New Orleans and Mardi Gras
New Orleans was left permanently changed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Mardi Gras season presents an opportunity for locals and tourists alike to collaboratively define this new and changed city. Carnival and Mardi Gras day itself can be viewed as theatrical performances in which local New Orleanians and tourists are involved in multiple dramatic interactions to present an ideal city and celebration. These reciprocal interactions between actor and audience result in a certain presentation of the festival, and of the City of New Orleans and often involves hiding the problems and devastating history that is very much a part of the city and festivities. Tourists from all over the world flock to the city to act in and be an audience member to the series of formal, ritualized parades and balls which take place between the Twelfth Night and Lent. The celebration is reinvented by its performance teams and audiences each year and thus, its meaning is constantly being renegotiated. The first formal masked parade presented by an organized krewe, or performance team consisting of city locals working together to stage the performance of Mardi Gras, took place in 1857 (Cohen 110). Each krewe has a distinct name, performance team members, and personal front. Unique ritual paradigms, such as the exchange of beads for disrobement, are created and enacted in which mutual understanding of the situation is necessary. The success of the presentation is determined not only by the krewe 's performance but by the audience 's acceptance of the krewe 's performance as believable, and their willingness to overlook mistakes. Thus, defining Mardi Gras and the City of New Orleans is a cooperative dramaturgical process dependent on the cooperation of actors and audience members. The product of this interaction between audience members and actors is a working, malleable definition of Mardi Gras ' and New Orleans ' self. The locals devoted to showing an ideal presentation of New
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