Peter Minshall

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Peter Minshall (born July 16, 1941 in Georgetown , Guyana ) is a Trinidadian costume designer and choreographer .

Life

Minshall was born in Guyana to an Englishman and a Guyanese. At twelve, he migrated with his family to Trinidad because his father in Port of Spain a job as a draftsman of cartoons had assumed. There he attended the renowned Queen's Royal College. At the age of 13 he made his first costume from found components and won the children's carnival at his school, which is given as the initial spark for his later career. After leaving school, he worked as a spokesperson for Radio Trinidad, where he was responsible, among other things, for commenting on the Monday and Tuesday trains of the Trinidadian carnival. At the age of 21 he moved to London to study drama and scenography at the Central School of Art and Design . In 1976 he moved back to Trinidad and has lived there again ever since.

plant

Minshall's first work was costumes, which he made during his studies for Sadler's Wells Theater after an artistic director saw his designs for carnival costumes and commissioned him. As a result, he was commissioned with further productions for theater pieces, for example for the dancer Beryl McBurnie and the playwrights Mustapha Matura and Errol Hill. In 1973 he outfitted his first carnival procession, which took part in the Notting Hill Carnival . He designed a carnival costume that sparked his career for his stepsister for the 1974 carnival season; the implementation required five weeks and the work of twelve people.

In 1976 he was asked by the married couple Stephen and Elsie Lee Heung, who have been successfully designing carnival trains for 30 years, to design a complete train for the Trinidadian carnival, as Stephen Heung was impressed by the costume for Minshall's stepsister. Minshall chose the poem Paradise Lost by John Milton as the central motif of the train . His costumes were so technically advanced that, apart from winning the major prizes of the 1976 Carnival, they permanently changed the demands on the trains of the Trinidadian Carnival. Before Minshall, it was common for participants in a carnival procession to wear costumes with a motto. Paradise Lost told a story for the first time, which was presented in a dance by the train and which was visualized by technical aids such as kinetic sculptures and precisely fitted props. In front of Minshall, the participants of a procession moved to music, since Paradise Lost their use was considered a performance or street theater. The use of wings on carnival costumes also goes back to Minshall. In the following years Minshall designed a total of 25 more carnival parades, in 1978 for the first time completely under its own name. He won the "Band of the Year" title in 1979, 1981, 1987, 1995, 1996, 1997 and 2006. He was the only train designer to win three consecutive years. The 1982 Papillon train comprised 2,500 dancers, each with three-meter-high butterfly wings. The king figure of the 1983 train River , a 4.70 meter high, kinetic sculpture called ManCrab , which was operated by a single person and, together with the queen figure Washerwoman and her two thousand-headed entourage over three days of carnival, performed the battle of the two main characters in a dance, applies as a turning point in Trinidadian art history. In retrospect, the art scholar Christopher Cozier assessed after ManCrab had passed the Grand Stand of the Savannah , "It was again of value to be an artist in this (the Trinidadian) society". In 1985 Minshall had two complete trains designed by him, Princes of Darkness and Lords of Light , compete against each other as part of his arrangement The Golden Calabash, symbolizing a battle of good against evil. Minshall only designed no trains in 1991 and 1992, influenced by the Jamaat al-Muslims coup attempt in July 1990. In 1997 he stopped working for the Trinidadian carnival with the Tapestry train . For Tapestry , the Trinidadian state television postponed the evening news to show the full length of the train.

Minshall's work was received quite controversially: Since his trains clearly set themselves apart from the rest of the Carnival in terms of content and hindered other trains in their work by delays, there were protests from other train drivers, which led to low ratings by the judges.

