Symposium: Leeds

Our keynote speaker was carnival expert Dr. Samantha A. Noël, Associate Professor of Art History at Wayne State University, US, a specialist in the ‘Pretty Mas’ aesthetic, delivering on ‘The Jaycees Queen Competition and the Pretty Mas' Aesthetic’. Kim Vaz-Deville, Professor of Education at Xavier University of Louisiana and expert on the Baby Dolls of New Orleans, will shared her curatorial experience of bringing Baby Doll mas into the exhibition space. Carnival Designer and Artist Rhian Kempadoo-Miller exhibited ‘Danca e Luta,’ her carnival-inspired artwork and examined the craft of carnival in a panel discussion. Cathy Thomas (University of California, Santa Barbara), Adeola Dewis (Laku Neg) Adanna Kai Jones (Bowdoin College, US) Emily Zobel Marshall (Leeds Beckett University) and Tola Dabiri brought their expertise on the gendered, literary, cross-cultural, performative, psychological and African-rooted aspects of carnivals and discussed the potent, transformative power of mas.

Rope Jab masquerader ‘Whip Princess’ Renella Alfred, Activist, Baby Doll expert and mas performer Amanda McIntyre and Poet, Playwright and Cultural Activist Eintou Springer joined us online from Trinidad to share their philosophies and practices of mas.

There was a performance of a traditional mas inspired theatre piece by Actor and Director Leah Francis, Co-founder of Black and Asian Theatre company and ‘Speak Woman Speak’, and a discussion on the artistic creation and female labour of carnival from the Mama Dread Masqueraders Leeds West Indian Carnival troupe. Author, Poet and Theatre-maker Khadijah Ibrahiim and Leeds-based poet Abdullah Adekola also shared their poetry with us.

There was also a carnival dance workshop and discussion with Lorina Gumbs and Leeds carnival band AnonyMas – to get us challenging our preconceptions and out of our seats and wining!

This was the third symposium in the AHRC-funded Women in Carnival global network coordinated by Emily Zobel Marshall, Cathy Thomas and Adeola Dewis (Women in Carnival project Advisor). Our previous two symposiums took place in Trinidad (Feb 2022) and California (May 2022).

Samantha A. Noël is an Associate Professor of Art History and the Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art at Wayne State University. She received her BA in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., and her MA and PhD in Art History from Duke University. Her research interests revolve around the history of art, visual culture and performance of the Black Diaspora.

Samantha has published on black modern and contemporary art and performance in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text and Art Journal and has an article forthcoming in the journal Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. Noel has also contributed essays to exhibition catalogues as well as chapters to the following edited volumes: Carnival is Women: Feminism and Performance in Caribbean Mas’ and Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts. Noël’s book, Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism (Duke University Press, February 2021), offers a thorough investigation of how Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century were responding to colonial and hegemonic regimes through visual and performative tropicalist representation. It privileges the land and how a sense of place is critical in the identity formation of early twentieth-century artists as well as their creative processes.

Noël is working on a new book tentatively titled Diasporic Art in the Age of Black Power. This book seeks to examine the impact of the Black Power Movement on visual art as it emerged in the political, historical, and social contexts of the United States of America and the Anglophone Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s. Noël was the 2021-2022 Smithsonian Terra Foundation Senior Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her research has also been supported by The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Moreau Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame. She has also received a number of grants and fellowship from Wayne State University.

Samantha Noël is a specialist in the ‘Pretty Mas’ aesthetic, delivering on ‘The Jaycees Queen Competition and the Pretty Mas' Aesthetic’ at this symposium.

Dr Emily Zobel Marshall is of French-Caribbean and British heritage and grew up in the mountains of Snowdonia in North Wales. She is a Reader in Postcolonial Literature at the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Beckett University. Emily is an expert on the trickster figure in the folklore, oral cultures and literature of the African Diaspora and has published widely in these fields, including her books Anansi’s Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural Resistance (published in 2012 by the University of the West Indies Press) and American Trickster: Trauma Tradition and Brer Rabbit (published in 2019 by Rowman and Littlefield).

