My relationship with Carnival is grounded in an understanding of Mas as both sacred practice and a choreography of resistance.
Carnival is the political arena where my body wrestles with questions of ancestrality, identity, collective agency and power.
Photography by Lime Life Media.
My current exploration of Carnival focuses on presence, performance, and embodiment in Mas, particularly within Bat, Jab, Moko Jumbie, and Blue Devil traditions. These forms demand more than performance as they call for full-bodied immersion into chaos, unpredictability, and spiritual transformation.
I am particularly drawn to how dark archetypes operate at the edge of presence and possession, play and invocation, improvisation and trance. Within these states, I am beginning to explore how affect and emotion circulate beyond fixed categories — opening questions around rasa and how complex, layered emotional states are lived, embodied, and shared through Carnival performance, especially in moments of social and collective crisis.
Through reenactment and pre-enactment of ancestral and political memory, my work in Carnival performance attempts to reworld Mas archetypes into new expressions and gestures of consciousness that challenge and reshape the present. My research is both auto-ethnographic and embodied, grounded in lived experience and relational practice. I thoroughly enjoy engaging with communities to understand how Mas carries spiritual, cultural, and political force in contemporary struggle, where it is not only performed, but lived, felt, and constantly reimagined.