Atlas Obscura • 31st March 2024

Why April Fools Day in France Involves Fish Pranks

If you find yourself in France on April 1, don’t be surprised if something seems fishy. Maybe someone gives you a chocolate or a pastry in the shape of a cod? Perhaps you find a paper haddock stuck to your back, and then everyone erupts into laughter and starts pointing and shouting “poisson d’avril”? Don’t be alarmed, you’ve simply immersed yourself in the centuries-long French tradition of April Fool’s Day, known as poisson d’avril or “April Fish.”

Atlas Obscura • 6th December 2023

How a Midnight Feast Became a Month-Long Dining Extravaganza in New Orleans

As a city known for its festivals and food, it’s no wonder New Orleans has a special gustatory way of celebrating the Christmas holidays. Although modern festivities no longer require celebrants to stay up all night, revelers can still indulge in the nearly 200 year old feast of Réveillon every December, as the Catholic French Creole inhabitants of the city did before them.

Atlas Obscura • 28th November 2023

9 Places To Find Wonder And Whimsy In New Orleans

While beignets and Bourbon Street are quintessential parts of the New Orleans experience, savvy travelers can discover so much more. For instance, the beautiful balconies adorning the Spanish-style buildings in the French Quarter? Some tell the tale of skilled iron workers from West Africa who integrated their indigenous ideologies into the iron work using symbols.

Atlas Obscura • 6th November 2023

A Music Lover’s Guide to New Orleans

Perched at the mouth of the Mississippi River, New Orleans has been a crossroads of cultures since its first indigenous inhabitants. Just over a century ago, the interplay of West African, European, and Caribbean influences in the Crescent City forged the signature sound of American jazz.

Out All Day: New Orleans • 30th August 2023

A review of the Irish Channel Bar Crawl

Strolling up to Parasol’s on an auspiciously autumn-like August evening, I’ll admit I was already inclined to enjoy the Irish Channel Pub Crawl hosted by New Orleans Crawling. I’ve been on my fair share of New Orleans history tours over the years, and this boozy spin on the classic French Quarter walkabout promised to enthrall our group with stories of battles, music, and pirates.

Eater New Orleans • 10th May 2023

Sam Caruso Is Forging a New Path With French-Style Custard in New Orleans

Salvatore “Sam” Caruso started making ice cream at home in 2018 with a two-quart Cuisinart machine, but he could never get the texture right. Despite his best efforts, it was always too icy, not smooth enough for his taste. Then, as the world shut down in March 2020, Caruso found himself with ample free time after being let go from his job. He used a serendipitous tax return check to buy a higher-quality ice cream machine for $1,300 and started experimenting.

WomenArts • 14th February 2019

Revolutionary Love: Elizabeth Vega & the Tornillo Occupation

Elizabeth Vega is an “artivist” – an artist and activist who understands that art is its own form of powerful resistance. She has dedicated her life to harnessing that power and teaching others how to do the same. Based in St. Louis, Missouri, she works constantly on projects that combine art and activism...

The Theatre Times • 19th May 2015

Where Are Women's Voices in Translation?

This past Saturday I attended a conversation at the Albertine Bookstore on the Upper East Side, organized as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. The panel was moderated by...

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 19th December 2023

New Orleans’s Intramural Theater Centers Consent in Their Devising Model

Within the swirling sea of weird experiments in making that is New Orleans theatre, Intramural Theater, founded in 2015, has managed to stake out its own particular brand of weird. While Intramural produces traditional plays and hosts community events, such as a twenty-five hour play festival, their signature work is reflected in their devised shows, which are collectively created according to a specific devising method developed by the company’s founding artistic director, Bennett Kirschner.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 11th December 2023

On Translating Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse’s Works for American Audiences

Sarah Cameron Sunde is an interdisciplinary artist and director working at the intersection of performance, video, and public art. Her current practice, rooted in the visual arts, explores deep time, embodiment, and ecological crisis, and it is informed by her decades of experience as a theatremaker, director, and translator. Amelia Parenteau is a writer, translator, and theatremaker who has translated fifteen plays from French into English.

Out All Day: New Orleans • 16th August 2023

Star Crossed: A Midsummer Nightmare

In a New Orleans summer rife with Shakespeare, Fat Squirrel serves up a manic retelling of the canon with 'Star Crossed: A Midsummer Nightmare'. Combining text, themes, and characters from over 17 of Shakespeare’s plays, Andrea Watson conceived and directed this original production with an ensemble cast of 18 performers.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 24th July 2023

On Producing an International Tour During a Global Pandemic

I met Eva Doumbia in New Orleans, Louisiana in March 2019 (as documented in my essay “New to New Orleans”), and over a glass of wine, she shared plans for her upcoming creation, , which would tell the story of various foods’ interconnected histories of dominance and oppression spanning back to colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

Out All Day: New Orleans • 20th June 2023

VANYA and SONIA and MASHA and SPIKE by Christopher Durang

Rounding out its first season, new-to-the-scene Crescent City Stage presents Vanya & Sonia & Masha and Spike by Christopher Durang, a belly-laugh comedy that centers on the narcissistic despair of its three titular siblings: Vanya (Doug Spearman), Sonia (Jana Mestecky), and Masha (Lorene Chesley).

