30 January 2008

Mardi Gras in New Orleans



Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Louisiana is one of the most famous Carnival celebrations in the world.
The season of parades, balls (some of them masquerade balls), and king cake parties begins on that date.
From about two weeks before, through
Fat Tuesday, there is at least one major parade each day. The largest and most elaborate parades take place the last five days of the season. In the final week of Carnival many events large and small occur throughout New Orleans and surrounding communities.
The parades in New Orleans are organized by Carnival
krewes. Krewe float riders toss throws to the crowds; the most common throws are strings, usually made of plastic colorful beads, doubloons (aluminium or wooden dollar-sized coins usually impressed with a krewe logo), decorated plastic throw cups, and small inexpensive toys. Major krewes follow the same parade schedule and route each year.
To New Orleanians, "Mardi Gras" refers only to the final and most elaborate day of the Carnival Season; visitors tend to refer to the entire Carnival as "Mardi Gras." Some locals have thus started to refer to the final day of Carnival as "Mardi Gras Day" to avoid confusion.
The traditional colors of Mardi Gras are purple, green, and gold. These colors are said to have been chosen by Grand Duke Alexis Romanoff Alexandrovitch of Russia during a visit to New Orleans in 1872.

Each year; the Mardi Gras (or Carnival) season starts on January 6, also known as Twelft Night. The Twelfth Night Revelers, one of Carnival's oldest Krewes, holds a masked ball each year to mark the occasion. Like Twelfth Night Revelers, many of Carnival's oldest groups - such as the Elves of Oberon and the High Priests of Mithras - hold masked balls, but do not parade in public.
The parade season starts off some three weekends before Mardi Gras Day with the
Krewe du Vieux parade.

Let's Celebrate Notting Hill Carnival


Notting Hill Carnival is the most popular place to be on what the British call August Bank Holiday Monday. Millions are drawn to Europe's greatest street festival to look at the bands (groups) of mas players, masqueraders (costumed dancers) dressed in every imaginable colour of the artistic palette mashing down de Grove ( dancing on the streets) of Ladbroke Grove as they wend their way to the parade route.
The stage is set for Carnival.
This is Carnival as we all know it. All the ingredients are present: there is the masquerade (the collective ritual celebration), public space transformed into a theatrical stage to play the mas (actual enactment of that costume) through kinesics/dance, mime, and specific gestures to tell a specific story; there is the mas itself (costumes) and music to create the extravagantly devised spectacle.
Every masquerade band has a specific theme. The mas man/woman (a carnival, creative artist) aims to depict a specific idea through the specially designed mas (the costume). Designs, however, do not simply occur. Each designer has an artistic repertoire: a range of possible and permissible ideas.
Carnival, mas and its accompanying Carnival Arts celebrate life in a very sophisticated, highly artistic way.
Here we are not looking at a generic Carnival. We are looking at a historical and culturally specific model, which has its origins not only in the African traditions that were transported to the Caribbean but also in the European traditions brought by the various colonizers.
This Carnival - from which Notting Hill and other Carnivals across Britain evolved - has its origins specifically in Trinidad & Tobago. It was transported to this country by economically marginalized peoples who migrated to Britain seeking a better life.
Today, Carnival is continually evolving. The traditional Trinidadian form now reflects the social and political experiences of Afro-Caribbean people in Britain.

Welcome To My Black Parade

Out there the rain falls

Creating disfigured faces

People build their day

Everyone tries to make

Another beautiful way

Another collection of all the pieces



Inside there’s nothing to

Leave behind the walls

There’s nothing to bother

You in your pain

And that pain is more than

You can handle

More than you can support

More than you can carry in your back

And you fall on your knees

Looking around searching a familiar face

Something to cling to…

But there’s nothing

Nothing and nobody for you


Out there the rain falls

Creating disfigured faces

Everyone lived their ordinary day

Not minding with the life that fades away…
Sara Marques, 1009

Tiredness


I am getting tired of this tired pulsation of time

I am getting sick of this sickness equality in whole life


The same fears, the same dreams
The same doubts, the same things


That makes your hearts empty,

Or full of nothing

And then you realise it,

You try to hide it,

Try to think about other things


Just to erase that little

Think of pain from your heart

That makes your social masks fall apart


And you get exposed

To the atrocities of reality

SSShhhhh! don’t make a noise

Just let yourself drown very softly…
Sara Marques, 1009