Five days before her death in 2009, Antoinette K-Doe paraded as Queen of the Camel Toe Lady Steppers, an all-female marching group. Danced articulations of race, class, and locality, performed by old and new New Orleanians, reveal why negotiations of the city's “local” culture are central to concerns of resource inequity before and after Hurricane Katrina.

“Culture Vulture” or community activist? When New Orleanian artists had to compete with higher-profile artists for funding and resources to create works in response to their own disaster, ethical issues emerged. Of the many post-disaster performances in New Orleans, the collaboratively written play Swimming Upstream thrives as an ongoing process and model for a partnership of local and out-of-region responses to disaster.

In post-Katrina New Orleans, creative artists took responsibility for remembering the disaster and re-visioning the city. This collection of articles and photographs offers a glimpse into the still-emerging effort to think through the past and envision the future of life and art in New Orleans.

Rex Nettleford's Katrina , performed by Jamaica's National Dance Theatre Company, projects both the un/natural disaster that befell North America's Gulf Coast in 2005 and the ways in which the Greater Caribbean has transformed experiences of bondage, marginalization, and suffering into a culturally affirmative creative impulse.

Interviews with three leading community-engaged theatre makers in New Orleans underscore why practices of public storytelling became crucial to the work of artists in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Connecting their work to New Orleans' heritage of African American neighborhood-based cultural performance traditions, O'Neal, Bebelle, and Slie emphasize the importance of cross-racial and cross-generational collaboration for generating theatre practices that are part of a collective struggle for pluralistic, democratic social change.

Drawing from her experience working with women from a wide range of backgrounds and struck by the pervasive sense of disempowerment in post-disaster New Orleans, Eve Ensler saw the need for a catalyst that could help women through their enormous distress and also provide an outlet for them to convert their pain into power. Together with the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, Ensler formed a workshop that created Swimming Upstream from personal stories of grief, loss, infringement, violation, disempowerment, insight, resolution, recovery, healing, and resilience.