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“Spirit Dolls” for 2020 TT Carnival/CADD ”Fluid Black::Dance Back”
“A girl’s doll is herself"
Presented for “Fluid Black::Dance Back”, the 4th Collegium for African Diasporic Dance Conference at the Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke University, 21 February 2020.
I join you all here at CADD in the middle of Carnival in Trinidad, where I am producing a Carnival band - Belmont Baby Dolls. For 2020 Carnival, Belmont Baby Dolls collaborates with visual artist, Brianna McCarthy, to present “Spirit Dolls”. “Spirit Dolls” sets its foundation on the traditional elements of the Baby Doll Mas: Baby Doll Dress, Bloomers/Pettipant/Frilly Panty, Bonnet (covered face)/Tiny Top Hat/Big Bow, Parasol/Stick/Weapon, Stockings/Frilly Socks. Materials are a mix of African textiles, European lace, and fabrics commonly found in Caribbean homes - florals and cotton prints. In this way, we are interested in a “Caribbean” Doll, with all those respective cultural influences, and moving towards something that is truly unique; self-defined. And while the aesthetic is strong, this mas is less about what a Baby Doll looks like, and more about what Baby Doll mas can do.
Spirit dolls act as vessels for beings of powerful spirits - Divine-beings, a spirit-of-divination, spirits of the dead, familiar-spirits, and even spiritual entities which have never had an earthly incarnation. Spirit dolls hold intention - for reasons that can include healing, honoring ancestors, divine connection, and expressing love. These dolls are often found on altars, as objects of devotion - petitioned with offerings like water, candy, cigarettes, coffee, etc. - to invoke their power in the life of the individual. The making of the Spirit Doll is a deeply personal ritual to bring to form a part of the self that is emerging from the unconscious. Carnival, is the performance ritual to invoke the spirit of the Doll; to open a path to the impossible.
“…the Belmont Baby Dolls sought to disrupt the idea that the limits of performance of this Mas are already known.”
The Baby Doll is, first, a mother. The incantations of the mas are many:
Reading 1: a mother with an illegitimate baby
This is the most traditional portrayal of Baby Doll mas in Trinidad & Tobago. A young black woman carries an “illegitimate” white baby in her arms. The Trinidad Mas describes the mas: “The Baby Doll character is a satirical portrayal of a mother with an illegitimate baby. Often the masquerader portrays a gaily dressed younger woman, with a frilled dress, gloves, and a bonnet. In all instances she carries a doll representing the illegitimate child. The masquerader usually stops male passers-by and various audience members, accusing them of fathering the child. She then asks or demands money from the new-found “father” to pay for milk, clothing, other needs, and/or to simply cease her accusations.”
Reading 2: Baby Doll as “Begging” Mas
Baby Doll mas upends the idea that in Trinidad, as masman Peter Minshall has said, “we pay to perform”. While that's true, the Baby Doll mas historically and traditionally collected money from spectators - those who “though they could sit of the fence over the socio-economic issues”. (Jacobs, Newsday)
Reading 3: Underaged Mother/Baby with a Baby
Directly answers the question of why is the character dressed as a baby. Abuse/Incest/Rape
Reading 4: Mother With Child
This reading speaks to the fact that the character is often played by adult women. As Belmont Baby Dolls, we’ll speak to the fact that we are independent women who take care of our children, have careers, and lead lives full of meaning. Perhaps this reading could speak to the infantilization of women and mothers; and how we claim and reclaim our roles as powerful.
Reading 4: LGBTQI Doll
Contemporary performance of the Baby Doll mas has, in its canon, Stephanie Leitch’s “Leslie the Lesbian Doll” (2016). Historically, the mas is played by both men and women, with an 1895 ban on “transvestite bands” that may have impacted this character’s portrayal.
Reading 5: Foster Mother
Perhaps this baby girl is carrying her sibling, left with holding family together when both parents are lost. She may not carry a real baby. Perhaps the doll she carries is a way to heal a broken relationship with her mother. She tells her Baby Doll that she is beautiful, perfect, smart and that she will always be there for her. She tells herself that. Perhaps the Baby Doll performs in fine garb, proudly displaying her “white” baby - of more value in the world than she.
