White Woman Draft

SKYROS CARNIVAL SKYROS CARNIVAL Photographs by Dick Blau Essay by Agapi Amanatidis and Panayotis Panopoulos Audio CD and Video DVD by Steven Feld VOXLOX 3 DICK I I grew up in the theater, my father a director and my mother an actress. As a result, I devel - oped a lifelong fascination with the dramatic moment, the heightened gesture, the mysterious transfor - mation of self into other. I suppose it was inevitable that my abiding preoccupation with the stage would find its way into my photography. When Steve called one day a few years ago and told me that Panos had told him about Greece’s wildest and noisiest carnival, I put down the phone and began packing my bag and cameras. What I eventually discovered on Skyros was not exactly what I spent the next few months imagining. I had been dreaming of Dionysus, Pan, and the Eleusinian mysteries in a smoky grove, but I found myself instead in a small Greek island town with an Internet café. Normal life continued amidst the wildness. Performers and audience were mixed together. And then there were the cameras. Everyone, it seemed, was either taking pictures or posing for them. This was not simply an ancient ritual; it was a modern media event. In fact, the carnival was old and new at the same time. Skyros carnival is a hybrid form in which the goat dancers, dressed in their rough, rank animal skins and festooned in huge clanking bells, mix easily with other performers who look decidedly of our moment. I would be standing at dusk on the street waiting for the dancers to appear when a kid would float by wearing a cheap monkey mask from the grocery store, and I would instantly find myself swept up with him into the world of myth. This was what I had come for. It is the story my pictures try to tell. 4 AGAPI I I sailed to Skyros for the first time in 1992. I remember it well, a turbulent midwinter ferry trip across the Aegean, just a few weeks before carnival began. I had never heard of the island before seeing the yeros ’ face on the cover of a book that had been misplaced on a library shelf. I was overcome by the image of this goat-masked figure. It was a decisive moment for me as a student of the anthro - pology of ritual and performance. I came of age in a time when intellectual and social debates on multiculturalism and identity were raging. As a child of Greek migrants to Australia whose family intermittently returned to live in Greece, my understanding of such issues was not just academic but lived. Anthropology offered me a way to bring academia and experience together. I was intrigued by the way that Greek communities celebrated their sense of place. Skyros and its carnival gave me a way to explore the community-building power of ritual. Years and years of research have now culminated in a dissertation on Skyrian carnival. My ethnog - raphy explores the elusive and transformative power that first gripped me in that image of the yeros on the cover of that book. The opportunity for expanded conversations with anthropologists and artists on this project makes possible a bringing together of my textual work with more sensual forms of representation. In conjunc - tion with this book, my ethnography can be read in new ways and my pleasure of researching and know - ing the carnival can be shared anew with Skyrians. 5 PANOS I I first met Steve in January 2003 at a hilarious Balkan music festival in upper Manhattan. He was there, along with ethnomusicologist Charles Keil and writer Angeliki Vellou, to promote Bright Balkan Morning , their fascinating multimedia publication with Dick about the lives and music-making of gypsy musicians in Greek Macedonia. By that time, I was working on an ethnographic study concerning the social life and symbolism of animal bells in Greek pastoral communities, while Steve had recently inau - gurated The Time of Bells , his long-term project of soundscape compositions recording the social and cul - tural dynamics of bells in Europe and worldwide. He had brought his expertise and sensitivity acquired through years of studying and recording sound in the New Guinea tropical rainforests to bells’ sound production and perception. His move from birds to bells disclosed a new world of possibilities for con - versation and collaboration between us. From a rich source of inspiration, his work also became the field of an intimate dialogue between my ethnography and his soundscape compositions. Working together was a dream to come true next year, when Steve and Dick visited Greece and I suggested that we travel to Skyros carnival to record its spec - tacular bellscapes. There started a warm and lasting exchange of voices, sounds, images, but also of feel - ings and rich intellectual stimulation. Agapi was the ethnographic eye to complement our group. Agapi, Dick, and I went to Skyros carnival for a second time in 2006 for a second round of photographing. This time, we added color to our images. The constant flow of sounds, texts and images that has been pass - ing among us for the last five years forms the basis of this multimedia publication. We hope that this book of still and moving images, texts and sound compositions, will also convey some of our pleasure and cheerfulness in the long process of making it. 6 STEV E I I went to the Skyros carnival in 2004 with Dick and Panos. Dick and I had already collaborat - ed on Bright Balkan Morning and Bells and Winter Festivals of Greek Macedonia . Our side-by-side doc - umentary work explored the complementary voices of still photography, sound, and moving image media. Dick’s photographs evoked an acoustic presence for me very much like the way I wanted my audio soundscapes to be cinematic, to be hearable like a film soundtrack. This synaesthetic interest also brought me together with Panos, whose anthropological work shared with mine a deep fascination with the senses and particularly the social powers of sound, an arena I call acoustemology, sound as a sensuous way of knowing. We had begun a conversation about how bells figured in ritual, especially carnival, where they both create and disrupt the experience of time and space. In Skyros we three created an in-the-moment documentary experiment, with a special focus on bells and the performance of masked dancers. That initial work was now considerably expanded by a second trip that Panos and Dick made in 2006 with Agapi, whose fifteen years of ethnographic experience in Skyros created new opportunities and understandings at each and every turn. Now that we’ve all come together, I am particularly happy that this project has materialized with VoxLox, the publication series I created for new dialogues in art and anthropology. 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 A CARNIVAL IN ALL SENSES ENTER I NG I In the dim light of the quaint, one-room Skyrian home, we see elements of local life: skillfully carved wooden furniture, dozens of neatly-placed antique ceramics, copper utensils, and embroi - dery — all deeply prized objects of folk craft — set amidst the usual modern appliances. Strewn on the floor are ropes, wooden hoops, and bells, many bells, round, flat, large and small. Several senior men, seated low to the ground, are engrossed in an activity they have been waiting for since this time last year: the preparation of the bells for the carnival costumes. A gentle clanging fortells the uproar to come. Carnival, the Apokries , is near. Soon all public meeting-places will be packed with revellers, and we will be over - come by the thunder of the yeri , the goat-masked “old men” passing through the cobbled alleyways of the village. The town will be filled with the noise of their rumbling bells — a vast soundscape that extends far beyond the borders of the island’s only village. The sound will penetrate every street and home, every artery and capillary, from the town square to the monastery located on the peak of the rock that looms above the village. Thus will the town and the masquerade come into being. You can feel anticipation in the air. This is the only time of the year that some Skyrians will visit their place of origin. Excited visitors are packed in the small lounge or stand chatting on the deck of the ferry as it comes from the port of Kimi to the island. The Apokries is the most important annual event held on Skyros. It is the island’s most powerful attraction for Skyrians and tourists alike. Families and friends will reunite during this period. The whole community will be reborn in a massive over-stimulation of sentiment: a carnival in all senses. Carnival is a compelling affair. It has been celebrated unfailingly — but not unchangingly — for at least a century and continues to hold a central place in the island’s social life. On Skyros, carnival comes as a burst of life that propels us out of the dormancy of winter and into the rites of spring. Skyrian carnival is a visual spectacle, a feast of costumes, dramas, and performances. Its complexity can be viewed through multiple lenses. Social historians like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie see carnival as a seismic movement of social forces, an uprising where class struggles and tensions can erupt into actual 45 confrontations.

Load more