England farewell

Late Trinidadian musicologist Dr Geraldine Connor’s “ultimate ambition” was for Carnival Messiah to tour the world for many years “as an icon that declares who and what we the people of Trinidad and Tobago are really made of”.

Connor told graduates of her alma mater, Diego Martin Secondary, on October 17, 2008 — when she was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame in recognition of her achievements — that Carnival Messiah was “my life’s work, a production that is wholly imbedded in the cultural practices of (TT)”.

Speaking about her life and work then, she said, “In order to make a difference, we must first acknowledge and understand the past, this in order to realistically address the present, which then allows us to inform and impact on the future.”

Connor attended Tranquility Girls from 1960 to 1963, and Diego Martin Government Secondary from 1963 to1968. Before classes, she took piano lessons from 6 am for one hour each day during the week. In the evenings before taking music theory lessons, she routinely walked a mile to buy 12 fresh hops for the family.

“By 16, I’d become a very accomplished Grade 7 pianist, achieved Grade 6 theory, and was generally a very healthy young woman,” she said.

The TT school environment sparked her interest in the dramatic and “the honing of my instinct of observation, and an ability to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, and work out how to reproduce this on stage”.

Connor was born on March 29, 1952 in England to Trinidadian parents and cultural ambassadors, Pearl and Edric Connor. She died of a heart attack on October 22, 2011, in England and was laid to rest on Friday. Edric was a well known international singer, actor, folklorist and filmmaker and Pearl, a theatrical agent and black theatre consultant.

At the time of her death, Connor’s friend and colleague, Wilma Primus, told Sunday Newsday, Connor, in collaboration with friend and colleagues Viscount David Lascelles and Terrence Suthers and the “Carnival Messiah Family”, were developing a commercial arena production of Carnival Messiah.

This production was meant to honour her late parents; mentor Beryl McBurnie; inspiration, Lord Kitchener, and friend and role model Andre Tanker. Tours involving large scale venues in TT and across the world had been planned to begin next year, she said.

In her 2008 address, Connor spoke extensively about her creation of Carnival Messiah. Her introduction to Carnival, she said, was as dramatic to her introduction to music and drama.

She related, “Every Carnival Monday morning, a masquerader, whose name I have been unable to unearth, would leave Diego Martin heading for the J’ouvert celebrations in Port-of-Spain on foot in a most colourful Jab Jab Jester costume with bells, a pointed hat and armed with a most dangerous eight-foot leather whip you ever did see. He would always stop at Sierra Leone junction. We would hear his voice calling us to attention; his whip whistling through the air then viciously hitting the ground. He would dance his very own dance, to his very own music, which was obviously in his very own head. He would only be there for five minutes, then he would be gone in a flash.

“That experience and the sight in the savannah of George Bailey’s Africa and Silver Stars ‘Children of Lilliput’ and the sound of the Guinness Cavaliers’ steelband at our first Panorama, led me to research and develop in later years my theory that proclaims “Carnival” as the theatre of the Caribbean.”

Connor left TT for England with her parents shortly after graduating from Diego Martin in 1968 and graduated from the Royal College of Music, London, in 1974 with majors in classical voice, pianoforte and conducting.

When she completed her college education in England in the mid 1970s, she said, “I could not get back to (TT) fast enough. Interestingly, I had managed to miss the hey day of the Black Power movement. Therefore on my return I encountered a climate of major change, at times somewhat sinister, but certainly a movement away from Europe towards things indigenous to (TT).

“I immediately recognised that this was going to be my time, and thus it was during the 1970s and 1980s that although I was now based in the Caribbean, I instinctively still kept a footing in both cultural camps.

“I met and worked closely on the one hand with Beryl McBurnie in the folkloric area, and on the other with Marjorie Padmore in the classical musical arena.

On her return to Trinidad, Connor entered the teaching profession, initially teaching music at Queen’s Royal College from 1976 to1984.

She spent eight years teaching music at QRC; founding and touring two large choirs — HNC/QRC and Family and Friends.

In 1984, she returned to England to work at the Brent Black Music Co-operative as Education Supervisor, where she was also a tutor in black vocal techniques.

On her return, she met Horace James and Bernice Ward, who ran the Trinidad Folk Singers (UK version of La Petite Musicale), and performed alongside artistes like Vivienne Comma, Noble Douglas and Ava Agard for seven years.

Her other artistic highlights included Take Two with Paul Keenes Douglas at Beryl McBurnie’s Little Carib Theatre in 1989 and as musical director for Santimanitay - Minshall’s first carnivalesque sortie into stadium presentation in 1989.

Connor returned to England in 1990 to take up the post of Senior Lecturer in Multicultural Music at the College of Music, City of Leeds, West Yorkshire. In 1992 she was a Senior Teaching Fellow and Lecturer on the Music Studies Bachelor of Arts Popular degree course at Bretton Hall, University of Leeds, Yorkshire. She remained there until 2004.

Of this experience, she said, “So when in 1990, I returned to Britain for the third time, this time to Yorkshire ... it was here that I finally realised my innate creativity as well as my academic voice. My collective dual life experiences had finally led me to this point.

“And so it was in 1993, Carnival Messiah, which I describe as my life’s work, a production that is wholly imbedded in the cultural practices of Trinidad and Tobago, was born. I often joke that it was ‘Born in Trinidad and Tobago’ and ‘Made in Yorkshire.’”

Carnival Messiah was first produced by the West Yorkshire Playhouse 1993 and in 2002, drawing record audiences of 16,000 and 27,000 consecutively.

Creating Carnival Messiah, she said, “I use the Caribbean historical experiences of African enslavement, 16th century European expansionism/colonialism, and 19th century Asian indentured migration to show how the people of the Caribbean accommodated and employed the multiple and shifting identities of Africa, Europe and Asia within one space to empower themselves.

“I concluded that they did this by re-interpreting, reconstituting, modifying, transforming and representing the dominant western narrative of imperial Europe in a new guise.”

“Such was the horror and rupture of their historical experiences, that the people of the Caribbean developed many severe and strategic cultural coping mechanisms.

“The coping mechanisms have manifested themselves today in particularly unique forms of cultural expressions which all demonstrate the use of strategies of camouflage and syncretism to disguise them. These strategies were in fact movements of resistance - albeit non-confrontational resistance.

At the invitation of the TT government, Carnival Messiah premiered at Queen’s Hall in July 2003, and was held over in 2004. In September 2007 to commemorate the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, it was also staged on the grounds of the Harewood House, Yorkshire for 14 nights. In 2008, two excerpts of Carnival Messiah were presented as the star presentations at the Royal Albert Hall, London for one of Prince Charles’ charities.