We’ve just recorded a new podcast with Zainab Farooqui for Listen: Crisis Response Journal, reflecting on our ongoing work in New Orleans and the ideas developed in our recent book, Performing New Orleans. It was important for us to record this conversation while we were in the city itself, as being present in New Orleans allowed the discussion to be grounded in lived experience, ongoing relationships, and the realities of place.
Rather than treating the book as an endpoint, the recording allowed for a new conversation on what happens when research is developed in dialogue with a city—and tested in dialogue with communities, practitioners and institutions.
The discussion challenges dominant, often neoliberal, understandings of resilience that shift responsibility from systems to individuals. Instead, we explored how resilience is already being practised by artists, cultural organisations and communities, and what emergency managers can learn from this. From Mardi Gras to muraling, from theatre companies delivering food during COVID to everyday street-level creativity, arts practices reveal both how cities absorb shocks and how they live with and manage long-term stresses.
Crucially, the podcast argues for paying artists, consulting meaningfully, and recognising arts organisations as strategic resilience actors in their own right—not simply as delivery mechanisms for existing policy. We also discuss why resilience frameworks need to value qualitative, lived experience alongside metrics, and how infrastructure itself “performs” in people’s daily lives.
For resilience professionals, the message is clear: a whole‑of‑society approach means learning from existing cultural practices, valuing local expertise, and making space for more human, creative, and equitable forms of resilience planning.
We look forward to the podcast going live (and also to CRJ’s book review of Performing New Orleans), thanks Zainab for a fascinating discussion!
On Wednesday evening, we were in conversation with Lauren Turner Hines at an event hosted by the Gulf South Open School, generously moderated by Professor Amy Lesen. Bringing people together around a table and over food to think collectively about art, theatre, everyday performance, and resilience was an extraordinary treat. In part, this event allowed reflection on Performing New Orleans: Rethinking Resilience in Art and Everyday Life, but it also enabled conversations on the next steps for our research in and beyond the city.
The conversation ranged across artistic, cultural, everyday, and theatrical practices, and the ways these might help surface terms and models of resilience. We spent time reflecting on how stories operate — how they can include or exclude, shape perspectives, and differ from instructive ‘messages’. Rather than aiming for neat conclusions, we were interested in how the arts invite us to spend productive time with complexity: sitting with difficult experiences, questions, contradictions, and uncertainties in order to discover and imagine (im)possibilities for a changed and more equitable world. We also reflected on the potential of terms such as transformation and refamiliarisation to open up new discourses on resilience.
The conversation itself embodied these ideas. It was rich, generous, productively critical, and shaped by everybody around the table. We were grateful to hear from members of the Gulf South Open School and to be in dialogue with people whose thinking is grounded so deeply in this city. It was also a pleasure to connect with colleagues from Civic Studio, an organisation whose work demonstrates what thoughtful civic leadership looks like in New Orleans.
One small but powerful gesture captured the spirit of the evening: Civic Studio’s practice of bringing a box of pens, covering the community table with long sheets of paper, and inviting participants to write and draw as they thought through ideas from the event. These sheets of paper are collected and archived by Civic Studio, irrespective of their condition, where people have been eating throughout, as a record of the community table series.
It was amazing to be sat around a table in a discussion that ran much later than anticipated. Thank you to Gulf South Open School, Amy Lesen, Lauren and colleagues at André Cailloux, Brunel University of London and Southampton University for supporting the event, Civic Studio, and everyone who joined us for creating a space for good food and conversation.
We’re delighted to be contributing to a ‘Community Table’ discussion, hosted by the Gulf South Open School (GSOS) at the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice (ACC) at 6pm. We’ll be speaking with Lauren Turner-Hines, the CEO of the André Cailloux Centre and the discussion will be moderated by Prof. Amy Lesen (Antioch University). We are grateful to GSOS, the ACC, Brunel University of London, and Southampton University for supporting the event. Really looking forward to great conversations on the vital importance of the arts in New Orleans in responding to contemporary challenges. Info below:
Community Table: Rethinking Resilience in Art and Everyday Life
Join us for a conversation between New Orleans arts leader and founder of the The André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice, Lauren Turner Hines, and Stuart Andrews and Patrick Duggan, interdisciplinary arts-and-resilience scholar/practitioners from the UK who deeply love and cherish our city.
