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We are in the south of Glasgow, an area called Pollokshields, and have followed a painted green line on the road behind Tramway to the entrance of The Hidden Gardens. There, partly obscured behind blooming flower planters, is a chalk board with a beautifully hand-written sign inviting us to ‘Remember FACTS: F face covered, A avoid crowds, C clean hands, T 2m apart, S self-isolate if needed’.

The sign is ‘inviting’ because it is both aesthetically considered and because it requires one to get close enough to see past the flowers and read its detail. It is a sign that asks the viewer properly to engage with it, in order to enact its wishes. This sits in marked contradistinction to more ‘institutional’ or ‘municipal’ messaging signs which tell or demand something of viewer in quite mechanistic terms. Of course, we understand the potential need for such public health messaging but, based on our observations, such signs often seem to have little impact on people’s behaviour around them. 

In Glasgow, we have been struck by the relative lack of such municipal signage (in comparison to Newcastle, for example). This has caused us to consider the relationship between ‘formal’ social-distancing messaging and more informal, homemade invitations to abide by the ‘FACTS’ or rules of the places we are encountering.

Stuart Andrews and Patrick Duggan

We began work on social distancing strategy and reimagining city life at the close of 2020. In those early days, we found ourselves unsettled by setting out on this work in winter – preparations seem the stuff of earlier months. In that particularly uneasy winter of COVID-19, we became especially aware that our work was starting many months into the pandemic. We would need to join existing conversations, take account of initial responses and subsequent revisions, and attend to the now rich strategies that are framing social distancing in UK cities. Looking ahead, we will need to be aware of further revisions and to consider the ways that these emerging strategies operate in the current context of COVID-19, and may help address future pandemics. 

We are fascinated to know how strategies change, how alterations are trialled and implemented, and what further changes might be made – now and for the future. We are particularly interested in changes that might be made through engagement with ideas and practices of performance and by attending to the ways in which we might understand and develop strategies for the practise and, thereby, the performance of a city. 

This new project builds on our established research and practice on the intersections between arts and resilience strategy, and, specifically, our work in New Orleans (2018-). Earlier this year, we reflected on the ways in which performance can contribute to contemporary investigations of the process of developing city hazard mitigation strategies. Drawing on our work in New Orleans, we developed, 

a model of strategy development as performance, which can operate in arts practice/management and in city hazard mitigation. Through this, we identified such aspects as terminology, form, place, principles for engagement, the importance of individuals and the rethinking of familiar practices as vital elements in investigating and informing the performance of strategy.. 

(Andrews and Duggan, 2021, p. 198)

Where that research focused on planned processes of strategy development (the generation of five-year city resilience strategy documents), this project explores the ways in which city strategy is developed and revised to engage with a live and ongoing situation, in this case, COVID-19. Specifically, we are working with three UK cities (Bristol, Glasgow and Newcastle) to understand city-specific strategies of social distancing and the potential to develop these by drawing on intersections between arts and resilience strategy and practice in each city.

Research in allied fields recognises the value of accounting for local distinctiveness in strategy development, and the risks of more overarching approaches. Writing on lockdown strategies from an interdisciplinary perspective in Transactions in GIS (Geographic Information Systems), David O’Sullivan et. al find that, globally, ‘[m]ost responses to date have been applied uniformly, without consideration of the variance in risk or in case numbers that occurs regionally.’ (2020, p.968) They suggest that focusing on geography can ‘give a distinct advantage of allowing a tailored response that is more effective at minimizing harmful side-effects.’ (ibid) As cities or regions may experience varying risks or case numbers of COVID-19, so they may also vary in the performances that contribute to the daily practise and understanding of those cities or regions.

In investigating social distancing strategy through performance analysis in our three case study UK cities, we seek to discover effective means of strategising distancing that attend to local nuances, to the situated practices in and of those cities. In particular, and building on our established methodology, we will explore mutually productive intersections between resilience and arts strategists, to develop means of enabling social distancing over a sustained period and, in the process, allow for intersecting approaches to city strategy generation. 

This is a project that seeks to understand how we might sustain social distancing in cities. It is, necessarily, concerned with distance, duration, with staying the course, or rather, enquiring into the course, attending to its form and its ways. Perhaps it was important that we began this work at a time when the duration of separation was being keenly felt. In the UK, as the new year unfolded, we listened to news of the crowds that gathered in the snow on Town Moor in Newcastle, of parties broken up late in the night. In recent days, we have followed stories of the ‘Kill the Bill’ protests in UK cities, responding to the proposed Police, Crime, Sentencing and Court Bill. With the partial release of lockdown conditions (March 2021), we watched images of public gatherings in parks, city squares, and on beaches.

In undertaking this project, we are reflecting on the limits, the impossibilities and the inevitabilities of social distancing. We are looking for ways in which we might begin to re-think and re-imagine what it is to be distanced from others for a time. We are questioning appropriate means of supporting life at a distance for a sustained period. Looking ahead, we are considering what will follow from the end of distancing in the three case study cities, what the removal of ‘distancing’ will involve and what the form and implications of distancing might be, should it be reintroduced in individual cities, in response to COVID-19 or future conditions. 

References 

Stuart Andrews and Patrick Duggan, 2021, ‘Towards “Strategy as Performance” in Hazard Mitigation: Reflections on Performing City Resilience in New Orleans’ Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance Volume 26,- Issue 1: Performance, Resilience and Resourcefulness. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2020.1844563 

David O’ Sullivan, Mark Gahegan, Daniel J. Exeter, Benjamin Adams. 2020, ‘Spatially Explicit Models for Exploring COVID-19 Lockdown Strategies’, Transactions in GIS, 24, pp.967-1000. DOI: 10.1111/tgis.12660. 