Whether dealing with mothers left with the weight of family responsibilities, the exploitation of vulnerable women by white men, the abdication of the role of a victimized and exploited for an assertive empowered woman; with queer performativities or healing modalities in Carnival - Belmont Baby Dolls is interested in, as Eintou Springer said of her script, “Baby Doll Meets Midnight Robber”, “the language of the times, linking tradition with modernity...” These are full bodied truths, structured by our lived experiences as girls and women.
“In this process, [the Baby Doll] characters are individualized and symbolized, becoming themselves the impersonation of what their [mas] portrays; they are the subject of the representation - rather than just the lens through which the characters is represented - who tells and acts, being, as in Carnival, the protagonist of the story”. - Sterzi, Valeria. Deconstructing Gender in Carnival: A Cross Cultural Investigation of a Social Ritual. Columbia University Press, 2010.
Belmont Baby Dolls reads all the readings, and motions to - as a collective; as a band - perform the connections and complexities of those readings within the context of Trinidad Carnival. We locate ourselves in Freetown, as a physical, conscious reminder that freedom for mothers, women and girls is at the core our message. And, that the most important element in doll making is you.
This continued practice and research in mas performance and Carnival, is called “Fractal at the Surface, Rhizomatic at the Root”. From “Belmont Baby Dolls” (2019):
Rhizomes are roots which change their structures to adapt to their environment. The origin comes from the Greek word which means “mass of roots”, or as I’ll call it, for this Carnival context - “Roots Mas”. Rhizomes are of the underground; the underbelly. Fractals - ubiquitous in nature - fare infinite, self-similar, iterated, and detailed mathematical constructs. Fractals are useful in describing processes in time - particularly, chaos theory or, for this purpose, a Carnival. So, I begin with these most ancient and futuristic of technologies as a way to not only think through the irrepressible nature; posterity, depth and complexity of Carnival and its performativities, but in theorizing a “diasporic imaginary” of its future. As Dr. Kevin Browne wrote, “consider the possibility that the internalization of folklore epistemologies is not a haunting, but an exercise in/expression of supernatural intentionality.”
It is supernatural intentionality for me to be standing here when I’m leading a band. In the Caribbean. And, I’m exhausted. How fitting to host, with Adanna Jones, Yanique Hume, A’Keitha Carey, and Jean-Sebastien Duvilaire “Beyond Exhaustion: Dancing Towards Transformation”, on the embodied practice of exhaustion and transformation particular to the Trinidadian Carnival, Bahamian Junkanoo, Haitian Rara, and Jamaican wake complex dances. Carnival is here - with Agatha Silvia Oliveira’s “Fluid Dynamic Between the Terreiro and Concert Dance Stage in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil”, Esther Kurtz’s “The Aural-Kinesthetics of Axé: How sound and movement cohere community and mobilize resistance in African matrix practices of Brazil”, and Marianna Monteiro’s “Dancing at the crossroads” (the crossroads at which two or more routes or roots meet provides the ideal space for thus work. the junction at which two or more roads meet is one that includes the past, the present, and the future). Carnival is here - with Greer Mendy’s “Shared Spaces” and Rachel Carrico, who parades annually in New Orleans with the Ice Divas Social and Pleasure Club. (I wonder how much of Geoffrey Holder’s “It” factor was attributed to being born in the home of Carnival, as may be explored by Kylee Smith. )De mas lives even in Olutomi Kassim’s “Staging Black Activism”; in Andrea Woods-Valdes “a blackgirlaesthetic for a blackgirlbody”, which envisions black female visibility and subjectivity as embodied epistemology; and certainly, in the presence of other Caribbean scholars like John Hunte, Cynthia Oliver, and L’Antoinette Stines.
Look me! Ah quite in the Carolinas, in blasted snow….and looking to make ah mas. With people on whom we could call to open even more space in this incredible space…Haitian Rara, Bahamian Junkanoo, Trinidad Carnival, Brazil Carnival, New Orleans Mardi Gras, wake dances of Jamaica, Orisha dance….a mas(s)… global Black dance masquerade culture and tradition, all together, during CADD. Join us for “Midnight Mas(s) tonight with selected music, live drummers, ritual, rum, and of course, dance.
Belmont Baby Dolls is distinguished by its commitment to collaboration with Black women artists of the Caribbean. In 2019, Belmont Baby Dolls collaborated with Canadian-born, Berlin-based artist with Trinidadian roots, Shannon Lewis for its inaugural presentation, “Carnival Baby”. For 2020 Carnival, Belmont Baby Dolls collaborated with Trinidad-based visual artist, Brianna McCarthy, to present “Spirit Dolls”.
