Showing posts with label carnival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label carnival. Show all posts

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Carnivals under threat

While huge amounts of  money are being pumped into the top down spectacle of the Olympics, England's long established culture of African-Caribbean led community carnivals is under threat from a mixture of funding cuts and increasingly restrictive policing and licensing constraints.

The St Pauls Carnival in Bristol has taken place every year but one since 1967, with 90,000 taking part last year. But there will be no Carnival in 2012, with the organisers saying that they do not have the funds to organise the event and comply with the regulations.

Now Lee Jasper has highlighted that Notting Hill Carnival, the biggest in Europe, may not happen. The authorities seem happy to allow it to drift into being cancelled with the organisation responsible for it in recent years not functioning and local Councils making little or no effort to encourage any replacement. As Jasper says: 'The history of the Notting Hill Carnival and the reason for its existence are firmly rooted in the ideals of freedom, unity and community empowerment.  Sadly, much of the language and debate from Kensington & Chelsea and Westminster councils and the Police largely focuses on how the event should be ‘contained’.If the authorities, through a combination of stealth, political and economic destabilization, forced resignations and using austerity and the Olympics as their pretext are able to effectively close down Carnival, the nation and London will be the poorer for it'.

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Up a Tree in New Orleans

I have been to a few parties in my time, but dancing in a tree house is something I haven't done.
In the past year there's been a series of parties in New Orleans in a big tree house in the grounds of the NOLA Art House, an old Creole mansion (built c.1870) where loads of artists live and work. The tree house is a 5 storey structure, apparently including a pool (not sure if that's up the tree or on the ground nearby).

The place looks amazing. According to one party goer: 'For anyone who's been in the tree house, the fact that anything at all is keeping it up is only slightly reassuring. When the installation is full of people dancing to music spun by DJs, the whole structure reverberates with the beat. The shaking is not so fun when you're standing on an isolated pod and the only person who can help you off is busy taking pictures of your terrified face'.

Lot's more about it here. They are having a Mardi Gras Festival of the Rising Sun in February - prompted by the story that the The House is said in several guidebooks to be the original House of the Rising Sun. Sadly I'm in New Cross rather than New Orleans, but if you're in the area check it out.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Festival Communication, Festival Time

'Festival communication actively engages the participants. It is this feature that distinguishes festival from those large-scale forms that may be observed from a distance or by television or those events in which the participants passively receive messages but have no choice in their roles. Therefore, we can describe festival action as a combination of participation and performance in a public context. Very little festival action is private; those acts that are, such as courtship or religious devotion, are nevertheless made possible and defined by the special purposes of a particular festival. Moreover, what is spo­ken, acted, or displayed in festival - public or private -anticipates a response, social or supernatural. This active mode, then, makes demands on participants, requiring their attention. And this concentration of attention heightens consciousness, creat­ing an intersection of individual performance and social reflex­ivity.


Festival communication involves a major shift from the frames of everyday life that focus attention on subsistence, routine, and production to frames that foster the transformative, reciprocal, and reflexive dimensions of social life. Such a frame shift does not rule out the mundane or the dangerous; com­mercial transactions flourish in many festivals, and mask and costume have on occasion disguised bloody violence. The shift in frames guarantees nothing but rather transposes real­ity so that intuition, inversion, risk, and symbolic expression reign.




The messages of festival concern the shared experience of the group and multiple interpretations of that experience. Shared experience may be enacted as myth, music, or drama; it may also be the marked representation of a segment of everyday life such as harvesting; it dominates the rhetoric as well as the action of an event clearly defined as "ours." In all socially based festivals, however, the messages will be directly related to the present social circumstances as well as to the past. Because festival brings the group together and communicates about the society itself and the role of the individual within it, every effort either to change or to con­strain social life will be expressed in some specific relationship to festival...

The manipulation of temporal reality

The temporal reality of festival incorporates time in at least two dimensions. In the first the principles of periodicity and rhythm define the experience. Not surprisingly, this cyclic pattern is associated with the cycles of the moon in cultures in which the lunar calendar is or has been used in recent history. With the passage of time festival occurs again and again, marking the cycles of the moon, the annual repetition of the seasons, and the movements of the planets governing the solar calendar. Festival occurs calendrically, either on a certain date each month or on a specific date or periodic time each year. The cycles of lime are the justification for festival, independent of any human agent. Unlike rites of passage, which move individuals through time, and unlike private parties, which structure a way out of time, festival yokes the social group to this cyclic force, establishing contact with the cosmos and the eternal processes of time.


In the second of these dimensions of temporality, expres­sions of tradition and change confront each other. Meaning in festival derives from experience; thus festival emphasizes the past. Yet festival happens in the present and for the present, directed toward the future.

Thus the new and different are le­gitimate dimensions of festival, contributing to its vitality. In the festival environment principles of reversal, repetition, juxtaposition, condensation, and excess flourish, leading to communication and behavior that contrasts with everyday life. These principles can be applied to every code in use for com­munication. Repetition, for example, operates so that the sound of drums, fireworks, or singing voices may be continuous throughout an event, or the major visual symbol such as an image of a bear or the symbol of corn or the cowboy/gaucho may be shown in many circumstances...'