In June 2019, we returned to New Orleans for the second phase of our work with the city for the Performing City Resilience project. In Phase One (2018, including a visit in March/April of that year), we had surveyed arts and hazard mitigation strategy and practices through interviews, site-visits and by attending events. We report on that work here and published initial findings in an open access article here. That article theorises the significance of ‘Situation Rooms’ in New Orleans, and considers how we might rethink the form, practice and designation of these places in New Orleans and in cities internationally.

Our objectives for Phase Two were to:

• Disseminate ideas from the survey phase, principally those published in the article, to inform arts, resilience and hazard mitigation policy development in New Orleans.

• Further develop our thinking on the ways in which performance can be useful to the creation of new and more critically nuanced understandings of city resilience, leading to new publications.

Outcomes

1. Changes to Emergency Preparedness and Hazard Mitigation strategies

As a direct result of our work, the City of New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (NOHSEP) is engaged on ‘a long-term path of embedding arts and cultural practices in our strategic planning’. This is being enacted through fundamental changes to NOHSEP’s long term strategic planning and policy-making processes. Steps taken to achieve this include recognising that:

• Art and culture ‘should be appropriately represented in critical planning and policy’ 
• Emergency ‘preparedness and resilience work can benefit from greater [engagement with] the arts’
• ‘[E]mergency management … can also be understood through art and culture’ [1]

Other initiatives emerging from our research and work with stakeholders:

• NOHSEP invited the Arts Council of New Orleans to review proposals for its Comprehensive Recovery Plan.
  • Successful urban development projects will now need to explicitly address arts and culture.

• NOHSEP partnered with a local arts organization on a successful NEA grant application.

2. Innovations in city-wide arts planning

As a direct result of our work with the Arts Council of New Orleans, a cross-arts/culture committee has been established to allow city-wide planning of cultural strategy (particularly in relation to Mardi Gras). As the first formal city-wide arts and culture planning committee, this is a significant change in local practices and a major opportunity to establish structures for collaboration across and between arts stakeholders in the city.

Recognition

To acknowledge Duggan and Andrews’ “significant contribution” to hazard mitigation in the City of New Orleans, NOHSEP made the award of Challenge Coins at a gathering of key City Hall stakeholders (2019).

The Arts Council have noted how they “valued the opportunity to think about new ways of working and new areas of practice with established and emerging partners in New Orleans” and that “the international perspective of the [PCR team] created a particular sense of opportunity, urgency and a new call to action.”

Meanwhile, the Southern Rep Theatre report that our work has “expanded [the] scope for our vision … represent[ing] a fundamental shift in our own understanding of the role of the arts in our city’s fabric”. And the Marigny Opera House commented that we “have done a remarkable job… manag[ing] to initiate dialogue among the performing arts community about identifying, developing and maintaining areas of resilience for the cultural community…. caus[ing] us to consider and reconsider our strategies.” [2]

Performing City Resilience: Workshop Programme 2019

In seeking to contribute to strategic development in the city, we offered a series of workshops with organisations and institutions in New Orleans, particularly those who would be able to cascade ideas to organisations/departments with which they worked. Workshops were developed to address specific findings from our 2018 survey about organisations, their aims and objectives, and pressing concerns.

City Hall

We developed this workshop in dialogue with the Hazard Mitigation Administrator (NOHSEP). Specifically, this enabled us to situate the workshop in the existing NOHSEP-led process of developing the City’s new five-year Hazard Mitigation Plan.

Workshop participants included:

• Hazard Mitigation Administrator (NOHSEP)
• Senior Hazard Mitigation Specialist (NOHSEP)
• Programme Co-ordinator (NOHSEP)
• Chief Landscape Architect (Parkways)
• Deputy Director of City Planning
• Commander of New Orleans Police Department
• Principal Planner (City Planning)
• Planning Co-ordinator (New Orleans Fire Department)
• Assistant Planning Administrator (City Planning)
• City Planner
• Senior Advisor (Mayor’s Office)
• Coastal Resilience Manager (Resilience Office)
• Web Manager (Chief Administrative Office – IT)
• Chief of Staff (Chief Administrative Office – Land Use)

Arts Council of New Orleans

In this workshop, we worked with Arts Council staff to identify the ways in which their existing practices might speak to and advance resilience strategy in New Orleans. In addressing challenges to arts practices in the city, we proposed a series of interventions that the Arts Council could make in their working practices. We facilitated the development of these ideas as they relate specifically to the urgent concerns and strategic aims and objects of the Arts Council. Our priority was to develop innovations that could implemented quickly and easily.

Participants:

• Executive Director
• Deputy Director / Director of Place and Civic Design
• Director Artist Services
• Creative Director
• Strategic Development Director

Site Visits 

Working with senior hazard mitigation officials and executive directors from the Arts Council, the Southern Rep Theatre and the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans, we facilitated a site-visit workshop at arts and cultural venues in the city (The Historic New Orleans Collection, Art of the City: Postmodern to Post-Katrina and Music Box Village). This was designed to situate and place into conversation the ways in which arts and city stakeholders understand, articulate and contribute to city resilience. Through a series of facilitated exercises, we revealed and invited reflection on common challenges, and discussed the ways in which cross-sector working might be deployed to address those challenges.

Community Engagement Events

In a series of gatherings, we shared our research on arts and resilience with arts and cultural stakeholders and community-members across the City, hosted at the Arts Council of New Orleans, the Southern Rep Theatre, and Treme’s Petit Jazz Museum. Through these events, we generated a body of comments and reflections on the challenges facing the city, and the ways that arts cultural practices and organisations are already in engaged in addressing these – in ways that might go unnoticed but that are, potentially, vital to the City’s future. This body of work was fed back to decision makers within City Hall and will be informing our forthcoming publications.

