LAT: "strong, soulful, wicked, frail city": Is dance over in magic place?

[DeepModem Mom]

A strong, soulful, wicked, frail city
After disaster recedes, the rebuilding will begin. Artists and others wonder: What will become of the culture?

By Reed Johnson, Times Staff Writer


In the opening scene of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," Blanche DuBois arrives at the New Orleans tenement home of her sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski in a state of anxious uncertainty. "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields," Blanche confides to a neighbor.

Williams' metaphor, with its evocation of sexual yearning and intimations of mortality, echoes through this essential American drama, set in what may be America's most singular metropolis. And in the wake of the devastation wrought, and the many questions raised, by Hurricane Katrina last week, some of the themes Williams touched on in "Streetcar" — specifically about whether a fabulous invalid like Blanche and a shabby-genteel place like New Orleans could withstand the rigors of the modern world — seem more relevant than ever.

For a city of only half a million people, New Orleans looms as large in our cultural imagination as L.A. or Chicago. Playwrights, novelists, poets, film directors, painters, chefs, dive-bar raconteurs and especially musicians all have drunk deeply of the city's heady brew of flamboyance and decadence, joie de vivre and fatalism, the sexy and the sinister.

From its prissy French Quarter architecture to its brawny riverfront, to the shotgun houses of the traditionally black and Creole 7th, 8th and 9th wards, it is a place whose swirling eddies of French, African American, Caribbean and Roman Catholic influence have proven irresistible to those with brooding souls and hungry hearts....Even the devastating fallout from Katrina won't be enough to keep them from coming back, some artists promise. After all, the city's air of defiant bravado in the face of impending disaster has always been part of its allure. "The culture survives," says Quint Davis, producer and director of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. "It's survived slavery. It's survived everything so far…. I don't think you can stop the dance. I don't think you can drown the dance. We dance at funerals, and now we have to dance at our own funeral."

Others fear that the soulful old city of homey cafes serving warm beignets, and crammed like a giant curiosity shop with faded relics of the world the slaves made, will be swept aside by new development. That fear seems particularly acute among African Americans, who make up the overwhelming majority of the city....


http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-et-culture5sep05,0,4298125.story?coll=la-home-style

[Gruenemann]

1. Brilliant article. Thanks! eom