Exceptional Performance, Exceptional Place

This chapter assesses New Orleans’ situation in 2018. One can see Downtown Mardi Gras as a vast piece of egalitarian street theatre, whose process may witness ego-rivalries and identity contestations, but whose final performance achieves something greater than the sum of its parts—the physical manifestation of an aspirant desire, for a reanimated city, of tolerance, equity, and mutual respect. Downtown Mardi Gras may portend a new future for Carnival practices, the opening of the door to further, yet-to-be-realized ludic expressions and energies; it may also point to new civic constellations, themselves yet unmaterialized, that could help elevate actual lives, spreading more widely the benefits of post-Katrina recovery.