In thinking through how the house float phenomenon was like and unlike regular carnival, or at least the parading practices of carnival, five themes stand out: their material and organizational structure; the topics they represented; their sociality (who made them, using what connections); their unique spatiality compared to the usual urban activities of carnival; and finally, their temporality in relation to a specific historical conjuncture.

Like regular carnival floats and props, the qualities of the house floats reflected differential access to money, materials and know-how. My local fieldwork collaborator Maddie Fussell, who visited many house floats, suggested a three-tier classification system. Bottom-tier house floats were decorated with tinsel, lights and swagging in carnival colours (purple, gold and green) and dollar-store decorations (masks, beads) in the fashion that some New Orleanians decorate their houses every carnival season. In that sense, they did not have a theme besides ‘carnival time’. Top-tier floats were the most elaborate, made by professionals. Wealthier people rented props from float-building companies or hired float designers or artists to make their house floats. However, not all professional house floats were constructed at the homes of the rich: first, because artists themselves put a lot of effort into their own house floats or helped their friends for free, and second, because of a Covid-19 relief initiative called Hire a Mardi Gras Artist (HAMGA), founded by float designer Caroline Thomas and Devin DeWulf, captain of the Krewe of Red Beans, which undertook several aid initiatives during the pandemic (Radice 2021). HAMGA raised money to employ workers in the float-building industry during what would otherwise have been a jobless season. They invited people to donate to a fund and each time it reached $15,000, they drew one name out of all the donors whose house was then decorated to professional float design standards (Figure 15.1). This creative response to precarious labour raised $330,000, employed thirty-two Mardi Gras artists, and produced twenty-three house floats (https://www.kreweofredbeans.org/projects-2). It also raised the profile of professional carnival artists and the studios that employed them; people then sought them out to make things or teach them how to make things for their house floats. The middle-tier floats were those apparently constructed by amateurs—probably by the residents themselves. They often made creative use of common materials, twisting pool noodles into spirals to make fat, flat lollipops, for instance. These types of house floats are the most interesting to me because, like the new-wave krewes I study, they are homemade and emerge through the creativity and experimentation of the people who are closest to them.

The photo is taken from one end of a porch, looking along the front of a house on Toledano Street, New Orleans. Four people wearing paint-splattered clothes and face coverings are standing on or in front of the porch, facing the in-progress house float. Float designer and cofounder of the Hire A Mardi Gras Artist initiative Caroline Thomas is among them, with her right arm outstretched. A large paper-mâché skull in relief, painted in yellow and purple, hangs on the front of the house. A small sign waiting to be hung reads ‘House #1, The Night Tripper’, the name of an album by late New Orleans musician Dr John. A mural of Dr John is painted on a house across the street in the background.

Figure 15.1 The first house float by the Hire a Mardi Gras Artist initiative, ‘The Night Tripper’, a tribute to the late New Orleans musician Dr John, is installed on Toledano Street, New Orleans, December 2020 (centre, with right arm outstretched, is Caroline Thomas, cofounder of HAMGA)

Photo by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

The Krewe of House Floats was organizationally structured in a similar way to regular carnival parading krewes. Every krewe typically chooses a theme for its annual parade, with each float representing a different take on the theme. Similarly, each neighbourhood sub-krewe of the Krewe of House Floats—which emerged via Facebook—chose its own theme to inspire their members, though no one was obliged to stick with their neighbourhood’s theme. The Irish Channel neighbourhood chose ‘Channel Surfing’, so there were plays on TV shows, including a nod to Gilligan’s Island and an interactive version of the TV game show Jeopardy, whose host, Alex Trebek, had died in 2020. The sub-krewe of St Roch chose ‘St Roch and Roll’, spawning floats like ‘Do you Remember Roch and Roll Radio?’ which commemorated boom-boxes and local music venues that had closed during the pandemic. Riffing on the popular song recorded by Marvin Gaye in 1964 and James Taylor in 1975, the Bayou Saint John and Fairgrounds sub-krewe chose ‘How Sweet It Is to Be Loved Bayou’, and many of their house floats featured alligators (Hart 2021).

