By Al Creighton
Carifesta X has been launched in Georgetown. The tenth Caribbean Festival of Arts is to be held in Guyana August 22–31, 2008, and the first official public event to promote it at home and among the participating Caribbean territories was staged on the square outside the Bank of Guyana building on Thursday April 24.
Now that the festival has been publicly launched, it might be useful to open an occasional window into some of the artistic concepts, performance traditions and art forms that are parts of the Carifesta plan and that are expected to appear in the festival. Since the event is returning to its place of origin, one of the main ideas is to engineer a rebirth, returning it to its high place as the major festival of the arts in the region. It is to become a forum at which the best, the most representative, and the new directions in the various forms and disciplines as practised in the different territories are showcased.
One can therefore expect these territories to present a mixture of old vintage work that can show off the best of their art selected from a sort of canon. One can expect further selections that can give a very good idea of what may be representative of the arts of the territory. However, there will always be new work emerging that can show fresh new directions, preoccupations or experiments by artists in the various disciplines who are not necessarily among the established. In addition to those, there are also artistic or performance traditions which signify the culture of the nations.
A good example of a performance tradition that falls in this last category is the cultural form that was used to inform the shape and style of the stage design of the Carifesta launching. This design was broadly street theatre and more specifically the masquerade tradition. It is a most appropriate cultural form to be used as a concept, theme, motif, and performance text for a Carifesta held in Guyana and representing the Caribbean region. This is because the masquerade is a Caribbean wide tradition and is also known to be specifically Guyanese. Even more fitting, since Carifesta originated in Guyana, is the idea of getting back to origins and former grandeur. The masquerade is the oldest form of street theatre known in the region since the beginning of colonial history. It is a culture, it used to be a religion, it is a tradition and a performing art.
After carnival, masquerade has been the largest, most elaborate, the grandest and most all-inclusive cultural form known to the Caribbean. At its height in the nineteenth century and moving into the mid-twentieth century before it began to fade away in most of the territories where it had flourished, it covered the range of the performing arts. It is street theatre that at some points in its long history included dance, music, song, speech acts, stick fight, masques, costumery and rivalry. In its various forms, it has appeared in Jamaica, the Bahamas, Guyana, St Kitts, Trinidad, St Lucia, Grenada, Belize and Barbados, often under different names.
Masquerade still survives in Jamaica, where it reached its most elaborate splendour, Bahamas, and to a certain extent, Guyana, but mostly on the Essequibo Coast. The largest form is the jonkunnu (sometimes written as John Canoe), or maskarade known in Jamaica and Bahamas; masquerade known in Guyana; a number of forms known in the Trinidad carnival, such as the Pierrot, Pierrot Grenade, devil mas (including jab molassi) and burruquite; the mummies of St Kitts; Papa Jab or Flavier the White Devil of St Lucia; the tuk band of Barbados; the speech band of Tobago; and the Shakespeare Mas of Carriacou, Grenada. Of course, the street theatre tradition covers many more, including carnival itself, but the masquerade and jonkunnu tradition is the oldest in the region.
It is of African derivation. It is well known in Nigeria as the Egungun of the Yoruba in the west of the country, and as the masquerade of the Kalabari region in the south-east. These are traditional religious dances and masques in which the ancestors and the gods, wearing their representative masks and costumes, come visiting. It survived in the Caribbean as a religious ritual mainly featuring masked characters and symbols, dancing in street processions to the sound of the very distinct drum rhythms and the playing of a flute. The different masks and costumes had religious symbolism and retained their spiritual significance for a very long time before becoming entirely secular. Each mask used to be inhabited by a god or a spirit, as was the case in West Africa where masks were made as the living images of gods or ancestors. The costume makers in the Caribbean used to be professional spiritualists who knew how to invoke spirits and put them to dwell in the masks and costumes. That is why at the end of the masquerade season they had to be destroyed so that destructive spirits would not remain in them throughout the year.
However, outside of all the spiritualism, which is hardly practised or remembered today, is a rich performance tradition. Incidentally, most of the performances have also faded. The jonkannu developed several characters and dramatic performances over the years. Among the Jamaican characters are the horse head, cow head, house jonkunnu, house boat jonkunnu, actor boy, Pitchy-Patchy, Jack-O-the Green, belly-woman, whore-girl, policeman, the king, the queen and the executioner. There were also the set girls, belonging to the Blue Royal House, the rival Red Royal House and sometimes the Brown.
Apart from the dance and music, the performances include the drama of the rivalry between the king and a pretender to his throne; there is stick fighting and the ‘doctor play’ in which combatants are killed and brought back to life by the doctor. There are also the ‘toasts,’ a speech act performed by some of the characters. Some of these have also been found in Guyana, including a version of the doctor play and the toasts. Other known Guyanese characters include the stilt dancers, Mother Sally, bad cow and Bam-bam Sally.
Other versions of the drama of rivalry between kings, Turkish Knights and pretenders are acted out in the mummies of St Kitts, which is also known in the Dominican Republic where Kittitians settled some time ago. Like the jonkunnu and masquerade, the story of the St Lucian Papa Jab used to be acted out in the streets of Castries at Christmas time. The Trinidadian Pierrot and Pierrot Grenade are not generally known as belonging to the masquerade, but they are a part of that tradition. They are characters that used to appear in the Trinidad carnival, giving speech performances and building up to stick fights. The Shakespeare mas in Carriacou is an amazing performance still alive in that Grenadian island. The costumed characters learn lengthy passages from Shakespeare plays and compete in reciting them. The contest inevitably descends into a fight with sturdy whips.
This elaborate and varied tradition, then, very well defines the performance culture of the Caribbean region. It covers music, dance drama, masquing, mime and speech in what is a complex corpus of street theatre. The masquerade is also the primary image of Guyanese folk traditions, very representative, very distinctive and spectacular. It can be a very strong motif and artistic concept for the celebration of Carifesta X in Guyana.
