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Life in the old Carnival yet?
Story about how cultural change is reflected in a medieval carnival...
For several consecutive years Vicky Cremona wouldn’t miss the medieval carnival in Gozo (Malta’s sister island) for anything. She was fascinated by its manifestation – spontaneous street theatre without central organisation – and she set out to study the event. She was especially intrigued, given her background in theatre studies, by the dramatic creativity on display: the street performers are peasants and traditional towns-folk, and these are not the kind of people one thinks of capable of such masterly performances. But Cremona was nowhere to be seen at last year’s event; her interest has waned, and her studies deemed complete, as the carnival underwent a rapid transformation in the past few years. It was the kind of change she had envisaged and dreaded: in 1996 she told me that the increasing number of outside spectators were imposing their values on an event that had survived anachronistically only because few people outside Gozo knew or cared about it until the nineties. In any case, her worst fears have not come to pass yet. There may be fewer performances now than ten years ago, and none of the former macabre stuff (such as hens crucified alive, masked participants brandishing sickles, animal intestines and innards or women’s soiled underwear flaunted for gory effect), but the performances on display remain true to the original spirit.
The original spirit: turning social order and mores on their head in clever and crude travesties is what the carnival has always been about. It is thought to have originated in France sometime during the Medieval Ages, and spread quickly through the  Catholic countries of southern Europe. The primary purpose was the exceptional allowance of three days of debauchery before the advent of the forty days of ascetic self-denial of the Catholic Lent. The authorities – a collusion between the ecclesiastical and monarchic rulers of the time – tolerated these three days because their subjects could vent their frustrations in a fairly contained manner.
Then, the commoners started using the event to ridicule unpopular governance. Their masks, which concealed their identity from the possibility of retribution or disgrace, liberated them, so the event became, according to Cremona, “a mock revolution”. Eventually, the changes in the political landscape of modern times rendered the event obsolete in much of southern Europe, or else transformed it beyond recognition. In Gozo, however, it might have survived as a glimpse of what it was, partly because social change in this insular island is slow, and partly because the original context subtly prevails. (Gozitans still perceive themselves as being trampled by the whimsical and self-interest rule of the powerful Catholic church and the political elite in the mainland.) It’s no accident that the event in the town of Nadur takes place in the narrow alleyways behind the town church, rather than in the town square in front of the church, where there is more space.
Year after year the hits of the show (beyond the veneer of modernity – the cheap latex mask imports of devils or monsters or wicked old people) are the deliberately farcical performances, which could be something like a crudely-costumed group building a stone wall. The best performances are often the caricatures that express the vexations that the traditional townsfolk feel towards contemporary political initiatives or social trends. For example, one of the most dramatic carnivals of recent years unfolded in 1994 after the government introduced tougher restrictions on bird hunting: one float, which proclaimed “Birds for All”, summed the mood by displaying live birds sprayed in bright theatre aerosol paint. Last year one good performance involved a travesty of the rescue services demonstrations, ridiculing the demonstrations which had been held regularly with aplomb by the government. Another solo performer crawled along in a costume that was half human and half Coca-Cola dispensing machine (including large paint tin containers for legs) – perhaps a comment on globalisation?
As Cremona predicted, social change has caught up with the carnival. You’re unlikely, for example, to see a repeat of the live birds displayed in 1994. After several years of public debate on whether animals and obscenities could be tolerated, the council responded to the popular sentiment among tourists by banning such insensitivity’s. What you see now is more peculiar cross-dressing – very potent in this traditionally macho culture – and more outlandish costumes of hilarious travesties, and the ubiquitous open toilets, with the performers sitting on the toilet pretending to be doing their business unaware that they are being watched. Increasingly popular, in the bars thrown open for the event, are the peasant bands using only instruments – tambourine, bongos, clarinet, and an obscure indigenous instrument called the zavzava – to produce tribal merry music. In fact, zavzava-playing survived only in the Nadur Carnival, where it was noticed and resuscitated nation-wide by a group called Etnika, who use the zavzava in conjunction with other instruments. Etnika’s music is popular with an urbane audience from mainland Malta, many of whom visit the show in Nadur to see the source.
© Victor Paul Borg
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