Dragon's last dance

The passing of Glenn "Dragon" De Souza on March 17, marks the end of a remarkable career by a masman who can legitimately claim to have changed the face of Carnival.

Mr De Souza's Cocorite-based Keylemanjahro School of Art and Culture is not the only force driving the return of the moko jumbie to the forefront of the masquerade. His work training hundreds of children over the years, and the migration of those young people into other bands and spaces, sparked a dramatic resurgence in the profile of the moko jumbie as a canvas for costuming. When he founded his Carnival-arts school, the moko jumbie had all but disappeared from Carnival presentations.

It is not an easy mas to play. First, a player must learn to stilt-walk, starting a foot above the ground before progressing to ever larger, more improbable heights.

Layer into that the acrobatic dancing and manipulating the streaming clothing typical of the masquerade.

While Mr De Souza was doing his work in Port of Spain, other proponents such as Junior Bisnath were working with the form in San Fernando.

The moko jumbie has provided a source of drama on the Grand Stand stage, where daring costumes from Moko Somokow and Peter Minshall have competed successfully, literally striding above their competition.

The four-decade old school was the subject of a 2004 book by German photojournalist Stefan Falke, The Dancing Spirits of Trinidad.

A 2018 short documentary featuring the work of Mr De Souza, March of the Mokos, directed by Kim Johnson and produced by the Carnival Institute, won the Caribbean Spirit prize at the Toronto Caribbean Tales Film Festival in 2019.

Mr De Souza was awarded the Hummingbird Medal Gold in 2024. Today's moko jumbies in Carnival are truly impressive works, and swirling, sail-like cloth in vivid colours has become the norm.

The fine-art community has also embraced this new canvas, and the band's costumes for Carnival have been designed by a cavalcade of artists.

A project that Mr De Souza was set to work on next was his plan to create a mass gathering of mokos, more than 1,000 of the masqueraders at the Queen's Park Savannah to try for a Guinness World Record. It's been an ambition of local stilt-walker groups for years. The current record for a stilt-walker assembly is 959 students in the Netherlands in 2011. Mr Bisnath tried in 2017.

At this point, the gathering will at least be a formal recognition of the movement that Mr De Souza sparked and fanned back to life.

There are already more than a thousand local stilt-walkers, from children to elders, coming to the movement from all walks of life.

It is more than mas. It a community based on an understanding of balance.