Lakeviews: A Bus Tour As a Vehicle for Regrowth in New Orleans

Since the 2005 Katrina disaster in New Orleans, not many people frequent West End. A bustling row of seafood restaurants once lined the seawall on Lake Pontchartrain's south shore; now all that remains are a few scarred foundations and a clear view of the water. Although West End and its encompassing Lakeview neighborhood are not the only parts of New Orleans still struggling to jumpstart reconstruction, Lakeview's proximity to Lake Pontchartrain rendered it particularly devastated when the levees collapsed.

However, on 1-3 June 2007, West End showed peculiar signs of life. Two idling school buses and dozens of cars filled the weed-choked lot. A few people ordered plastic cups of wine and bottled beer from a makeshift bar. The rubble of a former dining room framed a simple scene: a single table flanked by two chairs, draped with a white tablecloth and topped with two place settings. Since it was wiped out by the aftermath of Katrina, this is all that's left of Bruning's Seafood Restaurant, family owned and operated since 1859. For a weekend its crumbling foundation was the starting point for Lakeviews, A Sunset Bus Tour: Performance, Art, Music, and Food. The tour also concluded here at sunset. For the two hours in between, the audience took part in a set of site-specific performances and installations at four other neighborhood locations, and afterward shared a meal with the artists at the former restaurant.

Lakeviews was produced in affiliation with the community-based arts network HOME, New Orleans?—a collective of multidisciplinary artists, students, local residents, universities, colleges, and neighborhood and cultural institutions. Unlike the numerous "disaster tours" that highlight post-Katrina devastation, Lakeviews was "intended as a rejuvenation ritual: to infuse the energy of art and audience into this decimated area" (HOME, New Orleans? 2007). Instead of merely mourning the ruin of Lakeview, the project worked to enliven the neighborhood by invoking its pre-Katrina life. While HOME, New Orleans? consists of diverse projects in three other neighborhoods— Central City, the Seventh Ward, and the Ninth Ward¹—the Lakeview team's bus tour/performance, with its focus on pre-Katrina life, most closely resembles the original Home, New Orleans? idea as devised by Richard Schechner, in dialogue with The VESTIGES Project: Think Tank: to remember and revitalize devastated neighborhoods by performing "the vast range of human experience" that was lived in these spaces (Schechner 2006).²

The very concept of a bus tour radically alters the normally sendentary artgoing experience by requiring viewers to be on the move. Spectators become passengers, visitors, pedestrians (daresay tourists?), and more. Not only are people bused between several sites; once in those spaces, they are invited to move through, in, and around them, to smell, touch, and taste them.

At 6:00 pm sharp, two packed school buses lurch out of the West End parking lot and lumber onto Robert E. Lee Boulevard. Passengers leaf through the program while enjoying wine or beer. Soon, however, the buzz of audience chatter dulls with four slow, swinging quarter notes and Fats Domino singing "Walking to New Orleans." Eventually the song fades into the recorded voices of several Lakeview residents telling stories about life in the neighborhood. This mix of casual storytelling and relevant musical selections continues as the buses turn onto Canal Boulevard and roll past a string of homes and businesses in varying states of decay and/or reconstruction. Past, present, and future conflate as architectural rot and barely emerging futures scroll past the windows. Recorded recollections stream out of the speakers as the passengers' own memories mingle with it all— for many who attend Lakeviews are neighborhood residents. According to visual artist Jan Gilbert, one of Lakeviews' key collaborators, "It found its way deeper into the community" (MacCash 2007).³

Meanwhile, a mysterious copilot crouches near the bus driver. Conspicuously silent and draped in black, local performance artist Kathy Randels's recurring presence weaves a narrative thread between most tour stops. Randels plays the Black Lady, a character that, according to the...