This timeline chronicles the creation of diasporic
pan-Caribbean carnivals from Harlem to Notting Hill in the pre-and immediate
post-Independence era, as well as in Brooklyn and Toronto in the mid- to late
1960s.
It traces the emergence of Caribbean carnivals and festivals
on theatre, dance, and Broadway stages in New York and London, in metropolitan
contemporary art galleries and biennials from São Paulo to Havana to Gwangju,
at the Olympics and other games since the 1980s as well as in protest and other
movements, all the way to Occupy Wall Street.
Cursory yet never
compiled before, this account seeks to record the impact Carnival has had on
contemporary artistic and curatorial practices as well as critical discourses
on art and performance, participation and the public sphere among an
increasingly global ever growing number of creative domains. It highlights the
contributions of artists, critics and curators, many of whom are collaborators
of En Mas’, while pointing to the way in which these events have provided
benchmarks for their practice–from Lorraine O’Grady’s attendance of the Caribbean
Carnival musical in Boston in the 1940s to Marlon Griffith’s experience of
Peter Minshall’s Rat Race in Port-of-Spain in the 1980s.
Like most exhibitions about the Caribbean produced in the
English speaking world, this timeline is predominantly about the English
speaking Caribbean even as it strives to account for accomplishments in the
Spanish and French speaking Caribbean as well—even as it also shows how
Carnival continues to dismantle such boundaries in a post-colonial,
multi-focal, global arena.
Like En Mas’ ,
this time-line places a great emphasis on the Trinidad Carnival and its
diasporic exports, due, in part, to the unprecedented reach of the Trinidad
Carnival model—akin to, say, the recognition of Jamaican music globally.
And
like En Mas’ as a whole, it is only but a bench-mark towards further
studies and future creative endeavours." (source;Claire Tancons)
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