Beverly J. Stoeltje, 'Festival' in Folklore, Cultural Performances and Popular Entertainments, ed. Richard Bauman. New York, 1992. See this post for another quote from this essay.

Photos of Carnaval del Pueblo in Southwark, August 2009 (a Latin American festival in South London), by love of peace (top) and vertigogen (bottom) via flickr.

Thursday, August 06, 2009

If it's called a festival, is it one?

'Festivals are collective phenomena and serve purposes rooted in group life. Systems of reciprocity and of shared responsibil­ity ensure the continuity of and participation in the festival through the distribution of prestige and production. Most fes­tivals provide the opportunity for individual religious devotion or individual performance, and this opportunity is a primary motive for the occasion. Other unstated but important purposes of festivals are the expression of group identity through ancestor worship or memorialization, the performance of highly valued skills and talents, or the articulation of the group's her­itage.

Rarely do such events use the term festival, employing instead a name related to the stated purposes or core symbols of the event: Mardi Gras (Catholic), Sukkot (Jewish), Holi (Hindu), Shalako (Zuni), Adae (Ghanaian), Calus (Romanian), Namahage (Japanese), Cowboy Reunion (American), and Feast of Fools (French). Those events that do have festival in their titles are generally contemporary modern constructions, employing festival characteristics but serving the commercial, ideological, or political purposes of self-interested authorities or entrepreneurs' (Beverly J. Stoeltje, 'Festival' in Folklore, Cultural Performances and Popular Entertainments, ed. Richard Bauman. New York, 1992).

Interesting point, but 'authenticity' isn't everything. John Eden reviews Bestival, arguing 'Whilst I agree with History is made at night’s comments on the commercial festival boom I would never really have been up for imposing something like Stonehenge Free Festival on children. I’ll take corporate sponsorship over hells angels, drug hoovers, and police brutality any day. They can discover all of that for themselves when they get older, ha ha'.

And indeed despite my earlier comments on festivals, we shouldn't fall for the myth of the earlier 'free festivals' as some kind of communism in one field contradiction-free utopia. There was certainly plenty of buying and selling , with the corollary of the threat of violence to preserve market share, and the violence of cops preventing Stonehenge festival in the mid-1980s was prefigured by the earlier violence of biker gangs - who, for instance, beat up punks at Stonehenge in 1980. As Penny Rimbaud from Crass recalled:

'Our presence at Stonehenge attracted several hundred punks to whom the festival scene was a novelty, they, in turn, attracted interest from various factions to whom punk was equally new. The atmosphere seemed relaxed and as dusk fell, thousands of people gathered around the stage to listen to the night's music. suddenly, for no apparent reason, a group of bikers stormed the stage saying that they were not going to tolerate punks at 'Their festival'. What followed was one of the most violent and frightening experiences of our lives. Bikers armed with bottles, chains and clubs, stalked around the site viciously attacking any punk that they set eyes on. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape to; all night we attempted to protect ourselves and other terrified punks from their mindless violence. There were screams of terror as people were dragged off into the darkness to be given lessons on peace and love; it was hopeless trying to save anyone because, in the blackness of the night, they were impossible to find. Meanwhile, the predominantly hippy gathering, lost in the soft blur of their stoned reality, remained oblivious of our fate'.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

J18 1999

Ten years ago today, the G8 Summit in Cologne was the occasion for the global J18 'Carnival Against Capital' with demonstrations, street parties, riots and every conceivable kind of protest in places across the world.

In London I took part in the huge carnivalesque protest initiated by Reclaim the Streets, which saw 10,000 people converge on the financial centre of the City of London. The day started for me with a protest by the Association of Autonomous Astronauts against the militarisation of space at the London HQ of the Lockheed Martin Corporation in Berkeley Square. Police prevented several people in spacesuits from entering the building (an incident broadcast live via mobile phone on BBC Radio Scotland), but a line of people stood outside with placards saying "Stop Star Wars - Military Out of Space" and handed out leaflets, the text of which is reproduced below. As well as a contribution to the J18 it marked the start of the AAA's 'Space 1999 - Ten Days that Shook the Universe' festival in London.

The we headed into the City where the main event was in full swing - in fact we'd already missed the famous storming of the London International Financial Futures and & Options Exchange. It was a blazing hot day and there was a sense of creative chaos with different stuff going off in all directions - one minute you were with thousands of people dancing in the streets, then you looked down an alleyway and there were people fighting with riot police. The latter seemed completely overwhelmed, I don't think anyone - authorities or activists - knew what to expect. At some point the crowd began to disperse, not in ones or twos, but in processions heading off in different directions. I remember a load of us slowly heading through an underpass with a huge sound system on a lorry shaking the walls with techno.

It was the peak of the Reclaim the Streets idea - in many different countries protests were accompanied by electronic beats from mobile sound systems. In London the police became wise to the tactic, and some of the activists also began to agonise about whether partying was getting in the way of politics (always a bad sign in the development of movements).

