The fact that live performance is unrepeatable is both its greatest attribute and a constant worry to theatre historians. How is it possible to study an art form that is fleeting, short-lived, ephemeral? Nowhere is the challenge more acute than with Carnival, a popular art form that comes from the grassroots and is acknowledged as an art of resistance. Initiated by newly emancipated Africans in British colonies in 1834, Caribbean-derived Carnival struggled against endless confrontations with governmental authorities for its survival. In 1962, when Trinidad and Tobago achieved independence from Britain, the country's first prime minister, Eric Eustace Williams, recognized Carnival as the national art form. Despite this recognition, Carnival artists continue to struggle because of lack of funding, misrepresentation in the press, and lack of appropriate credit for their role as artists. So it is particularly gratifying to find the National Library of Trinidad and Tobago leading the way by making the work of Carnival artists available digitally on its Web site. This essay examines this new online resource and considers issues related to studying and researching Carnival.
The Wayne Berkeley Collection
The Heritage Library of the National Library, which houses the original drawings of the Wayne Berkeley Collection, considers its role to be the following:
The Heritage Library is the key contributor to the future of our culturally diverse population. It is committed to promoting a sense of self by presenting the Trinidad and Tobago society to itself through the preservation of the nation's Heritage Collections and building the Oral History records. Its main role therefore, is to acquire, preserve and promote information in all formats, on or about Trinidad and Tobago. In addition, the Heritage Library houses the Legal Deposit items and acts as a national depository and resource for materials published in Trinidad and Tobago.Footnote 1
The Heritage Library was formed in 1994 as the result of the integration of the West Indian Reference Library of the Central Library Services of Trinidad and Tobago and the West Indian Reference Section of the Trinidad Public Library. The library's main goal is “to preserve and promote the culture of Trinidad and Tobago by staging educational programmes, and exhibitions and displays commemorating national festivals throughout the year.”
The first Carnival designer to be recognized with a publicly available digital archive in the National Library is Wayne Berkeley, whom many acknowledge as one of two top Trinidadian Carnival artists of the late twentieth century (the other being Peter Minshall).Footnote 2 The online archive of Berkeley's work includes numerous full-color drawings and a number of photographed costumes worn by models or mannequins. The collection is archived alphabetically according to the title of the costume. This has its drawbacks as it is difficult to search for works under the name or the year of the band. There are full descriptions of each design.
Born in 1940, Wayne Berkeley grew up in the Belmont area of Port of Spain, directly across the street from Harold Saldenah's mas (i.e., masquerade) camp (the site where the Carnival artist and his or her team make the costumes.) In addition to this exposure to the annual color, energy, and fantastical characters from Carnival, Berkeley's parents encouraged the arts at home. His mother was a leading floral designer and his father a pianist. Although his school curriculum in the 1950s did not include art on the official curriculum, Berkeley took art classes organized by the British Council.
In 1965, Berkeley was invited to design his first Carnival band. (“Band” refers to the group of people, also called “mas players,” that wear the costumes designed by the Carnival artist.) Berkeley explains his path to Carnival arts: “If you live in Trinidad and you are interested in the arts or designing of any type, at some stage of the game you are going to get involved in Carnival. It's a great vehicle for any artist or designer to see his work come to life and expressed in dance on the street.”Footnote 3
The widespread focus of Carnival design when Berkeley started was “historical mas,” designs that attempted to re-create the glory of past civilizations. Berkeley began his career as a design renegade of sorts, rejecting the prevailing norm and striking out on his own with a band called “Fan Fair.” Dylan Kerrigan and Nicholas Laughlin describe the significance of his first design:
Fan Fair, with its variations on the simple theme of the fan—Spanish, Egyptian, Japanese, and so on—had an enormous impact. It was one of the first major examples of fantasy mas, springing not from a history book but from the designer's imagination, and it helped to start the trend that within a few years would bring the historical genre to an end.Footnote 4
Since his debut in 1965, Berkeley has received the prestigious Band of the Year award nearly a dozen times, six of those in a row during 1989–94, breaking the previous record for consecutive titles. Berkeley's Carnival designs have been presented in Barbados, St. Vincent, and St. Maarten as well as in London's Notting Hill, where for a number of years he worked with Dexter Kahn from Cocoyea. In Seville in 1992, he designed the Caribbean section of the Universal Exposition of Seville (Expo ‘92), which celebrated the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage.
