The Marigny Parade
performance and DVD, 2011-2012
The Marigny Parade is a twenty-minute performance that was presented, once and only once, in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 22nd, 2011. The performance consisted of a multi-pronged parade of 350 middle- and high-school marching band musicians from New Orleans. They paraded from five directions, synchronized by radio click-track, towards Washington Square, a park in the Marigny Triangle, performing a composition consisting of simple, interlocking loops. The audience could follow each band as a second line or await their arrival in the park. The bands entered the park one by one, building the music in the park towards a finale. A 50- person video and sound recording crew documented the performance, resulting in a DVD released by Cantaloupe Music. The DVD consists of five different remixes of the performance documentation, ranging from a documentary-style cut of the performance from the point of view of one band to an ambient remix of all the footage. 5000 copies of the DVD were released, in order to raise up to $100,000 to benefit the Roots of Music, a New Orleans-based after-school program that teaches marching band musicianship to at- risk middle-school students city-wide.
Throughout the project I served as composer, director, and video editor. This piece was commissioned by Dan Cameron, curator of PROSPECT New Orleans, as the opening ceremonies for this year’s biennial. The New Orleans Video Access Center (NOVAC), working alongside my New York-based production team, produced the project. The work was funded with a generous grant from the Annenberg Foundation through the Metabolic Studio.