Stefan Szczelkun's film really captures the atmosphere, including some of the different musics on the day - drumming, samba, and at one point people dancing to Leftfield's Open Up (with John Lydon singing 'Burn Hollywood Burn'):



 The image below is from a Reclaim the Streets flyer given out in the lead up to J18. The central quote 'To work for delight...' comes from Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life (click image to enlarge):




The full text of the leaflet read:

On June 18th the leaders of the eight most powerful nations will meet for the G8 summit in Cologne, Germany. Their agenda will be the intensification of economic growth, "free" trade and more power for corporations as the only way towards a bright future. But these 'leaders' are not in control... Our planet is actually run by the financial market - a giant video game in which people buy and sell blips on electronic screens, trading life for money in their search for ever-higher profits. Yet the consequences of this frenzied game are very real: human lives, ecosystems, jobs and even entire economies are at the mercy of this reckless global system.

As the economy becomes increasingly global and interdependent those resisting its devastating social and ecological consequences are joining forces. Around the world, the movement grows - from Mexico's Zapatistas, to France's unemployed, to India's small farmers, to those fighting road building in the UK, to anti-oil activists in Nigeria - people are taking direct action and reclaiming their lives from the insane game of the markets. Resistance will converge on June 18th as hundreds of groups simultaneously occupy and transform banking and financial centres across the globe.

If you act like there is no possibility of change for the better, you guarantee that there will be no change for the better. The choice is ours.

Carn'ival n. 1. An explosion of freedom involving laughter, mockery, dancing, masquerade and revelry. 2. Occupation of the streets in which the symbols and ideals of authority are subverted. 3. When the marginalised take over the centre and create a world turned upside down. 4. You cannot watch carnival, you take part. 5. An unexpected carnival is revolutionary.

'To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection'

Cap'italism n. 1. A system by which the few profit from the exploitation of the many. 2. A mindset addicted to profit, work and debt which values money more than life. 3. An unsustainable ideology obsessed by growth despite our finite planet. 4. The cause of the global, social and ecological crisis. 5. A social system overthrown at the end of the 20th century...

A massive carnival in the world's biggest financial centre - the city of London - will be Reclaim The Streets' part of the day. Let's replace the roar of profit and plunder with the sounds and rhythms of party, carnival and pleasure!

Friday June 18th - An international day of protest, action and carnival aimed at the heart of the global economy: the banking and financial centres.

Reclaim The Streets. Meet 12 noon, Liverpool Street Station, London EC1. Bring a radio and disguise yourself to blend into the City. Office worker or bike courier costumes work best!

Don't play their game, call in sick on Friday June the 18th

Do not underestimate the power of global resistance

Text of the AAA leaflet given out on J18:
Stop Star Wars: Military out of Space - Association of Autonomous Astronauts

While film fans wait for the new Star Wars movie the real thing is already taking shape above our heads. Space technology is a key part of the military machine being used to destroy people and buildings in Yugoslavia and Iraq. And the US and other governments are actively planning to deploy new weapons in space capable of wreaking even more destruction on planet earth. Today the Association of Autonomous Astronauts are demanding that one of the key players in the space arms race - the Lockheed Martin corporation - hands over its resources to us for the development of peaceful, galaxy-friendly community based space exploration.

From the Blitz to the Moon
Space and military technology have always gone hand in hand. In the Second World War, thousands of people were killed in London and other cities by the Nazis' V2 rocket. When the war finished, Werner Von Braun and the other scientists responsible for the V2 were given new jobs by the US government. The V2 technology was refined and served as the basis for both intercontinentaI Ballistic Missiles (nuclear weapons) and the Apollo Space programme that sent people to the moon.

Satellites of death

A high proportion of the satellites launched into space serve military purposes. The 1991 Gulf War saw the US combine data from surveillance, meteorological and communications satellites to deploy its war machine with lethal effectiveness. It's been the same story in the current war on Yugoslavia. For instance, B-1B Lancer bombers have been used "equipped with advanced cluster bomb units which use satellite navigation to detect and destroy targets (Guardian 3.4.99). Naturally this super-accurate space age technology hasn't stopped people being blown to bits in hospitals, houses, old people's homes, prisons and on bridges.

Star Wars - the sequel

Military satellites are only the start. The US Space Command (part of the US Air Force) is actively planning the deployment of weapons in space. According to General Joseph Ashy, commander in chief of the US Space Command (motto 'Master of Space'), "we will engage terrestrial targets someday from space. We will engage targets in space, from space" . In the 1980s Ronald Reagan's Star Wars programme was derided as a Cold War fantasy. Now the plan to deploy weapons in space to 'defend' the US from missile attack is back on with the Ballistic Missile Defence programme. These 'defensive' weapons could be quickly adapted to attack enemy satellites or targets on the ground.

Cassini - nukes in space

The use of lasers and similar weapons in space would only be feasible with powerful energy sources, and public opinion is already being softened up for nuclear powered weapons systems in space. In 1997 NASA launched the Cassini space probe to Saturn with 32.8 kg of radioactive plutonium on board. Fortunately this rocket did not blow up on take-off (unlike many recent launches), but Cassini is due to pass close to earth again in August 1999 with potentially catastrophic results if anything goes wrong.

Lockheed Martin

Today military and space technology are concentrated in the hands of the same big corporations. With Lockheed Martin, the two areas are even co-ordinated in the same section of the company - Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space, based in Sunnyvale, California. Lockheed have reaped millions of pounds from the US space programme as a key contractor for NASA. Today, LM Missiles and Space are involved in the space shuttle programme and the development of the International Space Station. At the same time they are continuing to develop Trident missiles, nuclear weapons currently deployed by the US and UK governments in nuclear powered submarines in oceans across the world. Lockheed Martin UK is a major defence contractor for the Ministry of Defence, completing the installation of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles on Royal Navy submarines just in time for their use in Yugoslavia.