Out All Day: New Orleans • 14th June 2023

OCEAN FILIBUSTER @ THE CAC

Originally commissioned in 2016 by the American Repertory Theater in partnership with the Harvard University Center for the Environment, Ocean Filibuster attempts the impossible: letting the vast, unknowable Ocean speak for itself.

Out All Day: New Orleans • 14th June 2023

REVIEW: TWELFTH NIGHT @ TULANE

While the word play and “sword” play and poor Malvolio in his yellow stockings, cross-gartered, still hold their charm some 420 years after was written, Viola’s cross-dressing for survival made me yearn for an unabashedly queer telling of this story.

Out All Day: New Orleans • 30th May 2023

Review of A Midsummer Nights Dream by The NOLA Project

The NOLA Project’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Brittany N. Williams, is a romp, and this tight 2-hour production flies in the face of anyone who alleges The Bard’s works are boring.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 27th April 2023

Black Southern Playwrights Take Center Stage

The interruption of the COVID-19 pandemic gave way to a time of reckoning for theatre and theatremakers. As we collectively emerge from the pandemic’s crucible, let me present a beacon of hope for what theatre in the United States can be, at its best: “adaptable, emergent, sustainable, and well.” I am quoting Lauren E. Turner (she/her), the founder and producing artistic director of New Orleans-based theatre company No Dream Deferred and the We Will Dream: New Works Festival.

BOMB Magazine • 21st February 2023

Eva Doumbia and Chef Alexandre Bella Ola Interviewed

I first met Eva Doumbia while she was on a research trip to New Orleans. I was enthralled by her explanation of the show she was creating which used elements of documentary theater and religious ceremony to address food history, its connections to the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. I was honored when she asked me to translate the show from French into English and produce its United States tour.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 21st June 2022

HowlRound Anthology: Essays and Conversations from the First Ten Years

As HowlRound approached its ten-year anniversary in 2021, those of us who steward the platform began thinking about appropriate ways to celebrate a decade of publishing essays, livestreaming events, and bringing theatre practitioners together to amplify progressive and disruptive ideas. How could we offer gratitude within our commons-based frame while reflecting on the immense contributions of so many?

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 13th June 2022

From Awareness to Action: Facilitating Change in the American Theatre

Amelia: We’ve seen radical transformation! That keeps me going. To break it down for people who might not be familiar with our terminology, we are doing anti-racist work, which is assuming a context of white body supremacy culture, yet it’s not just about race. The collective liberation we are steering organizations towards is not about “diversity and inclusion” and filling a quota of how many global majority people you’ve hired at your organization.

AMERICAN THEATRE • 10th March 2022

The Shows That Got Away and/or Found a Way

One of the most important jobs of theatre journalism—some would say its central, even only, job—is to bear witness to and commemorate a fundamentally ephemeral medium in words and pictures. That’s plenty true in normal times, but this documentary mission has become especially urgent in a time of deep uncertainty and constant reshuffling due to an airborne virus, which has disproportionally encroached on art forms and social practices that rely on appointment gathering and shared (indoor) space.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 8th March 2022

Clowning for a Cause: Healthcare Clowns Offer Opportunities for Holistic Healing

Although the mark of countless successful theatrical performers is their passion, it takes a special combination of versatility and compassion to transition theatre skills into a healthcare setting. Tiffany Riley does precisely this work as a healthcare clown and a founder of the Laughter League and North American Federation of Healthcare Clown Organizations (NAFHCO).

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 5th January 2021

Seuls en Scène Festival 2020 / Festival Seuls en Scène 2020

Masse wasn’t interested in simply asking artists for video recordings of the works he had intended to present this year and instead came up with a programmatic mix of video recordings of live performance, “staged” readings, one making-of documentary, and a series of docutheatre works.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 24th November 2020

Hold on Tightly, Let Go Lightly

Pursuing a life in theatre or medicine requires such dedication that it can be hard to imagine a career transition, and yet, as this year has viscerally reminded us, the only constant in life is change. Although the path between theatre and medicine may not be evident at first glance, the specific skill set that both professions require makes the transition more seamless than one might imagine.

Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States • 9th October 2020

Interview with Charlotte Boimare & Magali Solignat

Conversation with the two authors Charlotte Boimare and Magali Solignat, co-writers of the play, "The Day My Father Killed Me." The conversation (condensed and edited) has been conducted by translator and theater maker Amelia Parenteau on September 17, 2020, as part of the virtual staged reading of their play on October 22 by Voyage Theater Company.

AMERICAN THEATRE • 18th February 2020

Into the Woods

The turning point was Katrina, as is so often the case when you’re asking questions in New Orleans, trying to get to the heart of the matter. A Studio in the Woods is located on a plot of land purchased by Lucianne and Joe Carmichael in 1969, comprising 7.66 acres of endangered forest in the Louisiana wetlands.

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 13th January 2020

"French and yet never French enough" / « Français, mais jamais assez français »

Any translator worth their salt can tell you the real work of translation is not the literal (painstaking!) rendering of one language into another, but instead the necessary accompanying cultural translation that carries the meaning of the work.

NOBO Commons • 23rd November 2019

The Fortress of Lushington

Amelia Parenteau interviews Bunny Lushington of the Fortress of Lushington, bringing us the second article in a series on theatre and dance venues in New Orleans.