These sub-krewe and float themes demonstrate some of the word play that is part of carnival. However, the play of satire was strikingly absent. One exception was a house float by a persistent water mains leak, entitled ‘Underwater World of Annunciation St’. It lampooned the New Orleans Sewage and Water Board, often satirized in carnival for its notorious mismanagement: boil water advisories, leaks, blockages, flooding and overcharging. Political satire featured in a few house floats that commented on national politics, with Bernie Sanders in his mittens or Trump in a dumpster fire. Krewe du Vieux kept up its ribald satirical style in its art installations, under the overall theme ‘Krewe du Vieux has no taste’. The Krewe of C.R.U.D.E., for example, created an anatomically explicit ‘covidgina’ accompanied by a poem about the complications of having casual sex during the pandemic. But among the house floats, there were surprisingly few direct satirical references to Covid-19. The oblique ones generally referred to the shared experience of lockdown rather than the virus or public health responses to it. For instance, ‘Snacking in Place’ (Figure 15.2) pokes fun at the comfort eating people indulged in as they stayed home. In Algiers Point, where the neighbourhood theme was ‘Staycation’, some house floats played with ideas of escape and boredom (‘Covid Island Castaway’, ‘“Bored” Games: Covidland’). The lack of satire can be partly explained by the temporal and spatial structure of the Krewe of House Floats. A carnival parade is mobile and passes in a matter of hours. Krewe members are masked and cannot be personally identified or singled out for any outrageous behaviour. Houses, though, stay in place, and they are occupied by identifiable people. To plaster your private home publicly with satire might be impolitic, especially at a time of both heightened political polarization and local pressure to pull together as a community.

Rather than satire, house float builders embraced sincerity and nostalgia, in the form of the tribute. Many people chose to depict a feature of carnival that they loved. Particular krewes—Endymion, Iris, Muses, and Chewbacchus, among others—were honoured, as were general features of carnival, like Mardi Gras beads and throws, the thrones on which krewe royalty sit, and even parade spectators. Jen Pagan’s float, ‘If Ever I Cease to Masque’, honoured defunct women’s carnival krewes, like the Krewe of Venus, which was pelted with rotten vegetables when it was the first female krewe to parade in 1941. Other house floats depicted something their creators loved about New Orleans or Louisiana as a whole. There were many tributes to New Orleans jazz and funk music and musicians, and to local food such as the crawfish boil. An ‘Ode to the Oyster’ emphasized how crucial this humble bivalve is to the ecosystem of the Gulf Coast. A house on Fortin Street, right by the Fairgrounds where the fifty-year-old New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is held every April and May, was transformed into ‘Forever Festin’’ (Figure 15.3). The Festival, which had been postponed, then cancelled in 2020, and would be cancelled again in 2021, has an iconic visual culture, made up of the map of the stages, signs for the food and drink booths, the ‘cubes’ or music schedule, and the logo, so this house float was instantly recognizable. It even featured Jazz Fest producer Quint Davis driving a tractor (because mainstream carnival parade floats are pulled by tractors). Several house floats made references to pop culture beyond New Orleans, including two takes on the TV series Schitt’s Creek which, as one creator wrote for photographer Young, ‘brings joy to so many and has helped so many of us find a smile and laugh during a challenging year’.

A two-storey white house with blue trim, a big porch, and a balcony, on Fern Street, New Orleans, is decorated with big colourful models and pictures of foods, including a taco, a slice of pizza, a bag of popcorn, an icecream cone, french fries, and lollipops. The lollipops are made from foam tubing wrapped with vinyl tape. On the white picket fence in front of the house hangs a string of colored lights with soda cans attached. A banner at the top of the porch reads ‘SNACKING IN PLACE’. The photo is taken on an overcast but bright day.