AAA

The Association of Autonomous Astronauts is opposed to the commercial and military exploitation of space. We really don't think it's worth going through all the effort of getting into space just to live by the same rules as on earth. What attracts us to space exploration is the possibility of doing things differently. We are not interested in finding out what's its like to work in space, to find new ways of killing. We want to find out what dancing or sex feels like in zero gravity, to find new ways of living.

As part of the J18 global festival against corporate exploitation we demand that Lockheed Martin decommissions its weapon-making capability and hands over its resources to the AAA. We will be outlining our programme of community-based, galaxy-friendly space exploration in our Space 1999 festival, which starts today.
There is some footage of the AAA J18 protest in this AAA video.
Other relections: Christoph Fringeli at Datacide - 10 Years J18 199; Ian Bone.

Friday, November 28, 2008

Notting Hill Carnival Under Threat - Again

For the umpteenth time, the future of Notting Hill Carnival is under threat, with complaints from the police and the Conservative Council of the 'Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea' about the failure of organisers to get the festival closed down by night-time, among other things. From the London Evening Standard, 28 November 2008:

'The Notting Hill Carnival faces cancellation next year amid grave concerns over public safety. Council chiefs have threatened to withdraw their support for the annual street party unless organisers dramatically improve their preparations. They claim this year's event was let down by "profound organisational failure" and it is their duty to avoid the 2009 carnival being marred by similar chaos.

Among the key failings identified by Kensington and Chelsea council, which hosts the parade, was the failure to recruit stewards until just three weeks before the event leaving little time for training. This year's carnival, attended by about one million people, descended into a riot on its final night with a large mob pelting police with bottles and bricks, leaving more than 40 officers injured... '

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Dancing at the Royal Exchange

Last week - 18th November - people gathered outside the Royal Exchange in the City of London (financial district) for a mobile clubbing event. You know the kind of thing, flashmob meets up and people dance to their own music on their headphones, then disperse. Life in London and Make Shift Media were there - the latter reporting 'There were babies, and men in suits, and cyclists, and students, and hipsters, and hippies… they were swaying, and rocking out, and popping, and skanking... Every once in a while a spontaneous cheer would erupt, people would throw their arms up and whoop and dance harder for a minute. So much fun to be among city strangers, staying warm in the chilly November night, all boogying down!'


As the financial crisis deepens, perhaps so does people's focus on the financial districts of London and other cities. In London at least this is an area that many people never go to unless they work there and it can be quite ghostly at weekends when less people are around. So it's good to see some streetlife returning to the area that was once the heart of London life, not just banking. Further east at Canary Wharf there was also o a Halloween dancing on the grave of capitalism event with ghosts and witches (on the same day there was an anti-capitalist Zombie Walk in Amsterdam).


The place where people danced last week outside the Royal Exchange in London was where hundreds of (mainly) punky protestors were penned in by police during the March 1984 Stop the City 'Carnival Against War, Oppression and Destruction'. And in June 1999, thousands took part in the riotous Carnival Against Capital in the area, with music from large mobile sound systems, not just from ipods. More to come I am sure...

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Dancing in the Streets: Revolution in Portugal 1974

In April 1974, decades of fascist rule in Portugal were brought to an end in a coup staged by left wing military officers. In the weeks and months that followed there was a mass upsurge of nearly 50 years of repressed energies, with strikes, demonstrations and factory occupations. A good account of these events is contained in Portugal: The Impossible Revolution by Phil Mailer, from which this vivid description of May Day demonstrations in Lisbon is extracted. It is a great example of the explosion of the carnivalesque in the context of a revolutionary festival - dancing in the streets with all possibilities open. Although the movement ultimately subsided, fascism was permanently vanquished, and the Portuguese colonies - including Angola and Mozambique - gained their independence.

We have never seen anything like it before. The whole of Lisbon is out, the emotion beyond belief. All morning the radio has been calling for 'calm and dignity'... We stand at the corner of Alameda and try to absorb it all: the noise, the spirit, the joy surging out in floods, after half a century of being bottled up...

This is the day of the workers and all Lisbon is here... I could cry. Others are weeping already. All day we march, lost in different parts of a crowd half a million strong. Flowers, carnations everywhere. Along the way, people are offering water to demonstrators, from their windows...

Young workers are dancing to the music. Police cars go by, with demonstrators on top of them. A bus passes, the driver tooting his horn in rhythm with other noises. There's no telling where that vehicle will end up: it's going in the opposite direction to the destination written on the front. The emergency exits of all buses are open, flags protruding from every window. A group of youths pass, 'the Gringos of Samba' according to their banner. Their Latin-American music is very catching. More people begin to dance. A group of students pass shouting 'O Povo armado jamaissera vencido' (an armed people will never be defeated). People laugh at this subversive variation of the 'official' slogan. The whole thing is confusion. People are cheering anything and everything. Someone shouts 'Viva Spinola, viva o communismo'.

