Peter Minshall in the 1980s
Mark Lyndersay
The dramatist
Peter Minshall, born 1941
Occasionally you’ll hear a Trini describing someone in a great hurry as “running like they just hear Minshall reach the Savannah”. The expression hinges on an indisputable fact: Peter Minshall is the only Carnival designer working today whose masquerade is capable of making ordinary spectators drop everything and race to the Savannah stage to see his band make its epic crossing — as spectators of older generations would have done to see the latest creations by Wilfred Strasser or George Bailey or Carlisle Chang.
Chronologically and creatively, Minshall comes at the end of the parade of golden age Carnival designers. As far back as 1982, artist and musician Pat Bishop declared that he “has drawn . . . truths which have something of the potency of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, or the late Beethoven string quartets,” and “lifted what was no more than folk festival in which glitter had replaced content, to the level of the highest art”. No designer emerging in the 1980s or 90s has been able to push the creative barriers further.
Born in British Guiana in 1941, Minshall moved to Trinidad with his family when he was a small child. His first taste of mas came when he was 13; with a cardboard box, green paint, and animal bones, he made himself an African witch doctor costume for the children’s Carnival competition. “The die was cast there and then,” he says. As a teenager, padded out with old pillows, decked out in his sister’s frilly dress, he transformed himself into a Dame Lorraine for J’Ouvert, “liberated from race, from age, from gender.” That total liberation has been the goal of his 30-year career.
Peter Samuel portraying the Midnight Robber from Danse Macabre (1980)
Noel Norton
When he was 21, Minshall left Trinidad to study at the Central School of Art and Design in London. After graduation, in 1969, Minshall found himself designing the set and costumes for a ballet production at Sadler’s Wells. He was launched on a promising career as a London designer; then his mother asked him to create a costume for his adopted sister for Carnival 1974. “It took five weeks, 12 people,” he recalls. “104 feathers, each one made of 150 different pieces of fabric.” When 13-year-old Sherry-Ann Guy finally took to the stage, portraying the Hummingbird, dancing “like a joyful sapphire”, it was a defining moment in the history of Carnival. “Ten thousand people exploded with her.”
Two years later, bandleader Stephen Lee Heung asked Minshall to design a band for 1,500 masqueraders. He chose Milton’s Paradise Lost as his theme, imagining the presentation as a symphony in four parts. Hummingbird’s. . .
Mark Lyndersay
The dramatist
Peter Minshall, born 1941
Occasionally you’ll hear a Trini describing someone in a great hurry as “running like they just hear Minshall reach the Savannah”. The expression hinges on an indisputable fact: Peter Minshall is the only Carnival designer working today whose masquerade is capable of making ordinary spectators drop everything and race to the Savannah stage to see his band make its epic crossing — as spectators of older generations would have done to see the latest creations by Wilfred Strasser or George Bailey or Carlisle Chang.
Chronologically and creatively, Minshall comes at the end of the parade of golden age Carnival designers. As far back as 1982, artist and musician Pat Bishop declared that he “has drawn . . . truths which have something of the potency of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, or the late Beethoven string quartets,” and “lifted what was no more than folk festival in which glitter had replaced content, to the level of the highest art”. No designer emerging in the 1980s or 90s has been able to push the creative barriers further.
Born in British Guiana in 1941, Minshall moved to Trinidad with his family when he was a small child. His first taste of mas came when he was 13; with a cardboard box, green paint, and animal bones, he made himself an African witch doctor costume for the children’s Carnival competition. “The die was cast there and then,” he says. As a teenager, padded out with old pillows, decked out in his sister’s frilly dress, he transformed himself into a Dame Lorraine for J’Ouvert, “liberated from race, from age, from gender.” That total liberation has been the goal of his 30-year career.
Peter Samuel portraying the Midnight Robber from Danse Macabre (1980)
Noel Norton
When he was 21, Minshall left Trinidad to study at the Central School of Art and Design in London. After graduation, in 1969, Minshall found himself designing the set and costumes for a ballet production at Sadler’s Wells. He was launched on a promising career as a London designer; then his mother asked him to create a costume for his adopted sister for Carnival 1974. “It took five weeks, 12 people,” he recalls. “104 feathers, each one made of 150 different pieces of fabric.” When 13-year-old Sherry-Ann Guy finally took to the stage, portraying the Hummingbird, dancing “like a joyful sapphire”, it was a defining moment in the history of Carnival. “Ten thousand people exploded with her.”
Two years later, bandleader Stephen Lee Heung asked Minshall to design a band for 1,500 masqueraders. He chose Milton’s Paradise Lost as his theme, imagining the presentation as a symphony in four parts. Hummingbird’s. . .
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