Figure 15.2 ‘Snacking in Place’, Fern Street, New Orleans, February 2021

Photo by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

A one-storey house on Fortin Street, New Orleans, is decorated with many signs that borrow from the iconography of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, including piano keyboards, a map of the Festival site, names of the stages (‘Acura Stage’, ‘Gentilly Stage’) and classic festival food (‘Crawfish Monica’, ‘Mango Freeze’). A cut-out of a man driving a tractor attached to a tree in front right of the house represents Quint Davis, the producer of the Festival. He holds a sign with the title of the house float, ‘Forever Festin’’. The high fence behind the house is the fence around the Fair Grounds Race Course, where the Festival is held. The photo is taken on a sunny day and the sky is bright blue, which contrasts well with the yellow and red in many of the signs.

Figure 15.3 ‘Forever Festin’’, Fortin Street, New Orleans, February 2021

Photo by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Tributes to New Orleanian and Louisianan culture and, to a lesser degree, broader popular culture feature in regular carnival. What does not, but did among house floats, are personal themes. A regular carnival float is by nature not personal: it is made by a collective, as part of a collective performance, and is embedded in the ethos and history of a certain microculture. In contrast, house floats could just represent something that just the household loved. One family honoured their pets, past and present. Another, ‘Born on the Bayou’, celebrated ‘the birth of the homeowners’ son nine months after the 2020 Bacchus parade’ (Hart 2021). One creator wrote on Young’s website that she realized the way to get her husband to help build their house float was to make it a fishing boat because he is passionate about sport fishing. The personal themes of some house floats reflect the relocation of carnival from public space and public sociability to domestic space and intimate social networks.

This brings us to the sociality of the house floats. Who made them, and what social ties did they mobilize in the making? These were not questions that Young asked, so there are few creators named on his website. Most of the texts are written by an unspecified ‘we’, which seems to refer to the household, often a family, perhaps housemates. Some people mention neighbours or friends or relatives who may not live with them. Others credit artists, though it is impossible to tell whether they were working voluntarily or for pay. This is consonant with the culture of discretion around money and employment in New Orleans, where it is a point of pride that conversations at parties rarely revolve around jobs and people can be friends for decades before they learn what each does for a living. That said, compared to mainstream carnival floats, which are built by professional design studios, and new-wave carnival floats, which are usually built by sub-krewes in rented warehouse spaces, the scale of production of house floats did shift to the domestic unit—a new cottage industry.

Many house floats seem to have been built, or at least directed, by women. Almost all the posts in the Facebook groups were made by people apparently gendered female, and most of the Krewe of House Floats officers’ and sub-krewe captains’ names were similarly gendered female. While this might be related to their domestic scale, it more likely reflects something that has been rising to carnival consciousness since the turn of the twenty-first century—that ‘ladies make parades’, as one new-wave carnival captain, Ann Marie Coviello, likes to put it. Not only have massive mainstream all-women krewes like the Krewe of Muses risen to outshine men’s parading krewes along the uptown parade route, but women are the driving forces behind many, if not most, of the new-wave krewes or sub-krewes—though the gendered division of labour in mixed krewes often remains unacknowledged. As is typical of heteronormative households, so it was with house floats: even if men did some practical work, women seemed to undertake most of the project management and logistics, including communications—posting on Facebook, talking to journalists, responding to Stephen Young’s questions.

It also seems that most participants in the Krewe of House Floats were white, like most carnival krewes in non-pandemic times. As mentioned earlier, African American New Orleanians have their own carnival traditions but they were historically excluded from formal carnival float parades except as torchbearers, mule or tractor drivers, or streetcleaners (Gill 1997). There are some important Black krewes, like Zulu and NOMTOC, and some quite mixed krewes among the float parades. Black women have recently founded a new sub-krewe in the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus, Women of Wakanda. However, beside such notable exceptions, most mainstream and new-wave carnival krewes remain majority white. Now, unlike regular carnival krewes, the ‘members’ of house floats were not often visible in documentation. This means it is hard to tell who made or commissioned what, particularly among the middle-tier, handmade floats. But of the house float creators on Young’s site who supplied photos of themselves, nearly all were white.

