Begging in the Ballpark, Blogging for a Chicken, and Running in the

Hall: Mardi Gras in Evolving Communities.

BARRY JEAN ANCELET

Mermentau wagon (photo: Barry Jean Ancelet)

A number of studies, from Leroy Ladurie’s history of the breakdown of carnival in 16th century Romans1 to Geertz’s penetrating examination of Balinese cockfighting2, have shown that very real social issues can underlie ritual performance. This sort of deep play is clearly at the heart of the South Mardi Gras, in which ongoing family and community relationships and tensions inform, challenge, reflect and ultimately reaffirm the tradition and the community itself3.

1 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le carnaval de Romans, trad. Mary Feeney, Paris, Gallimard, 1979. 2 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York, Basic Books, 1973. 3 Barry Jean Ancelet, “Falling Apart to Stay Together: Deep Play in the Grand Marais Mardi Gras”, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 114, no 452, Spring 2001, p. 144-153 ; Barry Jean Ancelet. “We Love Our Mardi Gras: The Social Implications of the Mardi Gras and How We Read It”, paper presented at the

1 What has come to be called Mardi Gras is a masked, brightly colored begging

procession that occurs on the day before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, a period

of fasting and sacrifice in preparation for Easter. This traditional festival is one of several

similar rituals that occur in the yearly cycle between the death of the old year (such as the

ancient Samhain or the more contemporary Halloween) and the rebirth of the New Year

(such as Easter or May Day). These rituals have common elements that express the death

and rebirth symbolism characteristic of this period that runs roughly from the end of the

Fall harvest to the beginning of Spring planting. Some of these celebrations add lively

color to the otherwise drab winter landscape, from green Christmas trees with brightly

colored balls to the brightly colored costumes of Mardi Gras. Some add warmth and light

to this otherwise cold, dark time of the year, in the form of jack-o’-lanterns, Christmas lights and Yule logs, New Year’s bonfires, Mardi Gras flambeaux, and Pascal candles.

Many feature ceremonial food and drink gathered by begging processions, such as

Halloween candy, Christmas cookies, Mardi Gras gumbo and Easter eggs. Some of this ceremonial food is loaded with symbolism, such as the black eyes and cabbage on New

Year’s Day, the bean (or baby) in the King’s cakes between Epiphany and Mardi Gras, and the brightly colored eggs and chocolate bunnies on Easter Sunday. During these moments, the air is filled with the sounds of gaiety during this otherwise mournful time, from Christmas carols to carnival laughter.

American Folklore Society annual meeting, Memphis, October 1999 ; and Barry Jean Ancelet. “ Le Carnaval de Basile : The High Stakes of Deep Play”, American Folklore Society, October 1998. See also Carl Lindahl, “One Family’s Mardi Gras: The Moreaus of Basile”, Louisiana Cultural Vistas, vol. 9, no 3, 1998, p. 46-53; and “The Presence of the Past in the Cajun Country Mardi Gras”, Journal of Folklore Research, no 33, 1996, p. 101-129; as well as the documentary film Dance for a Chicken: Mardi Gras in South Louisiana (Pat Mire, 1993).

2 Two related, but essentially different, versions of the Mardi Gras came to

Louisiana when began to develop its colony in 1699. The one that most people

know is the urban version, such as that which is found in New Orleans, as well as a few

other smaller sister cities, including Lafayette, Houma, Mobile, and Baton Rouge. Like its urban counterparts in Europe, it is processional in nature, involves ritual disguise and role-playing, and has aspects of ceremonial begging. Parades of floats with masked and costumed riders go through the streets disrupting ordinary life and providing a moment of gaiety to those lined alongside the route who beg for beads and doubloons with the classic refrain: “Throw me something, Mister!”