The exchange will explore cultural and creative practices as approaches to climate and environmental justice. In Stuart and Patrick’s recent book, Performing New Orleans: Rethinking Resilience in Art and Everyday Life (LSU Press, 2025), they explore cultural traditions, civic rituals, and everyday practices and their power for navigating challenges like climate adaptation and resilience. At this community table, we want to open a dialogue for new thinking about how performance and place intersect with sustainability, emergency management, and community knowledge: What creative frameworks for environmental and community leadership might help us imagine futures beyond crisis? The discussion will be moderated by Amy Lesen.
Yesterday marked a necessary start to this period of work in New Orleans: meetings, planning, and re-establishing conversations that have been ongoing—albeit at a distance—for some time.
The morning was spent sketching out the contours of a developing strand of research that builds from earlier work here. As ever, this involved less a sense of beginning anew and more one of returning to, and extending, an existing terrain—thinking through how questions around cultural practice, environmental context, and forms of knowledge exchange might be carried forward through both teaching and prospective funding bids.
Circulating the book locally
Being back in the city for the first time since Performing New Orleans was published also created space for more informal forms of engagement. We visited a number of the booksellers who have been generous in stocking the book, including Frenchmen Art & Books, where we were invited to sign the final copy on their shelves. A further signing is scheduled later this week at the Historic New Orleans Collection, which will offer another opportunity to situate the book within the local contexts from which it emerged.
Exhibitions and conversations at the CAC
The afternoon took us to the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), where we spent time with two current exhibitions. The CAC’s Festival/New/Works, part of its 50th anniversary programme, brings together artists working across Louisiana in a deliberately open, cross-disciplinary frame, emphasising practices that are still in formation rather than fully resolved. Rather than a retrospective or survey, it positions contemporary work as something iterative and in motion—a useful reminder of the provisional quality of much of the work we are engaged in here.
Alongside this, we visited Mending Kit, a large-scale, immersive installation by Jan Gilbert and Kathy Randels. Developed in the long wake of Hurricane Katrina, the work draws on Gilbert’s sustained interest in memory, loss, and transition, often using found materials and collaborative processes to explore how personal and collective histories are held and reworked. Installed across the CAC galleries, Mending Kit operates less as a discrete artwork and more as an environment: a space for considering repair—not as restoration to a previous state, but as an ongoing, incomplete practice shaped by community experience and environmental change. The project sits within a wider ecology of works at the CAC that engage questions of water, vulnerability, and adaptation in the region.
Future directions
We were fortunate to be guided through both exhibitions by Jan Gilbert, whose longstanding engagement with the city’s cultural and environmental landscape continues to inform much of our own thinking. The visit also provided an opportunity to meet Raelle Myrick-Hodges, the CAC’s new Executive Director. Our conversation ranged from the book itself to the role the CAC has played—and continues to play—in shaping the broader Performing City Resilience project, including through the support and leadership of previous director Neil Barclay.
Raelle outlined a number of forthcoming priorities for the organisation, including plans to convene a programme of performance work in April 2027 that will bring together practices from New Orleans and beyond. What was particularly notable was the emphasis on creating conditions for exchange—between artists, disciplines, and communities—rather than simply presenting finished work. This resonates strongly with many of the concerns that underpin PCR, and it will be important to continue this conversation as those plans develop.
Reconnecting with collaborators
The day concluded with an extended discussion with long-time collaborators Jan Gilbert and Kevin McCaffrey—an opportunity to reflect on next steps and to situate emerging ideas within a much deeper understanding of the city’s environmental conditions and cultural infrastructures. These conversations remain essential: they ground the project in lived knowledge and help to test assumptions that might otherwise remain abstract.
Extending the network
Among other things, we were reminded of an earlier connection made in 2023 at Docville Farm with what was then the Deputy Director of the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve. Now serving as Superintendent, we are delighted to be meeting later this week to discuss our developing interest in arts-led approaches to environmental leadership—a conversation that feels both timely and necessary given the broader trajectory of the project.
