The young woman walks up to me, lipstick smeared across her face. Puts her hand on my shoulder. “What to do?” She asks. “He say he doh love meh.” She points to the police officer across from us. “He love that nex’ gyul. Beat her?”
“You hadda beat him, not her,” I respond sagely. She stalks off towards him as my friend leans over to me and says, “You should have said to grab his gun!”
In any other context, this conversation would not be coming out of our mouths. But this is Jamette mas in The Old Yard, and the audience must become part of the show. It’s one of the last places they can.
There are not many spaces for traditional mas anymore. Two days later, on Adam Smith Square, I am having a conversation with artist Jackie Hinkson about how the traditional competition has become a sterile affair. Crowds are cordoned off from the performers, who line up single-file for their two minutes before the judges where their number is called and they are finally able to play their mas after the long wait. After the time is up, many wander off to the side to disrobe. This is not how it used to be, says Hinkson.
But, at least there, characters like the blue devils can display their fire-breathing talents. In a post by Maria Nunes on Facebook a day later, I learn that in the Paramin competition (the home of blue devil mas) fire is no longer allowed. Perhaps the crowds are now too packed for it to be considered safe.
The crowds on Adam Smith Square, similarly, widely outnumber the participants — it used to be the opposite. As a traditional mas performer myself, I have been on the other side of the barricades, and found the lining up and limited performance time equally discombobulating. When do you get the chance to really play the mas? To play yourself?
The lack of separation between character and audience was striking at The UWI’s traditional mas offering, The Old Yard—formerly known as Viey La Cou. When I was a child, my father would take me every year, long before the event made its way to The UWI campus. I remember trembling in fear as blue devils surrounded me, shrieking and whistling, smearing paint on my face.
Many years have passed since the last time I was at The Old Yard, although a few things remain the same — the retired lecturer and Head of Department at the Department of Creative and Festival Arts (DCFA) Louis Mc Williams is still the MC, as he has been since the inception of Viey La Cou in 1987. The theme this year is “One Family”.
“The idea was giving the artists, the mas, a space to parade and having the audience see the mas in all its glory,” says Mc Williams. He talks about the “interactive nature of the traditional characters”. It’s central to many of the character portrayals, like the Baby Doll searching the male onlookers for child support, or the Jab Molassie creating chaos within the crowd. “When you talk about street theatre... that relationship between player and audience,” he says, “traditional mas needs that engagement.”
It made me consider traditional mas as a vehicle to think about mas as a whole: as a conversation between the player and the watcher, similar to how theatre only truly comes alive with the addition of the final element: the audience.
Coordinator of DCFA’s Carnival Studies Unit, Dr Jo-anne Tull, talks about how “the idea really is about giving [students] the opportunity to maintain this legacy so that it will live on”. She notes that students are able to experience all parts of the process, from creating costumes, to theatrical performances, to working behind the scenes on the management side.
“This gives us an opportunity to have our students get into the Carnival ecosystem,” she says.While this ecosystem continues to morph and change, the visceral feelings of truly engaging with our culture and history remain the same. To see a portrayal of “Pissenlit”, described in the 1884 Port-of-Spain Gazette as “obscenity of gesture and language”, stooping over a bedpan and chasing fellow performers around with the contents, was a real treat, albeit a disgusting one. But the disgust is an essential part of it. As Mexican Poet and academic Cesar A Cruz says of all art, it is meant to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I had only ever read about Pissenlit as an extinct artform, but here it was, in all its horrifying glory.
Later in the day, I was thrilled to see a student, Dwayne White, take up the mantle of Cow Band Mas, a character once played in The Old Yard by UWI staple Reish Baboolal. Watching White charge across the grass, kicking up dust, to dive at the feet of a small child, was electric. The child went from terror to joy as he climbed onto the back of the Cow and was taken for a wild ride.
Through the array of interactions I witnessed throughout the season, those were the ones that felt the most precious — watching the younger generation experience the magic of engaging with their own history and identity, and hoping that this will spark a fire in them to continue these traditions themselves someday.
