Card 5.
The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is the largest outdoor festival in Australia attended by 650,000 people annually.
It is covered live every year on national television and begins with fireworks, at the site of Arthur Phillips' settlement of Sydney in 1788.
Show dedication of building by leather folk
Show clip of man discussing change, image of fireworks.
Luhrmann's film and the culture of the Sydney Mardi Gras are closely related; I have chosen clips from the 1995 parade, just as the planning for the film was underway, and I believe -- with apologies to those who consider source study the "elephant's graveyard" of literary interpretation -- that some of the floats and costumes provided specific inspiration or the visual design of the film.
Show twin clips of Mercutio as angel and marcher as angel.
Show kaleidoscopic review of individual marchers, show heart image
The Mardi Gras is also a model for the film's repurposing of Catholic imagery -- this marcher impersonates the Blessed Mother Mary McKillop, who worked for social justice and died in 1909. Her shrine is a world wide pilgrimage site. The range of styles associated with Christian imagery is wide -- here, for example, there is no burlesque or mockery, though later in the parade the Pope appears as an advocate of safe sex.
Show Mary McKillop float
Read against this context, the Capulet ball can seem a momentary triumph of alternative cultures and styles; a benign form of the merger of illusion and reality, as if the Mardi Gras, with its liberationist energies, had moved permanently from the margin to center.