A symposium celebrates the creative work of women and “unpacks” how Cajun and Creole culture have traditionally approached gender.
Music
You’re gonna break 5,000 eggs: The Current Calendar 10/31 – 11/6
For Abbeville’s Giant Omelette Celebration, 5,034 eggs will be cracked. That’s 4,984 more than Paul Newman ate in Cool Hand Luke.
Current Calendar 10/10-10/16
Festivals Acadiens et Creoles is a great place to eat. Victoria’s Secret spokesman Bob Dylan plays the Heymann Center.
Current Calendar 10/3-10/9
Cosplay and cult classics at Louisiana Comic Con, ASO’s symphony in the sky, Brew Paddle’s fall weather teaser.
Current Calendar 9/26 – 10/2
This week: Fleetwood Mac Revisited gets revisited at DTA. Ulysses Owens takes his jazz odyssey to AcA. Documentary Date Night is ready for nerdy romance. The Acadiana Food Hub hosts a Farm to Table Showcase.
Current Calendar 9/19-9/25
This week around Acadiana: Folksy blues at the Heymann Center, parking spaces come alive, Keith Frank does DTA, raising money for Cite des Arts, and an experiment in networked music making.
Arts Beat: 9/5 – 9/11
All the cool stuff you can do in one Lafayette week.
‘Rift’ in the scene
No matter the stats, the hustle, or the popularity, Forming the Void has built around its five-year-run, the hometown shows don’t pull the same response the band finds around the rest of the globe.
Special session — Joel Savoy talks new release with Kelli Jones, ‘Toi, Tu Joues à L’amour’
Joel Savoy and Kelli Jones have played music onstage and on records together for more than a decade. Until last summer, however, the duo had never made time to record their own project.
And just like that, the moratorium lifts: Artmosphere is now a bar
▸ The gist: It’s been a long and strange journey, but Artmosphere’s regulatory limbo is now over. The council voted to allow the popular Downtown venue to operate as a bar rather than a restaurant.
▸ Some background: Artmosphere, in a sense, is the poster child for Downtown’s tribulations associated with a 15-year-old moratorium on new bars in the district. The venue has operated for years on a restaurant’s liquor license, running afoul of regulations that require a restaurant’s food to make up more than 50 percent of its sales. Recently, Downtown officials and advocates have lobbied for an end to the moratorium, which they say created a monopoly for existing bars and grossly distorted the real estate market.
▸ “Have we now lifted the moratorium on bars Downtown?” Councilman William Theriot asked Mayor Joel Robideaux from across the council’s crescent desk. “Certainly, I would say the moratorium was lifted at a previous council meeting,” the mayor replied, indicating the official end of the practice was the creation of the conditional use permit itself.
▸ Can you spell C-U-P? In his interrogative with the mayor, Theriot referred to the new permit class as a “cup,” as in something you drink out of. Opening a new bar Downtown? Now you need to go to the city and get a cup.
▸ What to watch for: Yes, this is the visible end of the moratorium, but it’s hardly an opening of the flood gates. Artmosphere’s case continues to illustrate the effort required to crack the still-standing limitations on new bar licenses Downtown. Councilman Pat Lewis, who in May voted against putting the permit up for a final vote, amended the permit to stipulate that, among other things, Artmosphere must serve food when operating and must operate five days a week.
“I congratulate her for being persistent. She was very persistent,” Lewis said at the meeting. “You can ask the owner. I made it very difficult for her. It’s not just a rubber stamp.”
Will this Downtown venue fill the rock and roll gap? A new club takes a stab at restoring Lafayette's lost tour stop glory.
The Pearl, a planned venue affiliated with New Orleans music house One Eyed Jacks, will open Downtown this spring, the third stage announced or opened in the district in the last year.
Reader Talk: Y’all ready to go dancing?
The gist: Maybe. It depends when, where, if there’s a vaccine or if Lafayette gets its act together on wearing masks. We heard from 62 readers this week on our live music survey. The responses range (y’all got a lot of opinions), but for the most part what we’ve heard is things aren’t quite what they used to be.