_____________________

[1] Citations from Ryan Mast, Hazard Mitigation Administrator (NOHSEP) (2019), letter to directors (full correspondence available on request).

[2] Citations from Aimee Hayes (Southern Rep Theatre), Alphonse Smith (Arts Council New Orleans) and Dave Hurlbert (Marigny Opera House), letters/emails to directors (full correspondences available on request)

We are excited to announce that the first. academic publication from Performing City Resiliance is out:

‘Situation Rooms: Performing City Resiliance in New Orleans” (Stuart Andrews and Patrick Duggan)

The essay is available open access here – do please have a read and let us know what you think. We’re excited to be follow-up this work with another visit to the ever fascinating and beguiling New Orleans in June!

In October 2018, we presented some of our initial findings from New Orleans (2018) at the SALUS annual Healthy City Design international congress on ‘Equity and resilience: Creating healthy cities for all’.

You can see our talk here: http://www.salus.global/article-show/processes-and-practices-for-performing-city-resilience-in-a-healthy-city

A longer version of this paper is being published shortly by the journal Liminalities; we will provide a link to that once it’s out.

We are delighted to announce that we have secured funding from the University of Surrey for a return research trip to New Orleans. In this second visit, our work will focus on developing interdisciplinary perspectives on performance, the arts and resilience in New Orleans that can be operationalised in both practice and policy. We will be working with artists, NOLA culture bearers, cultural organisations and stakeholders in city resilience.

We’d love to hear from anyone we met on our last visit, as well as anyone new who is interested in this work. We will be in New Orleans 1 – 12 June 2019. Contact information here.

 

The University of Surrey is offering a number of well-funded PhD Scholarships. We would be delighted to hear from anyone interested in doing a doctorate with us that relates to the work of Performing City Resilience.

To fins our more about the funding please visit: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/fees-and-funding/studentships/vice-chancellors-studentship-award-2019-entry

Or drop us an email for an informal conversation.

 

“The arts are fundamental to how cities understand, renegotiate, and remake themselves in the face of their resilience challenges…”

We are delighted to share some of our initial thinking on New Orleans, performance, and resilience that was published today with 100 Resilient Cities: http://100resilientcities.org/performing-city-resilience-case-study-new-orleans/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=blog 

 

Patrick is co-editing a special issue of the journal Performance Research (with Gianna Bouchard, University of Birmingham, UK), entitled ‘Staging the Wreckage’. The theme has many synergies with the work of Performing City Resilience, indeed Patrick will be writing on New Orleans in the issue, and so we are very please to include the CFP here:

Performance Research, Volume 24, Issue 5: Staging the Wreckage

Deadline: 27 August 2018. Issue Editors: Gianna Bouchard and Patrick Duggan

Imagine walking into a vast and chilly aeroplane hangar.

Imagine encountering a space that is so vast that your own body’s scale and fleshy fragility becomes strikingly apparent to you in startling contrast to the volume and metallic solidity of the room.

Imagine the chill of this space.

Imagine its enveloping, sparse, metal-and-concrete scenography.

Imagine entering this space in search of answers.

Imagine entering this space in search of answers about the death of a loved one.

Imagine entering this space in search of answers about the death of a loved one who has perished, unexplained, in a plane crash.

Imagine entering this space in search of answers about the death of a loved one who has died in an unexplained aeroplane crash, and seeing the wreckage of that crash laid out for your interrogation.

Imagine that wreckage being one of four or five staged in the same space.

Imagine the room abuzz with the activity of investigators and others mourning, picking over the wreckage in search of…

From the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, to the devastation of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, to the images of the current refugee crisis and recent terrorist atrocities, the early twenty-first century has witnessed increased media interest in showing all kinds of wreckage to a global audience. While these particular examples are captured in images of the debris and detritus of a catastrophe, there has also been a significant turn, particularly in the UK, to the descriptions and linguistic performances of emotional and psychological wreckage, from the victims of various high-profile sexual grooming and abuse cases, to survivors and witnesses of other events. Wreckage is also increasingly made available through the rise of television dramas that deal with violence and representations of its aftermath. Theatre also often calls on stagings of wreckage to show the labour of performance, the inevitable failure of representation and the disasters immanent in human relations. Companies such as Forced Entertainment and Societas Raffaello Sanzio deliberately and provocatively perform wreckage as an intrinsic part of their theatrical practice.

The calling forth of the wreckage in these moments, whether through personal narrative, the detritus of performance or the crumpled remains of the fuselage of an aircraft is a means of trying to deal with the calamity, a way of keeping it in memory and a deliberate staging of the evidence. Once the wreckage is revealed, the resultant ricocheting of images and affect across the media and society can have a significant impact, spurring public enquiries, prosecutions, policy revisions and other forms of reflection and memorial. The loss of control implicit in the wreckage is often partially recuperated through future-oriented control of its visibility and dissemination.

This issue of Performance Research invites a consideration of these wider social and cultural contexts, as well as to more explicitly theatrical examples. In thinking about increased demands for staging the wreckage and showing the products of catastrophe, we invite contributors to consider such things as an ethics of spectatorship in relation to the wreck, documentation of the wreckage, its theatrical and performative staging, the effect of wreckage and its potential for salvage and renewal. Essentially, this issue asks: what does the staging of wreckage do? The issue is concerned not so much with the initial event but with the trace of the thing and the way that that trace is staged or performed.

