Cul­ture is not sta­t­ic. It changes. The change might come slow­ly or some­times sud­den­ly, de­pend­ing on the sit­u­a­tion, the ex­pe­ri­ences of peo­ple and what peo­ple choose to keep or get rid of. Cul­tur­al the­o­rist Stu­art Hall re­minds us that cul­tur­al iden­ti­ties “un­der­go con­stant trans­for­ma­tion” and are “sub­ject to the con­tin­u­ous ‘play’ of his­to­ry, cul­ture and pow­er”. This is why Car­ni­val will nev­er re­main frozen in time; it is ever-chang­ing.

As a cel­e­bra­tion which re­flects our his­to­ry, cel­e­bra­tions and strug­gles, it will adapt as time goes. Changes and adap­ta­tions to T&T’s Car­ni­val have been most vi­su­al since the be­gin­ning of the 21st cen­tu­ry and Car­ni­val con­tin­ues to evolve, blend­ing a mix­ture of tra­di­tion­al and new.

There are many pos­i­tive changes that we can wel­come. The fact that T&T’s Car­ni­val is a big at­trac­tion to T&T and wider Caribbean di­as­po­ras en­sures a steady stream of vis­i­tors to our coun­try. So­cial me­dia has ex­pand­ed our reach and vis­i­bil­i­ty. Live stream­ing of events, the pro­lif­er­a­tion of videos by celebri­ty vis­i­tors, artistes and mas­quer­aders, takes Car­ni­val way be­yond our lit­tle is­lands.

Al­so, lo­cal cel­e­bra­tions can be found through T&T, cre­at­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties for par­tic­i­pa­tion by a wider cross-sec­tion of the pop­u­la­tion.

Then there are oth­er changes which are vis­i­ble, but whether they’re seen as pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive all de­pends on one’s in­di­vid­ual pref­er­ences and feel­ings.

Prob­a­bly the most vis­i­ble “evo­lu­tion” is the fact that pret­ty mas now fo­cus­es more on the “pret­ty” rather than the mas. Par­tic­i­pat­ing in Car­ni­val, whether it is go­ing to a fete or play­ing mas, has evolved in­to a whole pro­duc­tion, es­pe­cial­ly for women. In the age of cam­eras and so­cial me­dia, there is pres­sure to al­ways look per­fect. This means not re-wear­ing an out­fit, do­ing your hair, nails, make-up and even adding eye­lash ex­ten­sions.

Some fetes have make-up artistes on site to en­sure that pa­trons are cam­era-ready. For many mas­quer­aders, the day starts long be­fore they hit the road. Hair styl­ists and make-up artistes book rooms in ho­tels and take book­ings from as ear­ly as 4 am.

Mas bands have been forced to up their stan­dards; they must now pro­vide cool-down trucks, ex­ec­u­tive toi­lets and air-con­di­tioned spaces and VIP sec­tions ac­com­pa­nied by ropes to keep the non-VIP and strag­glers out. Iron­i­cal­ly, play­ing mas has tra­di­tion­al­ly been about be­ing on the road and en­joy­ing your­self, but now, mas­quer­aders want to be off the road, in cool­er spaces where they will main­tain the “per­fect look” for the cam­eras.

The oth­er vis­i­ble change is the cre­ativ­i­ty, or more like the lack of it. Fe­male cos­tumes have been re­duced to two strings as “beads and biki­nis” dom­i­nate the roads. I am not even sure if we should be call­ing two pieces of string a cos­tume. They have got­ten skimpi­er over the years, show­ing body parts that re­al­ly don’t need to be re­vealed. The fem­i­nists will ar­gue that it’s a woman’s body and she has to­tal free­dom to wear what­ev­er she wants and that is ab­solute­ly true. How­ev­er, at the same time, there is a fine line be­tween nu­di­ty and fem­i­nism.

There is al­so a whole gen­dered as­pect to Car­ni­val which has emerged very sub­tly over the years. The whole im­age of Car­ni­val is now about women, specif­i­cal­ly sexy women. How come we are not see­ing the men’s cos­tumes get­ting skimpi­er and sex­i­er?

Most men jump in a shorts with some em­bell­ish­ments and head on the road. Why are mar­ket­ing agen­cies choos­ing young, sexy women as pro­mo girls? Why is it that fe­male so­ca and chut­ney artistes have to main­tain an im­age while their male coun­ter­parts can per­form in shorts and t-shirts?

The an­swer is sim­ple: sexy bod­ies look good on cam­era and in the age of so­cial me­dia, beau­ti­ful women in skimpy cos­tumes is what we want the world to see. At least we don’t have a short­age of beau­ti­ful women in T&T!

As I said in the be­gin­ning, cul­ture is not sta­t­ic. Thus, we can ex­pect T&T’s Car­ni­val to con­tin­ue evolv­ing, whether we like the di­rec­tion or not. At the same time, we are not help­less spec­ta­tors just look­ing on as it changes.

We can shape how it evolves, but choos­ing what should take promi­nence, what we should in­vest in and what we want to project to the world. By choos­ing what we want to re­ward and cel­e­brate, we can help to shape the way in which Car­ni­val grows and de­vel­ops.

Our cre­ativ­i­ty should be cel­e­brat­ed more through prop­er shows. Di­manche Gras has been able to do this over the years. Maybe small­er, sim­i­lar shows will show the world that Car­ni­val is more than beads and biki­nis and that we have so much more to of­fer. If we in­ten­tion­al­ly cre­ate spaces for the “mas” in Car­ni­val by sup­port­ing tra­di­tion­al mas, hav­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties for younger de­sign­ers to show­case their cre­ativ­i­ty and ex­pand­ing com­mu­ni­ty-based events, we can shape how Car­ni­val evolves. When we de­cide what to put on cen­tre stage, we de­cide what Car­ni­val be­comes.