|
The Association for Cultural Equity, the Green Family Foundation, and Media-Generation are pleased to announce the launch of the Cultural Equity YouTube channel. Featuring footage shot in 2012 of Carriacou’s enduring Big Drum ritual, the channel is a celebration of Grenadian folklore and a platform for cultural feedback with the people of Carriacou, Grenada, and the entire Grenadian Diaspora.
The Big Drum Nation Dance is a religious and social ritual that has been maintained on the Grenadian island of Carriacou since the 17th century. A way of uniting diverse African ethnicities, Big Drum salutes each one and pays reverence to the Ancestors and the Gods. It is a key element in the Tombstone Feast, when a tombstone is erected for a deceased person after the passing of years; it is also used at marriages, births, boat launchings, the building of a new house, and at village Maroon festivals. Kromanti Cudjoe, a legendary Maroon drummer, established the Big Drum in its current form in the early 1800s.
Alan Lomax first recorded the music and dance of the Big Drum in 1962. In 2012, Grenadian Cultural Ambassador and Big Drum leader Winston Fleary, along with the family of Lucian Duncan, invited Anna Lomax Wood (Association for Cultural Equity), Kimberly Green (Green Family Foundation), and filmmaker John Melville Bishop (Media-Generation) to Carriacou to document a Big Drum dance and other traditional performances and rituals. Fleary provides commentaries and song translations for each video.
The channel also features Alan Lomax’s final field recordings: video footage shot on his 1991 visit to Carriacou. Along with clips of Winston Fleary and Canute Caliste, a fiddler in the local quadrille tradition, Lomax documented the Shakespeare Mas' — the remarkable Carnival tradition in which men in outlandish Pierrot outfits engage in "combats," reciting from Julius Caesar and thrashing one another with switches when a speech is deemed poor or incorrect.
Please enjoy, comment, pass along to friends, and show your support by subscribing to the channel.
Best,
Executive Director
Alan Lomax Archive
Association for Cultural Equity
at Hunter College
|
