The Performance of Place in Crisis: On COVID-19 and Thinking Through Trauma in New Orleans

Mardi Gras carnival and its associated social and aesthetic performances comprise a significant part of the cultural identity of New Orleans, and street culture more broadly is a vital component of city life. In New Orleans streets function as performance laboratories; spaces to encounter new performance and practices of place and identity that explore and reveal the world of the city. In that context, the global COVID-19 pandemic was a very particular kind of trauma, but it was one met by residents of the city through performance. This chapter analyses new practices of street culture in New Orleans that emerged during and as a result of COVID-19. At a time when many forms of street culture, especially Mardi Gras parades with their ensuing crowds, were seen as public health threats in contravention of “rest at home” orders, and wider “social distancing” mandates, the chapter asks: how can performance reveal new forms of practice that enable thinking through trauma in collective, embodied ways that speak to the culture of New Orleans (and beyond), even while bodies were ‘banned’ from its streets?