The Kinaesthetic Landscape of Toronto Caribbean Carnival: Transforming the Road into a Stage

Abstract

Caribbean Carnival’s kinaesthetic intervention on Toronto’s Lake Shore Boulevard transgresses the official knowledge and bourgeois morality of this location, defamiliarizing conventional understandings of how the Lake Shore space is produced, and who it privileges. Since its inception fifty years ago, Toronto Caribbean Carnival has grown in scope and size, drawing over a million spectators to watch over 20,000 masqueraders in bands create what I call a kinaesthetic landscape of colour as they wine and dance in their elaborate costumes called mas for almost 3.5 kilometres on the Lake Shore Boulevard. The Grand Parade presents an opportunity for marginalized bodies, specifically the bodies of women of colour, to seize the public space of the streets and perform a new located space: one that groups of mas players personally and affectively identify, experience, and perceive differently. This article explores how the combination of spectacle and performative techniques such as ‘chipping and wining’ can create an affective alliance with the audience on the Lake Shore. In particular, I examine how the spontaneous choreographies and citation of physical ‘Caribbean’ idioms create shared experience, feelings, and movements that challenge the conventional understandings of the space in which it is performed.