Emily plays mas in Leeds West Indian carnival and has established a Caribbean Carnival Cultures research platform and network that aims to bring the critical, creative, academic and artistic aspects of carnival into dialogue with one another. She also consults arts and educational organizations on Decolonial methodologies and approaches.

Emily develops her creative work alongside her academic writing. She has had poems published in several international journals and anthologies and is Co-Chair of the David Oluwale Memorial Association, a charity committed to fighting racism and homelessness, and a Creative Associate of the Geraldine Connor Foundation.

Cathy Thomas is a creative critical scholar working on African American and Caribbean literature as well as being a comic arts scholar. She has written several articles, book chapters, two chapbooks, a syndicated comic, and short films. She is completing two books.

Cathy's spec fiction novel PoCo Mas explores a historically unprecedented Afrofuture attentive to the long histories Humanism, afterlives of anti-black violence, and aftershock of weather through the lens of Carnival and the poetics of mas(querade). Her collection of linked slipstream stories Girls on Film explores the mother-daughter-alien relation across time, race, and the silver screen.

Cathy is also researching her monograph Unruly: On a Genealogy of Afrodiasporic Women and Girls. She is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English. She received her Ph.D. in Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Adéolá Dewis is an Artist, Presenter and Cultural Theorist. Originally from Trinidad, Adéolá graduated from the University of the West Indies in 2000 with First Class Honours in Visual Arts and completed PhD research in 2015 at Cardiff University. Her research is focused on Trinidad Carnival performance as ritual and the translation of its self-empowering effects for art making and art presentation. This examination of the ways in which Carnival performance can be interpreted within art-making and presentation is geared towards empowering displaced peoples and generating accessibility to a form of experience traditionally only available to Carnival revelers.

Adéolá has a strong interest in modes of transformation and in exploring ways of re-presenting self, especially in relation to performance. Adéolá’s life and experiences as a mother and immigrant have informed aspects of her practice and continues to contribute to the ways in which her work takes shape.

Stacey Leigh Ross is a UK-based Trinidadian Life Story Artist and educator who teaches at the University of the Arts London. She uses art to create social change by building confidence in individuals through Life Story Art bespoke contemporary mixed media paintings that reflect the subjects’ best selves, using their own experiences as evidence that they’re loved, and capable of amazing things.

Stacey also nurtures creativity, compassion and inclusion in communities through and Community Art collaborations with local organisations, and Workshops which help define and develop individual and social purpose. Her current project is Carnival of Compassion - a practice-based PhD that is interactive, socially-engaged, multi-disciplinary, and collaborative. It uses Caribbean Carnival culture and storytelling to inspire acts of compassion. Stacey has published articles and spoken at conferences about colourism, inclusive teaching, and social change curation.

Dr Janice B Fournillier self identifies as Black/ Caribbean/woman/native ethnographer. She is a Professor at Georgia State University’s College of Education and Human Development. She has a major research interest in Carnival mas’ art and the teaching/learning practices associated with the process and outcomes. Her research stretches across international borders impacting her academic peers as well as practitioners, graduate students, policymakers, and community members. As a researcher-professor who prepares future researchers, Dr. Fournillier’s work challenges her students to push their thinking in the way she actively models the type of criticality and creativity needed to design and conduct qualitative and quantitative educational research.

As a Designer/Maker, Marina have been making and playing 'Old Mas' approx 27 yrs, first at NHC and then in her native Yorkshire since 1997. She is disabled, which has limited access to Carnival at times: her aim is to make Mas that is accessible for all bodies. And as a committed environmentalist, Marina has tried to focus on construction techniques that are sustainable. She would happily speak about any of those topics from a feminist perspective.

