Back from New Orleans

So I just got back, along with many artists and colleagues around the country, from the National Performance Network annual meeting last week in New Orleans. I had never been to one of the big annual meetings before, and I hadn’t been back to New Orleans since Katrina and the levee breach, so I was anticipating this trip quite a bit.

New Orleans is still really struggling in a way that makes me feel guilty for not having kept up better with what’s happening there, and for still feeling at a loss for what I can really do to help. Downtown looks and functions pretty normally, but the city feels different-very different. There are only a fraction of schools open and operating. There are no open performance centers. The performances for the conference were all held at a school for the arts. Talking to some of the local NPN partners and artists, it’s clear that the infrastructures that are in place are strained and getting worse, and in many cases, don’t exist at all. I took a bus tour through some of the hardest hit parts of the city, which I admit I had a few hesitations about, but in the end, it felt important to witness what I could first hand and to listen to people. Seeing the rest of the city made it abundantly clear that this calamity has basically been forgotten by the Nation-so many completely abandoned houses and stretches of land where houses used to stand. There is no progress at all in the 9th ward-none, except for the pink houses that Brad Pitt has put up to raise awareness and funds. Our tour guide told us that the French government had donated some funds for rebuilding there given the strong connection to the French language in New Orleans, which for me begged the question, why is it that it’s up to Brad Pitt and the French government to step in here? I also noticed a gleamingly new McDonalds just on the outskirts of it that made me shudder. Some of the other harder hit communities are starting to rebuild, but it seems that has more to do with individual families having insurance and the financial means to do so and less to do with any kind of government assistance. Everything is bottlenecked, but the upside (if there is one) is that community leadership is really coming alive because it has had to-there is no one else coming to help, so neighborhoods and communities have begun to organize themselves.

As for the conference, the best part for me was seeing so many colleagues all at once, and getting a chance to catch up with artists around the country and see their work. The two keynote speeches that were given have also stuck with me. The first by Andrei Codrescu, a writer who has lived in New Orleans since leaving Romania in the 60’s and has written lots of books about NOLA, including one post-storm. It was very affecting, poignant, humorous and thoughtful. Opening the day of performances, Louisiana’s Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu gave a rousing speech that we will hopefully be posting here soon, as I think it’s something people should really hear, so stay tuned. . . .