Only in 2006, at the request of the Trinidadian National AIDS Coordinating Committee, Minshall designed a medium-sized (under 1000 dancers) called The Sacred Heart , in which 400 dancers fight a battle between good and evil and the healing of the heart broken by greed, corruption, crime and disease Trinidads represented. After a further ten year break, he competed for the Carnival King title in 2016 with a king figure, combining the classic Trinidadian carnival figure of the stilt dancer "Moko jumbie" with the European ballet Swan Lake . The performance was again received controversially, only achieved third place in the critics' rating and was criticized as "non-carnivalistic", but was enthusiastically celebrated by the audience and some critics. After 14 years of abstinence, he designed a train again in 2020 and with Mas Pieta won the title for the best big train and the title “Band of the Year”; his king and queen figures "Love of Power" and "Power of Love" also took second place in the relevant competition.

Minshall himself describes his work as follows: “The Trinidadian carnival is a form of theater in which the costumes play a dominant role (...) so that they become sculptures. And when you put people in, they start dancing. This is my specialty. (...) I have 2000 to 3000 people available who move to music. I weave colors, surfaces and shapes around them and they pass the viewer like a visual symphony. "

Due to his experience with the design of ceremonies at mass events, he has been commissioned several times to design and equip opening ceremonies, for example at the Pan American Games in 1987 , the Summer Olympics in 1992 and 1996 , the Winter Olympics in 2002 and the Parisian celebrations of the French national holiday in 1992 For the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, he designed the Tall Boy , a kind of inflatable balloon in the shape of a person, which is set in constant motion by a fan placed under the figure and is now used worldwide as an advertising medium.

A documentary about costume designer, Mas Man Peter Minshall , was released in 2010. Another documentary, made by Trinidadian filmmaker Christopher Laird, about the 1976 Paradise Lost carnival parade , was released in September 2015, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and won at Caribbean Tales Film Festival the award for the best short film.

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Caribbean-Beat.com: Masman: Peter Minshall. Retrieved June 21, 2016 .
  2. ^ Caribbean-Beat.com: The history of paradise: on Peter Minshall's Paradise Lost. Retrieved June 19, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Private weblog: The face of Carnival. Retrieved June 23, 2016 .
  4. ↑ Angela Pidduck: Memories of past Carnivals . In: Trinidad Newsday . January 26, 2009.
  5. ↑ RepeatingIslands.com: Documentary of Peter Minshall's Paradise Lost released in Trinidad at the 2015 Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. Retrieved May 30, 2016 .
  6. ↑ a b Michael Anthony: Historical Dictionary of Trinidad and Tobago . Scarecrow Press, London 1997, ISBN 0-8108-3173-2 , pp. 384 .
  7. ^ Anne Walmsley & Stanley Greaves: Art in the Caribbean - An Introduction . New Beacon Books, London 2010, ISBN 978-1-873201-22-0 , pp. 170 .
  8. ^ Anne Walmsley & Stanley Greaves: Art in the Caribbean - An Introduction . June 2011, p. 30 , JSTOR : 23050537 (English).
  9. ↑ HuffingtonPost.com: Trinidad Carnival is Coming 2016. Retrieved June 23, 2016 .
  10. ↑ Trinidad Guardian, February 7, 2016: Meditations on a Minshall mas.Retrieved June 23, 2016 .
  11. ↑ Peter Christopher: Minshall's triumphant return . In: Trinidad Guardian . February 27, 2020, p. 5.
  12. ↑ a b Caribbean-Neat.com: Lord of the Dance: Peter Minshall. Retrieved June 23, 2016 .
  13. ↑ NIHERST.gov.tt: Peter Minshall - Mas Innovator. Retrieved June 2, 2016 .
  14. ↑ Trinidad Guardian of December 11, 2014: Who knew Minshall invented - Inflatable men? Retrieved June 23, 2016 .
  15. ↑ IMDB.com: Mas Man Peter Minshall. Retrieved June 23, 2016 .
  16. ↑ Newsday of September 25, 2005: Minshall receives Republic Day award. Retrieved June 19, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Minshall, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Trinidadian costume designer and choreographer
DATE OF BIRTH July 16, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Georgetown (Guyana)