The Carnival Performance Institute’s workshops, performance studies, and dialogues run alongside Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival. The program positions Carnival at the centre of performance studies and engages artists, scholars, and students in critical thinking about Carnival's performance histories and events, how gender is played out in contemporary Carnival performance, and how Carnival performance intersects with nationalism, transnationalism, and global mobilities.
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Studies in Mas & Carnival Performance: Theory in Motion with Makeda Thomas. The Dance & Performance Institute, TT.
Studies in Mas & Carnival Performance: Theory in Motion with Makeda Thomas. The Dance & Performance Institute, TT.
Studies in Mas & Carnival Performance: Theory in Motion with Makeda Thomas. The Dance & Performance Institute, TT.
Studies in Mas & Carnival Performance: Theory in Motion with Makeda Thomas. The Dance & Performance Institute, TT.
Studies in Mas & Carnival Performance: Theory in Motion
with Institute Director, Makeda Thomas
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4 ONLINE SESSIONS: THURSDAYS - 22 & 29 JANUARY, 5 & 12 FEBRUARY 2026. 5PM-7PM EST. $225 USD
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In this course, we approach Carnival as “theory in motion”—a living ritual where embodiment, creativity, and political imagination converge. Participants will apply key concepts from Carnival Studies and Performance Studies to analyze mas practices, examine mas as a space of memory, resistance, and relationality, and explore how embodied knowledge shapes Caribbean and diasporic performance. Through close readings, visual and movement analysis, and guided creative/embodied prompts, we investigate how theory emerges through bodies, gestures, craft, and collective play. Together, we ask: How do we theorize Carnival beyond festival? What historical, spiritual, and ecological lineages shape mas traditions? How do Black feminist and decolonial methodologies reframe Carnival analysis? What politics and poetics emerge through design and material practice? How do masmakers articulate theory through aesthetics, scale, and craft? And what future worlds does Carnival imagine and rehearse? The course culminates in the development of a theoretically grounded design, performance, or research idea related to Carnival.​ All sessions will be recorded for independent viewing.​​​​
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This online module is a program of the Dance & Performance Institute's Carnival Performance Institute.
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UPCOMING
Baby Doll Mas as a Healing Methodology in the Mother-Daughter Relationship
with Makeda Thomas
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SCHEDULE TO BE ANNOUNCED​
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"What am I mounting here? Baby Doll mas performance in the context of Trinidad & Tobago’s Carnival as a performance of love, as both a strategy of survival and intentional reclamation of open, apologetic, and soft relationships between mothers and daughters; where empathy does not sacrifice accountability and reckoning with our selves, others, and in the spaces between and all around; where the benevolence of mothering or daughter-ing resists being weaponized...where a Black girl's emerging womanhood does not transition her to competitor but as an expression of generations to come; of futurity. In whatever way the mas is played - and there are infinite ways I imagine - the Baby Doll mas performs the demand for accountability, of which the would-be recipient is deserving, thus teaching daughters respect and reciprocity, both within the mother-daughter relationship and outside of it. This mas reaches far back and forward into the "mother line" - that which activates in our daily lives. This ritual dance of the mas - playing Doll - is an ancient source of healing...and a dance of the spirit of sedition." - Makeda Thomas, 2020
INDEPENDENT STUDY
Studies in Mas & Carnival Performance
INDEPENDENT STUDY / $250
Studies in Mas & Carnival Performance III
with Institute Director, Makeda Thomas
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3 ONLINE SESSIONS: THURSDAYS, 13, 20, 27 FEBRUARY 2025
6-8PM AST.
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Together, we will think about mas and Carnival performance as practices, methodologies, analyses, events, and objects. How might our theorizing be thought of as performance? As a practice, mas is embodied, social, and relational - a corporeal activation and a theoretical method that moves toward analysis and a way of being in the world. The event of mas extends its temporalities beyond Carnival and into daily life. As an object of study, mas is a signifying object that attests to and exceeds the materiality of mas performance. Taking flight from the late Tony Hall’s “Jouvay Process for Dancers”, emergent from Jouvay Popular Theatre Process, “discovered out of a desire to see and describe, in performance values, the mechanisms of awakening and self-realization that are embedded in the emancipation traditions”, this thinking invokes a Jouvay Process in which mas practice, storytelling, text, and theorization give breadth to the nuances, dynamics, and ethos of mas and Carnival performance. We will consider temporality, spirituality and religion, gender and sexuality in the context of the Caribbean and Carnival, and mas as a way of knowing, un-knowing, and being in the world. This study will be embedded with a “deciphering practice”- an embodied praxis to render possibilities of new strategies and new shapes in the "making" of mas and Carnival performance.​
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"Studies in Mas & Carnival Performance III" is available online as an INDEPENDENT STUDY. The 13 sections of this Independent Study can be engaged in any order. The notes, questions, linked references, performance prompts, images/videos, and live session recordings offer ways to move through, think, and feel alongside the context and histories of conversations around mas and Carnival performance.
This online module is a program of the Dance & Performance Institute's Carnival Performance Institute.
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INDEPENDENT STUDY
Studies in Mas & Carnival Performance II
with Institute Director, Makeda Thomas​
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3 ONLINE SESSIONS: THURSDAY, 22 & 29 FEBRUARY 2024, 7 MARCH 2024. 6-8 PM AST.
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3 ONLINE SESSIONS: THURSDAY, 25 JANUARY 2024; THURSDAY, 1 & 8 FEBRUARY 2024. 6-8 PM AST.
"Studies in Mas & Carnival Performance" offers critical inquiry and embodied research around mas and Carnival - the ways in which dance and movement practice is informed by Carnival praxis, how mas aesthetics and methodologies are present in the lives of Caribbean diasporic people, how spaces of queer performance in Carnival create possibilities in dance theater, and how the relationship between Carnival and diasporic identities define Caribbean diasporic movement in our increasingly virtual realities. We ask: How do Carnival and mas performance allow us to rethink our shared potential as dance artists? How are practices of resistance expressed through dance in Carnival and mas performance? How can mas and Carnival performance practice be specified, activated, and organized to invoke its inherence as a form of Emancipation through shifting cultural and ecological landscapes? Guests include: Marvin George, Dr. Lyndon Gill, Dr. Cathy Thomas, Dr. Adanna Jones, Dr. Emily Zoebel-Marshall, and Rhoma Spencer.
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"Studies in Mas & Carnival Performance II" is available online as an
INDEPENDENT STUDY. The 10 sections of this Independent Study can be engaged in any order. The notes, questions, linked references, performance prompts, images/videos, and live session recordings offer ways to move through, think, and feel alongside the context and histories of conversations around mas and Carnival performance.
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This online module is a program of the Dance & Performance Institute's Carnival Performance Institute. ​​​
Studies in Mas & Carnival Performance
with Institute Director, Makeda Thomas
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5 ONLINE SESSIONS: TUESDAYS - 1, 8, 15, 22 FEBRUARY 2022; 1 MARCH 2022. 5-7 PM ​​​
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This online module is a program of the Dance & Performance Institute's Carnival Performance Institute.
