Saving Carnival’s history

But what is the Carnival Institute? An official brochure says it has the task of “gathering knowledge and artefacts related to Carnival and other festivals, collecting, analysing, preserving, conserving and disseminating this knowledge to the public.” This information is disseminated through lectures to schools and the general public, Carnival workshops, documentary films for cinemas, TV and YouTube, post-graduate lectures and supervision, student internships, and print publications.

Dr Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool, programme professor at the Academy of Arts, Culture and Public Affairs at the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT), told Sunday Newsday he started the institute in 1998 while he was the director of culture.

“We launched it but there was no place for it. We went to the NCC (National Carnival Commission), because Carnival falls under the NCC, and they gave us a building on Victoria Avenue, with me as director,” he recalled.

However, he said, the NCC felt it could not support the institute financially, and moved it to a small room at the Normandie Hotel.

Liverpool soon stepped down as director and the institute fell under the late Pat Bishop. “By being in that little area, it lost all its meaning. You can’t have a Carnival institute parked up in a room in a hotel.

And so it just decimated the whole thing. It went to naught,” he said.

The NCC eventually revived the institute under Dr Kim Johnson, relocating it to Jerningham Avenue, Belmont.

However, while the new space was larger than the room at the Normandie, Liverpool said it still simply was not big enough.

“The NCC doesn’t really have an idea what is a Carnival institute, because a Carnival institute must be big and sprawling. It should be a space for students to come in and do research, it should have a museum, a room where you can push a button and listen to icons singing, a room to show documentaries, a small printery...

“Up to now it can’t come off the ground because it doesn’t have the aesthetics or the funding.” Liverpool added that the institute should be both a living and virtual museum, also containing King and Queen costumes, and the outfits of influential calypsonians throughout the years.

He lamented that an institute in the US Virgin Islands had acquired many of the Mighty Sparrow’s outfits.

“That should be in the institute here! But where would we put them?” However, he did not blame the lack of funding for developing the institute solely on the government.

Instead, he believed it should be sponsored by companies and financial institutions.

The current director, Dr Kim Johnson, has similar thoughts.

He agreed the institute was understaffed and underfunded, as the government subvention covered mostly salaries, rent, and utilities, and suggested that companies and corporations sponsor individual projects to aid in the preservation of the country’s culture.

He said corporations gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to sponsor fetes or concerts, “things that would last one season or even one evening,” instead of contributing to something that would last generations.

For example, he said he would appreciate funding for a YouTube channel in order to teach interested people how to play pan or write calypso or parang songs. For that, the institute would need to hire people to develop a curriculum and to serve as instructors, film crews, and editors, but it did not have the money.

“Give me $30,000 and I can make that a global, go-to space.

With funding I could teach the world; without it, I’m spinning top in mud,” he said. Johnson added that our culture was “losing its youth” because people did not want to engage young people in “their medium” – technology and the Internet – in order to pass on the knowledge.

But funding is not the only challenge.

He stressed that the Carnival Institute was a research and educational institute, so he believes it should be under the Ministry of Education rather than the NCC, which falls under the Ministry of Community Development, Culture and the Arts.

He also believes it should be associated with the University of the West Indies (UWI) and UTT , as the institute’s clients range from PhD students to primary-school children.

“The NCC is concerned with organising Carnival and deals with things like calypso tents, portable toilets, putting up the North Stand, the routes for bands and things like that. The institute has nothing to do with that, and the NCC really isn’t interested in what we do,” he said.

In his three years as director, Johnson said there had been three NCC chairmen, but despite requests to discuss the goals and needs of the institute, he had only been able to speak with the current chairman, Kenny De Silva.

“The idea of presenting my vision of the Carnival Institute, what we could do, what is our potential – I have never been able to do that, because they were busy dealing with the North Stand and such.

If I want to spend $500 I have to go to them...The idea of research and education is outside of their scope, beyond their vision or interest,” he said.

In a brief telephone interview with Sunday Newsday, De Silva admitted the NCC should be more involved with the work of the institute and said it would attempt to do so in the near future. He also acknowledged that funding was inadequate, saying the institute was “trying to do as much as they can with the little they have.” And while he recognised that the institute should play a much wider role in society, he said the level of funding necessary for all the archiving and gathering of material needed for the preservation of our Carnival history made that very difficult.

Johnson said the Carnival Institute had a lot of financial potential, but the government was not taking the lead. He noted the number-one reason people visit Trinidad and Tobago was for Carnival, yet this mecca for pan, calypso and Carnival had no Carnival museum. He pointed out that if a person was interested in reggae, they would visit the Bob Marley Museum in Jamaica, and those interested in art would visit the Louvre in Paris, or the Tate Museums in the United Kingdom.

Steelbands around the world would love the opportunity to learn the history of the instrument at a tertiary level, or simply how to play. Also, Trinidad-style carnivals held the interest of people around the globe who would like to know more.

“Carnival is important to TT . It’s important that we study it, it’s important that we educate people about it, it’s important that we improve it, because it is declining. The Carnival Institute has a very important cultural and economic role to play,” he said.

Johnson added that traditional mas had roots in Africa and Haiti, as well as parallels in other Caribbean countries, and people could not properly understand Carnival until those links were explored. All of these were important intellectual and cultural links that the institute needed to develop, but, since he could not even get money to go to Tobago with two people for a week to film, he doubted it would happen soon.

However, he said the institute had begun the process of establishing links with research institutes in other islands. It could be supervising students from educational institutions around the world, playing its part in educational tourism, which is one of the most valuable forms of tourism, as it could lead to people remain in the country for years.

“The potential is vast. We have so many Japanese, American, British, and other people who come to play in our steelbands for Panorama. We could be positioning ourselves at the centre of a global network, because there are carnivals and steelbands all over the world that were inspired by us and they look to us. We are a mecca with a natural network. Let us develop it for our culture and our economy,” he said.

The institute is developing several documentaries, which are in different stages of production. These will focus not only on Carnival, but also on other festivals and aspects of TT culture, including Phagwa, Christmas, Hosay, a Kali puja, and a bongo wake.

Johnson stressed that the events and interviews needed to be filmed and properly archived, which takes up a lot of digital space, so proper data storage and backup was necessary.It was also necessary for the institute to have a proper online presence, where anyone who wanted to know about anything relating to Caribbean culture could go, while putting Trinidad at the centre.

The Ministry of Culture told Sunday Newsday it had also asked the institute to develop a concept for the establishment of a Carnival Museum at Fort San Andres in Port-of-Spain, working in collaboration with the NCC and the National Museum. The ministry said the partnership with the museum and further development of that initiative had the potential to provide space for the institute to become a more integral part of the Carnival landscape and to gain more prominence.