Mardi Gras is a New Orleans institution almost as old as the city itself. Although Carnival krewes, parades, and balls have had a shorter life span, they are part and parcel of the city's identity. If Mardi Gras has been the focus of many studies, the Carnival balls are an understudied aspect of the Mardi Gras season. Or at least we thought they were until Jennifer Atkins's book was published. While historians have generally focused on the street parades, considering the street as the main arena of social definitions, tensions, and interactions, Atkins contends that the more secretive and secluded krewe balls were where most of the social negotiations were conducted.

Atkins aptly demonstrates that the ballroom, where the krewes organized their ritualized celebrations after the street parades, was more than a place. “It was also a ritual, a performance ceremony where complex social choreographies inscribed status, power, and identity,” and where the codes of conduct were “distillations of socially constructed actions that translated cultural values into physical movements” (2). The krewe celebrations, where debutantes were presented to the elite and where women displayed the utmost splendors to reflect their husbands’ and fathers’ social position and economic power, were an essential element of the New Orleans social world.

Although the practice of the krewe balls and many of the characteristics Atkins mentions in her book have persisted to this day, she chooses to focus on the troubled period that followed Reconstruction. The choice of the boundaries is not accounted for in the introduction but, as the pages unfold, the reader understands the reasons for this choice. The early 1870s marked the beginning of the institutionalization of Carnival balls in the old-line krewes. After an interruption due to World War 1, the krewes slowly returned to a profoundly-changed Carnival scene. The burning of the French Opera House in 1919 was, to Atkins, critical in minimizing the importance of the French Quarter to krewe festivities. In the early 1900s, new krewes also appeared, deeply altering the etiquette that had prevailed until then, introducing new masking traditions and diminishing the seriousness of the celebrations. Gender, race, and class lines were also changed, disrupting the established codes. The new trends included the development of the Mardi Gras Indians, the advent of the Baby Dolls, the progressive institutionalization of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, the new involvement of middle classes in Mardi Gras celebrations, and the relaxing of the rules that maintained women in a subservient position in society and on the Carnival stage.

After an introductory chapter studying balls and Mardi Gras in New Orleans history and narrating the emergence of old-line krewe balls, Atkins studies, in Chapter Two, the year-long organization of the krewe celebrations demonstrating that, in New Orleans, it was definitely a means of “choreographing class” (30). The next three chapters are organized in an original way that Atkins very efficiently justifies. They follow both the chronology of the krewe celebrations (tableaux vivants, march, and ball) and the chronology of the period (Reconstruction, Gilded Age, and Progressive Era), each period corresponding to the expansion of one of the set moments of the celebrations. Chapter Three deals with Reconstruction, when the tableaux vivants that opened the celebrations started being organized, showing how they were used by male krewe members to assert their class domination and masculinity during the troubled times that followed the Civil War. Chapter Four delves on the second moment of the evening, the regal grand march and quadrilles that opened the balls, which developed during the Gilded Age, demonstrating that the focus on femininity and courtly traditions enabled the krewes to solidify the status quo of the gender balance at a time when the women's rights movement was being structured. Finally, Chapter Five focuses on the ball that often lasted through the night, showing how, in the Progressive Era, it was used to promote and preserve a conservative cultural landscape from the reform movements that threatened the established order.

The book primarily focuses on the balls staged by the old-line krewes of Comus, Proteus, and Momus, although a secondary focus is on The Twelfth Night Revelers and Rex and their interactions with the other three krewes. Atkins carefully examines the protocol, the etiquette rules, and the choreography of each stage of the celebration, showing that it reflected both the organization of society and the way the members of the New Orleans elite perceived the world they lived in, a world deeply transformed by the new rules of the post-Civil War world. For Atkins, the codifications of the evening “were as much mirrors of the krewesmen's idealized selves as they were escapes into fantasy realms” (8).

Drawing from a profuse array of primary sources including, among many others, krewes’ archives, newspaper articles, memoirs, correspondences, invitation letters, dance cards, and dance manuals, Atkins carefully describes the codes of the New Orleans Carnival balls, using them to understand how they both reflected and shaped New Orleans society. Because New Orleans was experiencing the turmoil of post-Civil War racial reorganization, at a time when issues of women's rights started being raised, the ball remained an arena in which the old elite maintained its idealized social organization. They were also a reflection of the new political and economic developments of the Gilded Age.

The book takes the reader into a fascinating racially and socially secluded world, a world of complex rules, secret codes, and choreographies. It shows how the balls organized and reorganized New Orleans’ identity in the five decades that followed the Civil War. The topic is undoubtedly original as is the perspective. As a dance historian, Atkins argues that the krewes’ balls “reveal that bodies in motion are meaningful, critical tools that offer insight into our past” (9), using “performance studies, dance studies, ethnography, and anthropology that positions dance as a cultural template” to dig deeper in the social meanings of the New Orleans Carnival celebrations. The reader would have welcomed a discussion of the French, Spanish, and Caribbean influences on the Carnival traditions, but if this omission is a fault it is a very minor one. Despite the absence of subsections in the text, the book reads like a novel, using an extremely accurate theoretical framework to interpret anecdotes that reveal the intricate links between the organization of the Carnival balls and New Orleans's complex race, class, and gender system.

As Jennifer Atkins concludes, many of the rules, traditions, and codes she has described still apply today and whoever has attended one of the modern krewes’ Carnival balls will recognize much of the choreography of today's balls. This makes her book an important tool in understanding New Orleans's contemporary society.