The less known version is the rural version that preserves some of the features of its rural European antecedents. This questing procession of masked and costumed participants on horses and wagons leaves town or a community center early in the morning, winds through the surrounding countryside under the control of a capitaine and

his assistants, and returns late in the afternoon to eat and dance until midnight. Some are

all male, some all female, some mixed. Their costumes reflect ancient as well as

contemporary parodies. Conical hats reflect European and African influences; mitres and mortarboards reflect a traditional scorn for medieval and contemporary institutions; venerable roles are preserved in contemporary versions of the French paillasse and the colonial nègre et négresse. Some masks take on more modern characters. This motley

crew visits farmsteads to sing, dance and clown for the residents and to collect the

ingredients for the communal gumbo eaten later that evening back in town. Some give

rice, flour, onions, or money, but ideally the offering is a live chicken which the

participants are expected to capture in the open field despite their varying states of ritual

3 inebriation, providing an important part of the chaotic play associated with the visits.

There is also an interesting tension between beggar and outlaw as the masked riders charge farmhouses and play mock terror games with hosts and visitors, and hold up their captured chickens in obvious gestures of triumph.

In the versions where horses are used as transportation, Mardi Gras provides the opportunity to display horsemanship. Riders race to the host house from the road when the capitaine waves his white flag to signal that permission to visit has been granted.

During the visits, riders often dance while standing on their horses. On the other hand, some participants are riding for the only time during the year on horses being ridden for the only time during the year. The predictable results are part of the humor and clowning that characterize the day. Music is provided by live musicians who follow along in a wagon or by tapes played over loud speakers mounted on an accompanying vehicle. The walking pace of the horses limits the number of potential visits that can occur in a typical day. The number of homesteads in the countryside has dwindled over the last few decades as people have moved off family farms and into towns. Now many horseback

Mardi Gras celebrations must supplement their gumbos with store-bought chickens to feed the growing numbers of riders at the end of the day. Non-participating spectators who come from the community, other towns, and other states and countries now to watch the increasing popular festivities also inflate crowds.

Like Cajun culture in general, the traditional Cajun Mardi Gras celebration is both historical and modern, with roots in our French past as well as in the contemporary social structures that have evolved as a result of the cultural and ethnic fusion that has occurred here in South Louisiana. Like its urban counterparts in New Orleans, Lafayette, Houma,

4 Baton Rouge and other cities, the country Mardi Gras can dazzle photographers,

documentary filmmakers and fieldworkers alike. Masking and costuming traditions based

on intense parody and inversion, equally intense improvised dramatic play, and athletic

chicken chases and whipping rituals can be so intriguing and engaging that they capture

all of our attention. But as Carl Lindahl4, Dana David5, Patricia Sawin6, and Carolyn

Ware7 have pointed out, Mardi Gras is essentially an intimate social event that defines and is defined by its community, its petit monde. The people who participate in this event

are the ones who show up to help fix each other’s fences and raise each other’s barns.

They are the same ones who once took part in community butchery co-ops and showed up by invitation at house dances. In order to understand the whole event, one must take into account the whole scene. Events that occur before and after, alongside and beyond the spectacular play can be at least as important to the nature of the visits.

This paper explores ways that three evolving communities are negotiating or

renegotiating their traditional South Louisiana Mardi Gras runs, historically a strong

expression of social solidarity8. In Mermentau, Mardi Gras organizers are innovating

ways to visit several local towns in an effort to reflect their expanded sense of

community. In Fiquetaïque, people from far and wide who are connected primarily via

cyberspace have developed a hybrid run that uses web sites and email contacts to gather

4 Lindahl, 1998. See also Carl Lindahl, “The Presence of the Past in the Cajun Country Mardi Gras” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 33, 1996, p. 101-129. 5 Dana David, “De-Carnivalised Laughter in the Tee-Mamou Run”, paper given at the American Folklore Society annual meeting, Portland, October 1998. 6 Patricia Sawin, “Transparent Masks: The Ideology and Practice of Disguise in Contemporary Cajun Mardi Gras”, Journal of American Folklore, 2001, vol. 114, p. 175-203. 7 Carolyn E. Ware, “Reading the Rules Backward: Women, Symbolic Inversion, and the Cajun Mardi Gras Run”, Southern Folklore, 1995, vol. 52, p. 137-159. 8 This study is based on fieldwork conducted throughout these negotiating communities. Interviews where held during different Mardi Gras events with the collaboration of the following participants and organizers:

5 participants who then visit a geographic community. And finally, in Acadiana High

School, students have developed a run that addresses their sense of community in the

school setting. These solutions are based on improvised tradition, bending typical notions

of historically continuous authenticity, striving for true authenticity rather than what is

only “authentic-like9” or faux-thentic. All three have been challenged to overcome

logistical and conceptual challenges in order to exist at all in ways that are deemed at

least functional by both participants and their potential hosts. These efforts have had

mixed results.

