| This is the time when the part of you that is music overcomes the part of you that is silence. This is when music rules the fools. It’s Mardi Gras in New Orleans, ladies and gentlemen, and the good times roll, and you might as well roll with them because there is only music to hold on to. —Andrei Codrescu |
There are few more boisterous times to dance and make merry than Mardi Gras. Also known as Carnival, its origins date to festivals in ancient Egypt or to Rome’s Saturnalia, with France possibly laying claim to the earliest fest with it’s Carnaval de Nice, harking to 1294. Celebrated in over 50 countries around the world, the tradition was introduced to America in 1699, with a celebration organized by a French settler near New Orleans, at a location dubbed the Point du Mardi Gras. Mobile, Alabama also lays claim to being the first, in 1703, with their tradition originally named Boeuf Gras, after the medieval European Druid festival of the fatted ox. Louisiana, however, is the only state to have designated Mardi Gras a legal holiday.
Carnival season begins, via Christian influences, on Twelfth Night (Epiphany) and runs through Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), ending with the advent of Lent on Ash Wednesday. Lent was traditionally a time to fast and forego eating meat, so Fat Tuesday, and the days leading up to it, was literally the time to feast on all the delicious fatty foods remaining in one’s larder prior to the grim fasting.
From the magnificently festooned Mardi Gras Indians (African American krewes named out of respect for Native American’s help in escaping slavery’s tyranny) and their dance battles in the New Orleans streets, to Rio’s spectacular Samba parades, these celebrations are unthinkable without music and dance, the social glue which binds us in joyful harmony. Dancers and musicians are subsumed in our most vital celebrations, as well as in our daily lives, and are essential to human connection and happiness.
Seek to connect and sow happiness by dancing today! Find numerous lovely events to attend online at the Dance Calendar.
See you on the dance floor —Sean Donovan