Moreover, at least in the documentation I have analyzed where authorship is discernible, Black creators in particular set their house floats up as sites to pay homage. Four of the five Black participants in Young’s website (as ascertained from the creator-supplied photos) had made floats that were explicit celebrations of African American contributions to New Orleans culture—famous African American women or Black jazz musicians, for instance—rather than, say, jokey or personal themes. Similarly, city council member Jay H. Banks commissioned a professionally made house float as a homage to his beloved Krewe of Zulu, over which he had reigned as King in 2016. This reflects the point made by Black scholars Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer that Black cultural artifacts are ‘burdened with an inordinate pressure to be “representative”, and to act, as a delegate does, as a statement that “speaks” for the black communities as a whole’ (Julien and Mercer 1996 [1988]: 455). While some white folks’ floats paid similar homage, the sincerity of these house floats, which firmly asserted the importance of African American culture, contrasted with the overall whimsicality of the phenomenon.

As creators figured out how to make their house floats, they mobilized their social networks in similar ways to new-wave carnival participants. They turned to the Facebook groups to exchange advice on techniques and materials. Experienced carnival artists held workshops on how to work in papier-mâché or how to make the beautiful painted cardstock flowers that are an iconic carnival float decoration. People learned from each other and from YouTube, often by trial and error as they went along, in correspondence with their materials. The two neighbours who made ‘Forever Festin’’ experimented with posterboard, glue and wire to make their float elements, and used yacht varnish to protect them from the rain. Jen Pagan re-purposed election signs to make giant doubloons for ‘If Ever I Cease to Masque’. Thom Karamus, who had made a shoebox float as a guest artist for ’tit Rəx in 2019, jumped scales to turn his house into a float in 2021. Although he had never worked in papier-mâché before, he decided to use it for his float. When I interviewed him about it, he told me he said to himself, ‘“How hard can it be?” And I looked at a YouTube video, I’m like, “Oh, little kids do it”. Yeah, well, it’s easy if you’re doing something eight inches big’. Thom’s piece, though, was a caterpillar’s head to hang on the front of his house that was six feet high, four feet wide, and eighteen inches deep. It used nine rolls of paper towels, seven pounds of flour, half a gallon of glue, one and a half pounds of glitter, ‘and a LOT of coffee’, as he wrote on Instagram (@thomofnola).

Thom’s house float was part of a remarkable group project: five households on his block made house floats on the theme of Alice in Wonderland: the Cheshire Cat, the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, a Wonderland featuring the White Rabbit and Thom’s Blue Caterpillar with the hookah (Figure 15.4). The joint effort emerged from a newfound neighbourly sociability. Before the pandemic, Thom told me, he knew his neighbours ‘in kind of a regular know-your-neighbours kind of way, where you wave and say hi, and you look after each other if a storm comes, you check on your neighbour, make sure they have water’. But early in the pandemic, when most people were working from home, if at all, and bars were closed, they decided to socially distance together:

We ended up having a root beer float party in someone’s driveway. And I guess it was May or June, it was pretty hot, and we all decided we kind of liked each other, and we laughed and got along. And then, ‘Okay, let’s do this again’. And we’d have a pizza party, and we would play some kind of game, and it just kind of grew from there.

In mid-December, the first Hire a Mardi Gras Artist house float, ‘The Night Tripper’, a homage to New Orleans musician Dr John, went up near Thom’s house (Figure 15.4), and the neighbours decided to make their own house floats. The theme of Alice in Wonderland, Thom said, ‘plays very well into Mardi Gras, the whole little bottle, “Drink me”, and the cake, “Eat me”, and some of the more trippy, dreamlike imagery. And just the idea of Alice having this adventure and experiencing things she had never experienced before. I think it’s very Mardi Gras’. Because ‘The Night Tripper’ was heavily publicized, Thom’s street got a lot of visitors and he enjoyed watching them realize that the other nearby house floats shared a theme. He and his neighbours even decided to celebrate Mardi Gras day together with a ‘Mad Hatter’s Tea Party’:

We all dressed up and we had little foods based on ideas from Alice in Wonderland, and we made a pot of tea. And we had a really great time. Just thinking about it now, I’m smiling. It’s definitely going to go down as one of my absolute favourite Mardi Gras. And there were no super krewes, there were no parades going down St Charles, there were no masquerade balls. The city was very, very quiet. And yet we celebrated in the most wonderful way. We did not feel lacking for anything.

