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Peter Minshall: Wizard of Dancing Mobile By Annan Boodram |
February 2002: The artistry of the legendary Peter Minshall once again held the spotlight at the opening ceremony of an international sports event.
In 1992 the world watched in awe as Minshall's costumes, among then "Saga Boy" and "Tan Tan", were featured at the Barcelona Olympics and in Atlanta in 1996 at the World Cup Soccer opening ceremony.
This year, the world's first glimpse of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, on February 8 was also of Minshall's work.
The launch at Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City pulled in a television audience of 3.5 billion and featured a diverse group of performers, including British music star Sting, who headlined a cast of top celebrities.
Minshall, one of the overall consulting artistic directors for the opening ceremony, produced and designed the first segment which ran for about 12 minutes.
His designs, some of which were built at the Callaloo Company workshop in Chaguaramas, Trinidad & Tobago and then shipped to the US, were an artistic and inspirational portrait of the central theme of the Olympicthe human spirit.
Minshall's segment "Fire Within" took the things that are familiar to T&T to the ice with 200 performers.
"It was most exciting challenge to go from jump up to slide. Quite a unique medium," Minshall told the T&T Express.
He took his inspiration from an old Carnival theme, fire and ice. The essence, he said, was "the fire within the human being."
According to Todd Gulick, spokesman for Minshall, designing for this Olympics was a different challenge.
He explained, "In the past Minshall designs have always been rooted to the ground through rhythm, but this was gliding on ice. We had to invent a new vocabulary and structure that would respond to movement on the ice."
Minshall and his team at Callaloo secured Sloc funds for some prototyping and experimentation for a few months, before coming up with the final dramatic designs.
Led by veteran Carnival queen and mas woman, Alyson Brown, the Callaloo Company built some of the costumes in T&T, while the bigger structures were built in the US.
Gulick said the more interpretative costumes that required a certain
local
technique and element had to be built in T&T. Brown said it was wonderful to see Minshall at work on the transition from earth to ice.
"It was different and required thinking, size, speed and mobility," she said.
She fondly recalled the many mishaps of their costumed model on rollerblades, trying to mimic the movement on ice.
"Sometimes he would zoom across the factory floor, or the old heliport for extra space and wind. We had little mishaps. .I was not shocked and surprised that Minshall could do it," Brown said.
Peter Minshall is the foremost artist working in the field of 'dancing mobiles', a form of performance art that combines the three dimensional quality of large scale sculpture with the dramatic and choreographic expressiveness of live human performer. The 'dancing mobile' is one of many forms to grow out of mas--the masquerade tradition of the Trinidad Carnival-- and was the subject of a fellowship awarded to Minshall by the Guggenheim Foundation in 1982.
A native Trinidadian, Minshall trained in theatre design at
the Central School
of Art and Design in London and went on to receive critical praise
for his work both in England and the United States. Through his
investigation of theatre and the other arts on an international
level, he came to appreciate the value and potency of the mas
as a form of creative expression, and gradually returned to the
mas as the principal medium of his work as an artist. In recognition
of his accomplishments in this field, both in the Trinidad Carnival
and abroad, the University of the West Indies in 1991 awarded
Minshall the degree of Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa.Speaking to journalist Dalton Narine in Everybody's Magazine some years ago, Minshall said, "A mas band is the closest thing to the abstractness of symphonic music. A progressive experience for the viewer, with a beginning, a middle and an end. There's that total whole, the many parts, and more parts within these parts. There are characters that lead sections, section leaders, and floor members. There's balance, color, shade, tone and form among all these arrangements. It's a cinematic experience, and its great beauty is that it is live."
Minshall was one of the first to design mas for the Notting Hill Carnival in London in the early 1970's. In 1974 he created the seminal individual work, "From The Land of The Humming Bird" for the Trinidad Carnival, and two years later designed his first full scale mas band in Trinidad, "Paradise Lost".
He has presented a mas at each carnival from 1978 through 1990 and intermittently since. His works have encompassed a great variety of moods and styles, from abstract experiments in line, form, color and kinetics ("Zodiac", 1978; "Carnival in Color", 1987) to themes of ecology ("River", 1983), racial harmony ("Callaloo", 1984) and the threat of nuclear war ("The Golden Calabash: Princes of Darkness and Lords of Light", 1985).
Minshall's 1989 mas "Santimanity", on the theme of man's inhumanity to man, was presented not only as street theatre in Port of Spain's carnival, but also as a theatrical event of enormous scale. Minshall designed and directed a thousand masqueraders; an eighty-voice choir; live and recorded music by Vivaldi, Jean-Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, Geraldine Conner, Carl Jacobs and David Rudder; more than one hundred actors and dancers and several towering dancing mobiles; in one and a half hour of mas-dance-theatre performance art, on the vast stage of a stadium arena.
His 1990 production, "Tantana", featured a breakthrough development in the monumental dancing mobile: "Tan Tan" and "Saga Boy". These two figures, each 4.5 meters tall, reverse the traditional relationship between puppet and puppeteer, and achieve such animation and mobility that they are able to waltz, tango, boogle and dance with each other. "Tan Tan" and "Saga Boy" have since appeared in Kingston, Jamaica; Tokyo, Japan; Nimes, France; Toronto, Canada; Miami and Atlanta, USA; Bridgetown, Barbados; London, England and Edinburgh, Scotland.
Minshall has also performed and exhibited in Washington; Sao Paulo, Brazil; the Pan American Games in Indianapolis, USA in 1987 and in Leicestershire, England.
His participation at the opening of the 1991/92 Barcelona Olympics was as a designer for several segments. And in Chicago, at the 1996 Atlanta World Cup Soccer his production, The Dance of Nations was featured at the opening ceremony.
Peter Minshall has received the highest honor bestowed by Trinidad & Tobago on its citizens, the Trinity Cross. But no amount of accolades and honors can ever truly be enough for this unique Caribbean who stands on a pedestal all alone, unmatched by any other artist of his genre in the world.
He is indeed a wizard of the dancing mobile!