We go to the house of certain young singers whose songs had been banned.Their records, censored, were rarely played on the radio. Everyone is drinking. A singing session ensues, which after an hour moves back to Rossio. We stay there, sitting on the ground, until 3 am, singing, watching people jump into the icy cold fountain. Finally, exhausted, I decide to go home. I shall never forget that First of May. The noise, the noise, the noise is still ringing in my ears. The horns tooting in joy, the shouting, the slogans, the singing and dancing. The doors of revolution seem open again, after forty eight years of repression. In that single day everything was replaced in perspective. Nothing was god-given, all was man-made. People could see their misery and their problems in a historical setting. How can words describe 600,000 people demonstrating in a city of a million? Or the effect of carnations everywhere, in the barrels of rifles, on every tank and every ear, in the hands of troops and demonstrators alike?....

A week has passed, although it already feels like many months. Every hour has been lived to the full. It is already difficult to remember what thepapers looked like before, or what people had then said. Hadn't there always been a revolution?

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Mardi Gras in New Orleans

This weekend there has been a 'festival of New Orleans' in London, with Dr John playing for free at the O2 arena in Greenwich. Unfortunately I haven't managed to get down there, but I have been reading up on the history of New Orleans, and specifically the Mardi Gras carnival.

The Mardi Gras carnival in its modern form is the result of ‘a process of creolization, a melding of cultural identities as strands of cultural material fused into a synthesis of something new’. In the eighteenth century, ‘Carnival began more as a closed operation than as a public festival’ with masqued balls in the houses of the wealthy preceding Lent. These later developed into formal processions under the auspices of the aristocracy.

Alongside this was another tradition of public dancing amongst enslaved Africans from the early days of 18th century New Orleans: ‘The plantation economy soon faltered, and land­owners could not generate enough food to feed the enslaved Africans who worked their holdings. The rulers allowed slaves to trade food they grew, hides or meat they hunted, and vegetables and fruit they cultivated at a makeshift Sunday marketplace on the grassy public commons behind the ramparts of the town. The place became known as Place du Congo, or the Congo plains. Today, a portion of the area is contained in Louis Armstrong Park along Rampart Street, just outside the French Quarter… on Sunday afternoons at the Place du Congo market a tradition of public dancing mushroomed. As many as five hundred dancers at a time formed concentric rings, moving in counterclockwise circles, their hand­clapping and feet-shuffling forming cross rhythms to music made on conga drums, tom-toms, panpipes, and calabashes… Costuming was fundamental to African ritual. Mask making as a specific tribal custom was lost in the Middle Passage, but the idea of mask-and-dance in a spiritual continuum lived on in a city where gentry flocked to see the exotic spectacles. Nowhere else in the South were slaves given such freedom of expres­sion in music and dance. The Africans sometimes dressed as Indians, "ornamented with a number of tails of the smaller wild beasts," wearing "fringes, ribbons, little bells, and shells and balls, jingling and flirt­ing about the performers' legs and arms."'

'The patrician love of masked balls and the high place of costumery in the danced religions of the Afri­can ritual psyche spilled into the streets as Carnival traditions unfolded. "Men and boys, women and girls, bond and free, black and white, exert themselves to invent and appear in grotesque, quizzical, diabolical, horrible, strange masks and disguises," reflected a visi­tor at the 1835 celebration. "Human bodies are seen with heads of beasts and birds, beasts and birds with human heads; demi-beasts, demi-fishes, snakes' heads and bodies with arms of apes; man-bats from the moon; mermaids; satyrs, beggars, monks and robbers parade and march on foot, on horseback, in wagons, carts, coaches ... in rich profusion up and down the streets, wildly shouting, singing, laughing, drumming, fiddling, fifeing ... as they wend their reckless way."'
In the 1850s, carnival began to become more formalised: ‘The Mistick Krewe of Comus, formed in 1857, gave Mardi Gras its formal patina. People wearing costumes and parading in streets had been around for years when along came Comus, a group of elite young white men…This was the first group to form an elite and secretive men's society, which came to be known as a krewe. "Their lavish balls could be attended only by those fortunate enough to have received invitations, but their proces­sions of floats, lights, and music could be viewed by anyone who cared to, and vast crowds lined the city's streets," observes the artist and Mardi Gras chronicler Henri Schindler… Float designs were steeped in themes of antiquity and Renaissance drama. With the artistry of early Carnival rose the aspirations of a former slaveholding class that wedded its eco­nomic recovery to an idea of neoclassical glory. Mardi Gras became a time when "deities of forgotten pan­theons and the splendors of long-vanished courts are restored for a season, summoned into being from the gilded vaults of the old city's memory”’.
Black Krewes

Later other parts of New Orleans society began to form their own krewes: ‘The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, the leading black krewe, was formed in 1909 (its parade began seven years later). Zulu today is the longest and most imaginatively designed black parade, a rudder of Carnival. Black men in blackface, wearing grass skirts, hand out gilded coconuts from floats that roll down St. Charles Avenue on Mardi Gras morning, preceding the Krewe of Rex . But where the Rex ball is a pinnacle in the calendar of the white elite, with invitations difficult to come by even for those with personal ties to members, the Zulu ball is a sprawling affair with upwards of ten thousand people, many of them bringing food to be laid out on a vast array of tables. Zulu is where privilege melds with the masses: just about anyone can go to the ball for the price of a ticket'.

