Party Art

Even the asphalt seems wired when "Jumbie" masqueraders hit the streets for Carnival in Trinidad. Their colourful, elaborate costumes stand out against the natural landscape. Glitter erupts in the blaze of an equatorial sun. Celebrants parade with oversize cardboard masks of triangular shapes-Picasso saw a magical power in their African-influenced geometry. The Jumbie rule throughout the festival, leaving catharsis in their wake. Afterward, the King Jumbie stands arrogantly in the airport, a tribute to the power of art.

It is this kind of art that the St. Louis Art Museum celebrates in "Caribbean Festival Art," an exhibition that opens this month and will later travel to Washington, D.C., New york, Seattle, and Toronto. Challenging Western concepts of art, audience, and even museums, curator John W. Nunley and designers Alex and Caroline Castro have re-created the ephemeral world of festivals in the galleries of the St. Louis museum's classical Cass Gilbert building.

Caribbean festivals play important roles in the cultural life of several American cities. They broaden the definition of art and music, and sensitize the existing aesthetic. They also give these groups status and a presence the television sitcoms may have missed. And, as these festivals dance their way into the new landscape, something distinctly American emerges. The Caribbean carnival at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, or the more famous Brooklyn Labor Day Parade have become festival forms of their own, absorbing and displaying New York City's kinetic energy. Mas in Miami or jump up in Boston resemble very much the character of those cities. Toronto's Caribana may be based on Trinidad's carnival but the tenor of the event is strictly Canadian.

"Caribbean Festival Arts" focuses on three festivals: the bacchanalia of Carnival, derived from European pre-lenten festivals and African masquerades; the Christmas celebration of Jonkonnu, a Jamaican street festival; and the Islamic ritual of Hosay, which migrated with indentured East Indians to the New World.

"These living traditions were rallyiong points for peoples who were subjugated during the colonial experience," explains curator Nunley. "Liberated through the festivals, these people today have 'invaded' the metropolis to become cultural colonizers."

The exhibition presents 36 costumes in elaborate installations. Mannequins cast from life stand among architectural constructions. Masks of wire screen and papier-mache are mounted in the introductory gallery. Dramatic lighting and settings heighten the theatricality of festival art, while slides, videos, and audiotapes create a multisensory carnivalesque environment. In the Trinidad gallery, the visitor passes through a corridor: On one wall is a lifesize photographic mural of a Carnival crowd; on the other; a video loop of the festivities. The visitor then moves across a stage, passing by one quee costume, "Diana Goddess of the Hunt," which is an elaborate mixed media piece of wire, cloth and sequined headress, that is eight feet high, ten feet wide and has a wing span of eight feet.

Some of the costumes are spectacular, ranging from human scale to as high as 16 feet. Others are subtle as complex as the themes they portray. All the pieces are examples of fine craftsmanship in wire bending and assemblage. The vivid colors, large scale, and gaudy decorative materials (mirrors, sequins, rhinestones, feathers, and beads) produce effects of surrealistic fantasy. Most of the costumes were commissioned for the exhibition, but several are actual piesces from past festivals. "These objects," says consulting curator Judith Bettelheim, "reorganise human experience, lifting it to ecstatic states."

The masks,costumes and ensembles depicted in Festival Arts of the Caribbean represent a unique attempt to trace the history, development and significance of these West Indian festivals. In pouring humans, labor and capital into this small part of the world, Europe, Asia and Africa left the cultural expressions of three continents to mingle simbiotically. Out of that process a creole aesthetic emerged. The festivals are the best examples of that aesthetic. "Three great rivers of civilization poured into this part of the world," says Nunley, "and the currents, foams and bubbles formed a perfect callaloo (a popular dish of mixed ingredients)."

They began generally as colonial celebrations of one sort or another. Slaves used them as a salve for their oppression, and, later, as a way to celebrate their freedom. The festivals often suffered brutal suppression by the authorities because of their expressions of nationalism or ethnic pride. They became powerful outlets for creativity and cultural continuity. Rex Nettleford, a Jamaican choreographer and tktk, argues that they were later used for communicating and affirming values and for strengthening bonds in the new societies that emerged from the colonial experience.

In tone and texture these festivals are quite similar. Masquerade and music are important components. Religious influence is present in some degree in most of them. Transformation and renewal are the heart and soul of these festivals. Competition is central.

The festivals all borrow from each other. Some of what we see in Bermuda's Gombey comes from nearby St. Kitts' carnival. Placing large individual costumes on wheels is an idea taken from the Hosay festival. Mosque forms have appeared in masquerade headpieces, and the Indian Tassa Drum now beats relentlessly during carnival. Carnival always borrowed themes from the historical periods of adventure, war and disaster. Bands also took ideas from Hollywood, from their native environment, and lately from current trends -- disarmament, drugs, pollution.