The first example involves a community reviving its traditional run after a hiatus

of several years. Like many South Louisiana communities, Mermentau had an active

Mardi Gras celebration until just after World War II. The fact that many of their young

men were away from home fighting in the war caused many communities to suspend

Mardi Gras celebrations. Some of these did not survive the hiatus. Furthermore, many

rural people who had traditionally lived on subsistence farms were drawn to towns and

urban centers for salaried jobs in the post-war boom period, effectively reducing the number of potential Mardi Gras hosts in the countryside. These two factors combined to reduce the number of communities actively celebrating the rural Mardi Gras. Some Mardi

Gras runs survived by combining with nearby runs into magnet runs, which incidentally reflected the way that rural and Creoles were interacting socially. Previously, life had been organized in small worlds; people ran Mardi Gras with the same folks they

Caroline Ancelet Emile Ancelet Lucious Fontenot Brandi Laiche André Mitchell Joel Savoy (editor’s note). 9 Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Foundation of , Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

6 would meet at house dances and butchery co-ops, with the same folks who were likely to show up to help harvest the crop of a sick neighbor or fix his damaged roof. After World

War II, Mardi Gras runs reflected the expanded social interaction among public school mates and church goers, as well as in public dance hall crowds.

In more recent times, some Mardi Gras participants have begun to express a desire to reconsider the community in which they are running. In part, this seems to be the result of a growing discomfort of not knowing the people they are visiting on the larger runs. This, coupled with the fact that many of those who went to town to work are moving back to ancestral lands as they retire, has caused some Mardi Gras to calve out of the larger runs in order to reestablish runs more tightly focused on a smaller sense of community.

Until a few years ago, folks in the Mermentau community who wanted to run

Mardi Gras participated in the Tee Mamou run centered a few miles to the north. Inspired by a desire for a run of their own, some community members, led by Keith Henry, Ray

Richard and Dale and Lou Trahan, reestablished the Mermentau Mardi Gras in 1993. One of their underlying reasons initially was a desire to run on horseback. The Tee Mamou run had converted itself many years ago to run in a truck-drawn wagon, partly in order to enable them to reach enough houses in the sparsely settled countryside. The horseback runs of several other communities, such as Mamou, Churchpoint, Elton and Oberlin, were seen as traditional. In fact, while they may have appeared more “authentic”, they may have been less effective than the motorized evolution of the Tee Mamou run10. By 1999, the Mermentau was accommodating those who did not ride horses by packing them into and on top of an extended horse trailer. That year, organizers also felt compelled to reach

7 out to the nearby community of Estherwood, many of whose residents attended the same churches and schools. It would have taken too long to make the trip with horses, so they were tied to a fence on the edge of Mermentau and the riders joined those in and on the trailer as they headed to Estherwood.

Mermentau run at Estherwood baseball park (photo: Barry Jean Ancelet)

Organizers also realized that they could not visit the entire town individually, so they had set up a single stop at the town’s little league baseball park, through the parish priest who announced the event in church the week before. Those who were interested in hosting and observing the Mermentau run’s Estherwood visit came out to the park that

Sunday morning around 10 o’clock — interestingly, this very Catholic procession, with arguably pagan origins, featuring amplified and the liberal consumption of alcohol had to go right in front of the town’s Baptist church, whose windows were wide open on that fine Spring day. Once at the ballpark, the Mardi Gras participants were locked inside the fenced ball field. Their Estherwood neighbors who arrived after the 9

10 Another Mardi Gras in Anse Lejeune recently calved off of the Tee Mamou run for the same reason.

8 o’clock mass lined the fence. Several chickens and ducks were released onto the field

where they were chased down by the Mardi Gras, cheered on by those along the fence.

