PANTHEON- AN EXHIBITION ON THE KING & QUEEN COSTUMES OF THE TRINIDAD & TOBAGO CARNIVAL
PREMIS
PANTHEON is an annual exhibition celebrating and investigating the Trinidad & Tobago ‘King & Queen of Carnival’ costume tradition. It was created in 2021 by Artists’ Coalition of Trinidad & Tobago’s founder & president, Rubadiri Victor, who is the Exhibitions curator and lead designer. Co-designer is des
igner Kirk Langton and lead-Artisan is Larry Richardson. The King and Queen Costumes are the crown spectacles of Trinidad & Tobago Carnival artisanry. Up to 30ft up and 30ft across, borne by a solitary human figure, they lead bands of costumed individuals as Monarchs across stages and through the streets. They are the culmination of the imaginative, decorative, and engineering arts of the island. T&T has created a form of large scale costuming unique in the world in its belief that the dancing-human and its ‘extended-costumed-body’ can signify any message imaginable- from the intimate to the epic. Trinidad & Tobago has never had a National Exhibition celebrating the Tradition before. COSTUMES THAT DANCE
There are not many communities in the world interested in large scale human costuming. Most of the parallel creations of others are ‘floats’- beautiful and ornamental- but static. About a hundred years ago, Trinbagonians made the unique decision that we wanted our large costumes to be kinetic- that they must EXTEND the human body, movement, and
Spirit. That simple decision marked a significant departure from the rest of the planet- and led to an array of Trini engineering, artistic, and imaginative innovations over the last century in costume design. These innovations are unique in human history and if many of them were patented they would have been worth billions. Like many of our cultural gifts- we have been careless with this tradition…
FACING DOWN CRISIS
Kings & Queens are the largest creative artefacts that T&T creates - bar buildings. They are supposed to be the crowning engineering and artistic spectacle in the Carnival- yet still they are the part of the festival we talk about the least. Possibly because that conversation comes with Responsibility. A Responsibility of Preservation and Transmission. The Kings and Queens are a tradition in crisis- being dramatically affected by the passing of an Elder generation of practitioners who hold the secrets of large costume engineering. This knowledge- unique in all the world- was not documented, institutionalized, or passed on. This last 30 years has seen a dramatic decline in costume engineering and the aesthetic power of the competition. At the heart of this crisis of the Kings & Queens lies a fact that makes it different than other Carnival traditions like Calypso and Steelpan- 99.9% of the Kings & Queen costumes are destroyed after Carnival. There is little to no trace of any of the great costumes of the past! Out of sight, out of mind… This would not matter if the skill to recreate them at a moment’s notice existed among a cadre of practitioners. But that skill is almost all gone- resident now in about 3 Elder’s heads. The fact that that there are no costume artefacts around to do forensics on means that we may be facing a moment soon when we would have lost the collective capacity to construct what we did before. It is a failure to build the Institutions necessary to preserve, house, curate, document, consecrate, matriculate, and transmit Legacy and Skills. The very duties of Civilisation. Most Trinis hold fond emotional memories of the great costumes of the past, being delighted by soaring artistic achievements like Terry Evelyn’s ‘Beauty in Perpetuity’, Minshall’s ‘Tan Tan& Saga Boy’, ‘Man Crab’, ‘The Sacred & Profane’, Berkley’s ‘The Hat I Got for Christmas is Too Big’, ‘Sprite of the Cocal’, Geraldo Vieira’s ‘Splendoria, Glory of the Sun’. At the same time many Trinis seem apathetic in the face of the collapse of the tradition- this distance between cause and effect is the space that PANTHEON is attempting to bridge. THE PROPER CARNIVAL AND STEELBAND MUSEUM
PANTHEON the exhibition was created to not only celebrate the Tradition, but to provoke these conversations and force the issue of transmission of skills and preservation and reconstruction of our great costumes. We are saying that, out of the tens of thousands of Kings and Queens created in the last 100 years- there are at least 100 worthy of reconstruction. That reconstruction should also constitute the creation of the necessary Guild of Masters around King and Queen construction that will preserve the artisan tradition- codifying, documenting, and transmitting the skill and institutionalizing its matriculation and practice. These 100 Costumes, we believe, are among the greatest works of Art of mankind, and should be the centerpieces in the Cathedral that we as a People must construct to hold our greatest achievements- the properly constituted and curated Carnival and Steelband Museum. PANTHEON- the Exhibition- models what that International Best Practice 'Carnival and Steelband Museum' would experientially be like...
