By Marcia Braveboy
Special for NAN
News Americas, PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad, Fri. April 8, 2022: The COVID-19 virus dealt a devastating blow to culture and the arts in the twin island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. But amid the thousands of deaths attributed to COVID-19 and artists teetering on the brink of starvation, leading artists such as the president of the Coalition of Artists of Trinidad and Tobago (ACTT), curator, Rubadiri Victor and designer, Kirk Langton, continued to throw lifeline to keep the creative arts industry afloat.
Victor, Langton and the rest of the ACTT team successfully staged “PANTHEON: an exhibition on the costumes of the Trinidad & Tobago Carnival King and Queen” in 2021, and now again in 2022. The ground-breaking event gave the creative arts side some oxygen – to show the world “what we as a people can do”. The first exhibition of its kind in T&T was held on Wednesday, March 9thand ran for two weeks, ending on Sunday, March 27, 2022.
YOU MIGHT LIKE: Rubadiri Victor – old in spirit but grounded in art
“When COVID happened, we had some clarity about the fact that there are going to be at least two carnivals that we might miss, and so we tried to calculate what the possibilities were for the culture that was present,” Victor said.
He added: “We knew what the crisis would be, but what were the possibilities? After the Virtual Carnival did not happen, we as ACTT tried to understand what is an intervention we could do, we lost a physical carnival where we lost 45 thousand visitors but could have gone after 45 million pairs of eyes. We asked, “What can we do to harness something that would move the culture forward, to spark a new kind of consciousness or movement in something that needs serious movement—and I thought that was King and Queen.”
What happened next saw one aspect of the creative arts industry cut off from life support until it got the legs it needed to re-emerge.
The event, Pantheon the Exhibition, was born in the popular high street that is Woodford Square in Port of Spain in 2021 as the Covid-19 pandemic progressed. The “Exhibition Pantheon” erupted from this unimaginable state of apparent nothingness and was subsequently adopted by Port of Spain Mayor Joel Martinez as a permanent part of the city’s calendar of events.
Langton told NAN that he is not the director of ACTT but someone who has worked together with Rubadiri Victor for the past 15 years, on several projects that Victor believes he would be the right artistic person to carry out. Langton sees himself as a collaborator in the ACTT scheme of things.
“Last year the exhibition was strictly about the Carnival and Pan museum, this year we added the ADOPT-A -COSTUME initiative, which we can say is already off to a good start,” said Langton.
“Pantheon the Exhibition”, the 2022 edition, was held at the historic site of the Mille Fleurs, a Great House located opposite the historic Savannah of Queens Park, which was recognized in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest or most big in the world. What made it more interesting was that black and brown people could not set foot in the compound of a Great House, just 100 years ago.
Moving the Pantheon exhibit from Woodford Square Road to one of Savannah’s historic “Magnificent Seven” buildings is a big deal. It has a historical significance that in a very mysterious and wonderful way is related to the struggle of a people, mainly African peoples, to establish the highly spiritual and cultural event now known as Carnival. And in 2022, having Carnival Kings and Queens step into the historic plantation estate of a Great House around Port of Spain Savannah is groundbreaking, when you put it all in its rightful historical perspective.
LIVE EXHIBITION
“Madame Cocoyea,” portrayed by creative designer Ruth Adams Mendez for example, placed second in the Carnival Queens competition. The costume was made of palm, bamboo and some fabric and was complete with a coco broom in hand, sweeping the path in front of her.
She told NAN with a smile, that the ancestors used the coconut broom a lot – to sweep away all the evil spirits from the houses. Madame Cocoyea was one of the favorite costumes, as a large number of visitors to the Pantheon Exhibition queued up to take pictures to keep for nostalgic value or otherwise. Many of the Queen’s and King’s costumes were too large to fit inside the space provided for the exhibition – and too delicate to display outside in the elements.
The PANTHEON exhibit, however, proved what can be done despite the restrictions to preserve and display carnival heritage artifacts from the King and Queen shows. Sadly, 99.9% of the King and Queen costumes are destroyed after the carnivals, and next to none of the great costumes of the past no longer exist – except as photographs and memories.
Shynel Brizan is the 2022 Carnival Queen. She portrayed a costume titled: “The Spirit That Brings Good Things.”
Joseph Lewis is the King of Carnival 2022. He portrayed a costume: “Kreegoseth”, which means, “Mystic Guardian of the Amazon”. This is the second time that both Shynel and Joseph have won the titles of Carnival King and Queen. It is also 3st once was a Moko Jumbie Queen and the fourth a Moko Jumbie Monarch.
In his many carnival writings, Victor always mentions the King and Queen costumes as the crowning spectacles of the Trinidad and Tobago carnival crafts.
“The King and Queen to me represent the embodiment of our artistic engineering and imaginative skills as a people. They are our gifts, our great engineers, artisans and architects and all kinds of people who work on these artefacts,” he told NAN. “They are the biggest artifacts that we create as people outside of buildings, yet they are the things that we talk about the least… I felt that one of the reasons was because they come with a kind of responsibility that Trinidadians understand that we don’t have, so we prefer not to talk about it. So the Kings and Queens enable us to tap into a conversation that we don’t otherwise have, they’re the only thing that can tap into the Carnival Museum and Steelband conversation properly. When we talk about Calypso or even Pan, there is a feeling that we can get away with a discarded building and a digital archive. But Kings and Queens charge us with the responsibility of preserving and investing in massive state-of-the-art real estate to house our heritage. They are looking for a cathedral!”.
ACTT says the measure is necessary for the future, to enable traditions to survive and innovate. ACTT has spent the last two decades making a case to stakeholders and the status quo for the need to invest in several art and culture museums that will see the creative designs born from the annual carnival events, preserved for people to enjoy and to help them connect with the creative genius within.
So instead of giving up those spectacularly designed costumes when Carnival is over, why not create a museum to house them, ACTT asked. And furthermore, they said, why not force Trinidad and Tobago to adopt a costume and exhibit in open spaces, not only for its aesthetic appeal, but to build a people’s consciousness of the value of arts and culture ours?”.
This is the basis of the PANTHEON ADOPT-A–COSTUME program, which to date has 5 corporate and government partners who have saved 4 costumes from destruction and which will be placed in lobbies and atriums for the year. More may follow.
Construction of the Carnival and Steelband Museum
Next on the agenda, as a means of dealing with what people have lost from the destruction of thousands of costumes over the past few decades, is the construction of the Carnival and Steelband museum – an atrium that will house T&T’s Carnival creations to all the times.