Brianna McCarthy is a mixed media visual communicator - through masking and performance art, fabric collage, traditional media, and installation pieces - working and living in Trinidad + Tobago. She is a self-taught artist and aims to create a new discourse examining issues of beauty, stereotypes, representation as well as the documenting the process – particularly poignant in an ever smaller digitally connected world. “Brianna continues in the mission of creating these spaces that situate black female bodies in power and in freedom; spaces within which we have our personal and social revolutions, within which we bravely love one another, within which we are our more beautiful and darker selves. Spaces in which we are completely good and worthy and deserving; in which we are the blackest black.” (McIntyre, Growing Up Together, 2015)
Through Carnival 2020, the performers of “Spirit Dolls” - Arnaldo James, Jade Drakes, Kwayera Cunningham Archer (joining us from Jamaica), Arielle John, Angelique Nixon, Shay Alexander, Lyndon Gill, Cecile Pemberton and her daughter, Eva who joined me and my own daughter, Nyah Love, Mari Pitkänen (who joined us from Finland), Isabel Dennis, and Jamie Philbert and Patriann Edwards, who joined us for performances for “The Old Yard” at the University of the West Indies, Centre for Creative & Festival Arts and the Band Launch at Granderson Lab, respectively - gave offerings for:
Belmont Baby Dolls at Trini Good Media’s Festival Radio & UWI’s Old Yard Performance & Exhibition
Sunday 23 February, 2020, 4.45 to 5:15pm, live from the Jouvay Suite at the Grand Stand, Belmont Baby Dolls Band Leader, Makeda Thomas, will be a featured guest on Festival Radio broadcast aimed at providing dedicated, alternative Carnival coverage. Carnival Hot Shots segment where hosts Ardene Sirjoo and Franka Phillip talk with folks pushing the envelope in their respective artistic spheres, innovating, pioneering. This segment highlights "new traditionalists" - those presenting new takes on old (art) forms.
Sunday 16th February, 2020, at noon, the UWI’s Department of Creative and Festival Arts presents its annual carnival event, “The Old Yard”, situated in the new Gayelle at DCFA. This event will feature the opening of the art exhibition “Baby Doll Mas’: Old & New Interpretations”, with work by Abigail Hadeed, Maria Nunes and Kevin Adonis-Browne. The exhibition continues February 17 – 26, 2020 | 9am – 3pm, weekdays at the DCFA Exhibition Hall, Gordon Street, St. Augustine. “Baby Doll Mas’: Old & New Interpretations is curated by Dr. Marsha Pearce and will also feature excerpts from essays by students of the UWI course “Mas: History, Development and Meaning”.
Learn more about “Spirit Dolls”, the Belmont Baby Dolls presentation for Trinidad & Tobago Carnival 2020.
Taking Time, Making Space: Restaging Afro-Caribbean Womanhood on the Streets of Carnival
“Through a deep consideration of the masquerade “Whitewash”—a processional performance presented by New Waves! NY at the 2017 annual West Indian-American Day Carnival of Brooklyn—this talk unveils the transgressive ways Carnival revelers carnivalized the streets of Brooklyn with their spectacular improvisatory dancing skills. As a band member of “Whitewash,” I witnessed Makeda Thomas—who is both the founder of New Waves!, a Trinidad-based, performance-centered institute, and the bandleader of our small masquerade band—with her (fairly new born) babe in arms, her pregnant sister, and her mother scold the NYPD officers assigned to our band on how Carnival and time was meant to operate. In other words, the ways in which dancing bodies of the “Whitewash” masquerade transmitted representations of Caribbean nations under the disciplinary eye of the NYPD blatantly revealed the sweaty, laborious ways Afro-Caribbean bodies challenged, resisted, and transgressed state/white/police time and its effects. At the level of their bodies, “Whitewash” transgressed the NYPD’s policies and renegotiated how time occurred along the Eastern Parkway, as well as how black bodies were visually consumed. Each dancing, reveling, masquerading, Diasporic body, thus found themselves toggling between multiple constructions of blackness and citizenship as they made space to jump, wine, and chip dong di road.”
