Brooklyn print edition (PDF) - Caribbean Life

‘Harlequins and Pierrots’
Roy Pierre and Associates’ 2012 Presentation
By Dalton Narine
Across the years, Labor
Day Carnival might have
found its bliss in an atonality
of colors, but nothing on
Eastern Parkway can be as
challenging as Roy Pierre
and Associates’ parade of
off-color and Off-Broadway
characters massing in the
dew of J’Ouvert. Harlequins
& Pierrots catching
the sunrise and penetrating
(and titillating) the bedrock
of the Caribbean community,
from Flatbush to
Empire Blvd., and Nostrand
to Linden.
“Pierre’s mas is the most
theatrical on the boulevard,”
Moreen Hartman says. “He’s
won 15 J’Ouvert titles.”
Pierre, who began playing
mas in Trinidad at age
7, alongside his late mother
Roslyn O’Brien, isn’t known
to restrain emotions. “I
guess that’s why [spectators]
call us The Minshall
Roy Pierre.
Photos by Keith Getter
of Brooklyn,” he said at his
camp. “It doesn’t matter
that we play out the mas in
the J’Ouvert,”
Expressive and deeply
focused, Pierre - born 66
years ago in Belmont, then
immigrating to Brooklyn in
his late teens - has no truck
with WIADC, organizers of
the Labor Day festival. It
might have been a hard slog
pushing against the mainstream,
yet he won Band
Now Coming to Crown Heights
������������������������������
��������������������������
������������������������������
�������������������������
�����������������������������������������
�������������������������������
615 Nostrand ave
(corner of Bergen)
Brooklyn NY 11216
www.connecticutmuffin.com
of the Year honors in 1984
with Midnight in the Oasis.
A skimpy budget and
withered sponsorship had
conspired to shift his presentations
away from primetime.
Now, 18 years into
his creative passage, Pierre
wears a graveyard grin,
savoring the excitement of a
mas, whose black-and-white
couture goes against the
grain of a comic character
dressed in multicolored
tights.
With costumes ranging
from $55-$90, Pierre
admits to no money in the
mas, while chiding organizers
for not pushing a business
head. “We need business
people, not culture
people.”
Nowhere do dark and
light play themselves more
appropriately than in Harlequins
& Pierrots. The
band might have a whiff of
traditional J’Ouvert, but it
definitely reeks of pretentious
overtones. And Pierre
will lure spectators as if by
engraved invitation.
Along with creative advisor,
poet Mervyn Taylor,
both hand the mas a kind of
hybrid genre of serio-comic
semi-opera, imbuing it with
a surfeit of surrealism so
loud as to make everyone
stare like displaced goats on
the Avenue.
As for transitioning
J’Ouvert to the footlights
- indeed, hopping over
them and taking over the
stage in spectacular fashion,
Pierre and associates
deserve props, says Martin
Heywood, of the defunct
Savage.
“People love Roy’s style
and fashion,” says Taylor.
“They have a sense of how
to transform themselves
into something. We take
the ordinary and make it
extraordinary.”
Black/White images from Roy Pierre 2012 Mas Camp.
The pair hooked up in the
late ’50s in a fancy sailor
band. Thereafter, as Minshall
masqueraders, their
outlook on mas deepened.
So, transposing their artistry
to Flatbush came naturally
- and with story.
Page 11 • Caribbean Life • Brooklyn/Staten Island • Aug. 31–Sept. 6, 2012