Carnival in Trinidad during the ’90s is yet to be recognised as a decade that delivered a significant turning point for the Carnival arts. In an ambitious tribute, five academics, a playwright and photographer weave their observations into a fascinating collection that studies a decade and offers an intimate lens into and critical survey of the contemporary works of mas by artist Peter Minshall.
Imagine, scholars from different universities in the Western Hemisphere were inspired to independently visit Trinidad, years apart, to witness and document Minshall’s mas bands in a Carnival that was brought to Trinidad and Tobago in the 1700s as a festival reserved for French Settlers.
Most of their observations of Trinidad’s Carnival sat unpublished. Enter Minshall historian and magazine editor, Pat Ganase, who received many of the essays, then facilitated connecting writers to a photographer who was also intrigued with Minshall’s work and trained his lens on most every Minshall band during the ’90s.
Emmy-winning artist Peter Minshall.
Sean Drakes
The Last Mas opens in Chaguaramas, a suburb west of Trinidad’s capital city, where Minshall’s Callaloo Company of players workshopped the drama of performing the mas in the run-up to Minshall’s historic role in co-designing the Opening Ceremonies for the Summer Olympics, Barcelona 1992. The visual essay of Sunday workshop photos gets to the heart of mas as a performance.
Gerard Aching, professor of Africana and Romance Studies at Cornell University, examines how nations achieve recognition and status in the world, and comments on Minshall’s dedication of his designs for Barcelona to the “island” that developed the mas, Trinidad and Tobago. Getting to Barcelona, Aching proposes that Minshall crossed the bridge from national to universal acceptance of the country’s unique art form.
IMAGE COURTESY SEAN DRAKES
Video link >> https://youtu.be/Qzapc21MXRg
Philip W Scher, professor of Anthropology and Folklore and Public Culture at the University of Oregon, observes that Minshall straddles the paradox of Trinidad—Carnival as expression or the catalyst in the deterioration of national values—to successfully produce works that are both celebration and ritual. Traditionally, Carnival is the outlet for controversy, rebellion, dissent, so what happens, Scher asks, when the resistance movement becomes the establishment? Minshall’s Tapestry, the final installment of his 1995–1997 trilogy, makes explicit the interwoven relationship between mas and society.
Minshall’s bands, Hallelujah, Song of the Earth and Tapestry were selected as Bands of the Years 1995, 1996, 1997. These may be considered the high point of Minshall’s career in Trinidad Carnival. Milla Riggio, professor of English at Trinity College, recounts the societal contentions that attended Hallelujah and reviews these bands that celebrate the diversity of Trinidad as a microcosm of the world.
The Last Mas
IMAGE COURTESY SEAN DRAKES
Video link >> https://youtu.be/3zDny5yc8gY
The book unfolds like its own band, with tempo, rhythm, and commentary. The mas presented through Sean Drakes’ intimate photographs is complemented and counterpointed by essays from articulate and erudite observers and academics, as well as those who have experienced the mas as players.
Riggio’s second essay takes its title from a Keith Smith epigram, “… Sure they tell us there is now more corn to feed more fowl, but where is she or he who would make the picoplat sing?” In her analysis of the last bands, Lost Tribe (1999), Hell (2001), Picoplat (2002) and the military-styled bands M2K (2000) and Ship of Fools (2003), Riggio notes how Minshall reprises traditional historical Carnival in the contemporary space “without nostalgia.” She echoes the deeper questions posed by Smith and Minshall’s mas about the heart and soul of the nation, the value of the artist to a society.
Performance art curator Claire Tancons, professor of Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, positions Minshall’s productions as epic, whether they are big bands or individual characters. One only has to think of Hummingbird, the individual mas that in 1974 became a watershed for a new age in mas. Tancons surveys the mas bands Red and Eyes of God, and individual characters The Dying Swan and Pegasus—Death and the Maiden, and concludes that the masman has evolved the Antillean epic by wrapping time and memory which he is able to unfurl like a marvellous peacock’s tail.
The Last Mas
IMAGE COURTESY SEAN DRAKES
Video link >> https://youtu.be/cnrdHPYAKIg
With a compelling interrogation of The Dying Swan—Ras Nijinsky in Drag as Pavlova, Antron Mahoney, assistant professor of Africana, Gender, and Identity Studies at Ohio Wesleyan University, makes his entry to Trinidad Carnival and investigates the validation of the queer identity in cultural performances in a society that is homophobic and hypocritical. It must be noted that Carnival has always been a space for cross-dressing, for ungendering, especially for men as women, a liberation into or accessing of the other. Minshall himself occupied femaleness, a virago to accost and berate and embarrass his teacher! In 2016, he took this casual cultural tradition to a new level of visibility. Here was a man dressed as a woman asking the carnival kingdom to make him king!
The late playwright Tony Hall and photographer Sean Drakes have shared experiences informed by their perspectives as masqueraders. Drakes was costumed to capture fleeting moments that illustrate the relation of the mas to the masquerader. The selection of vibrant photographs is his memory file of the best of those years.
Tony Hall accepts the challenge from Minshall to play an all-white silent Pierrot as counterpoint to his 1987 band, Carnival is Colour, and explores the internal dynamic of playing a mas. What does it mean, he asks when he puts on the costume. He discovers that it is a mas needing to be played. Hall uncovers the transformative process of playing, which he said led directly to his 1991 thesis on this mas-based theatrical process, the Jouvay Popular Theatre Process.
We need the book The Last Mas to remind us of the celebrated Minshall years in mas, the last years of the last millennium. The limited edition collectible is supported by generous grants from First Citizens Bank and the Ministry of Culture and the Arts led by Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly, and will be printed by year’s end for release during Trinidad & Tobago Carnival 2024 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Minshall’s iconic Hummingbird mas.
Pat Ganase has commented on Minshall since 1974. Sean Drakes has documented the Caribbean and produces video interviews of Minshallites.
