There are a number of changes percolating for Carnival 2011 that promise to shake the status quo of the festival in different ways. Last week, Minister of Art and Multiculturalism Winston Peters announced, to almost universal accolades, that Carnival would return to a stage in the Savannah. At that press conference, the Minister also announced another move that has been met with less reflexive enthusiasm, the creation of a “People’s Band” that would embrace anyone who wished to join with a costume.
Or at least that’s what he seemed to be saying. There was no detailed plan or strategy for how such a thing would work and in that information vacuum, concerns are being raised. In roughly the same time frame, the Trinidad and Tobago Coalition of Services Industries announced an initiative, in collaboration with the Ministry of Trade and the National Carnival Development Foundation to create a web-based Carnival hub that would function as a sort of single electronic party window for the festival. All of these changes provide early vectors of the kind of thinking that’s likely to inform Carnival over the coming decade and each offers both positive and negative possibilities. Beginning with the decision to return Carnival to the Savannah, it’s worth noting that simply building a stage with some bleachers in that flattened space does not reconstitute an environment that evolved over many decades to become the nexus of the parades that cap the season’s festivities. In that time, the space would eventually influence the way Carnival evolved more than the festival evolved the space.It remained, for far too long, a concept that was longer on history than practicality and the central lure of the Savannah stage concept was a heady mix of bands organised to parade for a critical aggregation of media coverage. In returning Carnival to the Savannah, the National Carnival Commission would do well to assess what the Grandstand Stage actually was, both for masqueraders and their audiences, and avoid building this project on any romantic notions of its role. In addition, the three-year experiment that put Carnival on the streets brought some new perspectives on what happens when there is a free flow of bands throughout the capital city and how that affects both masqueraders and audiences. For the largest bands, the idea of the NCDF’s Mecca of Carnival website is a useful, but not critical addition to their existing online marketing efforts.Where the key differences can be made is in bringing a brighter light to bear on smaller bands which have fewer resources available for marketing their own efforts in the festival. The project hopes to lubricate economic as well as creative interactions between participants in the festival and that’s certainly a welcome development. If it works well, it’s likely to accelerate existing informal linkages between Carnival creators, suppliers and workers. Of all these new initiatives, the proposed People’s Band is the most unsettling example of the potential gulf between what armchair observers think Carnival needs and what the people who work in the trenches to make the annual festival happen know must be done. There has been no public demand for an aggregation of mismatched costumes marching under, what might it be, a NAPA banner? There has, on the other hand, been a decades long need for well-organised parade routes, effective band traffic control, segregation of large bands from smaller masquerade initiatives and music positioned along the routes that smaller bands are expected to take outside of the city centre. In the notable absence of any actual plan or strategy for how a People’s Band might work, there seem to be other, long-standing issues plaguing mini, small and medium sized bands that could be addressed by less messy solutions.
These smaller bands are likely to drive innovation and market challenging designs and approaches to Carnival the most. Their development merit real support from the NCC and Ministry of Arts and Multiculturalism. Those bodies, should embrace new ideas for Carnival but pursue them in an environment that opens the concepts and initiatives to extensive consultation with the designers, composers, performers and technicians, whose work drives the engine room of the festival each year.
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