There was much laughter, but the lack of interaction appeared awkward. After the chases,

Captain Richard called the Mardi Gras together in a tight bunch to tell them that he felt

“the people want us.” Obviously improvising, he sent them to beg from the spectators

across the fence. He had also told the group earlier, “Don’t steal unless I say you can

steal,” teaching those who were running for the first time how to play. A while later, he

opened the gate, allowing the Mardi Gras to spill out into the parking lot among the

spectators, finally fully integrating the two communities in the ritual play.

After more than a half hour, the captain called his Mardi Gras to order and they

got back into the trailer and headed back to the corner where the horses had been tied.

The horsemen remounted and the procession headed down the road toward Mermentau

Cove, which along with the town of Mermentau proper was the primary focus of their

run. The horses slowed the pace and the distance between houses was considerable, producing long lulls. After a few houses, the captain commented that next year, there should be no horses. This was clearly a Mardi Gras that was still negotiating itself.

Folklorist Dana David noted that its script was still in re-writes, but that it had lots of energy and thus lots of potential. In subsequent years, the use of horses was completely discontinued. Their desire to include the nearby communities of Estherwood and also later Morse, where they also make a single stop along the town’s main drag, trumped the nostalgia some had for the horseback runs.

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Mermentau mask (photo: Barry Jean Ancelet)

In addition to expanding its route, the Mermentau run, also improvised its masks, costumes and ritual behavior. Some features were preserved virtually intact from the Tee

Mamou model, including the song and the requirement that everyone wear the capuchon hat. This requirement had already eliminated at least two other traditional hat styles, the mitre and the mortarboard, in the Tee Mamou magnet run. The clearest departure from the Tee Mamou model was in their masking strategy. Mask makers, especially Lou

Trahan who almost single-handedly masked the entire run, opted for a distinguishing feature derived from historical masks in the area. Contemporary Tee Mamou masks feature a long, phallic nose, but historically there was another style that featured a button or doughnut shaped nose, and it is this style that has come to distinguish Mermentau masks, as well as Lou Trahan’s ingenious use of found materials, such as bones, feathers, hair, and fur. And finally, performance strategies, including begging postures and

10 dancing for the household were transformed to include new features, such as lying in the road to stop traffic to ask for money and variations on line dancing based on current dance hall styles.

The relatively new Fiquetaïque Mardi Gras, which takes place just outside of

Eunice in the community also known as Savoy, is also in the process of negotiating itself, but for a different set of reasons. A group of young Cajuns and Creoles (including Joel

Savoy, Brandi Laiche, Alyce Labry, Lucious Fontenot, and Robin Miller) from several communities including Eunice, Basile, Mamou, and Lafayette, launched this run in 2005.

One of their motives was to separate themselves from the increasingly cumbersome

Eunice run, which has grown to include literally thousands of participants, including many from outside the area, a byproduct of the town’s open embracing of cultural tourism. The size of the Eunice run is perceived by some to be crushing the traditional nature that once was at its core. Participants are so strung out along the route that many don’t even know when the head of the procession is stopped for a Mardi Gras visit.

Fiquetaïque organizers wanted to create a smaller more viable run. Organizer Joel Savoy explained:

I started this because I felt the courir in Eunice was too big — there seemed to be no real point to it other than to parade around drunk. I wanted to start something based around a community and respect for the tradition. And that’s not to say our run is traditional in the traditional sense of the word. I believe in living traditions that grow and evolve. It may look very different today than it did 50 years ago, but there is an underlying purpose and sensibility.

11 They also wanted to create a Mardi Gras where their friends could run, a run that

represented their own contemporary sense of community. According to Savoy, this

community is connected in ways that are both new and old, typically communicating by

means of “email, cell phones and text messaging”. Savoy adds, “we have regular bi- monthly suppers starting about three months before the big day where we discuss plans, dividing up the work, etc.”.