'Zulu began as a double satire. A group of black longshoremen engaged in a parody of the Zulu tribe in South Africa and used their African costumes in a further burlesque of Rex and the would-be royalty of white folk. If Rex had a royal robe and scepter, King Zulu wore a grass skirt and waved a ham bone. Out of this smirking parody evolved an organization rooted in the working and middle classes. Louis Armstrong rode as an exultant king of Zulu in 1949. Today the city's leading politicians, including several dozen whites, are members of Zulu… The Zulu parade has been and still is one of Mardi Gras's most loved traditions'.

'The Zulu krewe consists of a non traditional hierarchy of characters. It has a king but no nobles per se, and one character, the "Big Shot of Africa: outshines the king (the term outshine was used in earlier days and meant to look better than someone else in competition). A Zulu member created the Big Shot character in the 1930s. He is the man behind the throne; no one can see the king without seeing the Big Shot first. Among the other Zulu characters, the Witch Doctor was one of the first. He prayed to the gods for good health for the members and the king, as well as for good weather and safety. The Ambassador, Governor, and Mayor were characters created in the 1970s, representing heads of government… Also in the 1970s, James I. Russell and Sonny Jim Poole created the "Mr. Big Stuff" char­acter, who tries to outshine the Big Shot. The idea came from the 1970 recording "Mr. Big Stuff" by Jean Knight'.

'Another side to black Carnival is a symbolic revolt against the overlords of history. In 1883 or there­abouts, a group of black day laborers began masking as Indians. This tradition harked back to the slave dances at Congo Square, where Indians watched Africans who sometimes dressed as Indians. Indians had harbored runaway slaves in Louisiana territory. Unlike Natives in many other parts of the South, where Indians were driven out by force, the Choctaws in New Orleans melted into the local popu­lation, many of them marrying blacks. Traveling Wild West shows of the 1880s had a hold on the black population. But with sinuous street dances and improvisational rhythms pounded out on hand percussion instruments, the Mardi Gras Indians cast a spiritual searchlight onto the African past. Embracing the persona of the Indian, the black tribes paid the supreme compliment to another race by adapting their trappings as spirit figures. The black Indians used the ritual stage of Carnival to parade as rebellious warriors for a day, stopping in bars, sometimes fighting, releas­ing passions otherwise bottled up by the dally grind of poverty and race’
'The trancelike possessions of African Americans in the vernacular churches found an analogue in the dancing of the black Indians, according to the late Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr., founder of Guardians of the Flame. "Trance: remarked the chief, a folk philosopher who worked for many years as a waiter and enjoyed the works of Albert Camus, "I can see winos, anybody, you can get to a certain point and go into a trance. To the casual observer they look like they're just jumping up and down, but in reality they're in a world by them­selves, rhythmically." Some call it a trance; others say "with the spirit." The term "possessed" is another way of saying "fugue state." The sudden force of energy rushes into the body, throwing it out of control, into gyrations, while the mind - or spirit- spins into another zone.’

Gay Krewes

'The French Quarter is the Babylonian essence of New Orleans, a riot of erotica during the big day, with many people walking around semi-nude, nearly nude, or nude-but-painted…The high point of Mardi Gras in the Quarter is the midday drag-queen beauty contest on a stage at the corner of Bourbon and St. Ann Streets. The dazzling costumes, many with rainbow feathers, dripping light, bespeak a tradition of the day without ­closets stretching back well before the rise of gay lib­eration in the 1970s. Gay Mardi Gras grew more formal in the 1950s with the Krewe of Yuga, which sati­rized the traditional Mardi Gras balls. The police raided Yuga's first ball in 1958, and ninety-six members had their names printed in the newspaper in an arrest sweep'.

'Undeterred, the Krewe of Petronius formed in 1961, marking a move by gay men into the Carnival mainstream. By the early 1980s some fifteen gay krewes were holding balls with elab­orate floor shows. The AIDS epidemic, however, cut deeply into the community, and by 1999 only five krewes were active, including the Lords of Leather and the first black gay krewe, Mwindo'.

Source: Mardi Gras in New Orleans, USA: Annals of a Queen by Jason Berry in Carnival, ed. by Barbara Mauldin, 2004, Thames & Hudson. Pictures: top: a 19th century Mardi Gras scene, sourced from a history of the Rex parade; bottom, Mardi Gras 2007 by 'Sir: Poseyal Squire Poet'

Sunday, October 05, 2008

The Carnivalesque

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White on the carnivalesque, extracted from The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986):

…in the long-term history from the seventeenth to the twen­tieth century, as we have seen above, there were literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to eliminate carnival and popular festivity from European life. In different areas of Europe the pace varied, depending upon religious, class and economic fac­tors. But everywhere, against the periodic revival of local festivity and occasional reversals, a fundamental ritual order of western culture came under attack - its feasting, violence, drinking, processions, fairs, wakes, rowdy spectacle and outrageous clamour were subject to sur­veillance and repressive control. We can briefly list some particular instances of this general process. In 1855 the Great Donnybrook Fair of Dublin was abolished in the very same year that Bartholomew Fair in London finally succumbed to the determined attack of the London City Missions Society. In the decade following the Fairs Act of 1871 over 700 fairs, mops and wakes were abolished in England.