To which end, ‘staging the wreckage’ may refer to or be concerned with (but is not limited to):

·         re-presentation/aestheticization of the wreckage of objects, materials and bodies

·         absence of/and staged wreckage

·         controlled (access to) wreckages

·         impossible wreckage/impossible salvage

·         accident investigations: planes, cars, boats, trains and so forth

·         human wreckage

·         relationships

·         stages after the performance has ended

·         performances that represent wreckage

·         medical procedures and documentations of such

·         historical staging of wrecking

·         ecological disasters and environmental waste

·         nuclear fallout and its documentation

·         staging of high-profile resignations

·         the day after an election

·         illness

·         death and death rituals

·         war

·         bad museum curating

·         (domestic) arguments

·         performance and trauma

·         therapy

·         giving bad news to someone you love

·         giving bad news to someone you hardly know

·         trauma tourism

·         the creation of trauma/memorial sites

·         school nativity plays

·         spilt milk

·         computer viruses, technological collapse

·         being set up (for a crime you didn’t commit)

·         fact and fiction of crime scenes

·         stock market crashes and graphic depictions of that

·         detritus from a really good party

·         suicide

·         sporting wreckages

·         postmodernity and wreckage

·         modernity as wreckage (after Benjamin, for example)

·         wreckage and biography

·         redundancy

·         reality TV (including auditions)

·         symbolic presentations of wreckage

·         representations of wreckage in theatre, performance, live art

·         deliberate wreckage in performance (breaking/smashing the performance)

·         the wreckage of performance (corpsing, interruptions, technical failure)

·         corpses/dissected bodies/wounded bodies

·         dementia/degenerative illness/memory loss

·         the wreckage of democracy

We are inviting longer essays (from 4,000 to 6,000 words), shorter provocations (2,000 words) and artist pages (number of pages to be agreed with the editors).

Please send 300–400 word abstracts plus a 100 word bio for artists pages, critical essays, interviews, practice research essays or provocations that attend to (but are not limited to) any aspect of the above.

Schedule:

Proposals: Monday 27 August 2018

First drafts: December 2018

Final drafts: February 2019

Publication: July/August 2019

Issue contacts:

All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to Performance Research at: info@performance-research.org

Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors:

Patrick Duggan (University of Surrey): p.duggan@surrey.ac.uk

Gianna Bouchard (University of Birmingham): g.m.bouchard@bham.ac.uk

 

General Guidelines for Submissions: 

•           Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our website (www.performance-research.org ) and familiarize yourself with the journal.

•           Proposals will be accepted by email (Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format (RTF)). Proposals should not exceed one A4 side.

•           Please include your surname in the file name of the document you send.

•           Please include the issue title and issue number in the subject line of your email.

•           Submission of images and other visual material is welcome provided that all attachments do not exceed 5 MB, and there is a maximum of five images.

•           Submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

•           If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to submit an article in first draft by the deadline indicated above. On the final acceptance of a completed article you will be asked to sign an author agreement in order for your work to be published in Performance Research.

PD: We’ve been told to meet Laura [Paul] at ‘Orleans and North Rampart’, outside a bar called Voodoo Lounge. The bar’s red paint is sun bleached, its walls cracked and crumbling slightly. The bar seems friendly enough but we can’t see anyone that we can immediately identify as our ‘tour guide’ [2]. Waiting outside I become anxious about having missed Laura somehow. I’m also preoccupied thinking about how much of a donation we should give the organisation (lowernine.org) if and when she does take us to the area of the city most heavily devastated by Katrina and the subsequent levee breach on the Industrial Canal. I’m probably also a bit jet-lagged which doesn’t help.

After some minutes of furtively popping our heads around the door to see if we could identify Laura (what were we expecting, I wonder? Branded t-shirts, a sign with our names on it…), she comes out and asks if I’m ‘Peter’. After the initial awkwardness of correcting her on my name, we shake hands and do introductions whereupon Laura leads us to her car, a beaten-up, well used pick-up truck (a Toyota I think) and we climb in. I get in the front passenger seat. Stuart comments on our having been noticing the size of such cars, some so large the bonnets are at chin height on him. She seems confused by the comment and I wonder about the clash of cultures that it might signal; I suddenly feel that there is something decidedly British about small talk. I notice the seat is loose and that it slides back and forth on its fixings as we break and accelerate. I hope we won’t crash.

SA: For what seems a sizeable truck, I am struck by the small size of the side windows. They appear as portholes of a kind, the view outside marked by the frame of the interior. I feel enclosed, secure but separate from the places we pass. Laura begins by talking to us both but quickly talks more to Patrick. I find I spend time looking through the rear window, seeing houses, streets and empty plots through the neat lines that in frostier climates would heat the rear window. My gaze is less directed, my view is of left, right and the road behind, rather than entirely determined by the way ahead.

PD: Immediately after we get going, Laura invites us to a barbeque for lowernine.org volunteers that she is hosting at her home in the Lower Ninth that evening. It is a disarming invitation, one that I hadn’t been expecting. I find it awkward to know what to say; it seems a beautifully generous offer that is designed, as Laura says, to help us to understand the Lower Ninth better. But we only know the area by reputation and so, unsure of how we would get there – or back – and having commitments nearer our own ‘home’ for the trip we decline the offer. I wonder if it is a choice I will regret.

