WW: Amplify how might specific ACASA members’ books be of particular interest to our Caribbean cultural base?

EL: Henry Louis Gates’ editorial stewardship reintroduced Mary Prince's biography to the African American canon, which includes her saga from Bermuda to Antigua to London. (I always think of this as an African Atlantic counter-text to Jane Austen’s ephemeral profile of Antigua in Mansfield Park.) Recently, he recently edited Wonders of the African World, a BBC produced PBS TV Series. Herbert Cole’s work includes the definitive text, I Am Not Myself: Art of the Masquerader , and most recently, A History of Art in Africa. Thompson’s seminal works include The Flash of the Spirit, and African Arts in Motion, Face of the Gods: Sacred Alters in the Americas, which feature the art of Crucian artist/priest Charles Abramson. John Nunley’s curatorship of the landmark 1998 Caribbean Festival Arts exhibition, and the accompanying text, Caribbean Festival Arts, co-authored with Judith Bettelheim, are of great importance to our festival traditions. Bettelheim has also written two editions of Cuban Festivals, a groundbreaking book about our pan-Caribbean syncretisms; and, particularly of their manifestations in Cuba. Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher’s book, African Ceremonies, document effectively the range of festivals, rituals and performance traditions of the continental African peoples. Robert Nicholl’s masquerade book on local traditions is entitled Old Time Masquerade in the Virgin Islands.

WW: You said earlier that Caribbean Basin Arts are re-staging a transformation in the Virgin Islands. What outlines, tracings or readings are you deploying on this Kongo Atlantic Arts cultural map?

EL: First, like Trinidad at mid-Twentieth Century, the Virgin Islands now boast a budding mixture of several peoples. Their participation at various levels, expressed in Creole vernaculars, are already the antecedents of future Carnivals elsewhere. On the one hand, I don’t think Trinidad can boast so many of its legislators who sing their own calypsoes during their Carnival Tent. Conversely, many of the Botanical Fraternities – across several island traditions – surface among the ranks of the vendors. Of equal importance, real ‘presences’ along with "agencies" from other cultural spheres have begun to surface in the US Virgin Islands carnivals.

Secondly, in context of the "lost" horned masquerade tradition - of which my play seeks to restore a small part of that folk memory - there are people living here, in the territory, from the Arabic cultures; who have their own Bilmawn masquerade tradition. Here, in the V.I., we have one of the oldest Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere, for whom the horned tradition as an Old Testament icon, is well represented. Surrounding us, the Hispanic-Caribbean Basin cultures have contributed Minatauro, the Vejigante and Diablito horned masquerade traditions.

WW: So now, distinctive from, say, Jamaica, or Trinidad, what might as ACASA find here?

EL: A spectrum of modern forms – a modern idealization – supporting the co-existence of several masquerade traditions. I suspect real nuances of the Adult Parade are best deployed during intense moments of recognition by "islands of spectators" along the route: certain "bows", curtseys, minuets, even breaking-ranks to extend informal handshakes. Other non-choreographed moments, for instance articulate vital temporal relationships between the preceding troupe’s music and one’s own. So, oftentimes, real energies are not displayed in the media-generated frontal arrays, or advancing formations; they lie elsewhere. For instance, in the St. Thomas Carnival, there are those individual performers who participate in several troupes – and different masquerade personages – leaving one troupe, and strategically changing costumes along the way, becoming another and joining a different troupe.

Continue>