Along the way, the smaller markers of progress also accumulated: three signed copies of the book (for a local bookseller, a local culture journalist, and the CAC’s new director), and the confirmation of meetings that may open up more sustained collaborations around environmental research in the city and its surrounding landscapes.
Taken together, it was a productive way to begin the work of the trip—less defined by any single outcome than by the careful reactivation of relationships, ideas, and shared points of reference that will shape what follows.
Although we’ve been coming to New Orleans pretty regularly since 2018, we’ve not had much opportunity to engage with musical performances when here. This may seem a little odd considering the city is so famous for its musical life, and while we have of course caught the occasional live set or two this has often been though happenstance rather than planning. In part this is because our work in the city has been less focused on this form of cultural production than on other forms of performance. Nevertheless, music remains the lifeblood of New Orleans’ culture, with the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival an annual cultural anchor point in the city.
With that in mind, it was something of a happy coincidence when we realized this trip to the city might coincide with the last weekend of the festival, and a delight to finally make it through the gates for the last day. Jetlag aside, it was an unforgettable experience; and while attending wasn’t strictly work, being at the festival affords an opportunity to reflect on some of our findings about the COVID-19 iteration of Jazz Fest from Performing New Orleans: Rethinking Resilience in Art and Everyday Life.
Social and economic contribution
While Mardi Gras is undoubtedly the economic powerhouse of the city’s annual tourism budget, generating approximately $890M each year, Jazz Fest is the city’s largest ticketed cultural event with somewhere between 400 – 500,000 visitors across its two weeks, and somewhere in the region of $400M generated. Inaugurated in 1970, the festival was a deliberate attempt to bring visitors to New Orleans from across the US and internationally. While there isn’t a clean source of data on attendance, best estimates suggest the festival audience is in the region of 40% local to 60% out-of-towners like us. So Jazz Fest is less locally/regionally oriented than much of Mardi Gras (chapters one and five of the book discuss this) but nonetheless an important cultural performance to residents of the place both socially and economically.
From a Performing City Resilience perspective, our interest here is less in any analysis of the music itself (indeed we are not musicologists) but rather to think about the event performance more broadly. One of the key parts of the COVID-19 impacted iteration of the festival was the way that its digital incarnation afforded a structure within which practices of community marking were enabled within the familiar structure of the two week(end) programme. People from around the world ‘came together’ through costuming, sign making, cooking and cocktail making, and the digital sharing of these. While these are small acts, their collective digital performance offered opportunities for community building and joy that, we argue in the book, were vital both to individuals experiencing physical distancing and possible isolation and a globally available performance of New Orleans cultural identity.
A space for all?
What was interesting to observe yesterday, was the ways in which these markers of identity – that is the ‘community’ of Jazz Festers, so to speak – were on display across the festival site. This included the costuming, sign making, flag waving and consumption of food (with locals offering advice readily about the ‘best’ dishes to look for!), but also markers of long term participation through the wearing of pervious years’ hats, t-shirts and limited edition festival shirt and shorts suits that are produced annually.
While children and families featured in the online version of the festival in 2020, the genuinely intergenerational nature of it wasn’t apparent to us until we observed it in person. From babies and toddlers in prams or being carried, to parties of middle-aged friends dancing, to older men and women snoozing on folding chairs, the festival establishes itself as a multi-generational space. Not only that but children feature heavily on the stages too, as dancers or offering additional percussion support, or indeed as the starring vocals in part of Kermit Ruffins’ set.
These things afforded a sense of collective practice, a sense of coming together to mark a repeated shared experience. That the event matters to New Orleans economically seems, in the embodied encounter with it at least, less important (less interesting) than the performance of New Orleanian identities that unfolds across the site. As local film maker and oral historian Kevin McCaffrey put it to us yesterday: “there are people I only see at Jazz Fest”… so, the annual encounter with the event performance of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival matters, from individual to the city-wide scales.
Where next?