By the 1880s the Paris carnival was rapidly being transformed into a trade show cum civic/military parade, and although the 'cortege du boeuf gras' processed round the streets until 1914, 'little by little it was suppressed and restricted because it was said to cause a traffic problem' (Pillement 1972). In 1873 the famous Nice carnival was taken over by a 'comite des Fetes', brought under bureaucratic bourgeois control and reorganized quite self-consciously as a tourist attraction for the increasing numbers who spent time on the Riviera and who were finding neighbouring San Remo's new casino a bigger draw. As Wolfgang Hartmann has shown (1976), in Germany in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, traditional pro­cessions and festivities were rapidly militarized and incorporated into the symbolism and 'classical body' of the State. This dramatic transform­ation of the ritual calendar had implications not only for each stratum of the social formation, particularly for those which were disengaging themselves from ongoing practices, but for the basic structures of symbo­lic activity in Europe: carnival was now everywhere and nowhere.

Many social historians treat the attack on carnival as a victory over popular culture, first by the Absolutist state and then by the middle classes, a process which is viewed as the more or less complete destruc­tion of popular festivity: the end of carnival. In this vision of the complete elimination of the ritual calendar there is the implicit assump­tion that, in so far as it was the culture of a rural population which was disappearing, the modernization of Europe led inevitably to the super­session of traditional festivity - it was simply one of the many casualties in the movement towards an urban, industrial society….

But, as we have shown, carnival did not simply disappear. At least four different processes were involved in its ostensible break-up: frag­mentation; marginalization; sublimation; repression.

Carnival had always been a loose amalgam of procession, feasting, competition, games and spectacle, combining diverse elements from a large repertoire and varying from place to place. Even the great carnivals of Venice, Naples, Nice, Paris and Nuremberg were fluid and change­able in their combination of practices. During the long and uneven process of suppression (we often find that a carnival is banned over and over again, only to re-emerge each time in a slightly altered fashion), there was a tendency for the basic mixture to break down, certain elements becoming separated from others. Feasting became separated from performance, spectacle from procession: the grotesque body was fragmented. At the same time it began to be marginalized both in terms of social class and geographical location. It is important to note that even as late as the nineteenth century, in some places, carnival remained a ritual involving most classes and sections of a community - the disen­gaging of the middle class from it was a slow and uneven matter. Part of that process was, as we have seen, the 'disowning' of carnival and its symbolic resources, a gradual reconstruction of the idea of carnival as the culture of the Other. This act of disavowal on the part of the emergent bourgeoisie, with its sentimentalism and its disgust, made carnival into the festival of the Other. It encoded all that which the proper bourgeois must strive not to be in order to preserve a stable and ‘correct' sense of self.

William Addison (1953) charts many of these geographical marginalizations in the English context in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Within a town the fair, mop, wake or carnival, which had once taken over the whole of the town and permitted neither outside nor outsider to its rule, was confined to certain areas and gradually driven ­out from the well-to-do neighbourhoods. In the last years of the Bury St Edmunds Fair it was 'banished from the aristocratic quarter of Angel Hill and confined to St Mary's and St James's squares' (Addison 1953). In and around London:


‘Both regular and irregular fairs were being steadily pushed from the centre outwards as London grew and the open spaces were built over. Greenwich and Stepney were the most popular at one time. Others - Croydon's for example - came to the fore later when railways extended the range of pleasure as well as the range of boredom, until towards the end of the nineteenth century London was encircled by these country fairs, some of which were, in fact, ancient charter fairs made popular by easier transport. ... Most of them were regarded by the magistrates as nuisances, and sooner or later most of those without charters were suppressed. Yet such was the popularity of these country fairs round London that to suppress them in one place led inevitably to an outbreak elsewhere, and often where control was more difficult. As the legal adviser to the City Corporation had said in the 1730's, 'It is at all times difficult by law to put down the ancient customs and practices of the multitude.' (Addison 1953)

In England the sites of 'carnival' moved more and more to the coastal periphery, to the seaside. The development of Scarborough, Brighton, Blackpool, Clacton, Margate and other seaside resorts reflects a process of liminality which, in different ways, was taking place across Europe as a whole. The seaside was partially legitimated as a carnival­esque site of pleasure on the grounds of health, since it combined the (largely mythical) medicinal virtues of the spa resorts with tourism and the fairground. It can be argued that this marginalization is a result of other, anterior processes of bourgeois displacement and even repres­sion. But even so, this historical process of marginalizalion must be seen as an historical tendency distinct from the actual elimination of carnival.

Bakhtin is right to suggest that post-romantic culture is, to a con­siderable extent, subjectivized and interiorized and on this account frequently related to private terrors, isolation and insanity rather than to robust kinds of social celebration and critique. Bakhtin however does not give us a convincing explanation of this sublimation of carnival. The social historians, on the other hand, tend not to consider processes of sublimation at all: for them carnival came to an end and that was that. They tend not to believe in the return of the repressed.