Embodied Interventions is a semester-long initiative that explores embodied interventions to interdisciplinary research methodologies, scholarly and creative production, and theoretical terrains. We will host three scholars working on embodied research methodologies in and across the Caribbean and its diasporas – Adanna Kai Jones, Dasha Chapman, and Maya Berry. Each will give a talk on their current research and then lead a movement workshop, offering a chance to engage with their embodied praxis and methodologies. Movement workshops are open to all levels of movers.
The initiative is coordinated by the Caribbean Studies Working Group, with the support of the Council for Latin American and Iberian Studies and The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale; by Theater and Performance Studies and the Dance Studies curriculum with support from the Yale Dance Lab and Robert Wallace Fund for Dance Studies; and by the Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.
Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration
"And whoever does not want to struggle/against failure, against danger,/whoever is not prepared to give everything/to feel that she is alive,/does not need to be a high-wire walker/Nor could she ever become one.”
Makeda Thomas and Dyane Harvey-Salaam in “The Light Fantastical”. Photography by Whitney Browne. NYC, October 2019.
The Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CADD) fourth bi-annual conference aims to provoke enlivened discussions on the power and politics of global Black Dance by bringing together scholars, practitioners, educators, and other stakeholders for three days of intellectual and artistic inspiration.
Fluid Black::Dance Back
Move between worlds - worldmaking in motion.
Flip the Script.
Do what you need to do, dance towards truth.
Justice, Pain, and Black Resiliency.
IT MATTERS that we dance, and we dance back.
Our 2019 conference theme, Fluid Black::Dance Back seeks to center African diaspora dance as a resource and method of creative and aesthetic possibility in pursuit of the following lines of inquiry:
How do dance and movement practices across the African diaspora create space for fluidity in gender, race, sexuality, ability, and other markers of identity?
How does race, gender, class and sexuality inform African diaspora dance communities, broadly defined?
What kinds of resistant practices does Black Dance offer to combat gendered and raced based discrimination, violence and brutality?
In what ways does Black Dance engender mobility on and off the dance floor or concert stage?
How does African diaspora dance help us to queer pedagogical pathways for dance in higher education?
How does Black Dance render Blackness visible in the absence of Black bodies?
Anchored by critical dialogue and provocative research presentations, the conference will feature breakout sessions, movement workshops, and film screenings.
We are interested in papers and presentations that consider dance practices throughout the African diaspora, the specific contexts that engender them, and the ways that they offer artistic and intellectual possibilities pursuant to the conference theme. We welcome contributions that represent rigorous engagement with any number of disciplinary and methodological perspectives.
Possible topics include:
The dynamic flow between black social expression or imagining and concert dance
African diaspora dance geographies and the fluidity of place
African diaspora dance in US higher education: opportunities and challenges
The Collegium for African Diaspora Dance aims to facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion that captures a variety of topics, approaches, and methods that might constitute Black Dance Studies.
“The Light Fantastical” for Clark Center/El Barrio's Artspace
“The Light Fantastical” will be performed for the Clark Center Showcase at NYC’s El Barrio Artspace PS 109 on 15 & 16 October 2019. El Barrio Artspace PS 109 is located at 215 E 99th St, New York, NY 10029.
The Light Fantastical is an open series of artistic explorations of the metaphors for art and technology that come out of Afrofuturist culture. - or more appropriately, “Caribbean Futurisms - which considers how Caribbean cultural forms navigate time and space, and innovate new histories, sciences and aesthetics. As with the future, The Light Fantastical is concerned with the past. The project was set in motion 20 years ago as a personal family history project, and reset with the loss of those archives in a 2018 fire that destroyed the artist’s home. Thomas performs her contemporary dance aesthetic with the eponymous Dyane Harvey-Salaam. The Light Fantastical lives in a fantastical, luminescent landscape concerned with archival performativities and the links between past knowledge and future imagination, offering a futurist reading of the past, and a historical reading of the future.
“The Light Fantastical” is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Delaware Art Museum, and has been made possible with a Performing Arts Award from Creative Capital and a CUNY Dance Initiative Residency at Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College.
“Light and space” artist James Turrell; steampunk artist, Tim Wetherall’s animation of the moon; C. Serroity’s wire figures; a wire dragonfly by the late Trinidadian artist, Brian Roberts - these are the some of the artists/works that are part of the world of “The Light Fantastical”, as performed at the Delaware Art Museum. Photographs by David McDuffie and Shannon Woodloe.