There is more thinking and research to be done here, including:
how Jazz Fest can be understood in the wider tourism industry of New Orleans (for instance in terms of location of event and distribution of tourists, or forms of tourist behavior)
how individual artists and bands articulated their position in the festival programme and what this say about the politics of the event itself and of the music economy/ecology in the city more broadly, such as Kermit Ruffins making a number of jokes about being scheduled at the same time as Trombone Shorty, or Rebirth Brass Band referencing Shorty’s 40th birthday, or Jason Marsalis repeated referencing of his family’s musical lineage (the son of legendary pianist Ellis Marsalis Jr.) and positioning (brothers Branford, Wynton, and Delfeayo are all successful jazz musicians, while Wynton’s picture was hanging in the Jazz tent during Jason’s set
how we might understand the role, function and politics of the festival’s site, Fair Grounds Race Course & Slots, in wider city discourse about place and place identity, and it’s role in disaster recover work
the politics of corporate sponsorship at Jazz Fest, and potential loss thereof
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.
It was a pleasure to sit down and talk about Performing New Orleans with Malik Mingo on Great Day Louisiana (WWL-TV) a few weeks ago – albeit from a few thousand miles away. We joined the show remotely to talk about Performing New Orleans, our new book about the importance of arts in rethinking resilience in the city, key performances in the publication, and the ways in which arts practices in New Orleans do critical work to manage city challenges. If you’re in the US, you can watch the segment here.
“The book’s findings suggest novel approaches to resilience that will be valuable to colleagues across the globe.”Austin Feldbaum, director, New Orleans Hazard Mitigation Office
“an essential resource for artists, cultural practitioners, and arts leaders seeking to engage with the ways performance not only sculpts discourse but also co-designs civic spaces.”Lauren Turner Hines, founder and executive director, André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice
“The authors insist that New Orleans is never ‘done,’ and they elaborate methodologies in these pages that will have lasting import for future work in and beyond this particular location.”Sean Metzger, author of The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization
Performing New Orleans examines the value of arts and culture in managing complex urban challenges, offering new perspectives on how artistic and everyday performances can be pivotal modes of practicing resilience. Through an exploration of understudied forms of performance in New Orleans, we highlight the centrality of the city’s arts ecosystems as a vital aspect of its ability to “perform” resiliency.
Performing New Orleans resists conventional definitions of arts practice; instead, it uses a diverse array of case studies to illustrate what arts practices are, what they do, and how they can enhance our understanding of people, place, and resilience. The case studies in this volume range from playing in the streets to painting murals; from tourist flourishes to the performative effect of infrastructure projects; from the design and leadership of arts centers to the unfolding of festivals, theater performances, art installations, and even public health messaging. We also review, critique, and rethink resilience theory and the often problematic idea of “being resilient.”
We bring together ideas from art and architecture, cultural geography, hazard mitigation, resilience theory, sustainability, theater, and water management to explore “performances” of the city to radically expand our understanding of urban adaptability. Performing New Orleans argues that a truly resilient city is one that recognizes arts and culture professionals as crucial, critical innovators.
We are delighted that Joycelyn Reynolds, President and CEO of Arts New Orleans, the city’s officially designated arts agency, is contributing a foreward to this book. 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.
Throughout our research on Performing City Resilience in New Orleans, we have been in conversation with individuals and with organisations that engage strategically with arts, hazard mitigation, and emergency planning in the city. Such conversation is critical to our research in New Orleans, and in those cities internationally where we are ‘outsider’ researchers and do not live in places that we study.
In our March 2025 visit to New Orleans, we focused both on re-connecting with existing contacts and extending our network in the city by looking at existing and new ways in which our work may be useful to future arts and “resilience” strategies in the city, whether separately or in combination. In this vein, we held a series of meetings/workshops with:
colleagues from departments across City Hall to explore our research on “rethinking resilience” as it relates to climate crisis, hazard mitigation, housing, and sustainability;
a strategic consulting firm for purpose-driven organisations in the city to workshop ways of networking their projects together (to reveal the importance of the “spaces in-between”), means of understanding their work in relation to the cultural imaginary of New Orleans, and ethical processes of engagement with arts and cultural stakeholders;
Arts New Orleans (ANO) to introduce new processes of team and individual reflection that help to find space to think strategically about the role and function of their work in the city, and from this means of identifying new strategic priorities (e.g. in funding distribution and fund raising).
Alongside these “set piece” events, we also held a number of more informal meetings to explore ways our research might be useful to new and emerging initiatives in the city, as well as making a number of site visits.