Callaloo Carnival Arts is a disabled-led Carnival Arts group based in Mirfield, West Yorkshire (UK). They use a range of Carnival Artforms to transform people, places and spaces. Their work features traditional and contemporary Mas characters, costume, mask, music, dance, and accessible performances in a range of settings,often working with people from marginalised communities.

They design, produce, and promote inclusive, accessible Masquerade presentations and Parades of all sizes at Carnivals, Festivals and Outdoor Events, working mainly in Yorkshire, the UK and occasionally abroad. Their signature events are Mirfield Carnival Parade and their PopUp Carnivals (which aim to bring Carnival to communities who typically face barriers in attending large Carnival events).

Rhian Kempadoo-Millar trained at Central St Martins Art School, London in Theatre Design in 1996 and Leeds School of Art in Textiles and Millinery in 2010.

For over 25 years she has worked as an artist and costume designer in UK, Europe, USA and Caribbean for carnival, dance, film, TV, theatre and video games. Her exhibition 'Liberar 22' is a combination of original canvases, art prints and sketches. Much of the work captures a feeling of freedom, movement and release, inspired by chapters of a woman's life through motherhood, career, love, grief, changing roles and relocation.

Since moving to Tavira in 2021, Rhian has returned to painting and drawing from more personal reference. Her Caribbean heritage (Indian, Guyanese, Scottish, West African) is reflected strongly in the style of work. Living and working between the UK and Trinidad and Tobago, she blends Caribbean aesthetic and tradition with contemporary issues, female narratives and social commentary. Characters from Carnival from Jouvay, Canboulay and Caribbean Folklore. Moko Jumbies, Blue Devil, La Diablese, Cowhead, Jab Jabs, Baby Doll feature through sketches, painting, collage and textiles.

Kim Vaz-Deville is professor of education at Xavier University of Louisiana. Her book The ‘Baby Dolls’: Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) was the basis for “They Call Me Baby Doll: A Mardi Gras Tradition” an exhibit at the Louisiana State Museum in 2013. She co-curated “Contemporary Artists Respond to the New Orleans Baby Dolls” at the Leah and George McKenna African American Museum in 2015. The “Baby Dolls” was selected as the One Book One New Orleans 2016 choice for a community campaign for literacy.

Her anthology Walking Raddy: The Baby Dolls of New Orleans (University Press of Mississippi, 2018) further explores the tradition. She co-curated the exhibition “Mystery in Motion: African American Masking and Spirituality in Mardi Gras,” shown at the Louisiana State Museum Presbytere in 2021. She is the lead investigator for the community grounded project, “African American Mardi Gras Maskers’ Post-Pandemic Ideas about the Good Life,” through “The Good Life Project,” an initiative of Morgan State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and the City with support from the Henry Luce Foundation 2022.

Kim's project also gained support from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities 2021 Rebirth Grant initiative. She has been awarded a 2022-2023 Louisville Institute Sabbatical Grant for Researchers for her book in progress titled “Masked in Mardi Gras: The Sacred Visual Art of African American New Orleans Carnival.” She is the associate curator for the exhibit “The Black Indians of New Orleans,” which opened at The Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris, France, on 4 October, 2022.

Dr Tola Dabiri is a consultant in the cultural sector, specialising in project management, equality and inclusion, and fundraising.

Tola lauched Electric Piers in autumn 2022, a new CIC which built on the work of Brick by Brick CIC and Museum X CIC. Tola has over twenty years experience of in working in the cultural sector in the UK, and has developed and managed a number of successful projects including the digital project Carnival in a Box (carnivalinabox.co.uk) in 2020, Fundraising for Archives for The National Archives, and UKCCA’s HLF funded Carnival Archive Project, (www.carnivalarchives.org.uk)

In her earlier career, Tola was a Senior Policy Adviser at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, and managed library services across London. Tola Dabiri has a PhD from Leeds Beckett University, and her research area is orality and the intangible cultural heritage of Carnival and masquerade, and she has a special interest in Grenada.

