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Abstract
This essay explores Trinidadian cultural production as it moves through the bumpy process of defining a cohesive cultural nationalism. Focusing on contested ideas of ‘the folk’ across the 20th century and into the new millennium, this essay considers how cultural performance plays an integral part in articulating Trinidadian notions of belonging. From state-sponsored cultural institutions to independent performance companies, local cultural production serves as a mighty signifier for both civic belonging and civic exclusion. Examining examples of Trinidadian performance on the public stage and in the studio environment, I argue that embodiments of culture become powerful tools to broker meanings of the nation, consolidate and define subjectivities, and to determine civic belonging and responsibility not only in relation to the state but– as importantly – within the community of each performing company's constituents and practitioners. Performance can be used to complicate notions of a stable folk practice, local–national identity and community by opening up new renderings of localness, combining or juxtaposing rural and urban forms of expression along with bringing different ethnic, class, generational and gender-coded performance styles into contact. In this era, historic cultural entities such as Carnival are in a dynamic relationship with contemporary cultural workers. Artists participate in these institutions, but they also chart creative paths outside them attempting to stamp their own visions of local creative practice for Trinidad's future.
Notes
1. Carnival has grown exponentially outward with the flowering of worldwide diasporic carnivals (such as Miami, Brooklyn, Chicago, Toronto, Notting Hill, etc.). From this explosion of Carnival as a global cultural export, local artists now find work shopping their cultural wares of music, dance and mas outside the borders of the nation-state. Conversely, returning expatriates make up a large percentage of Trinidad Carnival's tourist market. Also, contemporary Carnival-related cultural products are more aggressively making use of hybrid creative encounters, from soca artists’ collaborations with Jamaican dancehall artists to Indo-Trinidadian chutney and chutney soca artists (e.g. soca artist Machel Montano's collaborative tracks with dancehall artist Beenie Man and chutney/chutney soca artist Drupatee Ramgoonai) to the increasing trend of large mas bands importing costume materials or even whole costumes from abroad rather than making them locally (Nurse, Citation1999; Ho & Nurse, Citation2005).
2. In the 1980’s Drupatee Ramgoonai rose to prominence as a chutney and chutney soca songstress, and, while she made a stamp as a local artist able to crossover to both Afro-Trinidadian and Indo-Trinidadian audiences, she also upset traditionalists’ notions of proper Indo-Trinidadian female behavior. As Shalini Puri notes, Drupatee was depicted as the ‘antithesis of conservative representations’ both for her ‘sexually suggestive lyrics’ and her willingness to display her body on the Carnival stage (2004, p. 196).
3. The Center has now become The Department for the Creative and Festival Arts at the University of the West Indies. A Bachelor of Arts Degree in Dance was instituted in 2009, signaling a growing commitment to codification and training in the performing arts.
4. The NAPA issue marks a growing public visibility of contemporary artists’ concerns with 21st-century representations of Trinidad and Tobago's national arts. New entities such as The Artist Coalition of Trinidad & Tobago are mobilizing to press the government to be transparent about which local artists and art practices will be allowed access to use the facility. Through statements and public reports circulated through local newspapers and online media, the Artist Coalition of Trinidad & Tobago challenges the government to be clear about its vision for the local–national arts through its utilization of NAPA and other cultural infrastructure projects.
5. Since NAPA opened, it has been plagued by charges of faulty architectural design and a questionable bidding process. See Bagoo (Citation2010).
6. I received conflicting information regarding what African ethnic groups actually constitutedthese ‘five nations.’ The communities mentioned to me from various members of the folk dance community included the Ibo, Yoruba, Ashanti, Mandingo, Congo, Hausa, Kromanti, Temne, and Mende. For more on the saraka, see Warner-Lewis (Citation1991) and Elder (Citation1988).
7. Directly correlated to the calypso music tradition, calypso dances are more cabaret-style theatrical presentations. While many of Malick's calypso items use older classic calypso tunes (e.g. Matilda, Jean & Dinah), contemporary calypso and even soca tunes are used to choreograph newer numbers. Most often, costuming resembles Carnival's signature brightly colored two-piece top and bottom structure complete with headpieces and embellishments such as sequins and feathers.
8. Shiv Shakti has long referenced the performance styles and conventions of Hindi film through the visual spectacle of their own performance: donning elaborate costumes complemented with ornate jewelry and hairstyles or lip-syncing the lyrics of popular Bollywood songs during company dance sequences. In 2008, Shiv Shakti was featured in The Unforgettable Tour showcasing Bollywood film icon Amitabh Bachchan and other Hindi film stars. They have also been featured recently in a dance sequence for one of the first Bollywood films shot on location in Trinidad and Tobago. As Patricia Mohammed (Citation2002) explains, since 1935 Indian cinema has been an important vehicle in recasting and reaffirming what constitutes Indianness in Trinidad as a diasporic outpost of the subcontinent. Films conveyed notions of ‘authentic’ Indian values and morality and prescribed gender scripts for males (hero, protector) and females (devoted, chaste). Films idealized images of India through the cinematic experience making this now-other world present for Indo-Trinidadians. While for some these films enabled them to reconnect to their past lives in India, for others the films acted as introductions to a world they had heard about, and perhaps accessed to different degrees via language, rituals, traditions and Hindu symbols, but had never physically engaged.
9. In the contemporary moment, Canboulay as cultural concept has also been appropriated by younger generations to represent acts of cultural reclamation through neo-folk trends in which artists mesh traditional and postmodern practices. In the blossoming spoken-word and indie music scene found in many of Trinidad's local pubs and bars such as Songshine, an open mic performance series, or though the work of Terrenaissance, a local world music band, Canboulay is gaining new social currency as a sign of cultural re-valorization.
10. For more on Caribbean self-imaging through media, see McFarlane-Alvarez (Citation2004) and Warner (Citation2000).
11. My analysis of this piece is based on a video recording of the performance originally aired on TTT's Scouting for Talent television show.
12. See Rudder (Citation1999).
13. As noted by Rhoda Reddock (1999), it was the song's third verse that came under particular attack: ‘For those playing ignorant/Talking ‘bout true African descendant/If yuh want to know the truth/Take a trip back to yuh roots/And somewhere on that journey/Yuh go see a man in ah dhoti/Saying he prayers in front of a Jhandi [Hindu flag]/Then and only then you'll understand/What is ah cosmopolitan nation.’
14. I am not suggesting that units such as community and state are synonymous. They are different in scale and impact, but I argue that we need to pay closer attention to the ways cultural performances can powerfully impact the psyche and well-being parallel to the ways the state and business can impact material conditions including personal economics and access to resources such as education and healthcare.
15. I must acknowledge my performance associates’ in ThickRoutes Performance College for countless conversations on the topic of ‘complex complicity.’ We came up with the term during the creative process of Bridges, a semi-autoethnographic performance project.