The Overflow: We Will Dream New Works Festival Kick-Off
As part of his visit, we were delighted to be invited to contribute to The Overflow, the opening event for the‘We Will Dream’ New Works Festival, at the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice (ACC) on Bayou Road. We Will Dream is ‘the largest festival in the gulf coast region dedicated to uplifting new works by Black and African-descendant theatre makers’ and a critical platform for emerging work in the city. This year, the festival theme is ‘The Water Remembers’,
exploring the transformative power of water as a vessel of remembrance, connection, and cultural legacy. This theme is in alignment with the Katrina 20 commemoration taking place across New Orleans this year.
We have been in conversation with Lauren Turner Hines, Founder/Executive Director of ACC and No Dream Deferred since 2023, and we were honoured when Lauren invited us to contribute to the launch evening for the ACC New Works Festival – and we’re grateful to Lauren for being in conversation with us on stage for this event.
Turner Hines, Andrews and Duggan at The Overflow, André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice (2025)
In this event, we looked back over our work in the city and ahead to our new book, Performing New Orleans: Rethinking Resilience in Art and Everyday Life, which is out in the autumn with LSU Press. Our talk (available here) was followed by a panel presentation with key arts strategists in the city: Alana Harris (Mayor’s Office of Cultural Economy), Shaddai Livingston (ASHE, Afro-Indigenous Society), Nick Slie (Mondo Bizarro), Lauren Turner Hines (Andre Cailloux Center), Joycelyn Reynolds (ANO), and chaired by Shani Peterson (The Black School).
Young Artist Movement (YAM), Journey Allen, 2022, Colors of Our Culture, East New Orleans Regional Library (2025)
Our trip followed soon after the Superbowl had been hosted in the city. While this posed challenges to the city, the Superbowl also led to the installation of compelling new murals. We are grateful to Arts New Orleans, which commissioned many of these works, for taking us on a tour of mural projects in the city: around the Superdome, close to the Aquarium, as part of Gentilly Resilience District, and in New Orleans East. Through this visit, we were struck by Arts Council New Orleans’ work with the Young Artist Movement (YAM) and the ways in which youth voices and artistry have been so critical to the generation of murals in the city.
Alongside murals, we were able to experience the extraordinary Super Sunday parade of Black Masking Indians through Central City. We watched Decompositions, a performance by Farm Arts Collective at Catapult (a performance centre and home to arts and cultural practitioners), we caught music at various venues, spent time at the new Broadside venue on the Lafitte Greenway, attended a basketball game, and we were invited to join a work in progress showing by Goat in the Road at BK House and Gardens in the French Quarter. Even at the point that we have a book coming out on that investigates performances of New Orleans as means to reflecting on the city, we continue to be struck by the scale, breadth, forms, and the significance of performance in New Orleans.
Although we haven’t posted for a while, Performing City Resilience has not been standing still. Since our last trip to New Orleans in June 2023, we have been:
‘Restore the Oaks’ on Claiborne Avenue, New Orleans
1. Finalizing our forthcoming book, Performing New Orleans: Rethinking Resilience in Art and Everyday Life (LSU Press). The book will be out in fall 2025.
Performing New Orleans is the first full-length book to interrogate and value the vital role of arts and culture in rethinking just what we mean by ‘resilience’ and offers new perspectives on how artistic and everyday performances can be critical modes of practicing it. Emerging from performance studies, Andrews and Duggan bring together ideas from art and architecture, cultural geography, hazard mitigation, resilience theory, sustainability, theater, and water management to explore “performances” of the city that radically expand understandings of resilience in New Orleans, and internationally.
2. Developing a new seam of work on ‘whole society resilience’, a critical strategy that is employed in varying forms internationally, and which is core to the UK Government Resilience Framework.
