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The Teen Empowerment through Carnival Arts (TECA) Project is the brainchild of Rachel Watts, a Ghanian-born, T&T-raised arts educator currently living in New York. The initiative gives 12 teenagers from the community of East New York Brooklyn the opportunity to build a small Carnival band which will take part in September’s West Indian Day Parade on Labor Day.

Originally published in the T&T Guardian on July 17, 2016

Watts said she was inspired to create the program after going to Carnival in T&T and realizing that there are many young people who cannot participate in mas unless their parents pay for it. “I just thought of how unfair it was for Carnival to be something where we say it’s for everyone but actually there’s a large percentage of the population that can’t participate and participate in ways that are using their time productively. I wanted to create an opportunity for young people to create a band. It’s a group of 12 young people who are coming up with the concept, designing and making the costumes, and the way they can be in the band is not that they pay for it but they come and work to build their own costumes.”
Watts said many of the participants come from a Caribbean background and are interested in learning about their culture. The camp runs through July and August for eight hours each week and the students met on July 9 for their first brainstorming session. Watts said in July, the students will learn about the history of mas and traditional costumes, people who have done mas from a perspective of social commentary and different methods of building costumes. They will then move on to building the costumes in August. “Some have played mas, but some really haven’t but some are just interested in learning, or they just like art, and they like the idea of meeting different artists, or they’re interested in dance and performance.”
As part of the camp, the group will be meeting with various artists, performers and entrepreneurs. These include Makeda Thomas of Dance and Performance Institute T&T and Candace Thompson of Caribbean Dance Collective. They will visit Laura Anderson Barbata and the Brooklyn Jumbies, a group of Mexican stiltwalkers, where the students can see Moko Jumbies in a non-Carnival context; and pay a studio visit to Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles, who make parade puppets at the Processional Arts Workshop. Watts has also approached Pagwah Mas in Brooklyn for the opportunity to show the participants a mas camp. Watts is especially excited for the group to meet Shelley Worrell, the founder of caribBEING and curator of the Flatbush Film Festival. “She has a shipping container in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn where she sells some products and is using the Caribbean aesthetic from an entrepreneurial perspective. I wanted the young people to meet her because that idea of being an entrepreneur and what that means, coming up with an idea and making it reality, even if they don’t do it in Carnival, if they just learn that skill and then use it in some other way, that’s important.” They will also be visiting different museums and exhibitions, including “Disguise: Masks and Global African Art,” at the Brooklyn Museum.
Watts said the program affords her the opportunity to meld her skill as an arts educator and her passion for Carnival and Trinidad culture. “It’s multi-cultural, it’s making it accessible to young people and to parents who don’t have the means to make this accessible for their kids. It’s also an opportunity to develop a voice and to build entrepreneurial skills because they have to think about how to make this sellable to other people in their neighbourhood as well.” She said the parents of the students are expected to take part in the parade wearing the costumes made by the young people. “We want adults to become part of it, to celebrate the young people.”
Watts said she has been raising money for the different expenses, including materials and the $150 stipend paid to the teenagers, but donations and sponsorship are welcome. Most of the work will be done in a space called Arts East New York, a new space whose mission is community development through the Arts for the East New York community. “I could have done this in Flatbush or in another part of Brooklyn, but I wanted to do it in a community that’s trying to find a way to use the Arts to make a difference.”
Watts said her main hope currently is for the camp’s success. “It’s not going to be huge but I want the kids to feel proud of what they make and for us to get through this successfully, that they have a sense of pride and that they want to come back next year. In the long run, I have ideas of where I’d love for it to go, but I have to think realistically about what I can do by myself and what I could do if it were to grow into something else but right now it’s young people in Brooklyn, it’s where I am, so I want to build that voice here.”
For more information, find TECA Project 2016 on Facebook, email tecaproject1@gmail.com or call 917-624-4002.