Nachorious

Dit evenement is Engelstalig.

Using music, dance, and gulal (coloured powder), Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, from Trinidad and Tobago, traces indenture history and engages the audience in a participatory experience of Trinidad’s Carnival to connect to nach gyal feminist politics and embodiment in the Caribbean today. 

Trinidad and Tobago is a twin-island republic in the Southern Caribbean that was once a British colony, but was also impacted by Spanish colonisation and French presence as well as histories of African enslavement and Asian indenture on sugar cane plantations. Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago emerged from these histories and African cultural practices. It has since further evolved through the influence of migrants from India in the 19th century and other ethnicities that have settled over time.

This year’s mas (Carnival) commemorates 180 years of the Indian nautch girl - dancer, courtesan, tawa’if, devadasi, widow, bazaar woman, widow, and rand or randi prostitute or sex worker - escaping British imperialism, dispossession, criminalization, evangelism, political punishment, and impoverishment through the journey of indenture. Stereotyped as notoriously immoral and sexually loose, the indentured Indian woman was considered a threat to the system itself. Remembered through the character of the nach gyal, Nachorious, she still dances in the spirit of freedom and resistance. This Carnival Jouvay mas(querade) is made with indenture records from 1867, text from Mahadai Das poetry and historiography on the nautch-girl, a nach gyal figure whose spinning in the air will be a dance of life, and ghungroos to sonically memorialize this history.