The day before the drive, we had been told that people in the city were ‘done with Katrina’, bored of talking about it. We mention this to Laura and her reaction suggests that it is an over simplification at best, and a profound articulation of privilege on the other: one can only be ‘done’ with it if one is no longer facing it. On the drive from the bar to the St Claude Avenue bridge over the Industrial Canal (some 3 stop-start miles), Laura is animated about her work and what brought her to the City: she is Canadian, we discover, and was a volunteer in the immediate aftermath of Katrina but never left. She tells us that this will be the most biased tour we could ever have. I’m glad of the disclaimer at the time but its importance recurs throughout the hour and 40 minutes we spend with her.

Laura’s (near) monologue is incredibly fast and she moves from one register or topic to another without pause or acknowledgement of the shift: complaining about some erratic driving in front of us merges with statistics about the city merges with politicised commentary on the tour or the city. I find myself concentrating very hard on trying to ‘tune in’. She ‘helps’ me by intermittently but frequently moving her hand from the steering wheel to tap me on the arm with the back of her hand. Later, after the tour has ended, I’m struck by how familiar this movement and touch was but also how insistent I found it in its breaking of my personal space and in physically punctuating the monologue on my body. It also made me acutely aware of being in the car.

SA: As tour groups go, this is small. I’d expected there might be more conversation, that there might be more down-time between particular stops. I find myself disconcerted by the lack of small talk, the lack of connection, of conversation. It became clear that this isn’t a place where we might have anything of particular value to say, it is about listening, being present, not negotiating, reflecting on and responding to the experience.  But, of course, lowernine.org offers tours and we’ve booked a tour, Laura is keen we discover the place, that’s the purpose of all this. Yet, it was odd trying to make sense of a place from inside a car. And, it was unsettling sharing the space of a car and remaining in the mode of a tour. As the tour continues, I am struck by the contrast between the relative ordinariness of sitting in a car and the enormity of events that have had such a significant and sustained effect on the places at which we stop, and those we pass by. I wonder what it would have been like to have stayed for a barbecue, and whether we might then have all slipped from the conventions of the tour, when we would not be looking at a place through windows, but there, in person, out for an evening. I begin to think that might be more difficult, that suddenly we would need to have words with which we might engage with people and place.

 

PD: Pulling up at the bridge, Laura barely nods towards the traffic jam evolving before us and to the bridge beyond saying that we are now encountering first-hand the ‘environmental racism’ that divides the Lower Ninth from the City. The bridge is up to let a ship along the canal and we have to wait. This can take up to 30 minutes, we’re told; and we’re asked to think about the implications of that in terms of emergency services getting to a crisis given none are based on the Lower Ninth side of the canal.

Crossing the bridge I’m struck by the vastness of this manmade waterway. Even from above it is a scale that dwarfs the architecture on either side of it, and while I do not know it yet (for it will be some days until I witness it for myself) – you have to look up at passing ships from the street level. We turn a hard right immediately we exit the bridge, the car pulling up to an abrupt stop. This is the area farthest from the Levee breach that devastated this area, so the part of the Lower Ninth least impacted (though still flooded). It’s now gentrifying quickly and I’m shocked to discover that there are even AirBnB properties in the neighbourhood (an issue of some contention in the city as a whole). Laura asks us to note the vernacular of the architecture, extoling the virtues of good, old design practices that enable homes to be cool in the ferocious heat of the summer.

We drive on, crumping over huge potholes, being shaken around the cab of the truck. Still at the southern end of the district, that area ‘least’ impacted by the flooding that was a consequence of the Industrial Canal levee breach, we pull up at a shell of a home destroyed by the flooding and subsequent neglect over time. It seems to me in need of tearing down and starting again: “we could fix that up easily, it’s actually in pretty good shape”, Laura says, before explaining that the barge board [3] inner skin of the house still looks strong. A few yards further on we pull up at an abandoned home, it looks in better condition but the orange ‘Katrina cross’ still marks it out as ‘blight’. We’ve already seen a number of houses in other parts of the city that have been done up but that have kept their cross. Laura explains how the X system works, with each quadrant containing specific information in an internationally agreed code and I’m relieved that no one died here [4]. I ask if it would be ‘deeply inappropriate’ to take a photo. Laughing, Laura ribs me for the phrase but says it would be fine before thanking me for asking. I don’t really understand why one wouldn’t ask, this was someone’s home.

We drive past two beautiful, ornate properties that we discover were built by a Steamboat captain called Doullut and designed to flood up to the first floor. I want to pause here and look more closely but we move on. We pause surrounded by (mostly) renovated houses with neat gardens and are asked to look around and remember the scene, and to look north along the 1.7 miles of Flood Street that is to our left. Later we will be asked to recall that moment, noting the extraordinary difference that 2 miles makes.

We swing right into property owned by the Port of New Orleans, a gravelly track leads up a short steep hill that we accelerate up. At the top we can see the Mississippi River and realise that we are on a river levee. A woman runs towards us along a dirt track at the top, I wonder where she has come from, how far she is planning to run, and how she is coping with the heat. After talking about the port a little, we accelerate back down the hill in reverse; the car moves unnecessarily fast in what is evidently a practiced manoeuvre but one that is unnerving nonetheless.

SA: I find myself looking back through the lines of the rear window. I become aware of lines on the land, the waterways that bisect the land, the high watermarks on houses. Laura stops to show us the industrial canal on her phone. It takes a while for her to load the map, but it’s clearly important. The canal is not natural, she explains, this isn’t the meandering way that water flows. As we pass houses, and the remains – or lack of remains – of houses, so she indicates the strategic decisions that are at play here, that led to the building of the canal, and the decisions that have followed Katrina. These streets feel a long way from the city, I wonder how many people visit the ward in their experience of the city, of how places away from the centre of a city are understood as being part of that city (and as being implicated in discussion with those central areas). We are seeing plans, decisions, structures, the work of recovery – and the limits of this work.

