From Carnivalesque to Ritualesque: Public Ritual and the Theater of the Street

Abstract

Ritual, festival, celebRation, caRnival, holiday, public display eventthese terms and others are used to refer to a variety of public performances.Often the terms overlap.Sometimes they are used interchangeably.In part, this is due to the porous, shifting nature of the events themselves, heavily dependent on context and intended purpose.It is the intention of this essay to examine public performances in order to tease out shared qualities and to set forth ways of apprehending these events in a way that allows us to more fully grasp their purposeful meanings and to articulate ways that they differ.By approaching performance events as carnivalesque and ritualesque, we are able to understand the multiple modes of communication; the simultaneity of joy and anger, of politics and fun; and how "fun" in some contexts equals protest.Carnival, strictly speaking, refers to the pre-Lenten festival that represents an opportunity for sensual abandon in advance of the deprivations of the forty-day period of Lent.This festive occasion is known in several guises and in fact sometimes occurs outside of reference to the Western Christian church calendar: for instance, Fastnacht is celebrated in some Protestant areas after Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent (Tokofsky 2004); and as European colonizers and settlers brought the tradition with them to the New World, it became heavily synthesized with African masquerade traditions, resulting in a New World Afro-Caribbean and South American carnival complex.As West Indian populations in turn migrated to North America and Europe, Trinidadian-style carnival is often celebrated in summer in these new locations (Allen 1999).No longer tied to a Christian calendar and heavily Africanized, these Trinidad-and Rio-styled

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