Power and Play

Abstract

| african arts WINTER 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 4 Fancy Dress Carnival is a multimedia spectacle wherein masked performers don costumes and dance down the street or compete in an arena with accompanying musicians, usually a brass band, delighting Ghanaian audiences (Fig. 1). Fancy Dress is a distinctive form of carnival1 belonging to Ghana with a deep history that stems from both international and local practices. What sets Fancy Dress apart from other African masquerades are the carnivalesque meanings that connect it to other Black Atlantic carnivals. The colorful costumes, characters, and other fancy aspects exhibiting “play” and fierce characters expressing “power” interact with their spectators as a means to negotiate community identity, demonstrating a complicated relationship with Europe and the United States. Fancy Dress is a form of kakaamotobe, an umbrella term for a fierce display through costume, music, and dance found throughout the country.2 The carnival started around the turn of the twentieth century as a combination of local religious and performance practices with foreign carnival forms. Local performances include those primarily from Fante asafo, paramilitary troops with religious and communal responsibilities, but also from Nzema and Ga practices along the coast.3 British sailors and officers, West Indian troops, Afro-Brazilians and others came to the coast in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries bringing with them their comedic skits, carnival, and British Fancy Dress.4 The Fante, one of several Akan groups in southern Ghana, occupy part of the coastline in the Central Region (Fig. 2). Energized by these popular forms of expression, the local Fante created their own version of Fancy Dress to release tensions built during British colonization.5 As Doran H. Ross aptly stated, the Fante of coastal Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast Colony, were “fighting with art” (Ross 1979). Masquerade can manipulate the space for empowerment, and through “selective amnesia” participants and spectators can reinvent a more acceptable memory (than perhaps one of disempowerment) that suits the community (Njoku 2020: 190–92), which is often the case with Black Atlantic carnivals that use performance as a healing tonic from the cultural trauma suffered during the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. Theater in the streets as a performance conducted by the oppressed empowers participants and spectators as a therapeutic form of activism (Boal 1985: 122). Because characters allow performers to enact their desires and frustrations on the streets, Fancy Dress operates as theatrical activism to heal communities and thus has thrived for over a century. Multimedia events incorporating music, dance, costume, and skits provide a mechanism for letting off steam by revealing what is hidden from view. The hidden and unexpected are considered dangerous in many communities. Different rules exist during liminal periods such as those created by a masquerade; chaos creates a new order and is a source of power used to counter these dangerous forces (Kasfir 1988: 8). Ghana’s youth embrace this power through play by bringing long-established forms to the contemporary moment through the utilization of foreign visual culture, elaborate costumes, masks and brass bands. Like Black Atlantic carnivals elsewhere, Fancy Dress expresses a sense of joy and unity while it also releases tensions at many sociopolitical levels.