But a convincing map of the transformation of carnival involves tracing migrations, concealment, metamorphoses, fragmentations, in­ternalization and neurotic sublimations. The disjecta membra of the gro­tesque body of carnival found curious lodgement throughout the whole social order of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. These dispersed carnivalesque elements represent more than the insig­nificant nomadic residues of the ritual tradition. In the long process of disowning carnival and rejecting its periodical inversions of the body and the social hierarchy, bourgeois society problematized its own relation to the power of the 'low', enclosing itself, indeed often defining itself, by its suppression of the 'base' languages of carnival.


As important as this was the fact that carnival was being margina­lized temporally as well as spatially. The carnival calendar of oscillation between production and consumption which had once structured the whole year was displaced by the imposition of the working week under the pressure of capitalist industrial work regimes. The semiotic polari­ties, the symbolic clusters of classical and grotesque, were no longer temporally pinned into a calendrical or seasonal cycle, and this involved a degree of unpredictability in moment and surface of emergence. The 'carnivalesque' might erupt from the literary text, as in so much surrea­list art, or from the advertisement hoarding, or from a pop festival or a jazz concert.


Carnival was too disgusting for bourgeois life to endure except as sentimental spectacle. Even then its specular identifications could only be momentary, fleeting and partial- voyeuristic glimpses of a promiscu­ous loss of status and decorum which the bourgeoisie had had to deny as abhorrent in order to emerge as a distinct and 'proper' class.


Photos from Notting Hill Carnival: top from 1976 Carnival riot, bottom from August 2008 at the Good Times Sound System (sourced from Flickr, picture by Berg's Eye View).

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Sound Systems Ban at Luton Carnival?

From The Luton News, 27 March 2007:

'Police-run carnival' anger

Bedfordshire police appear to be digging in their heels over a ban on urban sound stages at Luton carnival. The force remains committed to keeping the dedicated music sites out of the May event for safety reasons. But carnival bosses say the police are simply dictating how the town celebrates its biggest day on the calendar.

Luton Carnival Arts Development Trust's Paul Anderson said: "They basically, flatly turned it down and we are still wondering why they are being opposed to it when the sound sites didn't have any incidents last year. We are starting to see a police-run carnival and that's not what we want."

A meeting on Thursday, between police, the carnival trust, the Afro Caribbean Cultural Development Forum and the Luton Sound Systems Forum, was the latest attempt by Luton Borough Council to find a solution suitable to all. As first reported in the Luton News, the urban and reggae sound systems, which attract thousands of people from across the UK, are set to be removed from the event at the insistence of the police. Supt Andy Martin, at Luton Police Station, said an objection raised by the police against four of eight music sites was based on previous experience of the carnival and was purely on the grounds of public safety.

Photo: Luton Carnival 2006

Monday, February 19, 2007

Trinidad Carnival

The Trinidad Carnival this week has commemorated a key point in the Carnival's history - the Canboulay riots of 1881-1884 (the picture on the left, from Illustrated London News is of the 1888 carnival). According to one account:



"The year is 1881 — the Canboulay riots — when a 'major armed clash between the Trinidad colonial police and the 'local' population occurred/ following a decision to clamp down on the Carnival celebrations of that year. The barrack-yards of Port of Spain, where the 'Diametres' ruled, presided over neighbourhoods, nurtured loyalties, honed and hoarded the weapons of survival for confrontations such as these, gathered their bands of revellers turned warriors and went forth to defy and try the governor. If Canboulay was a fight between bands where individual 'stickmen' resolved their inter-personal rivalries and waged regional warfare against other bands, in 1881, 'it took on the character of a historical underclass in united action against the police.' In 1882, Trinidad again — riot this time in San Fernando when the state tried to limit 'Playing' till 9.00 p.m" (Behind the Masquerade: The Story of Notting Hill Carnival – Kwesi Owusu and Jacob Ross, London: Arts Media Group, 1988).


In 1884 in 'In Princes Town, the masqueaders attacked the police station after magistrate Hobson decided to confine the police to barracks because the crowd was too large. After Hobson was felled with a stone, the police opened fire on the rioters killing a youth and seriously wounding two others'.
Picture right: Trinidad carnival 2006

Carnival in Brazil

It is Carnival time in Brazil, now a major cultural celebration, but one which people had to struggle to establish:

'By the turn of the [20th] century carnival had become the staging ground for a new battle fought between the proponents of a 'civilized' celebration and the recalcitrantly 'African' blacks. A flurry of police regulations and restrictions sought to limit or eliminate the black influence on carnival. African drum sessions were prohibited. With an eye to keeping black revellers up on the hills, many regulations specified that only 'certain types' of carnival associations could parade down Rio's principal streets... Police would raid sambistas' homes in order to confiscate their guitars' (Alma Guillermoprieto, Samba, London: Cape, 1990).

Today carnival is commercialised and partly contained in the Sambadrome, yet still arguably a festival of liberation:

'Nowhere is the world created by the festival more completely and absolutely opposed to the world of normal daily life, of work, suffering and sadness, than in the parade of the samba schools... without ever losing sight of the often oppressive, exploitative commercialization of the festival, it is still a world in which the experience of oppression and exploitation is swept away in a sense of freedom - a world in which the masses are heatlhy and energetic, well fed and well informed. It is a model of the world as it ought to be, yet as it is only during carnaval... The vision of carnval is clearly utopian - a model of the world as it might be rather than as it is'
(Richard G Parker, Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: sexual culture in contemporary Brazil, Boston: Beacon Press, 1993)