According to John Nunley, Berkeley's bands have the ability to transform the landscape of Port of Spain imaginatively. In 1975 his work “A La Carte” did just this:
Its twenty sections of maskers imitated corn on the cob, cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, gin and coconut, salt and pepper shakers, crêpe de suzettes, turkey and cranberry sauce, champagne and caviar, crème de menthe frappé, game with mushrooms, and fruit cocktail. The city became a moveable feast, a visual commentary on the real feasting of Mardi Gras.Footnote 5
Berkeley is also celebrated for his methods of mas-making and was one of first designers to experiment with backpacks to create costumes with significant height and make it possible for the mas player to wear the costume comfortably for many hours. As Adela Ruth Tompsett explains: “He seeks to exploit the full potential of designing for extension beyond and out from the human body. His use of materials is transformative. In preparing his designs, he experiments, employs all available technologies, seeks the ultimate result. You can always read the narrative his mas band ‘tells.’”Footnote 6 Kerrigan and Laughlin describe his approach to Carnival design as “well thought-out themes, executed to look effortless, but in reality the product of resourcefulness, creative intensity, and meticulous labour. Berkeley, famous for his ultra-efficient production line, with its worksheets and prototypes (and, later, computers), has been called the Henry Ford of Carnival.”Footnote 7
Like many Carnival artists, Berkeley is concerned about his artistic legacy. Despite the demands of his work, he has found the time to keep, manage, and maintain his designs, as Adela Ruth Tompsett describes:
In the late 1980s, when I accepted an invitation to visit Wayne Berkeley at home, to interview him about his work, I was led to a room entirely devoted to the safe keeping of his original designs, photographs of his work, programmes and so on. It was, in effect, an ongoing archive of his work as a Carnival designer. As he talked about designing for Carnival, he lifted out the relevant original designs, explaining the development of a particular theme through the King, Queen, individuals and section players, while I closely inspected each image, marveling at the detail, drama and inventiveness of the “costumes” before me as well as the ingenious ways in which they “told” the narrative.Footnote 8
Most of the collection archived online at the Heritage Library consists of his artwork, his vibrant and imaginative renderings of costumes. While this is crucial for understanding his artistic vision, the online archive lacks photographs of the designs in action during Carnival on the streets of Port of Spain. The next stage for this online collection would be locating photographs of the designs and making them available alongside the artwork. (Photographs of some of his costumes are available in the bimonthly journal Caribbean Beat.)Footnote 9
Berkeley's designs in Trinidad use as many as two thousand people, and many of them return to play mas with him year after year. As Debbie Jacob says, his popularity and success are “partly due to his ability to design for a wide range of people and their interests. People trust him to choose the best colour and the best design for them.”Footnote 10 Tompsett further explains Berkeley's talent for attracting and keeping a significant following: “People play mas for many reasons: to play life larger than it usually is, or to transform and be other than themselves; some play mas to feel beautiful and some wish, above all, to dance and be free. Berkeley designs for that diversity and knows how to use it.”Footnote 11
Because of the impact of Berkeley's Carnival career as a populist visionary and an artist whose “mas is, above all, celebratory,”Footnote 12 he is perhaps the obvious choice for the first digitally archived designer of the Heritage Library. The range and variety of Berkeley's design collection certainly “present[s] the Trinidad and Tobago society to itself,” as the library's Web site claims.
Archives and Pedagogy
One of the more exciting aspects of teaching at universities today is the opportunity to offer courses in theatre departments that would have not been possible twenty-five years ago. What follows is a brief case study of the difficulties in creating a Carnival curriculum in London, the European city with the largest diasporic Caribbean-derived Carnival.
Course leaders at Middlesex University (formerly Middlesex Polytechnic) in north London asked Adela Ruth Tompsett to create a course on Carnival in the mid-1980s as one of the options available to B.A. performance-arts students.Footnote 13 Tompsett, whose research interests focused on black British theatre and Trinidad and London's Carnival, embraced this opportunity to devote a semester to the art and history of the Afro-Caribbean population living in London. Students in the course were studying drama, music, and dance. They studied the colonial history of the Caribbean and considered the range of Carnival arts: the steel drum, calypso, costume design, wire bending, stilt walking, and so forth. Within a semester of study, Caribbean-derived Carnival intervened in the dominant and pervasive Eurocentrism of the subject matter of British higher education.
After a period of course development, Tompsett offered the first class in 1986, the first semester-long course on Carnival in Britain. The biggest problem during the development phase as well as after was the lack of resources. Although some items were obtainable in Trinidad, very little was accessible in London, despite the fact that London's Notting Hill Carnival dated to the mid-1960s. Tompsett therefore used multiple strategies to find materials that could be readily available to students. She collected news articles about Notting Hill Carnival as well as a variety of ephemera such as flyers and posters. She tracked every book she could find. Her many research trips to Trinidad gave her the opportunity to include publications from there. On those trips she also arranged to meet a variety of Carnival artists, such as Calypsonians Mighty Sparrow and David Rudder. She interviewed them and placed their tapes and CDs in the Middlesex Library. She also began to photograph the Carnival bands of London: prior to Carnival she attended their mas camps and documented the design process, and during Carnival she took photos of the bands on the road. Each year she would deposit an album of annotated photos in the library. Her trips to Trinidad included interviews with the leading designers, such as Wayne Berkeley and Peter Minshall. She also invited London Carnival artists to speak in the Carnival course. Lawrence Noel, Carl Gabriel, Clary Salandy, and Ali Pretty, key artists in London's Notting Hill Carnival, were among the many designers who visited Middlesex. Their interviews and photos are now available in the Archive and Resource for Carnival Study (ARCS) in the university's library at Trent Park. The collection is uncataloged.