The pandemic and the house floats project brought Thom and his neighbours together as a community—‘now we’re very comfortable and we spend time in each other’s homes and drive each other to the airport and go grocery shopping together and celebrate birthdays’. While their closeness might be exceptional, their joint project illustrates well the spatial shift that the house floats represent.

Thom Karamus, a middle-aged bearded white man with long hair, leans on a classic car outside his one-storey house on Dryades Street, New Orleans, which is decorated as the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. A large paper-mâché relief of the Caterpillar’s face is hanging on the short end of the house, along with a hookah that the Caterpillar is smoking and several spotted mushrooms. Caterpillar legs dangle off the porch roof on the long side of the house. A speech bubble sign saying ‘Who are you?’ also hangs on the house. The photo is taken at night and the porch is lit with green, yellow, and purple lights (Mardi Gras colours).

Figure 15.4 Thom Karamus in front of his house float, Dryades Street, New Orleans, February 2021

Photo by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Indeed, the most obvious way that the house floats differ from regular carnival is spatial, turning Mardi Gras into ‘Yardi Gras’, as people soon called it. Symbolically, I think they echoed the ‘open house’ party invitations that many New Orleanians extend to friends, friends of friends and almost-total-strangers during carnival season, when private homes—especially those near parade routes—become more public than usual. In 2021, the party invitations were not to enter particular homes but to visit homes in general—at a safe distance. This, of course, was their whole reason for being. The house floats were designed to disperse rather than concentrate human bodies and their viruses. The Krewe of House Floats’ statement of participation, which people had to agree with to join officially, emphasized compliance with Covid-19 regulations. It stated, ‘All Krewe activities will be carried out in such a way as to avoid attracting crowds’. Dotted as they were throughout the city, the house floats reversed the centralization that has been one of the dominant trends of carnival in the last two decades, whereby nearly all mainstream float parades in the Parish of New Orleans roll along the uptown, St Charles Avenue route. The Krewe of Mid-City, for example, no longer rolls in the neighbourhood called Mid-City where it started out. The pressure to centralize comes from the municipal government which is keen to have a single route to police and clean up. Yet New Orleanians speak with nostalgia of old neighbourhood-based carnival celebrations, and they saw the house floats as a way to regain that atmosphere.

Because of this relocation to neighbourhoods, I expected to find traces of tensions between neighbours on the house float social media discussions but there were none. Anxieties surfaced occasionally about unmasked crowds forming outside the most popular houses but that was a tension between residents and sightseers, not neighbours and neighbours. There were, of course, people with whom the idea just did not resonate. Some were put off by the intense debates around ‘rules’ that sprang up in the house float Facebook groups as people established parameters for this novel practice. Others thought the dispersion of house floats diluted the fun: an isolated house float was hardly equivalent to the critical mass of a big parade. A few people grumbled about house floats staying up too long after Ash Wednesday. For others, 2021 represented a chance to take a year off from making things for carnival. Still other people would have liked to participate but lacked the necessary time, money or materials, or were not allowed to modify their house. I noted one case on Facebook where a woman had started making a house float only to have her landlord rescind his initial agreement. Fortunately, she found someone else to take the decorations she had begun to make.

Overall, New Orleanians regarded house floats as a blessing rather than a nuisance. At first, poet Brett Evans feared the house floats were going to be ‘sadmirable’—a term he coined for the efforts made during the pandemic to lift people’s spirits that fell flat, like drive-by graduation congratulations—but when he saw ‘the level of gusto people were doing it with’, he realized the house float phenomenon could be a ‘bonus, not a consolation’. According to Brett, carnival gives New Orleanians an irrepressible impulse to ‘more-it’, to be extra creative and flamboyant. House floats were clearly an expression of this impulse.

