
It’s been really interesting to hear that sense of what it’s like to live in this place. What we’d like to do in the next question is turn to face performance practices more directly.
2.How do cultural practices, traditions, and performances in and of this place help address the challenges New Orleans faces?
We’d like to reflect on this from your professional perspectives, so Jan – would you like to talk us through your sense of this?
Thanks very much. It’s been great to look specifically at work that addresses challenges facing the city. Our third question is:
3.How does your work reimagine New Orleans?
Segue: Given this relates back to the sense of praxis you have articulated Austin, we’d like to come back to you as the first respondent to our third question. This question is driven by one of the academic imperatives that we are working on with the book project and we think it relates to the material impact of your work in the city. So, we’d like to ask you all, how does your work reimagine New Orleans?
Q&A
Segue: Thank you so much for those responses. In our work in the city, we have been struck by the different ways in which cultural practices across the city are engaged in reimagining what New Orleans is, both as a place to live and work, and in terms of its position within the cultural imaginary.
As we referenced earlier, New Orleans is very often represented in the world through popular and touristic narratives. The work our panellists identify is more complex, nuanced, and profound. What is most important here is the ways in which we understand, identify, and grow conversations between the practices our panellists have discussed, and the strategies that might be developed as a result of those conversations.
In a city facing significant challenges, but supported by such incredibly rich, diverse, and powerful cultural practices, it seems vital that we recognise that arts and resilience practitioners are all engaged in addressing the ways that we move beyond catastrophe in New Orleans.
We hope our panel has revealed interesting points of departure for the rest of the conference. We do have one final question that will invite our panellists to suggest options for how you might spend your time beyond the conference. But, before we turn to that, are there any questions from the audience?
Then:
https://performingcityresilience.com/lagniappe/
- 4.Where should people go, or what should people do instead of attending the conference?
Thanks so much for coming, we hope it’s been interesting.