Most of this collecting was done without funding from the university (such is and continues to be the fiscal reality of many British universities). Tompsett developed a barter system with some of the London artists, trading a video of their work for an album of her photos. Ruth recounts that within ten years of collecting there was enough material in the archive to support student coursework and make it possible to include Carnival study on a new part-time graduate degree, the M.A. in performance art.
The ARCS collection began to develop a reputation. By the early 1990s, inquiries from people outside the university started to come, and currently Tompsett receives queries on a regular basis. As university libraries offer public access, the ARCS collection is one of the few, if not the only, substantial collection on London's Carnival with additional material on Trinidad and Tobago. (To access this collection, email A.R. Tompsett at either R.Tompsett@mdx.ac.uk or carnival.e.g@gmail.com.)
By the late 1990s, many new or reconfigured degrees became available in the United Kingdom. These included degrees in events management, postcolonial studies, film studies, visual and performing arts, and media studies. The current trend in Britain is to combine degrees: combinations such as degrees in media studies and events management, as well as in cultural studies and history, are now available. Many of the students in these degree programs seek out research opportunities on Carnival. Events management students must do a project on a major public event, and many choose Notting Hill Carnival. According to Tompsett, even though courses at other institutions require significant research resources, students who visit ARCS continue to report that they find it difficult to find substantial material on Carnival in their home institution's library or other public libraries. As a result, the Middlesex University archive is a crucial element in the study of Carnival. However, the collection receives little support from its host institution other than space. There are currently no librarians at the university who support this collection with significant interest or knowledge.
Out-of-the-Box Sources
Despite the recent strides made in Carnival scholarship, it is still a challenge at times to find contemporary resources. Perhaps it is no surprise that two resources for Carnival research come out of tourism. These resources are respectable and worthy of consideration. The first resource is the aforementioned magazine Caribbean Beat, published six times a year by Caribbean Airlines (formerly British West Indies Airlines). Each issue has at least one Carnival-related piece. For example, in a recent issue an essay entitled “Calypso Dreams Come True” looks at new a film that features a range of celebrated calypsonians. Caribbean Beat includes reviews of books, CDs, and films in every issue.Footnote 14 Each year the January–February issue highlights the upcoming Carnival events in Trinidad and Tobago. The journal is available online, and print versions are available at reasonable subscription rates.
The second resource is the Insight Guide to Trinidad and Tobago.Footnote 15 While most tourist guides to the Caribbean and particularly Trinidad include something on Carnival, this guide is excellent in its details, historical accounts, and contemporary material. It is particularly good as a reasonably priced resource for students on the historical background of the islands and the current cultural scene. It has a considerable section on Carnival, and many of the authors are active Carnival historians and scholars.
The Challenge of Research on Carnival: The Anonymous Artist
Caribbean Beat makes every attempt to identify the photographs it uses: it provides the name of the artist, the name of the design, and the year it was presented. Photographs are essential to the history of Carnival, and yet it is common practice among presses in the United Kingdom to publish unidentified photographs of Carnival costumes. It is hard to imagine publishing a photograph of any contemporary artwork, by artists such as Damian Hirst or Rachel Whiteread, without crediting it. Yet this is standard practice when it comes to Carnival artists in the United Kingdom.
Another worrying aspect of this enforced anonymity of Carnival artists is replicated in certain scholarly publications. Several publishers have used photographs of Carnival art and designs without identifying the artist. For example, a book on the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) entitled The Turning World includes a full-page photograph of a Carnival costume.Footnote 16 This same photograph was used in a review of this book in London's Time Out magazine. The title of the work is “Shadow over Tiananmen Square,” and the designer of the piece is Clary Salandy. Neither the review nor the book credits Salandy for the work, although both credit the photographer. In another example, an entire book devoted to London's Notting Hill Carnival, On Route: The Art of Carnival, identifies none of the artists' works.Footnote 17 The editor, Pax Nindi, once a lead Carnival arts officer for the Arts Council in England, identifies himself as one of four photographers for the volume, which boasts unidentified color photographs on nearly every one of its pages. Many of the images are pixilated and out of focus.
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In conclusion, let us return to the happier note that the National Library of Trinidad and Tobago, is moving ahead with online resources such as the digital collection of Wayne Berkeley's designs. The existence of ARCS in London is also an accomplishment worthy of celebration.
Recall that the Heritage Library proclaims the importance of “promoting a sense of self.” Recently a student in London visiting the Carnival archive at Middlesex University, seeing the range and significance of the collection, cried out: “I can't believe it! I can't believe it! It's like I'm finding myself.”Footnote 18 In the end, that is what saving and preserving this material is about.