We presented our initial research at the 30th anniversary conference of the Emergency Planning Society and shared this with emergency and resilience professionals in an article in the industry publication, Crisis Response Journal (2024). We addressed the ways in which performance, and the arts more broadly, contribute to whole society resilience in an article for cultural geographies (2024):
“Performance approaches to whole society resilience” In this article, we reflect on the ways in which arts practices can contribute productively to national resilience strategies. We focus particularly on the UK Government Resilience Framework (2023, UKGRF) which calls for a ‘whole of society’ approach to resilience, echoing established initiatives addressing ‘whole community’ (USA) and ‘total defence’ (Sweden, Switzerland). In this context, we ask what performance research methods offer to understandings of whole society resilience, and how existing artistic practices ‘perform’ resilience in ways that are currently not accounted for. The arts, we argue, are a nuanced means of attending to complex geo-political contexts that allow space for legacies of racism, sexism, poverty, colonialism, and terrorism to be revealed as having (had) important and differing influences in shaping the resilience of varied communities within society. The UKGRF offers a compelling opportunity to think about what whole of society resilience might involve, who might already be engaged in this work, and how we might develop and maintain a robust ‘whole of society’ approach to contemporary resilience challenges. We discuss Through my Window, a community outreach project run by the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow (UK), mural painting in New Orleans (USA) that offers positive, joyful images of individuals in a city that is too often read through narratives of tourism and crisis, and Remembering a Future (London (UK), 2018), a live performance in which Aman Mojadidi addressed issues of race, identity, home and terrorism. In so doing, we argue that artists, arts organisations and arts communities need to be considered vital, strategically important resilience practitioners, and that the arts should be being taken seriously as an engine of societal resilience more broadly. Full open-access article available here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14744740241298970
3. Testing new ideas, we have also written a piece for Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, entitled ‘Political Public Art: A Performative Response to Crisis’.
4. Preparing for networking and research impact development in New Orleans. In March 2025, we are returning to New Orleans to continue our work with resilience and arts professionals across the city, as well as undertaking field research for future publications. We will be updating the news feed with information on our activities and findings while we are there.
Conversations at the National Covid Memorial Wall (UK).
Mississippi River, including part of Jennifer Odem’s artwork, Rising Tables (2017).
We arrived at the Jazz Museum just after eleven in the morning. It was a Saturday and the French Quarter was busy. This wasn’t entirely a surprise, it is a popular area with visitors to the city. Yet the effect was heighted with two festivals in close proximity, RiverFest at the Museum and the Creole Tomato Festival at the nearby French Market. Festivals have become critical means by which cities draw in visitors, revealing or introducing distinct aspects of a place, and limiting any singular version of that place. Here, in the growing crowds between these apparently unrelated events, we became aware of the ways in which a relatively small area of a city can be simultaneously framed by quite different festivals at the same time. We noticed an echo between the independent stalls that were gathered together in the covered French Market, and the independent festivals situated in the French Quarter.
RiverFest celebrates ‘the cultural, economic, environmental & inspirational impacts and contributions of the Mississippi River to the Crescent City.’ (https://www.nolariverfest.org/river-fest). This was the eleventh year of the festival, a day-long event which included ‘live music, presentations and panels, walking tours, delicious local food vendors and a full bar, and more’ (Ibid). The festival brought together practices and perspectives on the river. While it was held at the Jazz Museum, and while this year the theme was the Delta Blues, the remit of the event extends beyond music alone, speaking to the multiple ways in which the river is understood in the city and the Gulf South. Set just a short distance from the river’s edge, the Museum is well placed to welcome inhabitants and out-of-towners to gather and reflect on the Mississippi.
This was the first festival we had spoken at in the city, and we were pleased to have a chance to share our emerging research with the public. As we set up for our talk, we watched the arrival of performers who had launched RiverFest at Jackson Square, before leading a ‘second line’ to the Museum gardens below us. We were struck by the contrast of setting up our Powerpoint in a top floor room, while below, the Treme-Lafitte Brass Band, the N’Awlins Baby Dolls, and the Original Wild Tchoupitoulas Indians gathered at the outdoor festival stage below. Close by the Museum and festival entrance, a crawfish boil was being set up. Audience members arrived in the room, we chatted a little, time ticked toward noon, and we turned away from the window to begin.