They created an inclusive structure that eliminated the racial and gender segregation found in many other runs. André Mitchell, a black Creole participant from

Lafayette, stressed the importance of this feature for him and his wife, who is from

Québec: “We are an interracial couple and it feels good that we don’t get the stares that

we’ve gotten at the other runs”.

Without continuing local traditional guidelines, costuming and masking strategies

are wide open, but that doesn’t seem to present a problem according to Mitchell:

Most of the people were raised around it and participated in it since they were little. Others just want to experience something different. They’ve gotten tired of the big city and want something more traditional that has something tangible (like heritage and ritual) strapped to it… People come up with all kinds of get-ups for instance my [blond] wig. I have seen some creativity in the costumes.

12 Joel Savoy insisted:

We absolutely require a full costume, with mask. I see costumes that range from strict traditional to Halloween full body costumes. Some of the best are the last minute masterpieces people throw together when they arrive and are turned away because they’re not in costume — they really get into it then! I just want people to respect the tradition, or at least respect something…

Several other traditional runs, such as the ones in Mamou and Churchpoint, do not dictate specific styles, and thus attract wildly divergent and imaginative looks. The problems the Fiquetaïque run has encountered are based in two other less obvious but nevertheless critically important areas that are essential to the Mardi Gras. One involves the strategy for ritual play. It’s not just how you look, it’s how you act. Mardi Gras is essentially a game that is designed to generate carnivalesque laughter by means of carnivalesque play. Ironically, though this sense of play is essentially based on improvisation, it is also apparently difficult to invent out of thin air. One learns how to play appropriately by observing appropriate play. And even so, players don’t just reproduce memorized behavior. Instead, they improvise behavior in a way that they have learned works. There is what might be described as a grammar of Mardi Gras play, with which players innovate imaginative but appropriate expressive strategies that simultaneously surprise and remind. If people who fly or drive in from other areas to run with their virtual pals are not fluent in this langue, they cannot reasonably be expected to produce appropriate paroles. André Mitchell noted: “As far as the play, I rode a bike one year (briefly), and wrestled in the mud with my best friend. It’s great.” But Joel Savoy conceded about the ritual play: “That’s still a weak point in our run as far as I’m concerned. We do our best to encourage participation: Dancing, Begging, Playing Music,

13 General Misbehaving, but there are so many folks and to a lot of them it’s just a trail ride.”

In addition to basic fluency of play, there is also the issue of dialects. Even those who may have participated in various other Mardi Gras runs in the area report experiencing frustration at not having their play understood. This lack of a consistent playful strategy has resulted in frustrated attempts to fill the vacuum, with some participants pushing each other in ditches or mudsliding for lack of anything else to do11.

One displaced Mardi Gras veteran noted:

Most of us who ran traditionally back home were begging or singing. I’ll call us the “core” group. The urbanites who came to run would just skip around or mimic (poorly) what we were doing. There was an effort on the core group’s part to direct the others how to beg and gather around the home owners, but most would immediately start looking for the chicken to chase, or chased each other12.

Last year, some organizers who tried to import a whipping tradition based on several other communities in the area ended up having to explain what was going on during the run. This is not unlike trying to play a game while explaining and even developing its rules:

The community of the core group is close and there is a definite drive to share this tradition with our city friends, but it’s very difficult to do the day of the run. I feel this community, if you would call it that, is displaced, maybe? We know each other, but we do not know the extension of friends that we all bring to the run13.