PD: We turn to face north and begin moving up through the district, Laura waves at everyone, a friendly and familiar greeting but I can’t work out who she actually knows and who she is just greeting because it is the friendly thing to do. We stop at her house and she calls to her dogs who stare at the car, seemingly ambivalent to our arrival. We drive on. Some blocks later, we approach a house that is being renovated, there are some teenagers smiling and chatting outside it and a coach a few meters further on. This is one of the houses that lowernine.org are in the process of doing-up. It’s nearly finished. As we approach, the car slows to a stop and Laura asks how the group outside are doing. A moment later, a man emerges from the front door and waves enthusiastically, asking if we’re stopping in to have a look. Laura beckons him over and he bounds down the front steps, along the path and up to the car. They chat and Laura explains she doesn’t have time to stop. They have just hung the kitchen cabinets. The house is nearly finished. We are not introduced which feels odd: there is an odd distancing effect enacted as the man clearly notices us but we aren’t afforded a chance to say hello. The result is that I find the encounter unsettling, as though I have been unwillingly made a voyeur. Or that I am on some kind of human safari. I feel my (white, male, middle class, educated) privilege heavily weigh in this encounter and although I am here for what I would consider legitimate (research, not tourist) reasons, I cannot help but feel I am participating in something ethically troubling. We drive away and I meekly mumble goodbye. I wonder who he was. I really wanted to see the house.

Driving further north we see an increasing number of empty plots, absences in the landscape where houses used to stand. Earlier in our trip we had interviewed someone who described the Lower Ninth as ‘a bit rural’, I wonder if this is what they meant. Of course, these lots are not really empty – they have been overtaken by nature in a curious sort of way. The boundary lines between properties are discernible, either marked out by some kind of fence or, more often, by the differentiation between one lot being mowed and cleared of debris, and another being wild, overgrown, and “given back” to nature in an eerie kind of way. This is a particular kind of staging of absence and wreckage, one that acknowledges the disparity in those who can make it back to the area to work on their plot and those who can’t. These are the traces of lives not (yet) recovered. We are told that the City insists lots are cleared or that they will reclaim the land. I remember Laura’s statement that this is the most ‘biased tour in the world’ and wonder if there isn’t a more complex, nuanced element to this statement. I feel guilty for doubting it.

There are no sidewalks (although there are corners of sidewalk at cross-roads). There are no streetlights. There are very few working fire hydrants. There are uncovered storm drains everywhere: they are at least two feet wide, 4 feet long and 5 feet deep. These cavernous, gaping mouths seem symptomatic of a broken bureaucracy. They are also violent in the threat that they pose to anyone using the streets. Some stretches of the road have been resurfaced, maybe twenty meters in length. There seems no logic to the repairs and they abut other bits of the road that are potholed, cracked, riven. The pickup truck is bounced and bucked remorselessly, my seat shifts back and forward violently throughout. Piles of construction debris and dumped domestic waste are often interrupting the flow of the road. Apparently people drive to the Lower Ninth to burn out cars. It feels like a place out of time and out of place, it is dislocated and isolated. But people smile and offer a wave as we pass. Across a clear stretch of greenery we spot a large and new building. It’s a high school; we don’t go to see it properly.

We come to the other end of Flood Street. Unlike the southerly end, the scene here is one of abandonment. Scrub has grown up on what would once have been the places where homes stood. The area would clearly have been well populated. It feels lonely now, haunted by the regular and rectangular outlines of plots of land where families once lived. A little further to the west, we arrive at the very edge of the district. Marked out by a sloping grass verge, atop of which is a tall, hash, sharp line of dark grey wall that parallels the street below. The Industrial Canal and its new levee wall. We are dwarfed by the architecture, made small by its height and length. We pause under the wall, at right angles to it. This is where the most catastrophic breach of the levee system in the city took place during Katrina. I’m struck by how much the looming architecture of the levee wall makes me think of being inside a prison [5]. There is one, fairly large house to our left, its front porch addresses the levee. Stuart asks how people who live looking out at it feel. ‘Safe’, Laura says.

We drive along the levee for a few hundred meters before turning off to find our way towards a bridge back over the canal and towards the city centre. We’ve been in the Lower Ninth for about 90 minutes. We have not passed a single café, restaurant, or grocery store. Apparently a ‘drug store’ has recently opened near a bridge across the Canal. As we cross the bridge, I start to feel a bit broken by the experience. I want to be very quiet and to be with my own thoughts but I try to listen diligently to the information being imparted. We drive past what I later learn is an ‘evacuspot’ [6].

We pull up, back outside the Voodoo Lounge and get out of the truck. There is an awkward moment where we try to negotiate the handover of our contribution for the tour, neither of us really too sure of how this works. We hand over the money. Laura thanks us for our interest in seeing the Lower Ninth and in her organisation’s work. It seems a generous acknowledgement, after all it was she who has shown us around. I am exhausted and overwhelmed. I cannot process the experience nor describe to Stuart how I am feeling (about and in light of it). We head into the French Quarter and it seems a million miles from where we have just been. I find that I am fairly shaken up but I can’t quite work out why. Talking about it the next morning I find it similarly unnerved. I know that I will write about it.

NOTES (relating to PD’s entries)

[1] I am in the process of developing an academic essay that, in part, explores the experience of this ‘tour’, it will be published in a special edition of Performance Research entitled ‘Staging the Wreckage’ (24:4, Summer 2019).

[2] I use scare quotes here because while this is a tour, it isn’t a commercial one. Indeed, Laura later tells us that the ‘Hurricane Katrina Tour’ run by Grey Line (and other commercial tours) is no longer permitted to go into the Lower Ninth and that the only way to see it as a ‘tour’ is with a Non-profit organisation like hers.

