**Making Mas with teens: a five-year journey to realization**

Mas is the name given to the annual tradition of costumed masquerade in the carnival of Trinidad and Tobago. Short for the word masquerade, it is a form of art that is not merely visual. As Peter Minshall (highly prolific artist, designer, and masman) put it:

“Mas is a powerful, communicative, expression of the spiritual and physical energy of human beings and that is as good a definition of art as you can get anywhere. Mas is a combination of music, dance, sculpture and painting, it communicates with gesture and movement, it is danced, it is played.”[1]

Mas is a type of performance art, which allows thousands of people to experience the art not as observers, but as participants wearing costumes and embodying characters based on specific themes. This form of expression is accessible to thousands of people and can’t be contained in spaces like museums and theatres.

When I was growing up in Trinidad, Carnival was the space people used to comment on social issues. Calypsonians sang about politics and social justice. During the carnival season and on the road individuals and groups found creative ways to define their artistic voices and be heard. Traditionally, the core elements of mas included social commentary, hand-made costumes, and celebratory protest. Carnival today is a booming industry. In addition to its occurrence in many of the Caribbean islands, versions of it can be found in cities like Toronto, London, Miami, and New York. Besides the Caribbean carnivals, processional arts can be found all over the world in New Orleans, Brazil, Portugal, France, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Italy, Spain, Germany, Bolivia and many more.

For the last few years, The Atlantic has published some beautiful images of carnivals around the world.

http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/02/carnival-2015-around-the-world/385537/

I began to think about the place of teens in Carnival of today. In my last few experiences of Carnival in Trinidad, DC, Miami, and Brooklyn, I thought about how expensive it now is to participate. While the emphasis is placed on mass-produced pretty mas costumes (feathers, bikinis, and sequins), the press focuses on the negative forms of participation by young people, violence and pickpocketing. I wondered, given what I do professionally:

How can I help to create an inclusive and engaging experience for young people to participate positively in their own culture, learn about the history of carnival, develop practical problem-solving skills through working with their hands, and develop their own artistic voices?

And so knowing what teens are capable of, I embarked this summer on a project based out of a community arts organization in East New York Brooklyn, called Arts East NY. I called it the TECA Project: Teen Empowerment Through Carnival Arts (TECA). Doing this project stemmed from my restlessness, wanting to work directly with teens again, wanting to connect artistically and professionally with my culture, wanting to challenge the trend of commercial mas making and wanting to provide a place for teens to participate in their culture rather than watch it go by.

Through social media, word of mouth and pounding the pavement I was able to find 16 teens and their parents willing to take this journey with me.

The idea was to introduce teens to the mas I knew growing up, to the mas that still exists but is drowned out by the sea of sequins, bikinis and feathers, to the origins of mas where social commentary and subversive celebratory protest were our social media, to the mas that is performed, danced, played.