Photo: cropped film still from Tara Wyllie's Adeola Dewis Re-presenting Ourselves - Assembly Creatives
I was invited to be part of an Assembly. Assemblies are creative,
interactive forums that are based on engaging with the ways in which the arts
can be used within the community to highlight/address real issues. This
Assembly was about connecting with Cardiff-based Caribbean elders who have specific
links to the Butetown community. The aim was to use the arts to encourage these
elders to remember and begin to talk about different aspects of their life and
experiences in Wales. As a group we sang, recited poetry and prose, danced and enacted
scenes in order to invoke memories. We ended up with an evening that was full
of conversation and sharing. My specific contribution was called Making Something out of Nothing. I
consider myself to be a relatively recent immigrant having lived in Cardiff for
11 years and as a result, I was interested in the ways in which my experiences
could potentially connect and be relevant to others within this diasporic space
that is the UK. It is relatively easy to make blanket statements about groups
of people, which is often the case when addressing Caribbean presence in the
UK. The more I speak and engage with groups within the community, the more I
come to realize that these groups are not homogenous. Yet, without intending to
contradict myself, there are several aspects of home experiences that sometimes
become significant when transposed to new spaces, such as the importance of
being able to cook our traditional food, preservation of accents and indulging
in certain cultural manifestations of our heritage – reminiscing through
festival music, hymns and social commentary.
When I think of home, I think mainly of family and Carnival among other
aspects like food and social sites. The specific traits that epitomize many of
the Caribbean spaces that I have encountered include a sense of resilience and
agency. I am thinking specifically of the art manifested in places like Haiti
and Cuba and how the notion of a Caribbean identity has been forged throughout
the region by disparate peoples. Trinidad Carnival is a unique combination of
ritual and spectacle, free abandon and an activity concerned with serious
social visibility. The Carnival is a creative space within which modes of
self-empowerment can be accessed through masking and performance. Historically
performances such as these permitted a re-presentation of self. This capacity
for re-presentation and re-invention within new places and the ability to make
a space within a place are in my view, key considerations of a Caribbean
diasporic identity.
I chose to work with a traditional Carnival character called Dame
Lorraine. The Dame Lorraine comes from a Trinidad Carnival masking form that
involves exaggerated body features. A male or female masquerader can play the
Dame Lorraine and this character can have both exaggerated breasts and
derriere. The first part of my performance entailed transforming into this
character using old clothes, a pillow, stockings, talcum powder and a small
blanket. The idea was about making a character out of scraps – something out of
nothing. The second part of the performance involved repeating a single
movement for a length of time in an effort to access a more transitory state of
performance that can potentially connect to an altered state of consciousness,
as another method of transformation and form of re-presenting self.
Temporary transformations via mask and/or performance and the making of
these spaces for transformation and re-invention articulate some of the ways in
which Caribbean people coped in the diaspora. We play within our multiple
identities, acting through the self that needs to be dominant within a specific
place. In doing so, we maneuver between home and here, making out of our bits
and pieces, something, somewhere, someone resilient.