“The Light Fantastical” is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Delaware Art Museum, and has been made possible with a Performing Arts Award from Creative Capital and a CUNY Dance Initiative Residency at Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College.
Makeda I woke up with your dance, your movement, your expression on my heart. In the past few years I have felt myself doing a movement with darkness, with pain, it has transformed me. And what you shared about gratitude moving you through the darkness is my story. You were telling your story and to me telling my story. You gave me a visual for the process I've undergone. I wish I could sit and tell you every detail of it. Some day I will be able to. I feel it in my heart that God wanted us to meet. I don't know all the reasons why but I feel blessed by your art. It spoke to me. I love you sister, thank you for sharing of yourself, being true to your story and your creative process.
Audience member, “The Light Fantastical” at Delaware Art Museum
“The Light Fantastical” for Delaware Art Museum’s "Relational Undercurrents"
“A performance piece from dance artist Makeda Thomas, who splits her time between New York and Trinidad as founding director of Trinidad’s Dance and Performance Institute, will round out the summer and include the opportunity to join her for a unique gathering that merges food, dance, and storytelling.”
Launching in July, this series will present dance, music, and performances from major artists with deep connections to Caribbean culture while tying back into the Museum’s exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, which runs June 22 to September 8, 2019. Curated by Tatiana Flores and organized by the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, "Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago"presents 21st-century art by artists with roots in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Curaçao, Aruba, St. Maarten, St. Martin, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Trinidad, Jamaica, The Bahamas, Barbados, and St. Vincent. Acknowledging the great diversity represented by these various countries, the exhibition explores thematic continuities found among the region. It features contemporary painting, installation art, sculpture, photography, video, and performance by over 60 artists from the islands of the Caribbean. Performances will be presented at the Museum, encouraging visitors to deepen their experience and further explore the exhibition. Read more here.
In my meditation on Archival Performativities, it is to never leave archives in a box, or in a darkened attic, as I did. To fade with yellow, be flooded, eaten by termites, burned to ash, or covered in soot. But that we shine a light on them, so fantastic that they either retreat back into hidden places or forward into that light and disappear, altogether.
Makeda Thomas. Presented for 2019 CADD Convening Public Roundtable: “Seeing Black Dance” at Theatre Arts & Performance Studies at Brown University (April 2019); and for “Fantastic Bodies: Archival Performativities” at Lehman College - Music, Multimedia, Theatre and Dance Department (April 2019).
“a tiny little thing” at Turchin Center for Visual Arts
“a tiny little thing”, a project of The Light Fantastical, will be exhibited at the Turchin Center for Visual Arts in Boone, NC. The exhibit, “With or Without”, on which Thomas collaborates with storyteller Kali Ferguson, is the subject of a long-distance collaborative practice and philosophy called, “Artistic Surrogacy”.
“Artistic Surrogacy”, curated by Cara Hagan, seeks to create issues of institutional bias, financial constraints related to art making and distribution, issues of geographical and/or circumstantial isolation, environmental implications of artist travel, commonly-held notions of what constitutes “art,” and what a "successful" art career looks and feels like.
A fire resulted in the loss of my family home and archives last year, and cleared the path for this work. The initial aim was to make a book - a tiny little thing - collaged with documents, recipes, drawings, quotes, bits and pieces, pockets of mythologies..,.A gift to my children - Shiloh and Nyah Love. In its place, is a 14’ length of cloth that survived the fire. It is composed of three pieces: a piece from my mother, a piece from my sister, and a wrap I wore during the home birth of my first child. Sewn hastily together just before the birth of my second child, the cloth is a traditional African tie used in pregnancy and during birth. Its great length and materiality is a meditation on motherhood and legacy; on surrogacy as an artistic practice.
"With or Without": The exhibition will be on view in Gallery A at the Turchin Center from June 7 through December 7, 2019.
CADD Convening and “Fantastic Bodies: Archival Performativities” at Lehman College
“Fantastic Bodies: Archival Performativities”
Music, Multimedia, Theatre and Dance Dept.
23 -24 April 2019 at Lehman College, The Bronx NY
Through lecture, readings, and movement sessions, we will consider the archive as performance. Archival performances practices, memory practices, states of potentialities, and the anarchive are also to be explored. During this two-day workshop, we will explore our own existing, remaining, and/or lost archives and examine how corporeality shapes memory in these sites of practice.