11 Interview with Emile Ancelet. 12 Interview with Brandi Laiche. 13 Interview with Brandi Laiche.

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Fiquetaïque gathering (photo: Barry Jean Ancelet)

Interestingly, the group’s contemporary sense of community is also largely

virtual, involving people who regularly communicate and stay in touch with each other

through emails, texting, cell phone conversations, and web sites such as MySpace and

Facebook. Many of the organizers and participants are Cajun and Creole musicians and

their fans. They are as likely to meet at a workshop in West Virginia or a dance/concert in

California as at a jam session in Breaux Bridge, Arnaudville, Eunice or Lafayette14. Their virtual community makes perfect contemporary sense, as founder Joel Savoy explained:

My Mardi Gras is a group of friends from around the world that come together once a year to celebrate together what is for every participant a very different event. For some, like myself, it marks a new year and entails the necessary preparation. For others it has religious implications, and for others it is a chance to visit and party with friends we don’t see very often. For the community, it’s the one time a year they are called upon to participate and contribute to something that brings the neighborhood together — in this age, living next to someone doesn’t necessarily mean knowing them.

15 Another participant added:

Most of the runners (that I knew personally) were friends from Eunice, Ville Platte, or Iota who grew up running back home and now were living in Lafayette. It was cool to be able to run together, because communities don’t normally mix in the rural runs. We all hung out on the weekends in Lafayette and went to the Blue Moon and local jam sessions. I communicate by phone with most of the members, but mostly at local events... we would just meet up the old fashioned way... I know I can show up at any given cultural event in Lafayette and see one or more of these friends, where we would consequently plan the next meeting depending on the next event15.

If Mardi Gras is indeed about confirming and celebrating community, it could

conceivably be adapted to this one. And yet this poses problems. Though the Mardi Gras

may reasonably include members from newly expanded communities, including virtual

ones, it is celebrated, for now at least, in a geographic community. In that regard, the

Mardi Gras is still pre-modern, representing an old sense of local society. That is, the

solidarity of the group may survive and even thrive in cyberspace, but when they gather

to run Mardi Gras, they find themselves in a real place. As Trevor Paglen points out in

his study of the politics of geography, quoting Allan Pred, “Geography […] is an inescapable existential reality. Everybody has a body, nobody can escape from their body, and consequently all human activity — every form of individual and collective practice — is a situated practice and thereby geographical16”. The unavoidable need to

celebrate somewhere poses interesting and thorny problems. The solidarity within the

Fiquetaïque run makes sense in the contemporary context, but Mardi Gras is not only in

the procession; it also involves those that it visits. Participants from far and wide visiting

14 Inteview with Lucious Fontenot. 15 Interview with Brandi Laiche.

16 this particular rural neighborhood find themselves trying to interact with people they don’t know. This diminishes the power of their masks, since their hosts would not recognize them anyway.

Barry Jean Ancelet: Do you know anyone who lives in the houses that the group visits?

André Mitchell: Can’t say that I do.

An experienced Mardi Gras veteran nuanced her assessment of this issue:

I do not know the home owners... after running the first 3 years, I still do not know them personally. But I didn’t know every home owner in Basile either, but I sing and dance for them on Mardi Gras day! And “worked” for what they gave us17.

And yet, this same temporarily displaced Mardi Gras opted to return to her own community last year. Even Joel Savoy, the principle organizer whose home serves as the starting and ending point for the run, has apparently expressed a few concerns over the viability of some aspects of the run. Last year, he wondered aloud if this new run had not inadvertently acquired some of the same problems as the Eunice run for which they intended to provide an alternative, and ironically for the some of the same reasons18. The

Fiquetaïque run’s popularity may risk over-extending its numbers. And its attraction of so many participants from the outside may challenge its ability to generate clearly appropriate play and community interaction.

16 Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World, New York, Dutton, 2009, p. 16-17. 17 Interview with Brandi Laiche.

17 I was glad to hear this new run was going to start with my friends from Lafayette, who were actually like me... grew up in smaller towns and found themselves separated from their traditional hometown runs. I was also initially happy about the idea of sharing the tradition with those who had never experienced it before. I had no idea how many runners would turn up and how many had no clue about the rural Mardi Gras runs19.

Despite the conceptual and logistical problems, there is hope and enthusiasm. This same

Mardi Gras sees much benefit in the experiment:

There is a whole new group who has been introduced to Mardi Gras… those who may not have ever had the opportunity to run. Eunice or other larger cities may allow outsiders to run, but they don’t get to see what happens at the house… Even though there may be a slight lack of participation in the begging at the home during the Fiquetaïque run, everyone does get to see what happens. I think if the same group comes back year after year, they will all get it20.