Eintou Springer is a poet, playwright and cultural activist born in Santa Cruz, Trinidad. She is a founding member of various cultural organizations, including the Writers Union of Trinidad and Tobago, the National Drama Association of Trinidad and Tobago (NDATT), the Caribbean Theatre Guild, and the Emancipation Support Committee. She was honored as Poet Laureate of Port of Spain from 2002 to 2009.

She is the author of several books, including poetry collection, for both adults and children, as well as having her writings published in a range of publications and anthologies, including Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (1979, edited by Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker and Beverly Guy-Sheftall), Daughters of Africa (1992, edited by Margaret Busby), and Moving Beyond Boundaries, vol. I. International Dimensions of Black Women’s Writings (1995, edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie). Springer has received acclaim for her work as a storyteller and dramatist. In 2011, her play How Anansi Bring the Drum celebrated the United Nations’ International Year for People of African Descent (IYPAD) and was part of UNESCO’s Youth Theatre Initiative.

Renella Alfred (Whip Princess) is the daughter of the original whipmaster Ronald Alfred and Whip Queen Shalima Buckreedee Alfred. Renella is from Trinidad and is a cultural performing artist, a teacher of the art, and a Keeper of the tradition Rope Jab. “Carnival is my life it’s who I am. I am carnival.”

Amanda T. McIntyre is the Art Director at Pride Trinidad and Tobago. She was previously the Art Administrator at New Local Space (NLS), a contemporary visual art initiative based in Kingston, Jamaica. In 2020 McIntyre was part of the faculty for the La Pràctica artists Residency and an advisor for the NLS, Curatorial, and Art Writing Fellowship. In 2018, she founded She Right Collective, a Caribbean feminist advocacy network that hosts platforms for contemporary literature, visual arts, and performance. In 2017, she was awarded the title Ole Mas Champion by the Bocas Literary Festival and the National Carnival Commission of Trinidad and Tobago. In 2021, she was awarded a Futuress Coding Resistance Fellowship.

Amanda's art practice is mainly rendered through performance, costume design, photography, and film. McIntrye is the creator and performer of the Dolly Ma and Dolly Ma Brigitta Baby Doll masquerades. Her essay "The Baby Doll: Memory, Myths and Mas" is published in Issue 6 No.1 of The Tout Moun: Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies special issue “Creating a Caribbean Sense of Place: Calypso, Spoken Word & the Oral Tradition." She is also the author of "Dolly Ma Brigitta, Queer Baby Doll Mythography in Trinidad and Tobago Carnival," published in the special 10- year anniversary issue of Qzine: Imagining Tomorrow.

Lorina Gumbs is Head Designer and Band leader for AnonyMas Carnival Leeds.

AnonyMas is one of the largest Carnival costumed troupes in Leeds with 19+ years carnival experience and still growing. An inclusive, diverse brand, embracing participants and artists from all backgrounds, encouraging a feel-good family unit. AnonyMas have been credited with reinventing Carnival costume participation in Leeds. The team (Lorina Gumbs, Cherise Hill and Fenella Gumbs) are trained in Art, Design, Project Management and fitness. AnonyMas take pride in both the artistry and performance of carnival.

They perform in eye popping feathered and embellished costumes, bring high energy and excitement to fashion shows, corporate meet and greet, launch events, film shoots, outdoor spectacles and not forgetting the streets at Leeds West Indian Carnival. Their flexible and adaptable skill set is transferable across all ages, genders and diverse backgrounds providing informal, corporate and tailored services.

Guy is the Secretary of Harrison Bundey Mama Dread’s Masqueraders, a Leeds based carnival troupe telling stories about social justice through costumes, dance and music. He is now retired but was a community project manager and educationalist.

Guy has attended Leeds Carnival for over 30 years and used to photograph the carnival, but for the last 10+ years he has participated in it. Huy co-produced a photograph based account of the carnival titled ‘Celebrate: 50 Years of Leeds West Indian Carnival’. After losing his partner Athaliah (Mama Dread) he have been more active behind the scenes, helping raise funds and organise supplies, as well as making and designing costumes.

