Every year after carnival, there are official and
unofficial post mortems of the festival, and every year the cries get louder
and louder as to the uncreative desert that seems to be expanding like the Sahara
across the geography of Trinidad’s carnival, and her satellite carnivals.
At a recent UTT post mortem I attended there were observations made by some of the masters students on the lack of
creativity in mas and music, the unoriginal concepts in design, and the
various effects this was having on the festival, like the ominous elephant that
the empty north stand has become.
Thinking about the problem post independent, post
oil boom, generations are having with creativity across the carnival landscape,
it is clear that we lost the creative edge. Creative and critical thinking seems
to be a rarity in a society where it was once abundant. In an age when access to
knowledge and information, is at our fingertips at almost any second of the day
to help build on creative expressions, we have gotten stuck in the business language
of spin, 'service', and 'experience', forgetting that creativity is what filled the
stands in our recent past.
In the lecture 'breaking the rules', Jazz pioneer
Herbie Hancock talks about breaking the rules as an avenue to creativity. In a society like Trinidad's where rules and laws
are broken on a daily basis it’s ironic that when it comes to mas and creative thinking, there are, or
seem to be unwritten rules that ‘designers’ appear to be both limited and defined by.
In this era of
universal education, and a growing
middle class, the society is clearly not producing pioneers like before, designers today seem to
lack the courage and imagination to
create new passages, or even develop on older traditions, our traditional mas
seems to have no direct attachment or influence to our modern ‘expression’ and therefore has nothing to stand on except for repetition.
Hancock
explores these avenues in this lecture, he says breaking the rules was an
essential part of his creative development. Observation and study of the environment
can provide all the tools for new expressions in creativity, shattering the
written and unwritten rules of the old yet building and reconstructing on some
of the very foundations. George Bailey and David Rudder did it, The Mighty
Sparrow , Peter Minshall, and recently Machel
Montanto all broke the unwritten rules and excelled, what’s stopping the rest?
Listen, learn, and enjoy.
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