U of M exhibit 'Midnight Robbers' documents London's carnival tradition

Photo by A.R. Tompsett

"The Recruiter," designed by Ali Pretty for Kinetika's Din Shuru, is one of the many traditional Trinidadian carnival characters.

Mardi Gras in New Orleans is but one expression of carnival the world over. Another is a tradition developed in Trinidad that has since become part of London's festive landscape, the equally vibrant Notting Hill Carnival.

A multimedia display of this annual event, "Midnight Robbers: The Artists of Notting Hill Carnival," opens Saturday at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, where it will be on display through Sept. 11.

Photo by A.R. Tompsett

"The Recruiter," designed by Ali Pretty for Kinetika's Din Shuru, is one of the many traditional Trinidadian carnival characters.

The London carnival takes place the last weekend of August and includes costume, calypso and steel band competitions as well as parading and overall revelry. It is a street festival but also a form of artistic expression, says co-curator Adela Ruth Tompsett.

London-based Tompsett, who began documenting carnival in the early 1980s, taught the subject for 21 years at Middlesex University, where she remains a principal lecturer in drama and the performing arts. She and fellow curator Lesley Ferris, an Ohio State University arts and humanities professor, will be in town for a Sept. 9 lecture and a closing event on Sept. 10.

The exhibit includes around 60 photographic images, a film, a costume and a large-scale wire sculpture by acclaimed carnival designer Carl Gabriel that shows how the tradition survives invested with new creative impulses.

The exhibit takes its title from one of many traditional Trinidadian carnival characters, the Midnight Robber, who summed up for Tompsett carnival's sense of cultural assertion and reclamation of identity for participants.

"This is a character with a huge hat, sweeping cloak, a coffin in one hand to collect money, but also to be scary, a gun," she says. "This was a boastful character, a speechifier. ... He was terrifying. He swept over to you and you put money in his coffin box quickly. ... He's grand, he's provocative, he's in your face, he's out there, and he believes in himself. He's self-affirming."

A carnival tradition dates back to the early 19th century in then-British controlled Trinidad when Caribbean Africans, emancipated in 1838 adapted the masquerade balls of French settlers (called a "mas" in the vernacular). As West Indies populations relocated to England post-WWII, many settled in the Notting Hill district, where they were often antagonized and socially suppressed, resulting in riots in 1958. A year later, Trinidadian/American Claudia Jones, who had been deported to England due to her Communist activism and who established England's first black newspaper, founded the London carnival as a way to invest a sense of pride and cultural identity in the city's Caribbean-English population.

By the early 1960s, carnival moved to the streets, where it was usually perceived as a "potential public disorder event," says Tompsett. Only in the last two decades has it become accepted as a part of the larger social fabric of London.

As an example of the spread of Afrodiasporic culture, "Midnight Robbers" makes a perfect fit, says University of Memphis museum assistant director Lisa Francisco Abitz, with the recently installed permanent exhibit, "Africa: Visual Arts of a Continent," and the related temporary exhibit, "Sogo Bò: The Animals Come Forth," a display of Malian puppetry. The Malian exhibit also runs through Sept. 11 in the museum's adjunct gallery space.

"The Sogo Bò allows us to focus on masquerading and then this is the African Diaspora next step," says Abitz.

Tompsett elaborates on the African and Afro-Caribbean heritage of carnival, which has survived in, among other aspects, its music and "chipping" dance step.

"European movement is about 'I'm light, I'm thin, I'm vertical, I'm always floating,' " she says. "And the African tradition in movement is to take energy and spirit from the ground with that foot fully in contact flat to the ground. That was at the beginning and it's still there when we go around the streets of Notting Hill. We're still chipping with foot to the ground."

"Midnight Robbers: The Artists of Notting Hill Carnival"

On display through Sept. 11 at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, 142 Communication Fine Arts Building. Call 678-2224 or go to amum.org.

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