Public Roundtable: “Seeing Black Dance”
Friday, April 19, 4pm-5:30pm
Ashamu Dance Studio, Lyman Hall, 026
From 18-20 April 2019, the Executive Members of the Collegium for African Diasporic Dance will convene at Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. The public round-table explores the relationship between black dance, sight, and language. How do we come to construct meaning when looking at black bodies in motion? What new vocabularies might we develop to better understand the contours, nuances, and politics of black dance both historically and contemporarily? This roundtable of members of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance - an egalitarian community of scholars and artists - will discuss the state of the field, and collectively imagine new futures for Black Dance Studies. Featuring: Thomas F. DeFrantz, Jasmine Johnson, Carl Paris, John Perpener, Raquel L. Monroe, Takiyah Amin, Shireen Dickson, Kemal Nance, Ava LaVonne Vinesett, Andrea E. Woods Valdés, and Nadine George-Graves.
We invoke the jamettes, the women of Storyville; those women who for themselves define their womanhood, motherhood, and sexuality. And we reject the idea that if we are all of those things, we are not precious.
For its first Carnival presentation, the Belmont Baby Dolls presented “Carnival Baby” - twelve MASterful performers whose work “traces the roots of this Mas as one in which women assert control over their sexuality, their womanhood, their motherhood; to assert their “performative identities” against interpretations that would deny both their agency and their pleasure”. (Vaz-Deville). We invited Masqueraders who extend this Baby Doll ethos throughout their lives. This was an embodied practice; an opportunity to examine how gender and race have shaped and continue to shape this ritual, to explore sexuality in the lives of Caribbean girls and transgressive sexuality performed publicly by women, and the way the tradition helps to revitalize spirits. We are the dolls, their mothers, their sisters, their aunts, their lovers…
There are several examples of individual contemporary Baby Doll Mas performance in Trinidad: this year, at Victoria Square, Belmont Baby Dolls shared space/time with an individual masquerader with over 30 baby dolls across 4 interlinked carriages; Hazel Brown’s “Single Mudda Association” (2018); Stephanie Leitch’s (2016) “Leslie the Lesbian Doll”, Michelle Isava’s “Sugar Baby Doll” (2009) and “Pretending to be Happy”, for UWI’s “Taking Back the Night” are a few examples of this contemporary performance practice.
But the icons of the Belmont Baby Dolls are women like Bianca Cabrera, who in 2018 played Mas with her mother, Francesca Cabrera, and baby. A photo of them crossing the stage garnered tremendous public response on social media. “Blows for dancing mom”, wrote Newsday; the female officer who stopped the family was praised by the Children’s Authority, with the Children Act 2012 and its $5,000 fine/6 years imprisonment being cited. The band leader promised to take “action to ensure that no child under the age of five is in her family’s band on Carnival Monday and Tuesday”. I’m not exactly sure how that worked out, but Belmont Baby Dolls hails Mother Bianca’s answer, “I play Mas when I’m pregnant”, and that she and her entire family, including the young children, were looking forward to Carnival 2019.
The dream of Belmont Baby Dolls was to “situate the Baby Dolls in this historical context and tease out the layers of meaning in their history as well as contemporary practices”. Going beyond references to the traditional Baby Doll Mas played in Trinidad #WhereTheBabyMilk and the Baby Dolls of New Orleans, the Belmont Baby Dolls sought to disrupt the idea that the limits of performance of this Mas are already known. As in my lived practice; as I define myself my own values, so too would this mas. And, as explored in scholar, Kim Daz-Deville’s (The Baby Dolls of New Orleans), “in watching and participating in these performances, black girls learned movements that might counteract the painful geographic lessons that they also learned each day”.
The desire to be special to someone, in fact to be treated like a baby doll, [is] a pervasive one for women left to their own devices to survive.
For 2019, #BelmontBabyDolls collaborates with Shannon Lewis @lolas_venus (recently in residence at @aliceyardinsta). Shannon Lewis is a Canadian-born, Berlin-based artist with Trinidadian roots, whose practice encompasses painting, installation, and performance. Lewis’ work, “Get Me Bodied” is flown as standards for the band. The artist writes:
“In Get Me Bodied, shapeshifting is an adaptation. It is the work we do to be able to move between spaces, classes, and geographies. But what does that work — the constant reworking — do to our bodies or our minds? It is about the performance and the objects that we collect along the way. We primp, preen, fix up — look sharp, grow, develop appendages that are useful until they’re not. It is about mobility, intersecting with sexuality, gender, race, immigration, class, economics, and social climbing.
