Great mas of the past honoured in Woodford Square

Carnival 2021 virtual celebrations are over and Lent, the season of prayer and fasting, has begun. So many people were surprised as they walked through Woodford Square, Port of Spain, on Friday, slowing down to see pieces from 16 surviving Carnival costumes on display throughout the square.

One of the costumes belongs to Peter Minshall, from his Man Crab of 1983. There are also fragments from mas designers Terry Evelyn in 1963, Wayne Berkeley from 1987, and another from 1971 by Geraldo Vieira on display. Each is enclosed in a "cage" wrapped in fluorescent tape, and accompanied by information about the costumes and Carnivals of the past.

The exhibition is a four-day tribute to some of the most memorable winning costumes of Carnival, which also honours stalwart calypsonians, wirebenders, legendary costume designers and bandleaders. The event, Pantheon No 1, is being put on by Rubadiri Victor and the Artists’ Coalition of TT (ACTT).

Members of the public stopped to admire what was left of large burnt-orange snakes, mesh butterfly wings and other pieces of junior kings and queens, traditional mas and fragments of winning mas that once was the highlight of a night at the Grand Stand at the Queen’s Park Savannah over 60 years ago.

To end the event ACTT plans to bring what is left of these costumes alive and make them “dance” on Saturday, the final day of the exhibition.

In a short interview with Newsday, Victor said 99 per cent of costumes are destroyed after Carnival Tuesday because there is no space to store them. He hopes that the country will see the need to preserve legacy and traditions through a Carnival museum.

“I feel that the one thing that could tip things over into talking about truly preserving the art are things like a Carnival/steelband museum, and those kind of things are the king and queens…When you contemplate that we have created thousands of those kinds of majestic costumes and might have less than 20 around – that's insanity.

“The elder generation of master artisans who had the skill, you know, a golden age that lasted from 1930-56, who brought this stuff to the classical level of execution, they're all dead. The first generation of them is all dead.

"So we now have to rely on whoever in the second generation got a smattering of those things that kind of piece together what it is that they were doing. And that's the terror of us.”