[3] See: https://adamickarchitecture.com/2016/06/07/historic-home-barge-board/

[4] See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Katrina_x_large.png

[5] In Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker’s wonderful book Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs presents a short essay entitled ‘Of Levees and Prisons’ which outlines the connections and parallels between the history of the development of the levee and penal systems across Louisiana and in New Orleans itself.

[6] See: http://evacuspots.evacuteer.org/ (somewhat troublingly, these figures are often referred to as ‘evacumen’)

 

 

Having recently returned from conducting research in New Orleans, our first case study city for the Performing City Resilience project, we reflect here on key elements of that research and point to follow-up work.

Preparation

In preparation for this field research trip and our broader Performing City Resilience project, we met with

Bristol City Council:

Chief Resilience Officer

Head of Culture

Head of Civil Protection Unit

 

Belfast City Council:

Senior Consultant (Smart Cities Team)

European Officer.

 

100 Resilient Cities

Programme Manager: Europe and the Middle East

City Solutions Manager

In each instance, there was great support for the project and recognition that it had the potential to fill a gap in current thinking and practice internationally.

 

New Orleans

As a city that has now ‘bounced back’ from disaster (a ‘shock’), New Orleans (NOLA) is now a thriving, diverse, and culturally expansive city but one that faces significant and ongoing social, political and environmental challenges (‘stresses’) – as such, it is a key city in understanding how cultural practices contribute to performing city resilience. It is, of course, impossible to capture the complexity of resilience, both as it relates to arts practices and more broadly to the particular geo-politics of NOLA. Thus, in visiting the city, our intention was not to try to flatten this complexity, nor to suggest a ubiquitous approach to performance as productive to discourses and policies of resilience. Rather, we sought to experience and reflect on some of the city’s complex arts scene(s) to see if and how they might contribute positively to a re-articulation of resilience that includes arts practices as well as infrastructure and disaster recovery narratives.

Over the course of the research trip we met with members of the city’s arts, city planning and government, and commercial communities to begin to develop a network of practitioners working in resilience in the context of future proofing NOLA to environmental and socio-political ‘stresses and shocks’. We also carried out a survey of arts activity taking place in NOLA at the time of the visit.

 

Activity

Meetings and Interviews

• Neil Barclay, Director and CEO, Contemporary Arts Centre
• David Hurlbert, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Marigny Opera House and Director of The Marigny Opera Ballet
• Laura Paul, Executive Director, lowernine.org
• Nick Slie, performer, producer, cultural organiser, and co-director of Mondo Bizarro.
• Maxwell Williams, Artistic Director, and James Lanius, Production Manager, Le Petit Theatre.
• Shannon Flaherty and Chris Kaminstein, Co-Artistic Directors, Goat in the Road Productions
• Aimee Hayes, Producing Artistic Director, Southern Rep.
• Arts Council New Orleans:
  • Heidi Schmalbach, President and CEO,
  • Jocelyn Reynolds, Director of Artist Services
  • Alphonse Smith, Director of Place and Civic Design
  • Lindsey Glatz, Director of Marketing and Communications, and Director of Luna Fête
  • Laura Dean-Shapiro, Strategic Development Officer
• Doug MacCash, Arts Correspondent, Times –Picayune/ NOLA.com
• Ryan Mast, Director of Resilience and Sustainability and Hazard Mitigation Administrator, Mayor’s Office, New Orleans Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness
• Andrew Larimer, Co-founder of NOLA Project, independent director, and Chief Creative Officer at Fat Happy Media.
• Delaney Martin, Co-founder and Artistic Director, New Orleans Airlift
• Glauco Adorno, local freelance curator.
• Justin Maxwell, playwright and Assistant Professor, University of New Orleans.
• Victor Holtcamp, Associate Professor, Tulane University
• Members of Mardi Gras krewes

 

Forthcoming Interviews

• Tommye Myrick, writer, producer, director and restaurant-owner
• Denise Frazier, Assistant Director of the New Orleans Centre for the Gulf South (Tulane University), performer and musician.

We also have invitations to correspond with a number of people who attended the event at CAC, and will be following these up shortly.

Site-visits and Performances

• Le Petit Theatre (French Quarter)
• Crescent Park
• Marigny Opera House (Marigny Bywater)
• Southern Rep Theatre (Seventh Ward, venue under construction)
• Fritzel’s (French Quarter, music venue)
• Lower Ninth Ward (lowernine.org tour)
• Second Line viewing (Frenchman Street)
• Easter Parade (Jackson Square)
• The Stranger Disease, Madame John’s Legacy (site-specific, immersive performance, Louisiana State Museum)
• From These Roots, Music Box Village (site-specific music and dance, Marigny Bywater)
• Emergency Operations Centre, NOLA Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness
• Why Is Everything A Rag, Jockum Nordström, CAC
• Lee Circle (CBD, site of monument removal, 2017, General Robert E Lee)
• Industrial Canal (site of major levee breach during Katrina)
• Congo Square, Louis Armstrong Park (Treme-Lafitte)
• Markets: Auction House (Warehouse), St. Roch (South 7^thWard), French Quarter Market.
• Lafayette Cemetery (Faubourg)
• See also ‘Walking’ for discussion of the city as site (31-3-18 blog entry, https://performingcityresilience.wordpress.com/blog/)

 

Public-facing Activities

From the beginning of this project, we have been convinced by the value and importance of engaging with key city stakeholders as a core activity within the research process. During this fieldwork, we hosted a public conversation about our project and about the city and its arts and culture. Leading up to this, we published a number of blog entries that reflected our emerging understandings of city, and our work in it.