This, of course, brings us right back to the old model of traditional transmission. There may be no way around it, and no reason to look for such a way. It may be that someone will eventually develop some version of a virtual run for virtual communities that would take place entirely within cyberspace, complete with avatars and virtual realities. For now, that has not yet happened. Even if it did, it would represent a remarkably different activity from the one that the quite real Fiquetaïque participants are striving to negotiate.

On a related note, my wife Caroline, who has integrated a number of cultural features, such as storytelling and traditional music, into her high school French classes, recently developed a unit on Mardi Gras. She brought in mask makers, costume makers, singers and musicians as part of an experiential, culturally-connected language

18 Interview with Emile Ancelet. 19 Interview with Brandi Laiche.

18 development strategy. In addition to learning French vocabulary and expressive

strategies, her students learned to make their own masks and costumes, and to sing

various versions of the songs associated with the tradition. Once they found themselves

so equipped, they suggested that they should actually run Mardi Gras together. She

explored various options with them, including the question of what community they

would visit.

(photo: Barry Jean Ancelet)

The first year, they decided to board a school bus to visit some of their own

relatives and neighbors. The co-optation of the school bus seemed a particularly effective carnivalesque inversion. But afterwards, as they did a post-mortem on the experience, they determined that loading Mardi Gras onto a school bus wasn’t enough, mostly because they didn’t all know their hosts21. They recommended continuing the search for a

more genuinely connected community, and the subsequent year’s class came up with a

solution that was as surprising as it was obvious: they ran Mardi Gras in the halls of their

20 Interview with Brandi Laiche.

19 school, disrupting classes (with just a bit of advanced notice) and playing with their friends and teachers. They begged for such things as pencils and extra points. The song they sang was borrowed from an existing run (Basile), because one of the students had participated there and could sing it and play it on the accordion. Masks and costumes looked like those made by the couple from Iota who had come to teach them. Afterwards, the participants agreed that this was a much more meaningful and satisfying carnivalesque experience, and subsequent classes have followed this model. The fact that not all teachers were delighted with the disruption only added to its perceived effectiveness as Mardi Gras play.

The specific play they perpetrated on their colleagues and teachers varied. Some students struggled to come up with something to do that seemed appropriate to Mardi

Gras. Others improvised more freely and successfully. They brainstormed to come up with play that would be both effective and acceptable. Some of it derived much from documentary films that the students had seen, including stealing shoes and other personal effects. Some of the play evolved. The most effective personal effect to steal proved to be student id cards, but they took care to hang them around the teacher’s neck. They also found that immobilizing their fellow students with saran wrap was effective without the discomfort of tape. Eventually, as they got an opportunity to participate in the hall run, younger generations of students who had witnessed and experienced the play of the juniors and seniors who generally make up this upper level French class imitated and perpetuated aspects of play that seemed to work and discarded other aspects that did not, so that there is now what amounts to the transmission of traditional play strategies from one “generation” to the next in this negotiated community.

21 Interview with Caroline Ancelet.

20 All of these runs face a similar challenge: to constitute or reconstitute Mardi Gras tradition in places where it did not exist before or had lapsed. This involves the generation of practices that historically were transmitted through the traditional process.

The inherently improvisational nature of Mardi Gras makes this altogether possible, but the particular circumstances of these three Mardi Gras contexts expose the dialectic between tradition and improvisation. In the case of Mermentau, they are tweaking and innovating solutions to catch up to and keep up with a constantly evolving geographic community. In the case of Fiquetaïque, the issue is more complex, to find real and meaningful ways for a virtual community to run in a real place. Organizers and participants there are bravely facing the challenges of preserving and innovating Mardi

Gras in a whole new world. The example of running Mardi Gras in the school halls shows that Mardi Gras can be negotiated, including the critical issues concerning community and play, in ways that can be functionally traditional even in such an unlikely setting.

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