Abdullah Adekola is a Black writer and performer based in Leeds. His breakthrough collection of poetry Nigrescence is out now.

Khadijah Ibrahiim was born in Leeds of Jamaican parentage. Educated at the University of Leeds, she is a literary activist, theatre maker and published writer, who combines’ inter-disciplinary art forms to re-imagine poetry as performance theatre.

Hailed as one of Yorkshire’s most prolific poets by the BBC, her work appears in university journals and poetry anthologies such as Red, Magma 75, Weighted Words, Stand and More Fyah. Her collection 'Another Crossing' was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2014. She’s performed and produced art and theatre programs, in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. In 2010 she was a writer in residence for El Gouna writes, Egypt, and South Africa as part of the British council, Verbalized Sustained Theatre. In 2017 and 2019 she was shortlisted for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. 2018, shortlisted for the Sue Rider ‘Yorkshire Woman of the Year for her contribution to the arts.

Khadijah is the founder and Artistic Director of Leeds Young Authors, Producer of ‘Voices of a New Generation’ poetry Slam, and Executive producer of the award-winning documentary ‘We Are Poets’. She was a creative associate for Ode To Leeds for LeedsPlayhouse. A member of The Black Writers Guild, an associate artist with the Geraldine Connor Foundation GCF, and a coordinator for Inscribe readers writers for Peepal Tree Press. Her live arts commissioned work ‘Dead and Wake' featured part of Words in the City, and part of Opera North and Leeds Playhouse; her play ‘Sorrel & Black Cake - A Windrush Story', was funded by Heritage Lottery as part of GCF. Other works include ‘Hair Stories’, ‘I was a stranger – Prince Alamayu’ a short Opera with Leeds Studio and the Black British Sound System symposium featured at The British Library, Goldsmith University, Leeds Library, and Chapeltown arts.

Khadijah's live art installation ‘My body is a Protest - the Passover' was created during the pandemic to open complex conversations around Black bodies, art as Joy and Wellness. Khadijah was curator for Africa Writes 2022 Leeds Royal African society of literature and ‘In Memory of the Grief Café’ featured at Bradford lit fest 2022. Khadijah is part of Collections in Verse, Poet in the City and the British Library the commission that celebrates poets to create new works inspired by British Library exhibitions and local histories, stories, and experiences.

Leah Francis is a Co-founder of Speak Woman Speak theatre collective. The Company formed in February 2013, and seeks to highlight hidden voices of diverse women. Some of the work by the company: Loss, Unknown and Soledad & Betto was funded by Arts Council England and performed at Yorkshire Dance and West Yorkshire Playhouse, Slunglow’s The HUB in Leeds, at Fira B Theatre Festival in Palma De Mallorca Spain. Their current piece in development is White Walls, a piece about Mental Health and Black Spirituality. Leah is also a youth theatre practitioner at Freedom Studios. As an actor she has performed for companies such as Red Ladder, Heritage Corner and Chickenshop Shakespeare. She has experience in Directing for companies like Mind the Gap and Tribe Arts.

Adanna Jones in an Assistant Professor of Dance and Dance Studies in the Department of Theater and Dance at Bowdoin College. She received her PhD in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and her BFA in Dance from Mason Gross School of the Arts – Rutgers University. Currently, her research and scholarship remain focused on Caribbean dance and identity politics within the Diaspora, paying particular focus on the rolling hip dance known as winin’.

Regarding her creative endeavors, Adanna uses dance to both grapple with her research findings, as well as generating critical research questions.In addition to being a member of the Un/Commoning Pedagogies Collective, she is a current Steering Committee Member of the Coalition of Diasporan Scholars Moving. Both organizations aim to tackle, endure, unravel, and combat the pangs of white supremacy within academia and beyond.