The Arts and City Resilience, public workshop-discussion, Contemporary Arts Centre (CAC)

In this workshop-discussion, we presented initial findings from interviews, performance attendance, site visits and observations of the city, before opening up to a wider discussion of those findings with the audience.

At the end of the meeting, we invited participants to offer reflections on the following points, in writing:

1. What one thing will you take away from this event?
2. What one action will you take as a result of the event?
3. What would you like to tell us?

Responses to these questions, together with an audio recording of the event, will inform our analysis and resulting publications, they will also form part of an impact exhibition we are designing (see below). Information on attendees and feedback from the event is listed below.

 Blog Entries (https://performingcityresilience.wordpress.com/blog)

We developed a strategy for blog entries that arose from initial observations in the city, which embeds various kinds of practice as key drivers of each blog entry. We created six blog entries (‘Landing’, ‘Listening’, ‘Eating’, ‘Walking’, ‘Noticing’, ‘Asking’; c.3200 words, performative reflections, academic writing, photo essay). The next two blog entries will be ‘Reporting’ and ‘Gathering’.

 

Project Impact

We are beginning to chart the impact of this project on arts and city professionals in and beyond New Orleans. Recently,

• We were invited to do a podcast with Parksify (https://soundcloud.com/parksify/patrick-duggan-and-stuart-andrews-on-art-and-city-resilience). We will be doing a follow-up interview in the coming weeks.

 

• Performing City Resilience and, in particular, the work in New Orleans, was featured on the On TAP podcast (and website), hosted by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Pannill Camp, and Harvey Young. Camp described the work as

‘a really fascinating project designed to understand how arts practice contributes to resilience of cities… it sounds like a great project’ (Pannill Camp, On TAP022, April 2018).

 

• 32 people signed up for the CAC event, including artists, directors of arts organisations, city government officials, curators, and commercial stakeholders – and included residents of and visitors to the city.

Participants to this event noted the following key things:

1. There is no shared language with which to have conversations in and about the arts in the city; relatedly, there had been, until this event, no identified space or opportunity for open, non-instrumentalised meetings on arts and culture in the city.
2. We were the first people to facilitate a meeting that raised questions about the cultural and socio-political function of the arts in New Orleans, as they relate to resilience challenges – and that this was identified in the meeting as a needed and welcome intervention.
3. Our perspective as international outsiders was welcome and useful in helping local stakeholders identify what ‘work’ their practice or institution was doing.
4. There were people in the room who had not met each other and that there was a commitment to continue the conversation after we had left.

 

Next Steps

1. Conference paper reflecting on our time in New Orleans, needs identified by city stakeholders, and findings from the field research: http://healthycitydesign2018.salus.global/conference-show/healthy-city-design-2018.
2. A joint-authored, interdisciplinary article contextualising our research in relation to extant resilience theory, performance studies and our work in New Orleans. This will directly respond to requests by interviewees and members of the CAC event audience for meaningful ways to bridge the gaps between arts practices and city resilience planning.
3. Drawing specifically on our time in New Orleans, we intend to publish a joint-authored article explicating research practices for understanding and engaging with with a specific city, using performance analysis, interview material, resilience theory, and observations of places and practices of the city.

 

If you attended the event at CAC, if you’re interested in this project, or its emerging activities and findings, do please contact us for more information.

 

 

 

Today we are holding an event at the Contemporary Arts Centre in New Orleans. We’re going to offer some very tentative thoughts about our time in the city, have a conversation, and ask people to make their own reflections on the event and what they’ve taken from it.

We are asking:

• What one thing will you take away from this event?
• What one action will you take as a result of the event?
• What would you like to tell us?

Over the last eight days, we’ve been meeting with various arts practitioners, arts organisations and their staff, and other city stakeholders, and seen some performance practices that are happening in the city at the moment. We’ve been asking all of the people that we’ve met a series of questions that we think are relevant to the broader concerns of Performing City Resilience. These have included asking about the city’s: challenges, arts infrastructure, audiences, collaborations, engagement with the arts as a social, political or cultural concern, artists’ understanding of their position in the ways the city thinks about itself.

From these conversations, some of the things we have noticed have been to do with the centrality of cultural practices as part of the city’s fundamental understanding of itself, that different spaces and companies have different audiences but that many of these spaces and companies are directly engaged with increasing diversity in these audiences. That there are multiple inequities that divide, for example, across race, class, economics, and one’s time in the city. Allied to this, the city has challenging infrastructure, and faces changing environmental conditions (both ecological and in terms of ‘recovery’ and ‘reconstruction’). Despite these, people dance in the streets, spend a year crafting costumes for a single event, and music is everywhere. That eating together is important. That artists are profoundly engaged in thinking about the challenges that the city faces, as well as the joys of living here, in with and through their work. This is often implicit and deeply embedded in their work rather than an explicit ‘mission’.

The city has a rich and plural arts scene, that has the potential to contribute to resilience thinking for itself, in relationship to formalised processes of resilience at city government level, and from this, inform more nuanced understandings of resilience internationally. However, there is no unified language to facilitate this potential and perhaps this is where our project has something to offer. In the coming months, we will be working on blogs that reflect on our trip here, as well as academic publishing that theorises our findings in more concrete ways.

For now, we are looking forward to our event at the Contemporary Arts Centre at 6pm tomorrow (http://cacno.org/special-events/arts-and-city-resilience-new-orleans) and, hopefully, to facilitating an interesting and timely conversation about Performing City Resilience with makers, spectators, resilience professionals, residents from and visitors to New Orleans.