“The task of a migrant is to learn the anatomy of a new society and reconstruct yourself in a new accommodating form. This framework and your performance in it are never invisible to you. So you either become flexible with the constant social contortions, or you fold over and break. The work sits in a space that contemplates the push and pull of this operation. It sits in a space that has fun with high femme performance fantasy and total exhaustion. Self-making as sport, for access and for life.”
Indeed, among the delicate pink, gray and white laces, ritual anglaise, tulle and flowers - were painful conversations, confrontations, negotiations about our experiences as black women; about sisterhood and love. Public reaction to male masqueraders playing Baby Doll scaled from simple recognition to confrontational. The Mas struck a chord in many, for many reasons. “This is mas. This is not a mas” becomes a repeated refrain. Embodied practice is a state of reality that can allow us to dis-embody to the state of spirit. And this spirit reveals itself in the incredulous whispers of “Baby Dolls” by the scores of young black girls along South Quay and in the shout of acknowledgement by the older gentleman propped up along Jerningham, “Baby Doll! Baby Doll! I see you.” This is the “supernatural intentionality” the Belmont Baby Dolls will engage in the future: a “roots mas” grounded in tradition and in the diasporic imaginary.
"A girl's doll is herself," — Rae Armantrout, from Next Life; ‘Distances'
“Timeless, forward thinking, respectful of tradition, not afraid to innovate. That’s what is; that whole idea of independent Mas. - Wendell Manwarren (3Canal), speaking of Makeda Thomas, Belmont Baby Dolls Band Leader at “Independent Mas Speaks”. Tuesday, 19 March 2019 at Propaganda Space.
Belmont Baby Dolls is a project of New Waves! MAS, a program of the Dance & Performance Institute. New Waves! MAS made its inaugural Carnival presentation with “Whitewash” in 2017, and presented “Blue Blue” in 2018, for Brooklyn’s West Indian American Day Carnival. Belmont Baby Dolls is its first presentation for Trinidad & Tobago Carnival.
Rhizomes are roots which change their structures to adapt to their environment. The origin comes from the Greek word which means “mass of roots”, or as I’ll call it, “Roots Mas”. Rhizomes are of the underground; the underbelly. Fractals - ubiquitous in nature - are infinite, self-similar, iterated, and detailed mathematical constructs. Fractals are useful in describing processes in time - particularly, chaos theory or, for this purpose, a Carnival. So, I begin with these most ancient and futuristic of technologies as a way to not only think through the irrepressible nature; posterity, depth and complexity of Carnival and its performativities, but in theorizing a “diasporic imaginary” of its future. As Kevin Browne wrote, “consider the possibility that the internalization of folklore epistemologies is not a haunting, but an exercise in/expression of supernatural intentionality.”
- Notes from “Fractal at the Surface, Rhizomatic At The Root” by Makeda Thomas, Belmont Baby Dolls Band Leader at “Independent Mas Speaks” with Wendell Manwarren (3Canal), Andrew Patrick (Black Indians-Warriors of Huracan), Donna Dove (Phagwa Mas), and Robert Young (Vulgar Fraction). Tuesday, 19 March 2019 at 24 Erthig Road, Port of Spain.
Looking beneath the surface of traditional mas by Paula Lindo for The Trinidad Guardian. 22 March 2019. Photography by Abigail Hadeed/Splice Studios.
UPCOMING!
Carnival Studies Mas Colloquium - “Traditional Masquerade - Contemporary Time & Space”
| 2:00pm | April 9th, 2019 |LR3, DCFA Cheesman Bldg
The Carnival Studies Mas Colloquium is a research event that highlights the work of practitioners from the creative industries who are actively exploring the boundaries of Mas as an artform. Guided by the understanding that Mas is both Art and ritual borne out of Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival space the colloquium concentrates on exploring the visual and performative expressions of the activity. Through the colloquium leading practitioners in Mas are invited to share their work, experiences and thoughts on the impact of Mas on Caribbean art and society with students of the University of the West Indies and the general public. The colloquium emerges out of the Department of Creative and Festival Arts (DCFA) course CANV1702 Mas History: Meaning and Development.
MAKEDA THOMAS @makedathomas - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
