Carnival in Trinidad
Carnival is ancient, from Egyptian rituals and Roman Saturnalia to the various festivals of the Middle Ages. It celebrates fertility, excess and consumption through satirical inversions of the social order and power hierarchies. In the Middle Ages, the most important carnival was celebrated before Lent, a period of fasting and religious introspection. The word “carnival” comes from the Latin, “carn”—meat and “levare”—to remove to pull away from meat or flesh during Lent.
Carnival in Trinidad has evolved over two hundred years out of the masquerades brought to the island by the French fleeing Haiti, elements of West African culture that survived through slavery, the cultural expressions—especially musical ones—of Indian indentured immigrants, American interventions in the island, and government financial backing.
The Haitian French—white and free persons of color—who came to Trinidad following the 1783 Cedula de Poblacion, brought their love of entertainment and fetes, particularly the masked ball. The masked ball itself was an import from Venice, famous for its great Carnival that included traditional character costumes and licentiousness made possible by the masked face.
In the Caribbean, these masked balls occurred indoors, and slaves were barred from participating. The formerly enslaved, however, brought the festivities outdoors, taking to the village and city streets and creating some of the key figures associated with traditional Carnival.
“Canboulay” from the French “cannes brulées” or “burnt canes” is the precursor of modern Carnival. In the pre-emancipation period, it was the festival marking the end of the harvest season with music and dancing.
Black Trinidadians added numerous other elements and characters to their public fete: the “Negre Jardin” or field slaves who extinguished fires in the cane fields; JabJab or devil from French “diable”; moko jumbie or ghost figures on high stilts; stick fighters; limbo dances; minstrels; midnight robbers; burrokeets or horse men; Dame Lorraine, the voluptuous elite woman; and later sailors and fancy sailors.
By the 1940’s the Canboulay was replaced by the Dimanche Gras or Fat Sunday, Carnival Sunday, the first one occurring in 1948.
Band designers or “mas men” spend the entire year conceiving their band’s theme and designs. Actual production and festivities ramp up after New Year’s. Steelpan bands rehearse and admission-only calypso concerts or “tents” begin. The actual Carnival celebration occurs over the Saturday through Tuesday preceding Lent.
Saturday is Panorama, the competition among large steelpan bands playing out versions of the year’s calypso and soca songs. For Dimanche Gras, Fat Saturday, the male and female leads of each Carnival band parade their costumes in Queen’s Park Savannah before crowds and judges. They are judged on the aesthetics of their costumes and their ability to embody and communicate the band theme by animating their costumes through movement and dance, and a King and Queen of Carnival are crowned.
Carnival Monday morning begins with J’ouvert, from the French, “jour overt”—daybreak. This is not pretty mas but a raucous throwback to the early days of Canboulay: Revelers cover themselves in black grease or dirt; don rags, drag, or infant clothing; or assume traditional characters such as JabJabs or Moko Jumbies to parade through the streets. The Calypso Monarch is also picked on this day.
Mardi Gras, Carnival Tuesday, is the culmination of the entire 4-day event. Revelers dress in full costumes and march in their bands, with costumes based on a specific theme. They dance and wine their way through the streets of San Fernando to Skinner’s Park and of Port-of-Spain to the Queen’s Park Savannah, where participants are judged for best mas band costume and individual street parade costume. The Road March King or Queen is crowned for the singer whose song was played most frequently through the day.
Peter Minshall, Mas Man
Peter Minshall is universally recognized as the greatest Carnival band designer or “mas man”. He revolutionized Carnival as a vehicle for epic conceptions played out over years, the costumes and their movements, and choreography of the spectacles and band leaders. He has taken the Carnival paradigm global, designing the ceremonies for Olympic games, Superbowl events, and major awards ceremonies. He has won more “band of the Year” titles than any other designer, Trinidad’s highest awards, an Emmy award, and even the Prince Klaus of the Netherlands Award for his contributions to world culture through Carnival.
Born in 1941 in Georgetown, Guyana, he moved to Port-of-Spain, Trinidad as a small child where he was first exposed to Carnival. He made his first costume as a young teenager. He attended Queen’s Royal College, the leading secondary school in Trinidad, then studied Theatre Design at London’s Central School of Art and Design.
His Carnival career began in 1974 when he designed a costume, From The Land of the Hummingbird, for his adopted sister. Ornate, detailed, and allowing the wearer total mobility, it became referential in the history of Trinidad Carnival.
For Minshall, Carnival is public art and theatre on a massive scale that takes on big issues, from the historical, the ecological, the existential, to the cosmic, but always rooted in and informed by a Trinidadian context. For instance, he based his first band,1976’s Paradise Lost, was on John Milton’s 17th century epic poem of the same name. However, he drew heavily on the traditional bat and JabJab characters for his costume designs. As theatre, the performance unfolded over four sections or movements over the days of Carnival.
He continued to develop his conception of public theatre, culminating in the 1983-1984 trilogy widely considered his greatest achievement. It began with River (1983), whose queen, “Washerwoman”, represented life and purity. The band king, “Mancrab”, represented greed and technological madness.
