Gillena
Cox
Drag Yuh
Bow
Yamata no
Orochi: The Eight-Headed Serpent
Looking at a
feature of the Japanese Kagura folk enactment with their
precision to detailed design and movement and listening to
the rthymn of the drums, my thought shifted to a folk
custom here in Trinidad and Tobago. Why this thought
linking? The stories are different and the costumes are
different; its something about the rhythm.
Drag Yuh Bow is an
interesting folk custom, here in Trinidad and Tobago, more
frequently seen nowadays at carnival time, as an icon of
traditional mas; also, very much prominent in staged folk
productions, is the Tobago speech band.
The Speech Bands are most present at The Tobago Heritage
Festival, first staged in 1987. The Festival spans a
two-week period from mid-July to August, an annual event.
Les Coteaux
Speech Band
The players in A Tobago
Speech Band wear ruffled shirts, flamboyant coloured satin
pantaloons, stockings, and wire hats, or cork hats ornate
with coloured paper streamers, the hats look like ships.
Face masques are usually of wire mesh. Their traditional
footwear are alpagartas, but it is not unlikely to see a
present day character wearing sandals. They carry sticks
which represent swords of Admirals past, in the history of
the island. Characters dance a stacco marching movement to
background drums and fiddle, criss-crossing each other on
stage.
Out of the march a challenger emerges, goes to the
microphone and chants "Drag yuh bow, Mr. Fiddler." the
music subsides briefly, and a question is posed. Questions
may be of a social and political or even personal nature—and
the expectation is that after replying, in return, a
similar question will be flung back. The music returns in
cresendo, after each oration.
Questions and answers are commonly posed in comic rhyme so
that audiences are thrown into fits of laughter.
Special to this tradition are the dialect of Tobagonians
spiced with a Scottish brouge influenced from land
overseers and church missionaries from the nineteenth
century; and, the background music of fiddle, flute, and
tarmbrins is a combined harmony of African and British
folk rhythms molded to produce a new Tobago sound.
rhythm of the drums—
Iwami Kagura
serpent slain
speech band photo from
http://www.tobagowi.com/herit/
Iwami Kagura photo from
http://www.city.gotsu.lg.jp/157.html
much love
gillena cox
