An opinion piece about plans to spend £45,000 studying carnivals along the Jurassic Coast of Dorset and East Devon

IS THIS country too anchored in its past or feeling too guilty to be so politically correct?

There is a certain irony that Carnival should be studied in a country that has never been keen on Catholicism.

Mardi Gras, after all, is not very British.

Carnivals no longer have much to do with Lent but to my mind they do have a lot to do with cities.

Rio and London spring to mind, not the Jurassic Coast.

Weymouth or Bridport may well have wonderful carnivals but their reputation is not national, let alone international.

I have only lived here for two years, which makes me ignorant, but none of my forty-something friends that have lived here a while longer – or forever – have ever suggested going to either.

The events we do go to are ones anchored in many of the people who make up West Dorset and East Devon, the districts mainly relevant to the Jurassic Coast.

Culture and food

Take the world-renowned Bridport festival. If you write in English you will probably have heard of The Bridport Prize; thousands of entries from around 80 countries world-wide make a pretty wide introduction to a town and its world-class festival. But who has heard of the Bridport Carnival?

The Beaminster Festival of music and art – when the sleepy medieval town comes alive for a fortnight – is another example.

Dorset Arts Weeks is the largest Open Studios event in the country, 800 artists take part, and that’s only visual arts.

Food festivals compete with each other and attract hundreds of people, local and otherwise. Our area is filled with talented creatives and Dorset could lead the world in placing culture at the heart of quality of life. Who will lead the creatives or at least coordinate them I am not so sure. Working together to a common goal is not something I have seen enough proof of since I have lived in the UK (23 years) although thankfully this is slowly changing.  

Take Normandy as an example. Helped by the French government, Normandy has marketed itself as the birthplace of Impressionism. 2010 sees the largest Impressionists exhibition ever, drawing art enthusiasts from around the world: Americans and Japanese are very keen).

This did not happen in a day, it is a massive investment in time, effort, organisation, structures; more importantly it is born from a realisation that art is a medium by which rich and poor have always communicated, something that not only brings inspiration and well-being but also economic repercussions.

Would Impressionists be the same without Constable or Turner? Should we not celebrate our artists rather than leave them to be marginalised?

Why look to Carnivals in an area that is heavily anchored in the countryside and the sea?

West Dorset and East Devon are not about cities or even large towns, they are about communities that get together on a human scale to come up with child-friendly events, fêtes and festivals.

Drawing an analogy to music festivals, this is not Glastonbury, this is Truck.

Friendly, quirky, socially responsible, sustainable, on a human scale and a hell of a lot of fun.

It may be less socially acceptable to do research on art and culture and far more politically correct to conduct research on inner city leisure time.

Is this a case of looking to the industrial past that makes us believe that cities come first and foremost?

Is it a guilty feeling that countryside people are luckier than city people and need less investment from any governmental body?

Or is it a case of an idea coming from London or even Weymouth rather than from the people that actually live along the Coast concerned?

The originators of the idea cannot be blamed if their lack of vision is due to the lethargy of the people concerned.

We could point the finger if the people concerned have not been properly consulted or even informed. I have not lived here long enough to comment on this.

But I do know that information is difficult to get unless you actively look for it.

Thank you Real West Dorset for coming up yet again with an interesting debate.

Editor’s Note: The three-year PhD Carnival studentship is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the successful applicant will work with Exeter University academics and members of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site Arts Programme team.

The project will focus particularly, but not exclusively, on Weymouth, as there is “an agenda of connecting communities along the Jurassic Coast with communities sharing strong carnival cultures across the globe, the aim being to forge a globalised carnival community expressed through embodied performance and arts practice.”

Here, for the record, is the full list of research questions.

• What are the historical geographies of the Jurassic Coast’s carnivals?
• To what extent have elements of transgression, empowerment and resistance played a role in the movement and experience of the area’s carnivals?
• How is ‘carnival’ being used by the Jurassic Coast WHS Arts Programme as a vehicle for community cohesion and relational celebration, both along the coast and through UNESCO World Heritage Site networks?
• How is the local carnival heritage negotiated within the context of an internationally orientated festival that has a global audience?
• How does the mobilisation of carnival in different policy agendas impact on community engagement and participation within the practice of carnival?
• How does the transgressive nature of carnival and mobilization of arts practices within the event work through governance frameworks?

We might come back to the question, just for the fun of it, of whether the nature of carnival is transgressive or whether that notion, generally derived in modern academic discourse from the pre-war Russian critic and philosopher Mikhail Bahktin, is, arguably, wrong.

(And not just because I truly cannot think of anything transgressive I have ever seen in, for example, a Groves Nursery float).