The Treme-Lafitte Brass Band, the N’Awlins Baby Dolls, and the Original Wild Tchoupitoulas Indians at RiverFest
Our talk focused on artistic and everyday practices of ‘living with water’, a phrase that has become increasingly familiar in academic literature and professional practice. There is something positive, possible about ‘living with’ water, although we are aware that life ‘with water’ is not always so positive. Relatedly, in the talk, we noted the interest in blue/green architecture and design, in which places are increasingly being developed or adapted to manage water, to slow its course, and limit flooding. In this context, we introduced and reflected on ways in which artists in the city, and everyday practitioners of the city, have helped advance understandings of living with water in the metro area and in Greater New Orleans.
From venues such as Music Box Village and Studio in the Woods, to artworks including Rising Tables and Float Lab, to everyday negotiations of water, and water management strategy, we considered ways in which people in the city are revealing new means of understanding, practising, and managing water. While we framed our work in terms of water, rather than the Mississippi alone, the work of preparing the talk allowed us to discover and trace the significance of the river to our forthcoming book as a whole. We made a note to look for other such aspects of the city and region that exist in the emerging book but that aren’t mapped in the list of chapters.
In conversation with participants after the talk, we discussed the ways that the arts addressed the pandemic, we considered the limits to definitions of the city, and spoke of the value of thinking about New Orleans in the context of the Delta, region, and state. We shared our concerns about any use of the arts to appear to ‘fix’ resilience challenges, pointing more to the ways in which arts practice may reimagine challenges, and the ways these understandings can be placed in productive dialogue with resilience initiatives. Time moves quickly and soon enough we’re back outside, amid the music and dance of the garden. We’re grateful to the organisers of RiverFest for programming our panel and to our spectators for their generous reflections on the work.
American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) conference 2022
Plenary Panel: Friday 4th November 2022, 3.30-4.45pm
We’re looking forward to revisiting New Orleans next week to co-chair a plenary panel of key voices from arts and resilience in the city, for the 2022 ASTR conference, which is being held in the city. We’ll invite our panellists to reflect on the importance of performance to understandings and practices of the city, and we’ll think through some of the challenges of narratives that romanticise and catastrophise New Orleans.
Click here for details of our panelists and here for the conference schedule for the day.
On 20th February 2022, we went to the intersection of Girod Street and St. Charles Avenue to watch the Krewe of King Arthur roll by. A little daunted by the aggression of some of the throwing of throws we witnessed on Canal Street earlier in the day, we approached with some trepidation (though Patrick was intent on getting a branded throw for is son, Arthur). As we approached, it became clear that the atmosphere here was much different to that on Canal Street: families were gathered, conversation was flowing and people were helping each other to catch and collect throws.
Crowds gather to watch the Krewe of King Arthur
A few minutes after arriving, we noticed three girls across the street trying to attract the attention of those opposite. Making eye contact, they bounced small bouncy balls across the street when the parade came to a halt every now and again. This became an ongoing means of communication across the space; a silent performance of community, joy and collaboration evolved over the next couple of hours. Hand signals, reaching to catch, eye contact, pointing, occasional vocal calling and much laughing came together to create a conversation between strangers; the girls and (what we took to be) their parents on one side, a slowly rotating/changing group of parade goers of all ages on the other. There was no hierarchy, no competition. The game was inclusive, spontaneous and joyful; participants laughed, feigned exasperation if a catch was missed, and actively looked to reengage one another if the conversation was interrupted by the passing of floats or marching bands.
An elderly couple dance on a balcony opposite our position. They laugh with one another and with those in the crowd who spot them and dance ‘with’ them from the pavement. They, and we, sing to familiar lyrics played by passing trucks or brass bands. These performances create and enact communitas; people are brought together through joyful practices that encode a sense of (perhaps temporary) belonging, equality and understanding. This is an experience of being together in time and space, of being part of something bigger than one’s self. Though perhaps an idealised reading of carnival – and one that needs more critical attention to some more problematic gendered representations of sex, sexuality and race, the performances on Girod and St Charles suggest means of understanding the political potential of carnival beyond its excessive consumption and histories of segregation.
This impromptu community of participants cut a striking difference to the seeming aggression of earlier encounters between parade goers and float riders. The ball game seemed, by design or accident, to enable revellers to participate in the embodied experience of carnival with a greater degree of connection to one another, rather than clamouring for only for the ‘magnificence’ of receiving a particular set of beads, a doubloon or two, or a sought-after handmade gift. This social performance lent weight and clarity to the experience: carnival became visible as an opportunity to connection across race, class and age lines.