The differences are equally compelling. Traditions in these festivals reflect the history of those places where they have developed. With more British, less Spanish and little French influences, Jamaican Jonkunnu keeps a stiff upper lip compared to the bachanalia of Trinidad's carnival. In Jamaica and Belize, festival participants maintain a reserve by... wearing masks. In Trinidad and the Bahamas, masks were discarded a long time ago. Bermuda's Gombey is now celebrated at a major competitive cricket event. Hosay began as a celebration of Muharram, the first month of the moslem year. Almost immediately, however, it became vital to the cultural survival of all East Indians in the Caribbean.

The single most important element in all these festivals is the concept of masquerade. Two traditions compete in these festivals. Because of the old world origins of many of these festivals the European thread was always there. Carnival is a very catholic festival that is still celebrated in many European cities. The French brought carnival from the masked balls of Versailles. The Spanish disguise balls were also an influence. Jamaica's Jonkunnu incorporates the Quadrille Balance of European choreography. Most bands and troupes in present day celebrations still feature kings and queens and courtiers.

Historical imperatives introduced the African tradition of masquerade to these parts. A powerful movement in African culture, masquerade combines music, dance, costume sculpture and drama in a single performance. It is religious, sometimes spontaneous, and always engaging. It is used for satiricaly comment on society, with profuse use of allegory. Processions in African societies were thought ot have powers of healing, thus the sense of transformation and renewal still present in today's festivals.

It's no surprise that Trinidad artists are well represented in the exhibition. Nunley says he found the emotional motivation for the show during his visit to Trinidad's carnival in l983. "I was captured by these wonderful works of art," he remembers, "and I wanted desperately for others to experience it."

Not only is Trinidad's carnival the most elaborate in the Caribbean, but it has spawned similar celebrations in New York, Boston, Miami, Toronto, London, Amsterdam and Montreal. In the Caribbean, it influences costume and design for other carnivals, and has a major impact on cabaret, drama, musicals and dance theater. "Other art forms have always used festivals as a source of energy," says Nettleford.

Another gallery shows costume ensembles from Jamaica's Jonkonnu, where male entourages of dancers in wire-screen masks perform mimed variations on an established repertoire of dance steps to the accompaniment of fife and drums. Traditionally, Jonkonnu bands traveled from door to door, gathering supporters on their way to a designated central area where they would perform in competition with other bands. Nowadays, the performance usually takes place on a stage.

Also on display in the Jonkonnu gallery are five costumes used by African-influenced masqueraders to enact warriors and animals. One especially colorful mixed-media costume, titled Pitchy Patchy, has dozens of strips from various fabrics sewn together and looks somewhat like clothing worn byEgungun masqueraders of African Yoruba people.

The Europeans tradition in Jonkonnu has begun to show signs of other influences, but it still resembles an English mumming folk festival. And the wire-screen Jonkonnu masks closely resemble those worn by the Schieicherlaufen in Tirol, an Alpine region in Austria; one of these Europeans masks is included in the show, side by side with the Creole masks.

Even Cuba is not above a bit of bourgeois reveling. Two costumes in the exhibition, one from the forties and one from the eighties, are in the tradition of Cuba's carnival. In ceremonies that replicate rituals from nearby region of Nigeria and Cameroon, costumed performers represent ireme ("spirits"). Carnival originally began as a celebration of saints days, but it now coincides with the anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, since Fidel Castro planned his first major military operationagainst the ruling Batista government during Carnival, certain that the authorities would be engrossed in the festivities.

Also diplayed are costume-mask ensembles from Haiti's Rara festival, a celebration of abandon to the spirits that has overtones of voodoo, and costumes from Virgin Islands, the Dominican Republic, Belize, and St. Kitts Nevis. the largest costume, a huge colorful bat, which was built by a team led by Bahamians Jackson Burnside 111 and Percy Francis, greets visitors at the entrance to the exhibit.

For the Hosay gallery, the artists came to St. Louis: Ten East Indians from Trinidad constructed a tadjah inside the museum. The ornate miniature shrine is areplica of the domed tomb of the grandson of the prophet Muhammad; its wooden frame is layered over with metallic decorations, mirrors, tinsel, and paper, cut in filigree patterns.

Of course, no exhibition of this sort would be complete without a complement from New Orleans. For the uninformed, New Orleans fits right into Festival Arts of the Caribbean because of the city's old commercial ties with the West Indies. Calvin Trilling speaks about the city's "Latin flair for celebrations." Mardi Gras has the same French Catholic roots as the pre-lenten carnival found in the Caribbean. The Black Indians, a Mardi Gras element that combines African aesthetics and native American motifs, have some of the most colorful costumes in the exhibition. Embellished feathered headdresses tower over patiently handsewn costumes of sequins, rhinestones and velvet. Ritually, when tribes meet at Mardi Gras, they dance and display layers and layers of costume to show off their artistry.

These artists have presented a gift to the Anglo world," explains Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson, an expert on Afro-Caribbean culture and a contributor to the show's catalog, "and it's time we returned the compliment."