For those who are new to Carnival here are some
explanations to guide you through the Carnival Lingo
Notting Hill Carnival is the most popular place
to be on what the British call August Bank Holiday Monday.
Millions are drawn 
to Europe's greatest
street festival to look at the bands (groups) of mas
players, masqueraders (costumed dancers) dressed in every
imaginable colour of the artistic palette mashing down de
Grove ( dancing on the streets) of Ladbroke Grove as they
wend their way to the parade route. The stage is set for
Carnival.
This is Carnival as we
all know it. All the ingredients are present. There is the masquerade
(the collective ritual celebration), public space transformed
into a theatrical stage to play the mas (actual enactment
of that costume) through kinesics/dance, mime, and specific
gestures to tell a specific story. There is the mas itself
(costumes) and music to create the extravagantly devised
spectacle. In addition, every masquerade band has a specific theme.
The mas man/woman (a carnival, creative artist) aims to
depict a specific idea through the specially designed mas (the
costume). The mas thus conveys the theme - the artist's
vision through a wealth of visual clues and symbols from which
different people will take different layers of meaning both
literal and metaphorical. These ideas are translated into designs
that function in terms of balance and texture, and the
relationship of these to colour, rhythm and movement.
Designs, however, do
not simply occur. Each designer has an artistic repertoire: a
range of possible and permissible ideas. How the designer selects
from this repertoire rests with his judgement 
and how he utilizes the carnival forum. In addition,
like fashion designs change: what is acceptable today is not
tomorrow. This involves year-round planning as well as private
space for the designs to materialize. The designs go through
three distinct phases: conception and researching of the idea,
development and execution. The designer first presents the idea
in the form of thumbnail sketches. At this point what is being
sought is shape and movement in the costume. This is followed by
several meetings with the mas engineers, who decide on the
feasibility of the design, and they in turn deal with the entire
network of mas workers and helpers who produce the band. This
complex mosaic: carnival artist, aesthetic depiction, costume
design, mas worker, mas player, dance and music harmoniously
crystallizes on the street stage before a massive audience.
Carnival, mas and its accompanying Carnival Arts celebrate life
in a very sophisticated, highly artistic way.
Here we are not looking at a generic Carnival. We are looking at
a historical and culturally specific model, which has its origins
not only in the African traditions that were transported to the
Caribbean but also in the European traditions brought by the
various colonizers.
This Carnival - from which Notting Hill and other
Carnivals across Britain evolved - has its origins specifically
in Trinidad & Tobago. It was transported to this country by
economically marginalized peoples who migrated to Britain seeking
a better life. Today, Carnival is continually evolving. The
traditional Trinidadian form now reflects the social and
political experiences of Afro-Caribbean people in Britain. The
original model has also been taken up and developed by a variety
of other groups to encompass their own socio-cultural legacies -
West African, South American, European and Asian. Carnival's
growth, from the 1834 "Black Devils" slavery ensemble
to the post-modern mas (masquerade) forms found in Britain
today, thus reflects its potential to expand continuously to
include new themes and nuances.
During the course of 1995, the Combined Arts
Department of the Arts Council of England commissioned the
linguistic anthropologist and carnival scholar, Dr. Patricia Alleyne-Dettmers
(Fellow in the Department of Sociology & Social Policy at the
Roehampton Institute, London) to develop and compile a publicly
accessible National Carnival Database of textual and visual
information.
The database initiative was undertaken by the Arts Council as
one of its major strategic initiatives in response to and in
recognition of a long standing need to:
- Create a publically accessible central resource of
information on carnival practitioners and practice in
England, which could be used variously to rase awareness,
critical understanding and the profile of Carnival and
carnival arts development.
- Provide a national resource for a fast developing
regional, national and global art form.
- Synergize Carnival in Britain as a highly sophisticated
art form that provides the means for multi-cultural
expression education, integration and communication.
Patricia Tamara Alleyne-Dettmers (BA Trinidad & Tobago, MA,
Msc, PhD, USA) is a professionally trained linguistic
anthropologist who was born and educated in Trinidad, the USA and
the Federal Republic of Germany. She has studied and researched
Trinidadian Carnival over the past ten years, and continues to do
so from the perspective of the native masquerader, and from the
outside as the professional anthropologist.
Her PhD dissertation, Jump , Jump and Play
Mas! Innovates in linguistic models to elucidate complex
carnival cultural traditions. It analyses not only the
multi-cultural configurations that constitute
Trinidadian/Caribbean culture, but it confronts the readership
with the complementarity of different forms and styles in
Carnival that transcend ethnic and national barriers as a culture
matures and grows.
In Britain, her research examines the processes of cultural
transformations underlying the mechanics of Globalization
and global migrations of the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora as they
relate to the socio-historical origins of Notting Hill and other
British Carnivals and how that newly-emerging, highly artistic
cultural form re-negotiates and adapts itself to its new cultural
niche: Black British Culture.
She is currently working on Carnival texts both
on Trinidadian and Notting Hill Carnival for publication.
Her broad knowledge includes the history of
Carnival, the sociology underlying the formation and production
of bands, as well as the aesthetic cultural representations of
carnival bands (this refers to the masquerade themes that are
played and what these symbolise).
AUTHOR: Dr Patricia Tamara Alleyne-Dettmers
SKETCHES: Wayne Berkeley
PAGE DESIGH & EXECUTION: Dr Oliver Flanagan
Email Author
This page has been accessed 
times since 1 July 1997.
Contents © Patricia Tamara Alleyne-Dettmers. All rights
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