It is February 2022 and we are back in New Orleans to research intersections between performance and emergency preparedness. One of the prompts for this trip, as well as re-engaging in longterm conversations with the city, was our sense that New Orleans has been and continues to be extraordinarily impacted by the pandemic. Indeed, the city feels different this time – businesses that were once thriving and seemed powerfully secure have closed, practitioners have lost their livelihoods and public health has struggled to keep up with the pressures of the virus. Yet, at the same time, as we argue in our interim report Performance and Pandemic Response: Invitations to Innovate, with the #SleevesUpNOLA campaign the city has responded with creativity, skill and performative acumen to the challenge. So, in part, on this trip we are interested to explore New Orleans’ processes and practices of pandemic response.
Families prepare for the arrival of Mardi Gras parades, St Charles Avenue, New Orleans, February 2022.
During our time in New Orleans, we are meeting with arts, culture and hazard mitigation professionals, surveying key sites in which arts and culture bearers have addressed the pandemic and other challenges that have arisen since the last time we were here. We will feed back our findings to colleagues in the city and also in the UK and internationally, to demonstrate specific ways in which arts and culture enable new and vital means of pandemic response.
As part of our ongoing AHRC-funded project Social Distancing and Reimagining City Life, we expect to publish this work in briefing and policy documents that we hope will inform ongoing responses to the pandemic, and to planning for future responses to public health challenges. Indeed, it was gratifying to hear from the current Hazard Mitigation Administrator, Austin Feldbaum, that our research to date has informed and led to innovations in the city’s pandemic response strategy (conversation with investigators, 18 February 2022).
The work will critically inform our ongoing publications on the city, significantly a co-authored book we are developing with LSU Press to rethink city resilience through performance cultures in the city of New Orleans. In this book, we address the ways that challenges in a city are rarely neatly delineated. Of course, Covid-19 is a major and ongoing frame to thinking about city resilience at this time; but equally, New Orleans continues to grapple with the climate emergency, with underlying ‘stresses’ of race and economic inequity, and emerging ‘shocks’ such as Storm Ida (August 2021) that the city is still actively engaged in recovering from.
Blue tarpaulin protecting the roof of a house in the Treme, New Orleans, February 2022.
We are in New Orleans from 17th-25th February. If you are engaged in thinking through or responding to Covid-19, or other such ‘resilience’ challenges, through arts and culture, emergency or resilience planning, or public health in or beyond the city, and you would like to be involved with this work, we would love to hear from you.
It has been a while since we last posted on what we have been up to and what the next steps will be. So, here’s a bit of an update:
From June to August, we conducted research fieldwork in all of our case study cities for our AHRC funded project ‘Social Distancing & Reimagining City Life’ (responding to COVID-19). Having conducted this work in Bristol, Glasgow and Newcastle, we wrote and published our initial findings and reflections. A short article for Crisis Response Journal outlined our project and findings to-date. This was distilled from our fist project report ‘Performance as City Pandemic Response: Innovations to Innovate‘.
These publications share our research findings and open up conversations with colleagues from across arts and emergency planning. We are seeking innovative new approaches to cities’ emergency challenges. The work invites new ways of thinking across and between professional practices in arts, resilience and emergency planning. We hope this opens up dynamic ways of thinking through questions of place, the pandemic, and urban resilience.
Ideas from these publications will form the foundations of the next phase of the project: interdisciplinary workshops to develop practical ways of using our research. We’ll work with colleagues across our case study cities, and beyond. Details of these free workshops will be forthcoming in October and early November. If you might be interested to be in conversation with us, please do get in touch. Both the publications are open access and available via the links above, or through our Publications page.
Some other things:
– On 15th October, we are sharing our work to an interdisciplinary audience at Pervasive Media Studio (Bristol). The event is open to all and will be an opportunity for conversation about the work in an open and welcoming environment (online or in-person). Find our more here: https://www.watershed.co.uk/studio/events/2021/10/15/art-and-performance-pandemic-response.
– We are continuing to develop our climate emergency focused Albuquerque project. We hope to be able to share more concrete news on this very soon.
