Buckle up for Caribbean festival time; Carnival parade set for this Saturday

The Dorchester Day parade comes at the beginning of the summer. The Caribbean Carnival Parade (CCP) comes at the end of the summer. Both the season-starter and the season-closer are largely Dot-produced celebrations, although the latter is often perceived as largely a Roxbury institution.

This Saturday’s CCP is one of 24 North American Caribbean-style carnivals that share the uninhibited partying style and music of the West Indies. The revelry features elaborate costumes, masks, steel pan contingents, street parades, erotic public dancing, powder-sprinkling and craft exhibits.

Actually, Saturday is really just the kick-off for the local Northeast mini-Carnival season. Many, if not most, Boston “mas players” will travel on this coming Sunday, August 28, to Worcester for the carnival there. Over the long Labor Day weekend, they’re to the Big Apple where the West Indian Association hosts five days of events in Brooklyn. Finally, on Sun., Sept. 11, the action returns to New England for the Cambridge International Carnival.

The Caribbean Carnival has mixed roots in African culture, Christianity, and slavery. Traditionally the name “carnival” comes from the Latin meaning “farewell to meat,” alluding to to pre-Lenten festivities like Mardi Gras, a last-blast celebration before the penitential season. In the Caribbean, and even more so in Brazil, Carnival can come anytime in February or March because the weather is always plenty warm for skimpily clad revelers.

But it’s too cold up here to celebrate at the liturgical Carnival time, so West Indians in New England moved the celebrations to the time of year that has weather most like typical island climates.

But as the Cambridge Carnival website explains, there’s more Carnival than preparation for Easter.

“During slavery, the Carnival celebration was originally done in secret, which spawned public communication and cultural bonding for the Afro-Caribbean cultures from as far back as the 1600s. Since the abolition of slavery in the US and Caribbean, Carnival today has become a celebration of emancipation, freedom, and expression.  Free people could publicly celebrate their native culture, emancipation and, freedom of expression through costumes, masks, music, drumming, and dancing.”

So, for more than four decades, the Hub’s West Indian community has celebrated a Trinidadian-style carnival in August. Band leaders (mostly female) recruit marchers for their mas bands (short for masquerade bands) and vie with one another for scores before a panel of judges from the islands.

Six of the nine mas bands in Boston are based in Dorchester and Mattapan. The other three are from Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, and Cambridge.

Each mas band selects a costume theme for each season. This year, for example, the Dot-based D’Midas has chosen “A Space Fantasy” for its 2016 motif. Aside from barely-there thongs, the costumes are built from bent-wire frames, covered with brightly colored paper and glitter.

Among the wide range of planet-themed D’Midas outfits, the yellow “Lady Saturn” package for $400 includes not only the out-of-this-world feathery finery but also round-trip bus fare and food for the Worcester and NYC Carnivals.

This Saturday’s parade, which typically attracts tens of thousands of participants and spectators, is the largest cultural event in Boston’s black community and one of the largest in the city. But like so many neighborhood parades it gets little city-wide media coverage.

However, you don’t have to be “Trinibagonian” to contend that the CCP by far the most eye-popping and eardrum-splitting event in the annual Boston city calendar.

The CCP is supposed to begin at 1 p.m., but hardly ever does, with a straggling contingent of elected officials and political candidates. The mas bands assemble at the parade staging area along Martin Luther King Boulevard before proceeding up Warren Street through Grove Hall to Franklin Park, where they proceed past the judges.

Boston’s best live steel bands also vie for bragging rights. Last year the top four “pan bands” were all from Dorchester/Mattapan: 1. Soca & Associates (Band of the Year); 2. Socaholics 3. D’Midas and 4. Dynasty.

The central information site for all things CCP is Boston Carnival Village at bostoncarnival.org.


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