Minshall conceived and executed a grand narrative in which these two warred for the souls of the River People, played by the band’s masqueraders. On Carnival Monday, the River People paraded in the streets dressed in white cotton, representing their pure and uncorrupted state. They moved under a white canopy, a visual marker of the river, three-quarters of a mile long. Carnival Tuesday showed the River People, still dressed in white, parading under a rainbow canopy created by Mancrab. He defeats Washerwoman, whose lifeless corpse signals the pollution of the River People dramatized by the different colors of paint they spray at each other.
The River trilogy continued the story with 1984’s Callaloo, portrayed as the son of Washerwoman who came to lead the fallen and polluted River People. The epic culminated in 1985’s The Golden Calabash that staged the inconclusive clash between two bands, Princes of Darkness and Lords of Light.
As a sign of the ways Minshall was pushing the boundaries of Carnival’s work and expressive form, his Rivertrilogy won no titles. Some judges were perplexed by the notion of a grand narrative playing out over all the days of Carnival and over multiple years. Others resisted what they saw as a foreign conception overtaking the primary functions of Carnival—steam valve social release and festivity.
Minshall responded to such criticism with a sarcasm that reflected national social, economic and political troubles. In Rat Race (1986), he costumed revelers as long-tailed rodents invading Port of Spain whose king, Man Rat, represented the insanity of modern technological excess. He staged Carnival Is Colour (1987) whose reliance on abstract geometrical forms was his response to criticism that he invested Carnival with too much meaning. Ironically, it won band of the year. Jumbie (1988) and Santimanitay (1989) were characterized by sinister, malevolent spirit figures and effigies.
The mid-90s saw Minshall’s second Carnival trilogy: Hallelujah (1995), in Song of the Earth (1996) and Tapestry (1997), a prayer of thanks to the divine for the gift of life. He drew on religious iconography and figures from Trinidad’s diverse peoples and Carnival’s long history.
The culminating spectacle of Tapestry featured a “cavalry” of traditional burrokeets or donkey-men, winged stilt-walkers who combined the characters of Moko Jumbie and bat; a 2-foot-tall golden Weaver of Dreams; a Black Madonna who was mask and huge skirt evoked the Madam Lorraine; and an effigy of the Hindu god Shiva, Lord of the Dance, that spring to life, amazing onlookers. The visceral impact led state TV to suspend news programs so the country would watch uninterrupted. Journalists reported that spectators wept in humility and rapture. Minshall, in a deft Aristotelian stroke, produced national catharsis by using Carnival to manifest the divine presence that made church and street the same.
Minshall revolutionized Carnival not only in terms of its theatricality and ability to take on epic themes, but in costume design. He pioneered costumes, particularly for the band king and queen, that come alive with the performer’s movements. This resistance to static costumes embodies his belief that Carnival expresses the body’s primal energy.
He carefully choreographed the band king’s and queen’s key movements across the Carnival stage to ensure that these movements animate both the costumes and his conceptions. Saga Boy and Tan Tan, the king and queen of his 1990 band, Tantana, wore 16-foot fully mobile puppets who danced through the streets to enact their romance.
Mas for Minshall is living art that Trinidadians make fresh every year. The Trinidadian aesthetic is performance itself, and performance is none other than life in the present moment.
Written Reflection
Option 1
In the film, “Mas Man”, one critic characterized Peter Minshall’s work as inappropriate to the genre by staging the negative side of the human experience, most significantly in his River trilogy, or going too “high concept” by staging questions and concerns of epic proportions—good vs evil, technology vs humanity, the ephemeral nature of existence. Engage this idea—based on your viewing of the film and the scope of his work represented there, to what extent do you agree or disagree?
Option 2
Reflect on the two videos on J’ouvert in Trinidad and Kanaval at Jacmel, Haiti. What similarities do you notice and what differences seem significant? What social function do these Carnival expressions seem to fulfill? How do they challenge your understanding of Carnival?
Option 3
Devise your and respond to your own prompt! Alternatively, you can formulate a set of questions and show how these arose from specific scenes or moments in the various films you viewed.
Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical (Rhea Storr, 2020)
Filmmaker Rhea Storr offers an ecstatic immersion into Junkanoo—a form of carnival celebrated in the Bahamas and a living expression of Afrofuturism as resistance.
Three Keywords:
Radical comes from a Latin word meaning “root,” in its earliest uses, it refers to roots of various kinds, first literal and then figurative. Because roots are the deepest part of a plant, radical came to describe things understood as fundamental or essential. In phrases like “radical reform” and “radical change,” radical implies a shift in the most basic or necessary part of something.
Tanisha G. Hill-Jarett says the “radical imagination entails stepping outside the confines of the now and into the expansiveness of what could be. It has been described as the ability to dream of possible futures and bring these possibilities back to the present to drive social transformation.” She proposes three processes that comprise the radical imagination: (1) imagining alternative Black futures, (2) radical hope, and (3) collective courage.
Hill-Jarett elaborates, “Afrofuturism intersects with the Black imagination to provide a framework for communicating ideas around possible futures and creating spaces of Black empowerment. Afrofuturism is an epistemology and artistic expression that explores the African diaspora experience through alternate realities and futures using imagination, technology, and mysticism. Afrofuturism reasserts Black agency in a way that places African diaspora people as central story writers and occupants of the past, present, and future. “
Discussion Questions
.What does it mean to have and cultivate a radical imagination within the context of the Bahamas?
.Why is carnival a vital space to experience collective world-making?
.How does the short documentary understand and perform Afro-futurism?
.What visions of the future do you see performed in carnivals?