Lastly, house floats were the product of a unique temporal conjuncture. Thom Karamus’ commitment to the serious play of papier-mâché was only possible because his regular work, in film production, had been put on hold due to the pandemic, as had his usual conduits for carnival creativity—helping friends make throws or floats and, in some years, parading with ’tit Rəx. The success of house floats was specifically bound up with the circumstances of the pandemic in early 2021, which left many people with more time on their hands than usual. This was made plain in 2022 when the easing of Covid-19 regulations meant the regular activities of carnival could resume. Although the Krewe of House Floats relaunched, far fewer people participated, because everyone was caught up in the familiar hectic rhythms of making mobile carnival parades and costumes alongside their jobs and other commitments. Some house floats of 2021 were re-used in 2022, a practice that is rare in regular carnival where people generally do not use the same costume two years in a row and floats are redesigned and repainted every single year. The re-use of house floats reinforces the sense that they were made during an unusual time. When the ban on parades was lifted for carnival season 2022, New Orleanian carnival-makers were happy to put their energies back into their usual celebrations.

Conclusion

House floats were an unanticipated and hugely successful response to the pandemic-related restrictions placed on carnival in New Orleans in 2021. They resembled regular carnival krewes in their material variety and the ways people improvised and made the floats, in some of their themes, and in the gender and race of most of their makers. They departed from familiar carnival in their lack of satire, their mobilization of households and micro-local social networks, and their spatial shift to neighbourhoods. Thematically, the house floats often represented things people loved, in their city and their lives, and things they felt nostalgic for during the pandemic. Yardi Gras was an exceptional iteration of the annual ritual calendar, emerging from an exceptional time.

The very creativity and playfulness of carnival was what made Yardi Gras possible. The idea of house floats emerged from a joke, a play on the image of a carnival float that made it domestic and hygienic. The themes of house floats showed that people played with words and ideas as they usually do in carnival, even if there was not as much satire as usual. Making the house floats gave people an opportunity to play with materials. The plays of performance and pleasure, in contrast, were far less possible in Yardi Gras than in Mardi Gras. Performance needs an audience, and while house floats could physically resemble stages, they were not supposed to invite crowds. Besides, it was the houses, not their residents, that were in costume, playing different roles from usual. Similarly, the sensory intensity of carnival was thoroughly diluted in Yardi Gras. The house floats offered a visual spectacle, and some even gave musical ones in the form of porch concerts, but these had to be kept small. Although New Orleanians could pursue their own pleasures in small groups as they enjoyed the house floats, the excitement of moving in sync with a parade, interacting with strangers in a crowd, or thronging the streets in costume was impossible to reproduce.

That said, the house floats phenomenon was still playfully social. A contagious idea for the pandemic times, it captured New Orleanians’ imaginations, allowing them to collectively and creatively declare their love for the city and its culture and to assert that flattening the curve did not have to completely flatten carnival. Playful improvisation and contingency are built into the social structure and creative practices of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. New Orleanians re-make carnival every year, in dialogue with materials, traditions, current events, and each other. It is precisely this resourcefulness and collective creativity that enabled the playful reconfiguration of carnival during Covid-19.

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1 I would like to thank Maddie Fussell, Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee, Rachel Lyons, Alastair Parsons, Helen Regis, and Stephen Young for assisting me with this study of house floats. I am grateful to everyone who has taught me about carnival, especially, for this piece, Rob Cambre, Karen Eberle, Brett Evans, Thom Karamus, Jen Pagan and the contributors to Stephen Young’s website. I presented drafts of this paper in 2021 to the annual conference of the Canadian Anthropology Society and the joint conference on Creativity and Covid-19 of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Folklore Society. Alastair Parsons’ research assistance was funded by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Dalhousie University. My research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Archive. Many of the interviews I have conducted on carnival will form a public archive at the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History at Louisiana State University Libraries.

2 This study has undergone initial and annual review by Dalhousie University’s Research Ethics Board.

15. Happy Yardi Gras!Playing with Carnival in New Orleans during the Covid-19 Pandemic1

Introduction

Play in Carnival

Covid-19 in New Orleans

Playing with Carnival: House Floats on Parade

Conclusion

Works Cited

15. Happy Yardi Gras!Playing with Carnival in New Orleans during the Covid-19 Pandemic 1